

Ensemble

Thirteen Stories

by S. P. Elledge

Ensemble: Thirteen Short Stories

By S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 S. P. Elledge

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because of G. A. Elledge
**Table of Contents**

Mummified Couple Found in Peatbog

Wordblind

Mona and the Witchdoctor

After Ovid

Frog Baby

The Last Day of June (The Old Ones) Quintana Roo

from Impossible Musics I: The Omniphonium

Kisses

A Fever of Unknown Origin

Lazarus Risen

Game Over

The Flight

Mummified Couple Found in Peat Bog

How could we forget the day we died? It was after the first blush of autumn, on a day that was still and warm—there was no wind; we remember there was no wind. The cloudless sky shone more white than blue, and the cidery scent of fallen apples hung in the air. On the way to our grave we saw a herd of elk grazing peacefully in a meadow. We walked on.

This much is true: our fellow villagers had led us to this lonely place. Here they would judge and then strangle us. They wanted us, this time, to sleep together forever. First our foreheads were branded with iron and ashes; next our clothes stripped from us. We were ashamed. Our children and neighbors looked on. The ones we had married turned their backs. A rope was wound around my neck, then his, and pulled. Our last breaths caught in our throats. Life... life lost us so easily. We fell staring into the sky. Above a raven was poised motionless on the face of the sun, as if the world had stopped.

After the dust blinded us the raven spoke from afar, and it said: Wait. We lay beside one another in the grave they had dug for us, his hand in mine. Soon the earth held us so heavy we could not move even if we had been able. With their picks and shovels our friends flattened the mound above us. Then wordlessly they left. We were alone.

The earth at first was cold, damp, bitter in our mouths. Even so we knew we were next to each other; our souls remained with us. Our own friends had executed us, but we were together in death. For a while we listened patiently for our hearts to begin beating again, as if death, like an illness, would come and go. But our hearts remained silent, and death never left us.

Although we could not tell days, seasons, or years, time did pass, and in time we sank deeper into the softening soil, our bodies pressing closer together. Gradually we became aware that tainted water had seeped over us, and somehow our bodies were kept whole. We did not decay. Instead we seemed to grow stronger as we drank this foul water. Our arms felt powerful enough to burst through earth and reach sky. Our brains, our desire remained intact. Perhaps soon we would throw back the sod like a blanket and rise from our bed. But we remembered what the raven had said. We would wait.

More water came, and it did not go away. We were aware of being at the bottom of a shallow lake. The lake was our fingers, ears, mouth: We felt, heard, and tasted all that which entered, drowned, and did not leave. When a flock of geese landed on the water above, our empty veins seemed to rush with blood.

The idea came to us that there might yet be a child growing within my body. For was it not possible that, although we were dead, our child was alive? When she had grown large and strong enough she would burst forth from our tomb, a miracle to the villagers we had left behind —our gentle vengeance. Nothing stirred within me, however; I realized my womb was barren, and our sleep went on.

We slept, if it was indeed sleep, endlessly, never moving, never changing. And what of the world above? We wondered if the ones we had married ever forgave us, or if our children were able to forget. What happened to them all—whom did they come to love, and when did they too die? But after many centuries their names and faces blurred, faded, and we could not remember. We longed only for the world we had loved apart, yet together: There had been blue flax flowers in the meadow above the pines, the chiming of goat-bells below. There had been windswept fjords and singing caverns along the sea, and the midsummer sun which never left its watch over the earth, just as now we never left one another.

A thousand other things we recalled too and missed: the linden bowing in the wind, the willows, the waterfalls we bathed under, the smooth stones in a brook, the lark at daybreak, food we shared, thunderstorms we ran from, stags locking antlers in the woods... We used to pull burrs from each other's hair and eat berries from out of our cupped palms. When it grew hot among the pines, we cooled by kisses placed on eyelids and ears. When we were shivering on the cliff sides we huddled under one fur. How we missed everything! Even the flies which alighted on our bodies afterward, when we rolled apart and looked down at the pastures and their flocks.

We dreamed of our bodies, of their moist, mossy scent, of the way we tasted, of the veins and muscles and bones we could trace under the skin, of the ways we had slowly twined arms and legs like two old trees which have grown around one another. We had burned into each other with such intensity it sometimes seemed we would forge into one body, one mind.

If ever we were to return the best world to find would be this world we had lost, a world that like us had changed very little. In the world we returned to, however, there would no longer be anyone left to accuse, lie, or keep us apart. There would be no cruelty, no sadness. There would be only us and us only.

The waters of the lake receded, and what we knew to be peat began to form around us, pressing us closer still. Like a bridegroom drawing his bride down for a longer, firmer embrace the peat drew us deeper into the earth and held us there. Roots twisted around us, tying knots in our fingers and hair. Animals burrowed alongside us, licked our faces, and moved on. Otherwise, nothing touched or disturbed us. The peat kept us safe for eternity. We were its secret, like pearls within shells from the sea or crystals inside rocks from the mountains.

After we had waited until we no longer thought or dreamed of anything but white, empty sky boots sounded over our heads and shovels grunted. We awoke. They had come to release us!

We broke into the world again, facing the same sky we had always known. But here were strange new men, and they dropped to their knees when they saw us. Though we were still naked we were no longer ashamed. We had lasted when all else, we knew now, would be changed or gone forever. The field around us was burning, and through the smoke we saw a raven rising with the smoke until it disappeared.

Other men came, whispering in an odd language, as if they did not want to wake us. These men were as gentle with us as mothers washing their newborn children. Soft brushes caressed our faces, and they scrubbed us all over, finding new places to touch and examine like inexperienced lovers. They scraped the mud out of our mouths and combed the dirt from our hair. We were lifted up and carried away, hands still tightly clasped.

Soon we were left in a cool quiet room under a dim white sun. They circled the table we lay upon, pointing and prodding and intoning words like holy men in a ceremony. Our stomachs were opened, our last meals examined, our hearts and livers and the rest cut out. Then we were sewn and sealed up again. Something which stung was painted over our bodies. And lastly, with very delicate tools, they pried our fingers apart and we were separated. Once more we were swaddled and carried away, and this time placed in narrow, padded boxes. There was darkness, and then we were removed to a larger, brighter room.

Now I lie in my cold coffin and he lies in his across the room. Many people come to see us, some to gasp or laugh; others refuse to look. We will last forever, this we understand. We will never crumble into dust. But never again shall we touch one another.
Wordblind

The god of the giant silvery oak at the edge of Mar's garden, the god of misshapen and hapless Jack trapped inside his box until you crank the handle just right, the god of the church clock down the hill which pronounces one of its twelve names every hour, the god of the toads and snails and caterpillars and other tiny beings with monstrous faces in Mar's garden, the musty god who creaks inside Far's carefully locked desk drawers, the indecisive god up in the sky who sometimes looks like a pinkish cloud and sometimes like a pearly mist, the god of shoes—the ones that hurt you and the ones that don't, the god who muddies up paint-boxes, the gods of wind and earaches, the god of rainy days indoors, the god of cracks in the ceiling, the whispering gods who gather only behind closed doors, the gods in Mar's unlocked jewelry case with their glittery eyes, the gods under the bed and in the closet and even the silly one who tickles ears from within feather pillows, the gods for everything which has no real name, these gods have all agreed:

Don't tell!

Tell what? Nothing! And _that_ is the secret Mar and Far want so badly to know—that one tells nothing because there is nothing to tell. No words _could_ tell. One could hold one's breath forever and still keep breathing and still have nothing to say to them—or anybody else.

From the smallest of gods—the god of dust, who is also the largest, for dust is everywhere—to the oldest of gods, the wise and gnarled oak, who suffers much to bend his branches down for a small child—one has learned this silence, and this is why the words won't, _can't_ come. It really is too bad, for one would like to please Mar and Far now that one is more than six and one _has been given everything_ , as they say, but to break this contract with the gods, even if it were possible, would mean shutting the case of the world upon itself with all its bright colors inside—snap—and then only darkness within.

Not to speak is the charm that holds the world in place.

They say a god lives in the church down the hill—but one has never felt its presence when dragged within on Sundays; the place is too clean and the picture-book windows sealed too tight for any god's survival. The man reads from a book with many gods, though he says they all have just one name. Or maybe three. Anyway, he's a liar, one can tell from the way he shakes hands with no squeeze at all. _Oh, someday soon you'll be the loudest singer in our choir, won't you?_ Even the lilacs in the vestibule shake off their dew with laughter.

Only a phase, concerned aunts and uncles have said, swooping down with sweets and treats, but one-two-three specialists have agreed: _cause probably not congenital, larynx perfectly formed, nasal passages perhaps constricted by a slight excess of cartilage, while the maturation of the uvula..._ After which aunts and uncles nod and smile while their eyes drift away. Mar and Far know whatever the world has said is not sufficient, however, and take as evidence certain words they think they've heard murmured during unwary sleep, when even the gods have left and no one, not even parents, should be listening.

_Perhaps_ , said someone behind a closed door or just a shadow upon frosted glass, _perhaps, and yet, unlikely to be improved..._

Words exist enough in books, of course, and generous aunts and uncles have given far too many— _you really must stop_ —but of course those are unspoken words, charms which when recited cause magic, and are therefore, however beloved, very dangerous words, even when Mar has snuggled up close on the bed. _Don't be afraid, they're all pretend_ —but one knows she says this only because she's pulled down night along with the window shades. _What, you want the windows open?_ The stories are about gods who perished long ago and myths and other fairy tales remembered only by books—that is, stories of the real world which one's bedside globe insists lies beyond this bedroom, this garden, and this small town down the hill with its church clock and noisy children who have no names. Mar alone is allowed to speak the words in books, for if Far did, the ten-thousand voices in the ten-thousand leaves of the giant oak might awake from their slumber and shout in unison, in a quaking tumult: _Silence!_ One type of magic doesn't like the interference of another, and only Mar has a voice soothing enough to appease these temperamental gods. She still holds one on her lap to read to, though one is _becoming much, much too big!_ and the books are also becoming heavier, with fewer pictures, more words. These make one happier still. Anyone might think Mar and Far would appreciate this—for aunts and uncles have been so attentive and so proud that _we have such a little smarty_ —but they didn't, for the thicker the books and the longer the words, the harder to watch their child mute before such wonders. _You must be able to say it to understand it!_ Far's moustache said once in anger, while Far's cool gray eyes looked over Mar's shoulder and down into a pool of words, and all the leaves on the silvery oak tree in the garden below the bedroom window shook.

Later, when night crouched just at the foot of the bed and the whole world became possible outside the yawning windows, their only child would stare into the dark, and the dark would whisper from within the walls about that other life one was threatened with daily now, where little boys and girls must go to the school far beyond the hill to learn to be grownup, that is, _old_ the way they—Mar and Far and aunts and uncles—were, old and always having to talk in order to believe, always having to say what other people wanted them to say. The world outside the window, whispered the dark, was winter and killing snows that smothered Mar's garden; the world outside the window was summer's silencing heat that stilled even the shrillest insect. And beyond that world, the dark insisted, was nothing but utter whiteness: a pallor of snow, a parched summer.

Doctors may be kind and doctors may even be pretty, but they'd come and they'd go with no real answers—until at last the prettiest and kindest doctor of them all took faith in Mar and Far's fading optimism and held out three playing cards in her elegant brown hands, one right after the other, encouraging a vocal response, _any sound at all_. But the card showed a bright red trike and the murmured answer was _bubba bubba_ , and another showed a sulking dolly in a polka-dotted pinafore, and the mumbled answer was _brrap brrup_ , and another showed a jolly elf inside a rainbow bubble, and the muffled answer, barely audible, was _bup bubbub_. At last she fanned the deck across the table, and though she continued to smile out of her beautiful brown face, something inside her gave up with a faint sigh, as surely as the others... and as always, it was a kind of victory, though it really would have been nice to please Mar and Far at last, for they had been so good, so patient.

_The tonsils are gone? Adenoids, too? Certainly done a bit too young, but no harm in it, most likely._ Pretty and Kind let go of one's chin and stared into the stern face of the office clock. She did know _someone else_ , she said after a full spin of the second hand, _someone so far away_ —she demonstrated by spreading her arms, as if one were a baby or simpleton— _someone_ , she explained, who comprehended ancient mysteries in clear, clean, modern ways—not her exact words, but everyone's understanding of them. _Even if there is no cure_ , she added, _we're more than just the words we can speak, aren't we?_ Mar and Far cast each other exasperated but hopeful looks and agreed with the smiling, all-knowing doctor, though of course _it would be very expensive_ , they all repeated aloud, trying not to look down, across the table and its lovely scattered tractors and trikes and cakes and dollies and elves, into their child's far too solemn eyes.

Sometimes Far's mustache would curl up as he caressed the smooth blue underbelly of the bedside globe. _Here_ , he might say, tracing a line from one pink or yellow island to another, _is where they used to color in all sorts of funny dragons. Like in your books? And here_ —patting an empty ocean— _I think this is where the Garden of Eden was, until the dragons gobbled it up. Like this!_ And then he'd try to tickle one's own belly, but nothing could force a laugh. It was absurd, to think they'd have to fly over such dangerous places. And then Far would switch off the light inside the globe.

The future is like an endless book with blank pages which they—Mar and Far and aunts and uncles and all the rest so much taller than oneself—write in constantly to make things come true. The writing is in indelible ink; it can no more be rubbed out than the past, and so the future must be obeyed just as even the giant oak, though mightiest of all gods, must obey winter's command to throw down all its leaves. So it was no use stamping one's feet, no use breaking apart one's favorite toys bit by bit with teeth and nails when the summons came: a future as certain and as black as India ink. Besides, as usual after a while they will take away one's remaining toys and place them on the highest shelf, as if the closet had _any_ use for them.

One has so many aunts and uncles, and they seem to multiply at parties—nearly interchangeable except that aunts smell so fresh and sweet and uncles somehow sweeter still, like cherry tobacco in a pipe; and their neat beards have soft whiskers that don't scratch when they kiss, while lipsticked aunts when they kiss seem always to be on the verge of disintegrating into mere powder and perfume. They of course must always make it public, quite loudly so even the children down the hill might hear, how well they understand, how very sympathetic they are. As if they were talking about a child who had died, not one they have encircled in the garden. But —and here they might pause, palms to flowery breasts or fingers caressing beards—maybe something dear sister or dear brother had done was, well, _wrong_. Had there never been just one little trauma? Had dear sister nursed too long or perhaps not long enough? Had dear brother been too unsparing of the rod or had he used the strap too frequently? _Not to imply anything, of course_ —and here there would be a chorus of _certainly not, absolutely not!_ from both parents and their siblings. It was all too maddening, as if one were an idiot or hadn't ears at all to hear.

None of that would matter this time, _of course, of course_ —for the next day would bring the shiny silver plane so like a toy plane and then up— _up, up!_ —they spoke as if to a very small child indeed—above the fluffy clouds the three of them would go, to a magic land across the big wide ocean, where miracles happen just like they do in nursery rhymes. This one already knew —poor misshapen Jack had chattered about it every time the handle was cranked just the right number of times; when provoked, Jack would tell the future, for he could never keep one of its secrets for long in his poor hollow wooden head.

So aunties and uncles— _such kind dears, really it wasn't necessary_ —scooped ice cream high and pressed books and books and yet more books upon one, a tower of them wrapped in expensive shimmering paper that might have been hammered out of gold or silver, until the weight of all those words caused them to tumble right across the carpet—but the god of the oriental carpet with the daintily curled fringes was pleased. _It's not as if we're not coming right back_ , Mar said, looking her party best with saltwater-blue eyes she took from a paint box of her own. Everyone spoke now in a hush, looking at one sideways, as if one were soon to be taken by the trolls, into their labyrinthine caves and secret abysses, the way some stories described things, instead of _up, up!_ into the air to the other side of the blue and luminous globe. Underground, story-books said, clocks ran by whims of their own—they might chime only once or twice in a lifetime—and even a king might take centuries to return to his subjects in the world above. Instead of among trees people lived among their mighty roots, and instead of stars, those were diamonds the trolls mined in perpetual twilight. Everyone beneath the earth spoke in whispers, for a simple cough could cause an earthquake, and so you would be blessed if born mute. The good king lay sleeping in the farthest, deepest chamber, sacrificing speech and action to save the world above, until one day—and _now let's put down that book_ , Mar was saying as she tucked in the blankets. Which she needn't have said at all, for already one had fallen into the great, heavy book and closed the covers after, and already, with belly full, one was half-dreaming, half too tired to dream...

_Ah, here's a bonny bright child_ , the big doctor had sung out in a strange high voice, for already it was clear that these people spoke another language, though they used words one already knew. The doctor's enormous hands, so threatening and so black like the roots of a tree, were in fact girlishly graceful as they dared to prod two fingers big as carrots right into one's mouth. So gentle one didn't even choke, even as he commanded one to make nonsense sounds, _now like a pussy-cat, now like a doggy who's quite cross with you_. The doctor—who was big and bald, something like a giant and something like a baby—grinned a big toothless grin which really meant a frown, so that one saw right away that nothing he said could be believed at all. And so one didn't: _good_ meant bad, _good good_ meant very bad, and nothing said at all meant _you are a terrible beast of a child, why won't you admit you can talk?_ Still, however, the soft dark fingers caressed even one's most secret parts, still it took a large needle applied to the tip of one's most innocent finger before one was forced to _shriek like the Devil's own cat_ , as Far's mustache apologized and a ghostlike nurse cracked the door to see if she was needed—but still no words were set loose. How could words really express such pain, after all, and why did words have to exist anywhere outside of books? Why should they have to clutter up the world, which was already so full of its gods and treasures? It was better to contain words, make them orderly, in neat rows on crisp white pages, long lines of them ready to be slurped up like noodles. Must the characters that formed words and the words that formed sentences limit themselves to one pronunciation, one meaning? Saying nothing at all, one knew now more than ever, was... somehow... better.

There was a kind of clock on the wall which anybody would have instantly recognized as the nest of a small wooden bird. But the shy creature refused to show itself and time didn't seem to pass in this office with its tropical clouds pressing the windows, grumbling for admittance with the force of a mob, and its many dour books standing by on the shelves—one wondered how very long it must have been since even one of them had last spoken—and the god of clocks did not seem fit to let even one hour pass. One's little left-hand finger was still bleeding. Pitiful martyr, with its ruby solitaire. At last one must suck it, taste that taste which is the essence of oneself, more so than tears or the salt of skin. And one must close one's eyes, make the adults blind so they wouldn't see and would go away. This doctor in the guise of an overgrown baby was different from the rest, however; he had no colorful cards or toy trucks with labels that read Green or Red, but he had promised a _lolly_ if one was good and one so wanted to know what this thing called a _lolly_ was, though perhaps it was the trolls' magic way to break the spell and trick one into talking.

At last one was dismissed to the small adjoining room with its monumental nurse, who was so tall and so dark and had so white of a uniform that she must have been the god of all nurses, and Far seethed through smiling teeth that one must now _sit very still and very quiet_ —as if there were any other way to sit!—and his mustache was so terrible even the towering nurse looked momentarily afraid. Then Far was gone. Doors sealed in the quiet. The nurse sat down again, stealthily embroidering—she, too had enormous root-like hands, so of course she must be the doctor's wife—and one would have to wait on the hard iron bench like this, it seemed, forever, or until the incantatory whispers on the other side of the wall stopped and the door swung open.

It might have been better if Mar were here, but she was sleeping—she had said she would, anyway, _for a hundred years_ —on the hotel bed in a hotel pink as the inside of a seashell, with a strange pink beach miles below their balcony. The waves there made the sound one heard inside seashells, and ever since they had kissed her goodbye that morning it seemed she had been left very far away, curled inside the center of an enormous seashell on a vast, barren beach. They should go to her now before she was swept out to sea and drowned. They shouldn't be wasting any more time here.

Putting down her needle and tambour, the nurse smiled a gigantic smile that betrayed nothing except that she could probably read minds and said she must _pop out for just a moment to see a man about a unicorn_ , so one must stay right here or one's father might never come back and then one would have to live with this giant couple forever.

Much more than a moment—however exactly long a moment is—did pass, and tiny gnomish figures, male and female in wooden shoes, came out their old-fashioned house on this room's wall and struck miniature anvils with miniature mallets three times, while a cuckoo answered them from the other side, and the men's voices continued rising and falling, and the clouds rearranged themselves in a jigsaw sky, and it rained and then the sun came out, and still she did not come back... so it was no use but to go find her and tell her that one's mother could wait no longer. For who knew, maybe the nurse had not really just gone to the lavatory, and maybe she, too, was lost in the winding, multiplying hallways which now lay ahead, any one of which might contain white stones leading to a castle and a princess and a real unicorn, after all.

How long one had been in this forest was impossible to guess, for there were no clocks to chime or shriek hanging from the gargantuan trees, which grew so much taller than the ones at home, and so close together one could see just glints of sun shifting among the leaves, like a myriad blinking eyes. Writhing under the trees, in the green and gray half-light, thick roots and vines like great sleepy serpents did their best to trip and tangle one's feet; the sticky heat made everything seem as if it were dripping and melting—and from between mossy trunks, through gnat-clouded eyes, hospital doorways and corridors loomed, and weird birds carried aloft the voices of doctors or imitated precisely the cries of a hundred lost parents. In this country all one's old familiar gods had been abandoned, yet one was not really afraid—and most of all, one had no real desire any longer to go back to doctor giants and doctors' games and doctors' needles. Did much time pass the further one ran and stumbled and ran again? No, for here it was obvious the trolls would stop any clock they might find.

When one first saw them on a sandy rise above cracked yellow mudflats—for the giants' forest was not endless, after all, but gradually dissolved into the reeds of a flooded marsh or marshy cove—it was as if they had always been expecting a stranger to appear suddenly in their midst. And as if one had been expecting them, as well.

The tallest and dirtiest girl spoke first. _We all be pirates_ , she said, indicating the ragged black and brown children trailing her, _and now you one of us, or you sorry_. Again, although she used words one knew, it was obvious she was speaking a different language where meanings did not match things or actions. Pirates, after all, looked very different in books—and these children's swords were merely pointed sticks. Nevertheless, one followed them without any hesitation down to the muddy bank, where tree stumps stepped right into a watery distance lost in fog. Here, on the summit of a beached and capsized boat, the children surrounded oneself— not smiling, but not frowning, either.

The girl shook muddy locks out of her eyes; she was very skinny and probably far too tall for her age. There was only one boy almost as tall as she, but she would not let him or anyone else speak just yet. Around her waist she had tied some dripping seaweed like a pirate's sash. _We want to know_ , she announced, as if she had consulted the other children, _if you be boy or girl_. At this, the other children, most of them nearly as muddy and skinny as she was, nodded but seemed too polite to stare. _Answer! Boy or girl?_

One had no idea how to answer such a ridiculous question.

_I think you're girly girl girl_ , the leader went on as if she hadn't expected an answer, anyway, _because those girly girl clothes. Too nicey nice for boy._ Here she danced a little on the tips of her mud-caked toes. Huge flies swirled up around her. Everything stank a pleasant bathroom stink. _But they think you be boy. Your hair too pretty fine fine for boy, but your face so ugly for girl._

Once more there was no answer, and again it was as if none of them expected an answer, anyway. With some unseen gesture from their leader, the children—there were _five-six-seven_ of them—all sat down in a ring, swords at their sides, and began to debate in their odd, sing-song language. One was aware of their charcoal-like smell and their snotty noses and even of the way they breathed, but for some reason one was not scared; this all seemed too much of a silly game. Two fat little pirates had found several yards of sailor's rope alongside the boat and set about braiding and unbraiding the frayed ends like dolls' hair, waiting for the next stage in the game. The tallest boy, who had so many feathers and beads woven into his long wooly hair he might have been a girl himself, looked to his pirate captain, who rose again and pushed their hostage down, into the center of their circle. The metal hull of the boat was hot through the seat of one's new madras shorts—one was suddenly embarrassed to be so clean and tidy and pale next to these brazen outlaws. Why was one the only person here bothered by the flies and the heat? Next the children were looking at one's new oxblood leather shoes, filthy now as they were, and so without being asked, they were removed and the tall girl squeezed her elephantine feet into them. She made a grimace as if in horrible pain. The tall boy of beads and feathers clapped his hands in joy at her antics. She made an exaggerated bow, whistled loudly through uneven teeth, and swung back her seaweed sash. _Looky look at me_ , she told the rest, teetering again on her tiptoes. _Pretty fine lady! Pretty fancy me!_ At this they all laughed, even the new pirate in the middle, though nobody would guess such a rusty, throaty sound was a laugh.

_Listen to froggy!_ a boy with a just a few matted tufts of hair like marigolds growing from his scalp said—well, it might have been a boy, though it was wearing a tattered dress. This remark too struck them all as very clever—until suddenly the pirate leader swished her swordstick in the air and then deftly tossed both shoes down below them into the blackish yellowish muck. _What your name, froggy face?_ she then commanded, and all was quiet but for the buzzing of flies and lapping of water beyond.

No answer, and there never would be. Not until this moment did one realize what it was not to be a fellow pirate, but a pirate prisoner.

_Froggy fella keeping secrets_ , one of the smallest of the children testified, and all the rest nodded vigorously. It was only then that one noticed how late the sky said it must be and only then that one began to hurt for Mar, so far away in her seashell hotel, so very fast asleep. One might have begun crying, but it was too hot and there were too many gnats to tell.

The pirate leader was examining her captive so closely one could see the pinkish clouds in her pretty, wide-set eyes and smell what she'd had for lunch—squishy bugs, apparently. Her hands were large and muddy, like her feet, and they seized the collar of the blue shirt Mar had bought just for the trip. She smiled a smile almost as beautiful and genuine as Mar's at story time. _Confess, froggy, you be spy on us!_ she hissed, tightening her grasp on the shirt.

Obviously, this was a game they'd all played before, but not knowing the rules, it might be time to be afraid. It might be better to show them fear, as if to say, _I will play along_.

They were all waiting for some word, some way for them to know how far they could go. Any answer would be the wrong answer. Through brackish tears, through stinging gnats and encroaching fog, one saw the circle tighten and an anger even they must have been surprised by growing within these dirty half-wild children. _Confess! confess! confess!_ they repeated, now laughing and screaming and punching at each other, trying to get even closer to their prisoner.

And then their leader pinned the captive back against the hot hull of the boat, huge hot hand around choking throat, but all the same gentle, the way a kitten might be held up for examination. _You a fairy child_ , she said at last, all teeth and tongue and lips slobbering into the face below her. _You make milk sour, you give baby belly-ache._ At this the dried mud on her cheeks cracked, and laughing she gave her victim a little push into the arms of the other children. Swords—no, one must remember they are only sticks—scratched one's chest and belly, and the smallest of the boys dared to pee right onto the brand-new dress socks. The pirate queen pulled the upstart's hair and drew the hostage away from the rest and up close to her again; why couldn't one resist any of this? _Give us all your nicey nice, froggy frog_ , she commanded. Then a sudden slap across one's face—barely more than a pat, however, as if only to see the cheek flush a bit. Nevertheless, this seemed to signal that now all was possible. The rest were already stripping socks, shorts, shirt—though it seemed they were only doing this at first to make it easier to tickle. More amphibian sounds—mixed laughter and pain—bubbled forth, and they all humorously imitated this until it seemed even the forest behind them echoed with a thousand croaking beasts.

The pirate children fought over the meager articles of clothing, trying them on and splitting their seams or twisting them so hard they ripped. All at once they tumbled off the boat and into mud, which meant even more fun. Soon they had torn strips of oxford cloth and madras to bind one's wrists and make an appropriate gangplank blindfold—and they began their march across mudflat to the water's edge, the pirate leader poking one's back with her sword, the rest leading each other like a row of paper dolls unfurling. No one noticed the blindfold had slipped far enough down for one to see easily—to see happy children at their game, to see waves now shoving with more force at their bodies. For now that the fog was lifting, it was apparent that this marshland was a bay of the same ocean that lapped at the hotel where Mar lay forever sleeping—or had she been awakened with a kiss from Far by now, and were they searching up and down the coast for their lost child? Yes, it must be so, and yet... Then one had a thought as clear and cold as ice water, a thought that lasted but a moment, only to be left behind as all thoughts must—that one had never belonged to blue-eyed Mar and gray-eyed Far, that whatever one remembered was just a dream one was only just now awakening from, and that instead one had always been these pirates' playmate, and ultimately the pirates' naked, shivering prey.

Somewhere far away there existed a picture like this in one of those big books of monsters and myths which aunts and uncles had lately been bestowing—a colored woodcut of a tiny figure shackled to a rocky islet in the midst of a churning sea; on the other side of the rocks a winged dragon was just entering the picture—only part of its immense scaly body would fit within the frame. Mar had not yet come to that chapter. Who the figure represented or whether the monster was good or evil was not yet known, though it was clear the tide was rising and no matter what happened the person on the rocks was doomed... With lengths of hemp-rope and strips of cloth the tall wooly boy had tied their hostage to the last dead tree stump in the bay he could reach without having to swim more than a few feet. Lastly, for no reason, he tied a gag around one's mouth, _because bad bad little froggy don't talk nice_ , the shaven-headed girl said from shallower water, shaking her finger like a mother; at that, they all collapsed into giggles. Now that the water had washed off so much mud it was clear most of them were really not much darker than oneself would be in July—and splashing about in the foul water they seemed more than ever like innocent children at play. The tallest girl, their captain, was so happy in her work she sang a song whose words were nonsense or maybe just regular words in that secret language of theirs. For the first time in years one longed to be able to sing along with other children, to run and laugh with them on the beach, in the gathering dusk.

Running and laughing, indeed, they left their prisoner behind, tied securely but not too painfully to the tree stump, with the tide rising and the sun setting and a swiftly approaching twilight already almost caught up to them. The pirate leader turned and hollered from her regained perch on the shipwrecked hull, but what came out of her big wide mouth sounded more like the victory roar of a young lioness than words or a song. Even from this far off it seemed one could still see the pink clouds in her eyes. Several swords shot across the water, falling far short of their intended victim. A rain of mud, seashells, and pebbles followed, but the child pirates soon gave up, bored already with this elaborate game. Were they still crying for a confession? What could one possibly confess to be set free? By the time the tide was up to one's chest, the blindfold had slipped all the way off, as had the oxford-cloth gag—one wondered if the children could hear their prisoner's strangled laughter above their own—but they were either hiding behind the boat or had already gone back to the forest, where presumably they slept in trees or in caves underground with the rest of the trolls. Or then again maybe they all had nice beds with creamy cool sheets and cotton-candy pillows like one's own, and toys and many books, and a globe that lit up at night, and kindly animals in their gardens, and parents who loved each and every one of them...

And then it was nearly silent on the beach; even the rising tide made just the softest, gentlest of sounds—and after all, the waves were warm, and the sky, all the colors of the inside of a seashell, was reflected everywhere in the water, and somehow one felt warm inside and very much at peace. Whether one had left one's gods behind or they had been first to leave did not matter; the world here must be full of new gods, more powerful gods. One would only have to begin naming them for them to spring into existence and fill up forest and sky and ocean. Already one felt these new gods were burning up the whole world. For just a few seconds a breeze arose from the direction of the sinking sun—as if the great oak at the edge of Mar's garden and its thousands upon thousands of silvery leaves were quivering with one last fit of rage before it, like everything else left behind on the other side of the world, gave up the god within its branches and bark and became, like all other living things, merely mortal. Oddly enough, there was still that taste of one's own blood in the mouth, stronger than saltwater or tears, that essence of oneself that might last even after one has drowned and been swept beneath the ocean, beneath the earth even, into the troll peoples' secret recesses. Instantly the sun was gone in a quiet explosion of fire and flame, and the insects all at once began to chant within the silhouetted trees of a fairy-tale forest.

More water, please. Do you hear me now? I'm ready to confess. Listen, listen! Mar,

Far—I can confess now. If that's what you want. Listen to me, please. I want to thank you for making your way through the trees and finding me before it was too late, Far. Thank you moonlight, thank you white pebbles. Thank you for carrying me in your arms and above the waves. I confess, sir. I confess, I always could, I just didn't want to. I—I didn't know how to begin. Didn't think I could, maybe. Listen, Mar, Far... Thank you, Mar, for laying me down in your soft pink bed. Another sip, please... Thank you for waiting so long for the words to come. I will be good from now on, just you wait and see. I always wanted to be good, and now—now I just want to go home. I'm so much better, see? I want to learn to read aloud all the words in books. I want to feel new words in my mouth like something sweet and rich. Tell me what you want me to say. Now, for you and for all the world, I want to confess...

Mona and the Witchdoctor

By midmorning there was already a long line of cars from the city parked outside the witchdoctor's camp, and the families who were waiting stared as the three friends walked past. Mona, Abigail, and Naomi were not here to be made well or to find marriage partners or to attract money, as these people were, but just to look around. They were not believers, nor were they much in need of anything. Abigail was engaged to be married, Naomi was happy in her new job at a travel agency, and Mona was enjoying her summer, living at home and taking a photography course. They were young, not too long out of high school (where they had been a clique of three), and they looked and dressed and acted very much alike—though it was Mona who had the highest and loudest laugh. With an empty weekend before them, they had driven upcountry to check out things. Abigail's fiancé had told them where the witchdoctor's camp was (his aunt had gone several times to cure her various ailments), Naomi was bored enough to do anything, and Mona thought the camp might be a good place to take some snapshots, so early Saturday morning they had left in her parents' car.

The camp consisted of a shiny silver house trailer under a canopy of trees, a few sheds, and a dusty rock-garden. An expensive car rested nearby under a carport—it most likely belonged to the witchdoctor, who was said to be very rich, with several houses and wives in the city. Besides the people sitting in their cars, no one seemed to be around. The three young women thought they heard a muffled car radio or maybe a television, but otherwise it was quiet —there was probably a consultation going on inside the trailer. They had sneaked around behind one of the sheds, with some half-dead bushes to hide them, and were waiting for something to happen. It was hot, but the sky had gone cloudy, and Mona was afraid it was going to rain before she got any good shots. Abigail and Naomi were already eager to leave.

Just as they were about to give up, a screen door slammed. Someone was approaching the rock garden. If it was a man or a woman, they couldn't tell; the person was short, brandished an ivory cane, and was dressed in a funny sort of pajama suit and a multicolored wool stocking cap. He or she had peculiar colorless skin and moved quick and skittish as a bird; Abigail, who was the least clever of the three, whispered that it must be some sort of Chinaman. The client trailed a few paces after—a pudgy man in a business suit, looking very bored and a little sheepish.

There was a garland of dried flowers or peppers around his neck, odd against his proper pinstripes.

As the businessman watched from a safe distance, the witchdoctor spun around three times and then took up a handful of white pebbles and scattered them on the ground, making a circle around himself. Next he raised the ivory cane, said a few words the three friends couldn't hear from their position a good hundred feet away, and struck the cane three times in the middle of the circle. The businessman stood back with arms folded, fingering his necklace. The witchdoctor seemed pleased with this brief performance. Mona decided it would be a good time to attempt a photograph. Naomi and Abigail shrank back as she raised the camera.

The camera was old and made a surprisingly loud click as the shutter was released; both of the people in the silent garden looked up, and for a moment all three friends were frozen against the wall of the shed, just as a breeze came up and parted their screen of leaves. The businessman, probably a little impatient for his cure and to get going, hardly looked up, but the witchdoctor shook his cane and shouted something at the three girls who ran off, laughing and trembling and gasping all at once.

They continued to laugh all the way home (Mona higher and louder than the others) as they took turns describing the ridiculous scene, which grew more fantastic with each retelling. Each of the friends had noticed something different: Abigail how the witchdoctor moved his arms and hips like a sort of crazy birdwoman, Naomi how the businessman had stood balancing on first one leg and then another like a child who needs to go the bathroom, and Mona how dull and dusty the whole place looked, with all those shiny cars around it. She hoped the photograph she took would come out; it might be amusing. They all agreed the trip upcountry had been worth the effort, and they would have to do it again soon.

Mona's photograph, however, turned out all black—she was not used to the heavy, old-fashioned camera her teacher made her use—and Abigail's fiancé was angry that they had risked the wrath of the witchdoctor. His aunt had attested the witchdoctor was a very powerful man (he had cured her headaches and lumbago and gout, after all) who was capable of killing an enemy with just a look. The girls should have stayed away, especially since they did not believe. Abigail's fiancé did not really believe, either, but he still thought it was wrong to interfere with other people's magic. Naomi just laughed and called him a coward; they were modern women, and they lived in the real world.

Not long after returning from their trip Naomi lost her job when the agency unexpectedly closed down, so she had to borrow money from her parents to pay her share of the apartment she rented with Abigail. Mona jokingly said it must be the witchdoctor's curse, losing her job right then, and Naomi had to laugh. After all, she already had leads on a few other jobs, and she could use a vacation in the meantime. The same week Abigail and her fiancé broke up; they just argued too much, and she was no longer sure he really did love her. She did not seem too concerned—there were plenty of other men around. Mona agreed but added that she wondered when the curse was going to strike herself. Abigail and Naomi looked at her and laughed low, throaty laughs, but not for too long.

In time the joke wore thin. Everything was going fine for Mona—she eventually quit her photography class, but still expected to go to college in the fall. She lived at home with her parents, who were well enough off, so she didn't have much to be concerned about. But Naomi failed to get the jobs she applied for, and Abigail, who got a small allowance from her widowed mother to live on, couldn't find any men who didn't bore her. Other small disasters were happening with some frequency: Their refrigerator broke down but the landlord wouldn't fix it, Naomi's cat died for no apparent reason, and Abigail sprained her knee. Mona would exclaim Oh God it's the curse! but she was the only one laughing now. She suspected her friends were just jealous because she had nothing much to worry over herself.

When they went out to bars or restaurants together now they seemed to drink too much and argue even more. They fought over men they wanted to dance with, who would pay for the drinks, which bus route to take home. They had been friends since grammar school, but now that they were growing older in different ways they would inevitably have to part. It was not worth even talking about; such things just happened. In a few weeks Mona would leave for college and Naomi had decided to move back home with her parents, so Abigail would have to get a new roommate. Perhaps because they knew everything would be ending soon they spent even more time together, going to the beach, going shopping, making dinners together at the apartment. If they hadn't been arguing so much they might have been enjoying themselves more.

Abigail and her ex-fiancé would talk over the phone occasionally, though he wouldn't see her, and every time he heard about something going wrong he would bring up his aunt and the witchdoctor. The witchdoctor was incredibly powerful, he said, and you didn't have to believe in anything to know that. Just look at all his houses and cars and wives and even his political influence—though he couldn't say where he or his aunt had heard all this; such things were just known. If Abigail wanted her life to go better, his aunt had told him, she better make it up to the witchdoctor somehow. Abigail would listen and hang up after a while and stare at the broken refrigerator.

It's your fault, you know, she told Mona one day as they waited for Naomi outside an employment agency. She said it with a little laugh, but did not smile. You shouldn't have taken that picture, she said, nothing's gone right ever since. But the picture didn't even come out, Mona protested. Exactly, Abigail said.

Naomi was angry, too. She was no longer able to afford the latest shoes and music tapes. It was hard for her to scrape up enough money to go the movies more than once a week, and before long she would have nothing left. And now she had failed to get the job she'd most wanted. She stared at Mona, too, as if Mona were to blame for everything that had gone wrong in her entire life.

After that Mona saw less of her two friends. Anyway, she explained to herself, she had to get ready for college at last, and there was a lot of remedial reading to do. Her parents, especially her mother, wanted her to be around the house more instead of running off with her silly friends, and though she raised a fuss she didn't really mind staying in, watching television, listening to the radio, fighting with her brothers. Sometimes when Naomi or Abigail called she just let the answering machine take the message.

And then everything fell apart for her, too—the college wrote saying they wouldn't be able to admit her, after all—her grades were too low and they were so full up they had others on their waiting list. She should try again next year. It was a small private school, and she guessed they could do what they wanted, but next her parents said she really should get married or at least find a job and an apartment and stop moping about so much. They were angry when they saw how much she'd charged that summer to their bills at the shops downtown, and they decided she should serve as an example to her younger brothers and sisters.

It was more than Mona could bear, especially with Naomi and Abigail angry at her, too. And the more she thought about it, the more she wondered if there were something to this witchdoctor thing. After all, it was a pretty strange world, and though she didn't really believe in anything in particular there were a lot of possibilities she hadn't yet considered. Abigail's ex-fiancé could be right, that it wasn't smart to mess with other people's magic, magic the uninitiated couldn't understand.

She called him and got his aunt's phone number and address. His aunt lived in a high-rise apartment building and was younger and less eccentric than Mona had expected. Her name was Mrs. Moon, a funny name, and she did indeed have a big moon-shaped face and bottom. She had not sounded surprised when Mona called her up, and she smiled when Mona asked if there were anything Mrs. Moon could do to help her predicament. They sat in her crowded living room, which was uninteresting except for some queer dried plants hung from the curtain rods. Mrs. Moon patted Mona's hand and clicked her tongue against her teeth as if Mona were a child who had broken her favorite doll. Mona had out her checkbook to pay Mrs. Moon for her troubles, but Mrs. Moon pushed it away and told Mona that what she had done was very very wrong and she could spend the rest of her life atoning for her misbehavior; the witchdoctor was very very powerful, he was both man and woman, both very very young and very very old, and thus had power over both dreams and waking life. Had Mona been having nightmares? Mona couldn't really remember, but supposed that she probably had.

Of course, dear, said Mrs. Moon, whose dentures clicked and false eyelashes fluttered when she talked, of course. There is absolutely only one way out—you must go to him and do whatever he tells you.

Please—Mona interrupted, wishing now that she had not come, and that Mrs. Moon did not smell so much like onions.

Whatever he tells you, repeated Mrs. Moon, and she was the first to rise, as if she had suddenly remembered something burning in the kitchen. But, she added, it's your choice, dear.

Mona thanked her and went home, convinced Mrs. Moon was out of her mind. This magic business is nonsense, she said aloud in her bedroom, frowning at all the ugly clothes in her closet.

You've got to go back there, both Naomi and Abigail told her when she met them for lunch the next day. Now the landlord is threatening to evict us, Abigail continued, and Naomi's father is sick with something they can't figure out, so she can't go home.

Wait a minute, Mona said, you were there, too. You wanted to go.

But you took the picture, Abigail reminded her, and he saw you. It was your parents' car, and you drove us there. We were just along for the drive. It's up to you to turn things around.

Abigail and Naomi would not listen to anything Mona had to say, and Mona was glad they both had excuses to leave the cafe early, but not without telling her quite clearly once more that she had better go fix things.

When Mona got home her mother confronted her, as well, saying she had better start doing something with her life, she couldn't live at home forever, she was twenty and she'd be a penniless old maid soon. Mona said nothing, but asked to borrow the car to see about a secretarial job. Her mother was pleased to hear that and gave her the keys.

It took her several hours to cross the foothills and reach the flatlands upcountry where the witchdoctor lived. All the way there she felt ridiculous and angry, but knew that if she didn't do something people might never speak to her again. She was prepared to write however large a check he wanted, and lie to her parents about needing the money to loan to a friend or something, anything, later.

Perhaps because it was midweek the camp was deserted, no long line of cars and silent families, no impatient businessmen or lonely old ladies, though a light was on in the trailer and she could hear a radio playing as soon as she parked and got out. The late afternoon sunlight gave the big trees a coppery sheen, and the rock garden, instead of looking innocuous and dull as it had before, was filled with weird shapes and shadows. For the first time Mona felt a bit afraid, though she continued slowly down the dirt path toward the door of the trailer, its chrome so bright in the sun that she could barely look at it.

She knocked once, turned to go, then decided to knock again. She heard nothing moving within, just what sounded like a string quartet on a distant radio. Once again she was about to leave, but forced herself to knock once more. After a long time the witchdoctor opened the door. He was dressed as before in his black silk pajamas and funny wool cap, and up close she could see that he was no Chinaman; he wasn't quite like anything she'd ever seen. His body was small and soft and hairless, like a woman's, though he had a trace of a mustache, and it was impossible to guess his age—he looked both very young and very old at the same time. No appointments today, he said through the screen, and began to close the door.

Wait, she said, waving her checkbook at him, I have money! She noticed that he had a thick strand of ivory amulets around his neck and that his fingernails were long and painted silver.

Please, he said in a small, tired, sexless voice, come back tomorrow, but he did not close the door once he had appraised her more fully through the screen. He studied her with his young-old eyes, waiting for her to say something more. Maybe he did not remember her, after all.

I'm sorry for what I did, interrupting you like that, and I'm just hoping you'll take this curse off me, she went on, trying to see behind him into the trailer, but it was too dark inside. A heavy smell like turpentine hung in the air. Some birds flew past them. A wind came up. Without realizing how she had got there, she was now standing under the shade of one of the big trees in the yard, and the witchdoctor was closer to her, caressing the back of her hand.

He laughed, soft as a woman, and his silk-covered breasts rose up and down. Foolish girl, he said, showing his small filed-down teeth. Where do you come from?

She regained her balance, as if she had been asleep, and told him, recounting a brief history of her life, as if he were a teacher or potential employer or someone she had just fallen in love with.

He did not seem to pay much attention to her as she spoke, but grinned a great deal as she tried to guess what he wanted her to say before he would tell her it was all right to leave, go home now, she was absolved.

You, he said, are a pretty girl, a little thin, but I can tell you are strong. Good, good. I need someone to help me out here in the country, keep track of things. Can you cook? I need a wife who can cook. And sew. And look after me...

As he spoke he seemed more and more like a woman, both soothing like Mrs. Moon and admonishing like her own mother. Mona wondered what she was doing here, standing in the shade of a big tree in the middle of the barren countryside, talking to this creature from another world who wanted her to be his wife, and she wondered why she was not more afraid, why she felt so calm. Perhaps I am under a spell, she thought, and suddenly felt a great urge to break away.

I've got to go, she said, pressing a check into his soft palm. Take whatever you like, write in an amount, I promise never to do it again. He stared at her, deaf, expressionless, as she turned and hurried to her car. She had the feeling that if she spent one more minute with this witchdoctor she would never be able to leave for the rest of her life.

Her parents met her in the drive of their suburban house. It was night, and they were pacing the front lawn, flashlights scanning the front of the house. We've been robbed, they told her. Thieves had entered the house while they were out at their country club, and taken the television and her mother's jewelry box and her father's golf clubs, and who knew what else. Her brothers and sisters were all spending the night at friends' homes. If you'd only been here, her mother said, and where were you so long?

Mona exhaled a deep breath. Instead of explaining anything, she lied about a date and left to take a bus into town to see if Naomi and Abigail were up to anything. She wanted to tell them about her strange experience, and how she'd almost liked being at the witchdoctor's camp, almost liked being put nearly into a trance by his tired soothing voice, but when she reached their apartment she saw that it was a bad time to come. Abigail was alone, fuming, and she brandished the landlord's eviction notice before Mona's face as if to say it was all her fault. She'd have to get a smaller, uglier place she could afford on her own. If she had moved in with her fiancé when they were still together she wouldn't be in this state now. Worse than that, Naomi was at the hospital, with her father, who was probably going to die any goddamn second. Naomi had warned Abigail that she didn't want to see Mona. So what are you going to do about it? Abigail asked Mona, and Mona was so shaken she forgot to tell her about her visit to the witchdoctor before Abigail rushed out, saying she had to go see a boy she'd met at a dance-bar somewhere.

Mona walked down the crowded midtown street, wondering what there was left to do. Maybe, she wondered, it hadn't been enough to apologize with a blank check. Maybe she had insulted the witchdoctor further. Now it was late and she was hungry. She was tired. There was noise and traffic all around her, and she could think of nothing more to do than call Mrs. Moon again. Mona found a phone-booth and fished the number and coins out of her purse.

This time Mrs. Moon did not seem so pleased to hear from her. She sounded as though she had been asleep, though Mona thought she heard classical music playing in the background.

What do I do? Mona cried into the receiver.

I said—there was a pause as Mrs. Moon's voice faded away and the line crackled, before she came back more clearly—I said, you must absolutely do whatever he tells you to do.

Whatever?

I have to go, Mrs. Moon said. We'll talk about this more some other time, dear. Then the line went dead, and it was hard to tell if it had been Mrs. Moon hanging up or just a bad connection. Mona walked past the closed shops a while longer, trying to think straight, and soon was on a bus headed back home.

Her parents had finally gone to bed, leaving all the lights in the house on and a radio playing loud enough to hear from the sidewalk. Mona realized she still had the keys to their second car. She went back into the house, silently put a few things in order, ate in the kitchen, then left a short, evasive note. It was easy enough to pull out of the drive without being heard. She drove steadily for three hours, through a storm and then sudden clear weather, and arrived back at the witchdoctor's camp well after midnight.

A dim golden glow shone through the trailer's paper blinds. Everything was very peaceful; there was just the sound of the wind through the trees and a few nightbirds in the rock garden, which was serene as a grotto in the moonlight. The enormous sky was filled with stars she'd never noticed before, and once more Mona was amazed that she wasn't more frightened, that she felt so calm, almost relieved to be here.

She rapped twice on the screen-door and sat down next to her suitcase, waiting for a response. A bird or bat swooped by. The star-scattered sky had never looked so big and yet so welcoming. Nothing, she said to herself without quite knowing why, will ever be the same again, will it?

After Ovid

for Joseph Battell, 1839–1915

Vermont farmer, philanthropist, & philosophizer

I. The Maiden

At first he would be an orchid, seduce her with opulence and elegance. The variety known as "lady's slipper," _cypripedium reginae_ to the academy, would be appropriate for this clime: a decorous but virile blossom poised like an ephebe's delectable pink scrotum on a slender purplish shaft. It would be a tight squeeze and a difficult trick, but he'd been practicing already with much homelier flowers such as the native hawkweed and bachelor's button. As she wandered through the sacred cow-pasture she would be completely unable to resist the charms of his ornately veined petals and his manly stamen (like that naughty Jack of the jack-in-the-pulpit); stooping to admire him, he would change her into some sort of lively insect—what species exactly he hadn't decided yet, but something bright and quick would do. Perhaps a kind of hornet. Unaware she had been transformed, she would approach him with jittering antennae, cautiously step onto the lobed lip of his labellum, which would glisten like perspiring skin, and begin to explore the tunnel of his striated throat. She would have descended too far before she realized the liqueur she sought had already ensnared her feet and all his waxen, silken magnificence was enveloping her. How he anticipated the tingle of her waspish agitation, the tremble of her abdomen and thorax!

However, he had neglected to remember that women, even simple vestal virgins, adore perfume more than almost anything, of which orchids have none... and she nearly trod upon him on her way to the sacred spring.

_Orchidaceae_ are not the only flowers. Scarcely daunted, he would impress her next with sheer size and a daring design. On an island on the backside of the earth he had once witnessed the rare blossoming of what collectors call _titanum amorphophallus_ or titan arum, natively the _bunga bangkai_ , with its inflorescent fan of thick fleshy leaves wide across as a millstone, crimson bract, and an erect spathe that towers tall as a tree. At its tip would burst forth a corona of dazzling red flowerets like sticky jewels—and its musk would be so heady thousands of birds and insects might swoon in flight. No oversized epiphyte or giant _rafflesia_ could rival his masculine grandeur; she would surely strip herself naked and worship at his feet—that is, that efflorescence of mottled sepal leaves.

What might smell delicious to a passing beetle, however, was nothing but the stench of rotten carrion to a passing maiden, and she ran from his sight as did Syrinx from Pan, or for that matter, like any number of nymphs from any number of anonymous divinities such as himself. (In other lands, this arum was known as the corpse flower, not without good reason.)

Humiliated, his immensity now flaccid and wilting, his pollen scattered, he folded his leafy fan and retreated to a party on Parnassus in a deep funk, the odor still clinging to him.

The other gods, even the most common household lares and penates, were laughing at him, he was convinced. At the celestial dining hall, sitting alone sipping his goblet of nectar, he felt shunned, while the more popular gods gathered at other tables, roaring with pleasure as they told their smug jokes about tricking dimwitted mortals. Obviously no one had forgotten how an angry Jove had not so long ago diminished his powers because of a case of mistaken identity: He had abducted one of the king of god's favorite minions, mistaking the painted and girlish young thing for a real girl who had winked at him on the steps of a temple earlier that day. _That_ vice he would leave to the Greeks; he had spanked the boy and sent him promptly back to Jove, where the petulant lad had fabricated all sorts of scandalous lies.

Once he had had in his dominion thousands upon thousands of hectares of untouched northern forest—swamp maples, pines, oaks, silver birch—and endless hayfields, countless sugar bushes, innumerable dairy farms. Swift and diaphanous as damselflies, maidens would dart around the paddocks and though the high corn, and, swifter still himself, he had his pick of the fairest and youngest. He would boast to everyone on Olympus that half the population of his little kingdom were demigods sired by himself—and he would not be far wrong. That was an idyllic time, and his idylls were golden. Since that nasty episode with Jove's boy-servant he had lost his lands and his wealth and the better part of his powers—Jove was so unforgiving—though he was still allowed one last temple, not much more than a flower-bedecked stall in a horse-barn, really, in a remote impoverished corner of his former fiefdom where the citizens hadn't realized yet how his divinity had been devalued.

He drained his goblet and considered his latest downfall. She was just a scabby-kneed village girl, after all. She smelled not so much of the goats there as goat-cheese, and seemed even denser than the average human. He thought of how she had fled from him as if she'd seen Arachne sprout eight legs before her very eyes, as if he were Medusa reborn. Why he was so attracted to this particular girl totally perplexed him: unlike the other vestal virgins she was inordinately dark, with a dusky bloom upon her cheeks like a boy's first beard. Besides that, she was just the tiniest bit squat, her hair was always knotted with briar as if she had been lolling with the satyrs, and her big feet with their big toes in her big sandals were caked with the gray earth of his sacred hills. An otherwise charmless girl, and even so she could turn him to wood as surely as Daphne became a laurel.

In the Parnassian dining hall, he saw Venus lean heavy-breasted over the table to pass a tankard to Mars; surely there was something going on there yet again. Garrulous old Tiresias had been invited to the feast, had himself invited a herd of centaurs—and they were making an awful mess of the tiles. Castor and Pollux—twins, brothers, lovers, eternal bores—were drunk as usual, completing each other's sentences and caressing their own mirrored images. To the delight of a school of fauns, Hermaphroditus, ingeniously entwined with Salmacis, was giving convoluted lessons in a torch-lit alcove. Under a bower of mock-roses, that master mocker Momus, in powdered peruke and thespian pancake, separated from the fickle muse he'd been fingering and, feeling envious eyes upon his person, winked at the observer. Other heads turned. It seemed then that half the hall burst into harsh laughter like a startled flock of crows, while every other denizen of the heavens was pointing at him as rudely as might the Roman _hoi polloi_. Pan, randy as ever, blew him a kiss and his comrade Bacchus used his nether vent for a trumpet. And there was runty little stumpy-winged snot-nosed busybody Cupid, the boy who had shot his beloved full of arrows tipped in lead while piercing him straight through the heart with one of purest gold. Already Cupid was blindly zinging arrows about and thumbing his button nose at anyone the brat annoyed. How he hated Venus' bastard son! He spat at Cupid and stumbled from his couch and cushions to leave before the full effect of the aphrodisiacal arrows and ambrosial _petits fours_ would sink in and the real orgy begin.

At dawn he visited his shabby altar within the horse-barns just in time to see his favorite laying out that morning's offerings in rather tarnished serving dishes. Charred venison again: how revolting. He saw that she looked more unwashed than ever, one of the straps of her sandals was broken, and there were berry—or perhaps wine—stains upon her wrinkled tunic. A fine vestal virgin was she! And yet he was still certain that he wanted her with all his might.

As usual, he daydreamed of ways he could "carry her away," as more modest accounts so discreetly put it. He could become a bed of the softest, greenest, coolest moss, carpeting a chamber of the sacred root cellars, inviting her to rest upon himself in the heat of the day. On such green velvet she would tear off her vestments and she would ravish him, he ravage her thoroughly and completely. Her cries would stir the envious barn-swallows from their eaves and farm-boys and dryads would giggle in the haystacks. Desperately he longed for a day when he wouldn't have to restrict himself to this vegetable abduction! He'd become a bull-moose and scoop her up onto his antlers, or better yet a catamount who would chase her down like a common hare. He would change her into a flock of geese, and he would be the whirlwind in their midst. Reduce her to a block of salt and lick her up like a maddened forest boar. Why not steal other gods' tricks and become a shower of coins or a sexy prize ox or an immaculately white swan strong enough for her to straddle his downy back? He could be the lantern and she the moth, he the hive and she the bees—but here he realized he was descending into clichés worthy only of lesser deities and even lesser myths.

Lost in his reverie, the morn dissolved into midday; the sky grew hazy, then unreal as a faded fresco above the gladioli and squash-flowers in the sacred kitchen garden, and one by one her comelier sisters, who for hours had been weeding along the farm's stone walls, disappeared into the marble-like coolness of the stables. She alone remained in the sun, braiding her ratted hair between her fingers and chewing on a sprig of sassafras. Eventually Phoebus lulled her to sleep with the warmth of his breath, and she made a pretty snoring sound as liquid and joyous as a mountain rill.

He had rooted himself to the spot and begun to twist about her almost without forethought. Rapidly as darning needles he darted green fingers over and around and under her plump thighs, breasts, and shoulders; he laced his tendrils through her thick hair—carefully, carefully, so as not to rouse her any more than one mosquito might—and clasped her with leaves like myriad hands, hands like wings like leaves, all up and down her sleeping body. Quick as a spider he cocooned her body in thickening green lianas, teasing the hem of her petticoat with a tentative green branch, fanning her sweating brow with a quiver of his leaves. She was now bound as hopelessly as Laocoön by the sea serpents, Hercules by the python. Oh, but so much more tenderly! He wished to do her no real harm; on the contrary... From the thickest part of his stalk he sent forth a new kind of flower: one not found elsewhere in nature: heart-shaped, radiantly white with an impressive blood-red stamen that burst forth from its swollen cluster of damp petals. For a moment the blossom hovered in the still, sun-drenched air, throbbing and bobbing and alive with a honeysuckle-infused scent that would make even lumberjacks giddy ...And then he lunged under her patchwork girdle, and then he drove the spear of his lust deep within her, and then he powdered her with sweet sugary pollen while all his birdlike leaves pressed upon her at once. For one immortal half-moment, before she screamed, it seemed they might have been specimens motionless under a crystal bell jar, so hushed and hot it was with the sun at its zenith and the zephyrs asleep and all the farmyard silenced. Of course she woke—and with her the world.

The majority of this next paragraph would be, following scholarly tradition, best left untranslated in a demure footnote, though we may summarize: Jumping right out of the hayloft windows and crashing through barn-doors, stable-doors, cellar-doors and across the dusty yard, five strong sisters came to her rescue, shouting " _Eheu_!" and other classical ejaculations. They tore at his vines, ripped apart his embracing leaves, and crushed the monstrous flower under their sandals, while she, dizzied and dazed by the noonday sun, wept and clutched at her breasts and rent her own garments even though he had been careful not to ruffle them any more than a breeze might have. The sisters of course understood what had been going on instantly, and as they soon noticed there was no blood, slapped her cheeks and flung dirt into her eyes—as if it had been her fault, as if she had willed this rapist vine into action, as if she had never been a virgin at all! " _Meretrix!_ " they cursed her. Slut! Harlot! " _Perite_ ," she answered them, taking their blows but gathering in her sobs— _Go kiss Pluto's lips!_ With the tears already dry upon her cheeks, she backed slowly away from her sisters, retreating across the barnyard and through the flocks of geese and chickens, out under the rose trellis and through the hollyhock-garlanded gates... and then she ran back down the gravel road to the edge of the sacred waterfall, still feeling that heat pulsing inside her, still choking back the rage which now seemed to be caught in her throat like a peach-pit.

It was his misfortune that a barn-owl with insomnia had been watching from under the roof of the stables; the owl soon whispered this to Minerva, who told Apollo, who told Jove, and, still hurting from having been trampled so ignominiously in the mud, he was sentenced without trial. Since he was already so good at impersonating members of the plant kingdom, he was ordered to stand on a granite-capped crest overlooking hillsides devoted to pasturing sheep and cattle. Quicker than hairs erupting on a pubescent's chest, bark covered his; his feet plunged deep into the rocky earth; his arms lengthened and twisted, and clusters of coniferous fronds burst from his fingertips, stretching and fanning out above as if to summon every bird and squirrel; his head ascended yet farther into the air to reach for sunlight and graze the clouds—and he had become with little effort a giant pine tree. A majestic and broad-limbed white spruce— _picea glauca_ in your textbooks—wide enough to shelter a team of bullocks and tall enough to fear lightning. There was no other pine such as he for several counties, and his silhouette marked this range of hills as surely as any manmade monument might have; farmers would even use him to orient strangers, as in "Take yonder path up 'cross the millstream an' past th' abandoned mill, don't stop for the moose-waller, and turn left when you see that big ol' piney tree on the high ridge o'er your shoulder." Such a stranger might very well see stretched out under that tree a barefoot young woman and mistake her for what is somewhat archaically known as a slattern, being that her hem had been well-dragged through the mud and her sunburnt cheeks were smeared with wild blackberry and she carried a magpie's nest of tangled hair above her squinting brow. Around her would graze the goats which belonged to her poor family, nuzzling her occasionally and stamping the earth when they were ready for their evening milking. At that time she would quit the comforting shade of her favorite tree, rise and shake pinecones from her lap, and head back down the path with a sigh as if she were being forced to leave a lover's bed. Behind her the spruce would stand becalmed, for that is nearly all that a spruce can do in such a situation—though if there were a breeze present, the movement in his boughs might sound a little like a sigh. He would watch her walk slowly away, listen as the goat-bells clanged into the distance beyond the next blue copse, and then curse his fate. It is too much like a fable, he would think to himself: one of those with a particularly self-satisfied and superfluous moral.

II. The Pine

One might think it a dull and inactive life, that of a tree, but it's really not like that at all. Thrushes will too-whit too-whee you out of your dreams while it's still dark, bluejays keep you awake all morning, and raccoons roust you from your deepest midday slumber; there are always summer storms to fear and winter freezes that crack and split your bark. Beetles bore into you, chattering chipmunks simply bore you, nests tickle you, moss irritate you, and when it's too hot the sap trickles down your bark in a manner most unpleasant. The four zephyrs taunt you hour after hour, never leaving a needle unturned. Dogs humiliate you. Insolent bears have the audacity to rub their rumps against you just to relieve an itch. You thirst half the year and feel you could drown the rest. Many times you long to just lie down and rest. When you're the tallest and the mightiest, who will shelter you, who will shade you?

Still, it's not too bad; I could have been a sniveling fountain or a narcissistic little flower or a dumb, gadfly-beset cow or a nightingale consigned to repeat the same monotonous melody for eternity. Doubtless I have a stately countenance and a wide command of my territory. My limbs are strong and sturdy, my foliage thick and my pinecones ample, and when a woodpecker beats a tattoo against my torso the sound echoes satisfyingly across these boulder-strewn hills. Am I not beautiful, after all? Are not my newest and greenest needles soft as feathers, my scent alone enough to inspire nostalgic poets? Am I not as lofty and awe-inspiring as any of those tiresome Seven Wonders? Behold, I say to all within my presence, I am an imperial emblem of the countryside—and I am still godlike if barely a god.

I could not even say that I miss my old form, for I have had many bodies in my time—so many I've quite forgotten what it is like to have just one, to rest inside one skin for any length of time. I cannot remember what I once looked like. If _she_ had borne my child—my fertile anthers could not have missed their mark—I might have seen this child that bore my countenance and I might have looked into him as into a mirror. And known. But it was not to be so.

Centuries passed, a millennium or two. The mountains wore down a little, the stars imperceptibly shifted and rearranged themselves, and all I really knew was that every passing year I gained a ring and grew fatter. In time I forgave Jove, forgave even meddlesome Cupid. All I'd lost, lands and wealth and praise and burnt sacrifices and all, meant nothing to me. True, I knew sorrow for a long time... but then I left sorrow behind. I longed and then somehow I forgot longing. I let go. Only... something unsettled, something unfinished inside me remained.

After so very long, after I had been standing here, witnessing the incessant herds come and go with the turning of the earth and suffering the torments of the heavens for so very, very long, _she_ came to me, all of her own accord. She could not be the same girl, of course, and yet she was the same girl. It was not she and yet there she was, barely altered, I was certain—for she wore the same tattered tunic and tossed the same greasy locks, and she carried her shoulders in the same fashion as before, as though she were perpetually under a yoke, carrying full milk-pails.

She would come in the afternoons with her small flock of bony goats, carrying a burlap sack with apples in it for her lunch, and sometimes a lyre in her arms which she rarely plucked (for every young miss around here must always receive some rudimentary lessons in the arts of womanhood). It would have been nice to say that she looked sad or lovelorn, but in truth there was seldom any intelligent expression on her face, just a kind of ovine hunger, or else her features were blurred in sleepiness. Sleep she did for most of the afternoon under my big bristling boughs, whistling through her nose loud as a wasps' nest on fire and tossing and turning on the trampled grass as if it were on fire, too. She was not a sedate sleeper. Perhaps it was her dreams.

Staring down on her restless figure hour after hour I longed for her all the more with each of those hours, as if it were the first time I had ever really desired anyone—ah, it was exquisite torture to have her so near and yet so untouchable! All I was to her was reliable shade and perhaps a place to rest her weary back while she ground away at an apple. I looked with jealousy on the forests, fading from green into blue at nightfall, which would cover her in the distance when she left me every evening; it was as if we shared an unhappy marriage in which we never talked and every night she lay in another lover's arms... and yet she felt it her duty to accompany and aggravate my misery day in and out with her stinking billy goats.

One such summer's sunny afternoon, however, I felt more than saw an alteration in her appearance, though it took me weeks to begin to guess what that change was. For one thing, she began to torment her lyre in earnest, trying out refrains from haunted old tunes with little success but fingers forceful enough to break an occasional string. Sometimes she even sang, though this would drive the goats away and make me strain at my very roots. Undaunted, she'd throw apple cores at the herd and shout up into my branches. It was when she did this that I saw her smile for the first time ever and I knew then that she was in love... but, alas, not with me.

Ye gods above, what was I to do? My adored had no doubt been manhandled by some bucktoothed lug from the village down the way, some drooling young hayseed who'd been scaring the heifers not long before he'd discovered more natural pastimes. I wanted to quake my boughs and roar into the wind, but I could do little more than drop a few needles onto her hair— and she noticed me not at all and I raged within my wooden prison and inevitably I knew for the first time in my five thousand years of existence what it truly means to be in love.

She had even begun to wash her hair and use a handkerchief now, to sew up the rips in her garments and scrub her linens clean. She was turning herself into a woman—for _him_ , for one of those ungainly freckled clods who passed my way each morning and each evening, switching flies off the skinny kine they so flagrantly led to and fro across my verdant lands. I despised him, though I knew not who he was, and I longed more than ever to speak to her, to persuade her to leave this stinking mortal, but the most she could hear was birdsong in my branches, the futile whisperings of one lone pine.

In my mind, or the heart of my softwood core, I would speak to her nevertheless, without fail each day and with all my might. I would philosophize and rhapsodize, I would tell her more tales than all the bards together tell, I would teach her all I had learned in the ages I had known and lived and lusted, I would wax stentorian about the passions we gods are famous for and speak softly but reassuringly of the love trembling just beneath my bark. In my mind, my core, in my heart of solid pinewood, I would woo and win her with words, words which—cursed of the gods!—she would never hear. She was so bad at the lyre. Her voice would invite the turkey buzzards to harmonize. She wouldn't have heard me, anyway.

I will try to bring my tale to some semblance of an end without much further ado. Bear with me as I did then. There came a decisive day, a day and an hour just before a breathless summer sundown, when birds and insects alike had been stifled by the heat. It was, I like to think, a disguised Cupid who came to ask forgiveness for the way he had humiliated me so long ago, the way he had thwarted my age-old lovemaking among the maids of my lost kingdom. Or else despite all that happened it was just an ordinary meadowlark which had lost its way or its mate. My beloved had been sleeping rather more quietly than usual—the goats, too—when she blinked and woke to the sound of this bird within the evergreen twilight of my boughs, hopping from branch to branch as it piped its orphic song. On her back on a bed of soft needles she stared up, enraptured by the sound, by the fleet-winged bird catching glints of the last of the sun in its yellow feathers. The bird, or Cupid, seemed to be daring her to follow him, up there into air and light. She stood on tiptoe, stretching her arms as if she could tempt the creature to her, but instead it danced farther up my branches. In a frenzy now, she leapt like a bacchante into the air —as if she could snatch it as one might a moth. She cursed and her eyes were tear-filled, radiant. How I longed to bend and embrace her then! And as though my wish had been granted, a sudden strong wind bent my lowest bough lower, low enough for her to catch, and with her powerful farm-girl's arms she pulled herself up. For a moment she balanced herself there on the bough, a moment of ecstasy for me as I felt her cheeks brush my needle-tips and her fingers tighten—and that softness between her legs where she sat. Still the bird taunted her, dared her, implored her, and as if entranced by a Siren, she climbed higher. It flickered like a flame in the rising wind, declaiming like an orator of old, and I began to understand what it was trying to say, even if all she heard was the song of a lark. Believe me. For I was a god before I was a liar.

"Be still," the little bird told me, as if I could be anything but. "I have come to praise you. When all the world has passed you by, when all things have changed, you've been patient. Things have changed, you know, in the world of men." He was whispering into a knothole now, as if she might overhear. "It's _their_ world now. Ordinary mortals! The age of poets and heroes is over. All the gods have fled Olympus. You've been better off standing here, noticing nothing. You who were once so lascivious, so avaricious, so meretricious, no longer desired anything but her love. Here she is, take her. That kind of love, the kind that can last an eternity, is beyond my mischief. Perhaps you've become noble, you who were once so foolish."

Here the meadowlark paused and combed his pinions, as if he'd admitted too much. "Ha! I never liked you," he added in a lower voice. "I came here to help you just to make _myself_ feel better. You're so vain you think little birds have come to sing your praises. You'd just as soon think Jove sent me here! And I can tell you're as dirty-minded as ever. Look at you

—every bit the _hard_ wood."

Not that I was listening anymore to that little twit. Well, I couldn't help myself; she had straddled my trunk and I felt my bark snag her flimsy summer shift—I shuddered up and down my immense length and she shimmied upwards, breasts chafing against me, thighs tight around my girth, until all her clothing was in shreds and her sun-browned body sticky and aromatic with resin. The wind whipped through my boughs, I moaned, that insane bird was still twittering far up in the heights. Was she mad, too? Had Cupid cast a charm with his music, was this a panic worthy of Pan? She grazed her whole body against me as she heaved herself ever higher; she was bruised and bleeding and yet I could distinctly hear her laughing above the wind and the creaking of my limbs and the enchanted lark. Or perhaps I was holding onto her as much as she held me—there were splinters under her nails but my branches were now festooned with her underthings as, naked, beautiful, imperious as Venus herself, she ascended. Higher, still higher... In the vespertine thrall of heat and friction and song and wind we swayed together, the bird now perched on my topmost branch and she clinging to the limb just beneath like a sailor who has mounted the mast in a storm. Like a sailor, too, she held to the timber with one hand and shielded her eyes with the other as she scanned the horizon far below her.

Spread out below us we both surveyed the bosomy green earth, its sunlit peaks and shadowy valleys, the gentle slopes and craggy cliffs all. Forest and field, meadow and marsh, cow-path and wagon-way were unfolded before us like an enormous map, and we could see every detail together: the toy farms, the miniature mills and granaries, the cemeteries with their marble game-pieces, ribands of streams and little silver serving bowls that were lakes, the temple steeples and whitewashed cupolas rising above the distant shining towns. And in the last lantern-rays which friendly Phoebus was so kind as to cast our way, we looked down across this _trompe l'oeil_ landscape into the nearest village and saw children dancing in circles, youths walking side by side and hand in hand, lovers sprawled on picnic blankets, widows and widowers kissing on torch-lit porches.

For the first time, the last time, she looked down into my branches and seemed to see me for who I really was, to know then that I loved her absolutely and everlastingly. She smiled, I was sure of that. Could she be remembering, and if so, could she possibly have forgiven my rashness and brutality all those centuries ago? "Ah, yes, my friend— _something_ gold does stay," was the last the lark said to me—and unseen, that serendipitous bird had flown off into the dewy Arcadian night. We swayed together. She caught her breath and I felt her shiver in the cooling air. It did not matter now that I was a white spruce tree and she was a mortal, a woman. Ring within ring, in my core of cores, I realized that the bird's song had lit something lambent and merciful inside her and that now, although she could never articulate it, she understood, as well. So—grasping the topmost of my branches with the passion of a Fury, the eagerness of a bride rising to kiss her groom, she hoisted herself higher still and...

i) Metamorphosed into a glorious winged creature not found in any bestiary and for

which there is no Latin taxonomy, she flies bold and fearless into the snowy empyrean;

ii) She constellates each exquisite silvery angle of herself among all those legendary stars;

and/or

iii) Both of us transformed by a love worthy of the books, she reaches back to take

my hand and pulls me upwards, too—for I am once again a god, yet humbled, and she, a new-crowned goddess.

Frog Baby

Here, now, this night—here it is. Here is the jar. Here is the baby. The jar is filled with something that may be alcohol or formaldehyde yellowed with age. The thick glass of the jar, if you touched it, would feel cold. Inside the jar the baby looks cold, shriveled, its skin very white under the bright lamp. The skin looks waxen, hairless. A lacework of dark veins shines through the skin. The limbs are stunted, twisted at the joints. The head and torso are squat and amphibian. There doesn't seem to be a neck. An umbilical cord, sprouted from the abdomen, is twisted between the legs. Its eyes are like large white grapes. They are wide open. Dead eyes. The fingers and toes are curled under. Webs of skin fuse several of the digits. One fist presses against a cheek. The thumb touches its slightly parted lips. The baby looks ready to make a sound, very high, very soft.

This is no frog, you would say. This is a human baby. A deformed embryo. No mutant at all. just a baby. But you wouldn't like looking at it, just the same. It would be something to remember, later, in the dark of the night, and you wouldn't like it at all.

Here, now, this night. It is late. It is hot. Overhead, nighthawks shriek and swoop after mosquitoes. Most of the crowd has gone home. The lingerers walk slowly, slowly across the sawdusted fairgrounds. You might be there, among them, not wanting to go home, but not really wanting to do much else. Everyone is worn down by the heat, the long summer day. Tired, drunk, sweaty.

There is the carnie grub. He coughs and spits with great force. There is a microphone like a toy chromium rocket in his hands. Time to do his number for the thousandth time that day. Spits again. The carnie grub's voice is Texan, nasal . It is high, almost girlish. He is really just a kid, not that much older than you, but looks ancient under his grease, the way all carnie grubs do. He speaks fast like a girl, too, in breathless phrases. His words echo and fade out over the fairgrounds. They are a jumble, half lost in the distortion: _Gave birth monster miracle medical science history incredible shocking won't believe your eyes half human half frog only fifty cents miracle frog baby monster miracle..._

The carnie grub is standing before a sideshow trailer. The trailer is plastered with posters of the exhibit. There is a picture of a frog with little girl curls in a blue dress, riding a tricycle. There is another picture of the baby slurping a lollipop with a long long frog tongue. Here, it straddles a lily pad, there, it catches flies. A wide human smile on its enlarged face. But something horrible about the pictures, all the same.

A few stragglers have gathered around the trailer, not really listening to what the carnie grub has to say, though your ears echo with the words: _Won't believe it Christian mother amazing last chance tonight see to believe..._ Closer now, you see that the barker's fingers and fingernails are black with grease. His hair is even greasier. He combs his greasy hand through his greasy hair. He is sweating—there are dark crescents under the arms of his dirty T-shirt. He wipes his forehead with a soiled rag he plucks from his back pocket. His chest is bony and his arms are covered with blurred tattoos. And yet—and yet there is something refined about him, almost feminine. He might be a dancer, an acrobat.

Of course you should save your quarters, but you want so much to be included. You want to lose yourself among these people, watch them as they watch the frog baby. Afraid, yes, but it is the fear that leads you on. Like last year when you saw the missing link and the snake girl. Later, yes, there will be the dreams and the sudden awakenings in bed. But now there is the thrill. Now there is the attraction of the crowd, of the unknown. You will lose yourself, for now.

The ticket girl who takes your quarters is not a young girl. She is not really a girl at all. She is very, very, very old. Her skin is powdery white, her hair is dyed too red, and her broken, bitten fingernails are a matching red. She squints when she hands out tickets. She talks fast and Kewpie-doll squeaky. Between customers she slips on the glasses hanging from the red ribbon around her neck and reads a nurse book. She never looks directly at anything outside her booth.

She never looks toward the trailers behind her.

The carnie grub lights a Camel. _'Bout that time_ , he tells the ticket girl. She nods _uh-huh_. He scratches himself sleepily, decides to take a break. You watch him as he goes. There is an unlit passageway inside the trailer, leading to the exhibit. The trailer is too crowded, too low, too hot. The crowd breathes in each other's air. The crowd smells its own sweat. You feel like part of them. Maybe you have lost yourself. Suddenly the carnie grub has reappeared in the dark— his cigarette glows ahead of you like a firefly. He makes his way through the people and to the room at the end of the trailer.

A teenage girl pulls at her husband's hand. Her hair is pinched behind the ears. Her eyes are tired. She looks very young but somehow you know she is old in other ways, married— when she falls back from the group anyone could tell she is pregnant. Her belly protrudes from her unbuttoned smock, round and burnished as an apple. She pleads in a raspy whisper to leave. Her tall, freckled husband does not say a thing. He sucks in his cheeks. Draws her back within the group. She closes her mouth and eyes tight. Two farm kids are trying to remember the words to a song playing over the Spin-a-Rama's speakers. They are off-key, and their girlfriends laugh little nervous laughs.

The carnie grub sniffs loudly to get everyone's attention. He points to a framed page of newsprint hanging on the side of the passage. _This_ , he says, _tells all 'bout the frog baby. The whole truth, nothin' but. 'Case you're interested. This here's a picture of its mama._

A blurred photograph in a separate frame shows a fat Chinese or Mexican woman. A black shawl like a nun. Tired face. The caption could be Spanish, maybe not. The light is too weak to read by. Another faded photograph shows the newborn baby. It is held before the camera by a pair of enormous bloody hands. The baby, too, is covered in blood, or what looks like blood. The baby's eyes are open wide, staring at death. No one looks at the photo for long.

And here is the jar. Here is the baby. Look here, now, this hot, worn-out night. The jar sits before the spectators on a metal shelf. A single hot brilliant light illuminates the jar. Mormon flies hover around the light and on the drape behind. No part of the frog baby is a secret. A blonde with very browned skin coughs. Her shorter blonde friend gasps slowly. A kid stops in the middle of a joke. You feel a part of it all. The teenage girl tugs at her husband's hand again. He does not blink. She won't look.

A big Mexican woman, probably a migrant worker from downriver, gives the jar an impudent push with her finger. The carnie grub spits. _Look, don't touch, lady._ The baby has been set in motion by her action. It spins. One toe touches the bottom of the jar. It spins slowly to the loudspeaker music. Then it is buoyed back up by the fluid. The baby bobs sluggishly for a while. The big Mexican woman looks pleased with the performance. The baby is still once more.

Something that remains of yourself wants to leave, but the crowd has hemmed you in. There are no more than ten people here, but it seems like more. Science experiments, horror movies, ghost stories come to mind. It's not the baby, either—it's what the baby means. You knew the missing link and snake girl were fakes. Still, they were hard to forget. Still, maybe you wanted to remember. This one you don't know. You don't know if it's a fake or not. You don't know if you want to remember.

A little boy with lips blue from the blue cotton candy he's been eating glances up from his blue fingers. He giggles at the frog baby's nudity. The frog baby appears to be sexless. The boy's older sister does not laugh. She wants to see the baby ride its trike. Or catch a fly. _Can't it catch a fly?_ Her brother agrees. The carny grub taps his cigarette. Blows his nose into his rag.

The teenage girl turns away from the jar. She has seen without wanting to. She splays fingers over belly. Her husband seizes her by the wrist. Pulls her hand away. Christ, girl.

_How we know that ain't just a doll?_ A voice in the back, a bare-chested farmer with a flaming red back, just out of the beer tent, probably. He bats a mosquito away with his seed-corn cap. _What d'ya s'pose its ma got for it? Who'd pay for a damn thing like that?_

The carny grub scratches an armpit. Then the other. _Don't rightly know. Read that there spic story._

_Sure as hell a fake. Some kinda wax model._ The sunburned farmer heads for the exit. _Damn waste._

The two kids and their girlfriends leave, too. No longer talking, joking. One begins to whistle the melody reverberating throughout the fairgrounds before he is out of the room. His girl swats at a mosquito with her monkey-on-a-stick. The other girl stretches her bra strap through the neck of her t-shirt. Her boyfriend follows, idly picking his nose. Part of you leaves with them, part of you is expanding beyond this time, this place, this hot night.

A boy about eleven points to the jar. He might be someone you have known all your life, which is a very long time. Or a very short time. _Looks like_ , he says to his twin brother. _Looks like it was about to yell out something before they stuffed it in the bottle._

_That baby never made a peep_ , the big Mexican woman says. She is pressed close to you, seems to surround you, to absorb you. She has filled the trailer with the smell of green tomatoes.

That poor baby was stillborn. It was born stone-cold.

The boy's twin approaches the jar. Spreads his palms over the cool glass. The barker draws menacingly on his cigarette. The twin ignores him. His face is illuminated by the lamp. His eyes are wide beneath silky bangs. _Don't know_ , he says to his brother. _Don't know, but it does sorta make me feel all empty inside._ (Maybe that was you-maybe you were the twin boy with the silky bangs. Maybe you did feel a sickness inside. Could it matter now, a long, long, long time later?)

_Poor thing_ , the big Mexican woman says. She slaps a bug against her big thigh, winces. _Poor thing. You should pray, boys. Pray for that baby's soul._

One twin—your twin, maybe—hunches his shoulders. Stares at his bare feet. The boys laugh at something unsaid between them and go out the door. Maybe you left with them, as one of them, and then again maybe you are still here. Maybe you are dreaming and can't leave this dream. You think of waking in the night, to the cold moon, the wet pillow. A voice outside the bedroom door asking if you are all right. But you hear the little boy with blue lips giggling. His sister joins him. She reaches her hand down the front of her pants to scratch herself. _Dumb old baby. Yeah, dumb baby_ , her brother repeats. _Dumb old baby._

The big Mexican woman hushes the children as if they were her own. The brownskinned blonde frowns. The carnie grub is watching her. She licks her overbite with her tongue. Her shorter blonde friend digs at her fingernails. Leans on her friend. The teenage girl has turned away again. Her husband shakes his flat-top, hums low. They lock hands and leave. You hear him out there, still humming.

Everyone else leaves, too. The carnie grub steps aside, crushes the cigarette under his boot. The big Mexican woman flaps her hands before her face for air. _These things just not for me_ , she moans. _I'll have nightmares, you bet._ The carnie grub smooths back his greasy hair. He hastens the little blue-lipped boy and his sister out. He winks at the brown-skinned blonde. _You and your friend come back, y'hear?_ She wets her lips with a fingertip. _Oh sure_ , she says flatly. _Sure._ Her friend stifles a shriek of laughter with her hand.

The midway lights seem much brighter now. Maybe it is because the sky above seems so much blacker and the air cooler. The Spin-a-Rama's speakers rumble, vibrating the ground. The double Ferris wheel has stopped revolving. The grounds are nearly empty. Even the beer tent looks vacant. The carnie grub watches his customers fan out across the sawdust. Toward the Rubber Man, the two-headed calf, Chita the Gorilla Girl, the House of Mirrors. He sees the big

Mexican woman pausing before the gorilla girl's trailer. The two blondes get on the Tilt-a-Whirl. They hold hands like lovers and scream. The two farm kids and their girls are daring their strength on the electric chair in the arcade. The little boy with blue lips and his sister run down the midway to beg their tired, drunken parents for more money and candy. Some of the others have stopped at the beer tent before going home. A different snake girl from the one last year has stepped out and is leaning against the side of her trailer. She watches the teenage girl and her husband as they pass, arguing softly between themselves. The twins are nowhere in sight.

You could be them, any of them. You could be getting shocked on the electric chair or whirling on a ride until you're sick. You have expanded out over the fair, out toward the town and the homes and the dark bedrooms and above into the starry sky. Expanded like smoke, and disappeared. But you are still just yourself. You haven't really lost yourself to the crowd and the night. You are you. Tired, wishing for bed. Thinking of that yellow porch light in the distance, the voice calling you across the night, nighthawks swooping over the fields. Their high, high lonely sound. Do you want to cry just because you are tired? Or is it something else?

It is hot. It is late. The carnie grub squats under a strand of blinking white lights. Takes the pack of crumpled Camels from his shirt-sleeve, ignites one with a Flippo. He inhales. He exhales. The pale gray smoke encircles his head. He sits now and pulls off his boots. Sits and watches the sky. Listening.

The ticket girl smiles at him. Her nurse book is flattened before her. There is a hanky stuck in her cleavage. She is snapping gum, drumming fingers. Nothing left to do. One by one the machines are shut off and it grows quiet. _Getting late, hon_ , she calls. _That time._

_Yup. That time._ He leans back. Above him are white lights and stars. The electric cables are humming. The mosquitoes are humming. The whole fair is humming, but low, almost unheard. The carnie grub exhales a lasso of smoke. It floats toward the sky. Up and up.

It seems to ring the moon. Hangs there and fades away. He claps his hands and gets up.

The ticket girl jangles her coins. There is a reddish flash to the west, heat lightning. A far-off rumble. She slaps her nurse book closed. The carnie grub yawns. You are watching— near, from a distance, you aren't sure. But you know. You see. You will not forget. You will not forget one single moment.

Over there, the sideshow trailer. The jar. The baby. Its right temple touching the cold glass. Its fists almost clenched. Its face white and swollen, eyes open, eyes dead, almost unseen in the dark now. The mouth is barely open, looking as if it were on the verge of making a high sound, a soft sound. Years from now you might hear it, but not now. Now you are lost outside of this place, lost from yourself, and so tired. Years from now you will think of this night, this long hot night. Years and years from now I—lost, lost forever. Here, this night, though, the frog baby sleeps, never dreaming.
The Last Day of June

or, The Old Ones

**Early morning on the last day of June.** The young schoolteacher was dressing himself before his wardrobe mirror in the cramped attic room he rented from the bachelor farmer who lived below. It had been hot all night in the cramped attic room; today would be even hotter. The rising sun shone so brightly into the mirror he had to bend closer to see his face through the veil of dust. His was a boyish face, still downy on the cheeks and only just twenty, but in this light it faded into the pale, looked almost spectral. In another time, he thought, this is what poets who died young looked like, but he was finished as a poet. He put on a clean shirt today but no collar; he rolled up the sleeves and was glad that school was out, so he could get by without the seersucker. Downstairs, he had heard farmer and farmhand leave the house to go about their chores. A meadowlark was singing off in the paddock. And from much farther away, out the window and across a sea of indigo fields, from beyond the eastern gap and maybe even originating from the mountains themselves, he heard, or thought he heard, a thin high sound, like the peal of a distant waterfall, perhaps, or like bells.

In the village, the village barber stood under the morning glory trellis outside his cottage door, and he, too, thought he heard something afar, where it was still more blue than golden. It was as if the mist coming down the mountains to the east could make a sound. A tinkling, silvery sound–children laughing to the sound of pennywhistle and tambourine. But no, that was in another place and time. He had dreamt last night of such a place, an icebound world high in mountains much higher than these. A land of the dire wolf and ikons. The barber looked off in the opposite direction, toward the rising sun, past the tavern and the church steeple and the mayor's big house, into the foothills, but was too blinded by dawnlight to see any further. From that end of the village, down in the hollows still purple too with mist, he was certain he could hear an echo now–high, tremulous, almost a merry taunt. It was then that the barber, who was not young at all, remembered what he had heard from a traveling representative of a hair tonic company a month or more ago: that the Old Ones had been seen this year two or three counties over, that they had come down from their mountaintops for the first time in longer than most folks could remember, and that people said they were on the roam once again. They snatch babies right out of their bassinets, some fools would say, but they were thinking of the tribes of Romany, and no Gypsies had ever or would ever come here. The winters lingered too long, the summers sped like sparrows. But the barber looked forward to seeing the Old Ones again, for, like him, they did not quite belong to this place or any other, and yet they were bound to this rocky land as surely as ghosts of the murdered must haunt the rooms where they died.

The young schoolteacher had crossed the fields to where the white cattle, like bewitched sisters in a myth, huddled under a grove of oaks; they looked up sleepily but did not move as he passed them on his way to where the red-dirt road intersected with the gray-dirt road. Today the schoolteacher had books to return to the public library, and he was contemplating which he might borrow next. He meant to reread Homer this summer break, when there was so little else for a schoolteacher to do, but wondered instead if he shouldn't try _A Midsummer's Night Dream_. The village librarian wore her hair up with dragonfly barrettes like a girl from the city, and she was unmarried. She would have to ignore that he was hatless, in his shirtsleeves–but, after all, she had shown him books containing illustrations of ladies and gentlemen wearing much less than this. She had been places, seen things, if only in books. Thinking of her, he picked up his speed. Now there was no question that he heard, coming down the gray-dirt road from the pass between Owl's Head and Nag's Head, coming his way, the creaking of wagon wheels and the jangle of bells on horses' reins.

**Mid-morning on the last day of June.** The sleek gray quarter horse tethered to the mayor's hitching post had been waiting patiently for an hour as the mayor busied himself within the house. It was the largest house for miles around, with porches wide as a steamship's deck, and a stained-glass window, round like a porthole, in a high stairwell that looked out over the entire village. The mayor had woken with a fierce headache and had stubbed his toe on the chamber pot, and being a superstitious man, was certain that these were not good omens. Besides that, it was certain to be another very hot day, never felicitous for a large and heavy man. He kept a slim silver flask in his coat pocket, which he replenished, as he did every morning, with the cool clear liquid that smelled of crushed juniper berries. His wife was dead. She was buried under a juniper tree. The mayor had received a letter four mornings ago; it was still in his coat pocket, filed next to the flask, and he had still not opened it. Outside he heard his mare neigh once, as if to tell him to hurry, the minutes of the day were already dissolving one by one.

The barber was unfurling the striped awning up and over his shop window. The low morning sun glanced off all the bright things within. He kept his shop very clean, all the silver highly polished and the mirrors, large and small, spotless. Even before the awning spread its shadow, the shop was cool, too, perhaps the coolest place in town. It was the cool of silver and shadow. And quiet, often too quiet. There was reason today, however, for the barber to whistle, and whistle he did, one of the old country roundelays. The last time the Old Ones had come through here, he had shaved many of their chins, even trimmed many of the women's long gray hair, and they paid what he asked without fuss. In fact, they never seemed to speak a word, even among themselves. The barber knew they liked to camp down in the hollows, the mayor's disused lands, where rocks had never been raked from the topsoil, and no one would bother them. If this visit were to be like those of past decades, they would camp a night or two at most, pick up, and continue on their way, people said, until they found another, even more remote, part of the mountains to make their new home. The barber tied on his apron and sprinkled rosewater about the little shop, like a priest blessing a chapel.

Word had spread. In the village square, citizens in bonnets and caps were gathering, pointing down the post road, searching the horizon. The tavern was serving lemonade under its awnings as if this were a holiday. Children spun tin tops and wooden hoops out over the dusty road, only to be pulled back onto the green by nervous parents. Would there be a parade? Was the Fourth coming early? There was little talk in front of the children, but no one wanted to miss seeing them pass–the elders who'd seen it all before, sometimes several times, no less than the youngsters who had never. At ten, as if in welcome to the newcomers, the bells of the church steeple rang out their little melody of the hours, and the last of the children were called off the road to make way for what was now imminent.

The library was new, a Carnegie, quite small but large for a village this size, with a copper-topped rotunda like a teapot lid and dome lights and fanlights and a green glass floor between the book stacks. No light went to waste in the library. The schoolteacher was in the library, looking over the old leather-bound set of Shakespeare, of which the girl librarian was very proud, when the procession began outside the big leaded-glass windows. He had never witnessed anything like this before, though the librarian had already told him what to expect; she had heard tales of them since she was a child, but she had never seen them in all her eighteen years. With a glissando of little bells and a rhythmic stomping of hooves, the Old Ones marched by, oblivious to the village people, to the very village itself. The way they shuffled alongside their horses, the way their eyes stared straight ahead into nothing, they might have been blind. Undoubtedly a few of them were. What was clear was they were not wild Indians, come to reclaim their lands; neither were they true Gypsies, as some called them. Their skin was dark enough, but no darker than that of any farmer or farmwife who spent every day of every summer under the sun. Their clothes were not the Oriental costumes of stereoscope cards; they were threadbare and homespun and dusty, that was all. They were, indeed, very old—not one looked under seventy—but their faces were as angelic and anonymous as the faces of old, withered people anywhere. The two young people might have even been a bit disappointed if it weren't for their horses, who seemed tired and almost as old as their owners–but whose manes and tails were done up in elaborate braids laced with faded silver and gold ribbon, and their wagons, gaudy as a carnival's, ornamented like a carnival's, with elaborate signs and symbols painted silver and gold on their high varnished sides. The symbols might have been Egyptian–or they might have merely been Masonic. Horses and wagons alike were hung with tiny tarnished bells which glinted in the sunlight. It was almost like a circus promenade, albeit a circus you might find in a hobo kingdom. But there was one last wagon, long and low, black as coal tar, topped with hemlock garlands almost as black, whose two gaunt mules tarried behind the rest. Some in the crowd outside bowed their heads. Now it seemed the bells had been muted. There, an imperious crow had paused to preen on one mule's back! The coachman, a man whose face was shadowed under the broad brim of a parson's hat, did not bother to flick the crow away with his whip. Perhaps the crow was one of them. Next to the coachman sat the woman who might be the matriarch of the whole clan–unlike the rest, she had a crown of hair scarlet with henna, and she wore a tattered velvet gown from another era, of some sun-blanched shade of blue or violet or gray. Around her neck, she bore chains of blackened silver, bead necklaces, cameos on pendants, rusty silk ribbons, all swaying with the rhythm of the mules. She must have been a hundred and ten or more, but her face was painted and powdered, and she fluttered a moth-eaten fan before her sunken bosom like an ancient courtesan. There was also something about her akin to an Egyptian empress, at the prow of a long black ship like a galley, about to row into the afterlife. The two young people were among the most schooled in the village, but they had never seen such a bizarre old woman, nor such wagons and hex-signs and baroque equipage, not in any book or opera house or magic lantern show. Was this a funeral procession or were these backward people from far upcountry merely looking for somewhere fresh to pasture their horses? The schoolteacher found that he had placed his hand over the librarian's smooth cool hand as they stood at the windows, but once the procession had passed and the spell was broken, he shied away and hurried from her and the library without even remembering the books for which he'd come.

**Noon on the last day of June.** The schoolteacher was standing outside the tavern, wondering if he should go in for lunch or save his meager pay and go back to eat a meager cold meal with the farmer. But it was better for now to wait here, watching the world, even a very small part of it. He wanted to know things about the world beyond this cluster of white houses, the secret things which might only be revealed where no one else is looking–in an empty storefront, for instance, or in a village almost deserted in the heat. If he were a true poet, if he could paint the day in a poem . . . It was somewhat cooler under the tavern's front awning; within the tavern, he could see the sad fat funny mayor sitting alone at a little table, a slice of molasses pie and a glass of beer before him. Even at this distance, the schoolteacher could see the dark whorls the mayor's fingerprints had left on the side of his sweating glass. The tavern table looked like a child's plaything, cowering before the bulk of the mayor. There was something in the mayor's hands–an envelope, creased and greasy, sweat-stained. The mayor had still not brought himself to open it. Instead, he used it for a fan. The mayor looked out the window, not noticing the boy standing right in front of him, but admiring his blue-ribbon mare hitched across the road, beneath the umbrella elms outside the barber shop. The mare's tail never ceased switching flies. Its head was down, though, as if the mare were sleeping standing up. Inside the barber shop, the schoolteacher and mayor both watched the barber shaving yet another grizzled beard. It was very quiet inside the shop, but for the gentle scratching, the lapping sound of razor and occasional scrape of blade against the leather strop. The Old Ones of course did not speak to the barber or to anyone else in the village; it might have been that they did not speak at all, or at least not in any language anyone here understood. They did not buy lemonade at the tavern or any biscuit-flour or tinned meats or sorghum from the general store around the corner. Each of the Old Ones paid the barber with gold coins left over from the last century–worn, odd coins most people seldom if ever saw these days. The barber could not resist keeping a few of the coins each time the Old Ones visited; they were not worth anything more than their face value, but often he liked to look into the pie safe where he kept them–they were something to remember these long summer days by, gleaming in their cupboard like preserves in a winter pantry.

The schoolteacher pressed his face back to the tavern window. The glass felt good, felt cool against his forehead. He could tell the mayor himself was not feeling well. Indeed, the mayor was not feeling well at all, after his meal. He was certain he was coming down with a fever. He felt what he imagined it must feel like to be seasick. The arrival of the Old Ones was the cause, no doubt. His wife had been sure they were Gypsies of Tatary, abandoned by all the other Gypsy clans up here in these north-country mountains. Or else they were the lost tribe of Israel–either way, they could curse you as soon as they'd look on you with their frozen eyes, and they were at the least robbers who'd steal their silver forks and knives and spoons right out of her trousseau. The mayor swallowed the last of his beer, which was no longer cold, lukewarm now. The tavern was empty but for him. He placed the envelope back inside his breast pocket. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He scattered coins across the table. The schoolteacher had already backed away from the window, leaving, he noticed, the pale imprint of lips upon the glass. He saw the barber across the street, pulling up an old woman's long straight hair with one hand, as if it were a length of heavy rope, his longest scissors in his other hand. A smell of Wildroot and something even fresher, like tea-roses in the snow, wafted from the shop. The quarter horse neighed once, eager to get home to the cool of its stable and its straw. Up in the sky, one small pearl-gray cloud, as if on a trapeze, dangled between two blue peaks.

**Afternoon on the last day of June.** The mayor lay on his big broad bed, trying to sleep, watching the paddles of the fan revolve above him, a rowboat caught in a whirlpool. Seasick, far from land. He had a fever, it was certain now, and the slim silver flask rested beside him, half-empty. The barber had already fallen asleep, exhausted, in his big cast-iron chair. The door of his shop was open, and a breeze was now browsing the yellowed pages of an almanac lying open on a chair and chasing tufts of gray and white hair across the floor, which the barber hadn't yet swept. The mirrors reflected only each other, and shadows had dulled the glint of silver. The schoolteacher–back from lunch with the farmer and his hired hand, and now in collar, coat, and tie, a straw boater in his lap–was sitting on a bench in the village square. He, too, might have been asleep, were it not for that distant, enticing tinkling he heard from down the road, down in the rocky hollows. The farmer had warned him to stay away if the Old Ones camped here, that they caused no harm but did not like being spied upon. Part of the schoolteacher was afraid, but a large part of him was curious, as well. That was why he sat here, looking up into the clouds rapidly draining all color from the sky, hoping the girl inside would see him from her windows across the street and join him. Normally he would have a book in his hands and read, or pretend to read, until she closed up the library at three. Once recently he had even walked her to the gates of her parents' dairy farm as she talked endlessly if endearingly about flowers and botany and books he had very little interest in: _Bog-Trotting for Orchids_ , was it, or _Among The Flora of the Northeast Kingdom_? Someday, she would sail to Sumatra, she had said, to watch the corpse-flower open its stinking petals under a full moon, or to other rainforests where ferns grew tall as oaks–and giant spiders were quick enough to snatch hummingbirds in flight. She wanted to see a fabled desert plant that bloomed but once a millennium, died, and then was reborn like a phoenix. All she would need on her travels were gutta-percha boots, skirts short to her calf, pigskin gloves, and vasculum. She showed all her pretty teeth when she laughed. Today, whenever he glanced through the luminous library windows, he saw her pacing one end of the reading room to the other, back and again, as if she could not decide to join him or not. Perhaps it was because she feared where he wanted to take her. Even though he had never said a word about it, perhaps she realized what he was planning, and that was why it was nearly three-thirty and she hadn't left the library yet. So the schoolteacher sat on his bench, not really waiting and not really watching. Boater in his lap and sometimes in his hand but never on his head, shiny with pomade.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, the mayor held the letter up to the nearest window, to the light. He could make out the dark legalistic penmanship within, even the swoops of certain capital letters and slanted signatures, but could not yet bring himself to open the letter. His wife– no, it must be the new cook–dropped a heavy pot in the kitchen below. His wife was dead, his wife was dead, he must not let himself forget that his wife was dead. Even, perhaps most importantly, as he did mundane things–untied his shoes, unfastened his shirt-studs. The mayor lay back down, half undressed. Minutes passed. They might have been hours. A handkerchief he'd dampened with gin swathed his brow, like a war bandage, as if covering a wound. The bed was only half unmade, for he could never touch her side. The rowboat revolved and revolved, but eventually he slept a little. Meanwhile, the barber had awoken with a start–faraway thunder or a gunshot–and arose, dipped his fingertips in rosewater, and set about tidying his shop for the next day, empty as that day might be. He swept the hair into several neat piles in several corners, humming something with a rhythm but no tune. Outside the wind was picking up, but that did not bother him. Today he had much gold jingling in his apron pockets. Was there ever a happier sound? Outside his shop windows, it was getting gray enough to be dusk already, though this would be one of the longest days of the year. He watched himself in his big mirrors, waltzing with his broom, and was reminded for a moment of real dances in real dancehalls, long ago and in another country, when he was young, when he was very young....

**Late afternoon on the last day of June.** The schoolteacher was walking up the abandoned road toward the hollows, thinking of the librarian as he kicked up the gray dust, watching the dust hang there in the sultry air. The schoolteacher hoped the librarian, even if she seemed to love wildflowers more than books, might be the one person in this place to understand him. If he could only dare to tell her, if only she would stop puttering among her card catalogs and journals and potted plants and allow him to tell her, he would talk about how he had never expected to be teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in this little village far from his own hometown, which was a place not much bigger than this but on the other side of the mountains far to the west. He had hoped, still hoped to wander the world, to see the sights he saw in encyclopedias–the seven wonders of the world, dead cities and lost cities and cities filled with the babel of foreign tongues. Once, when her eyes brightened when he asked if she knew a good book of poetry, he had almost said all this right then and more. But quick as she had clapped a musty volume of John Greenleaf Whittier in his hands, he surrendered to muteness and left the library without even remembering to sign the card inside the book. Only later did he discover there were pressed flowers between the pages of her favorite poems: buttercup and Queen Anne's lace, snapdragon and bachelor's button and forget-me-not.

The schoolteacher had been walking this way, dizzy in a whirlwind of thought and desire, for a quarter of an hour before he realized he'd been followed. It was the librarian, after all, her pleats hitched up so she could walk faster in her high-buttoned boots, the top two clasps of her linen shirtwaist unclasped (this humidity!), the ribbons and silk flowers of her summer bonnet flying in the wind which swept so hard down the barren cliffside here. He stood and waited for her to catch up, looking out over the edge of the ridge they were on, out across the black pinewood and a moraine like a ruined aqueduct that sloped past old, overgrown quarries into the deepest part of the hollows. A flock of crows circled the deepest part of the hollows, where the rutted wagon-trail led, and from where now the smoke from several fires rose to meet as one in the steel-gray air. Everywhere was the gabble of crows, coming into the pines to roost before the storm. That was a sound, an omen, which always preceded the thunder here. A little further on, a mingled, musky scent like attar of civet, or valerian of heliotrope, or appoponax oil, rose on the wind, and there was the sound now not only of bells, but of mandolins perhaps or Andalusian guitars, and silvery laughter ringing off granite ledges. The librarian, hatless (had she lost her hat?), hair becoming unpinned, was at his side, and held onto his arm as if it were the most natural thing on earth to do–as indeed it was–and they began their descent toward the sound and smoke.

The barber yawned, straightened the outdated almanacs and gazettes, closed the windows tight. Tonight, he had decided, he would polish his work-tools at home while he waited for the storm. He was a scrupulous man, polishing one thing or another almost every night with the best of silversmith's paste and chamois cloth. He was whistling again, not humming, as he pulled down a little blind he'd had made to order: TONSORIAL EMPORIUM SEE YOU TO-

MORROW, and he shut the door behind him. Carefully, he rolled up the striped awning and fastened its braided cords. One last look into the empty shop–nothing askew, nothing amiss. All I need, he thought to himself with a smile, is a bowl of cream for the little people who come in the night to pick up the crumbs and spin their finest cobwebs. Across the street, at the tavern, the awnings were already up, the doors already locked–the only doors to lock in the whole village. The barber was holding his precious tooled-leather valise of scissors and razors against his chest, four silver-handled mirrors tucked under his left arm, another in his right hand. He held this largest one before his eyes for a moment, admiring its shine even in this sepulchral light, admiring the way the mirror so perfectly reflected the bruise-black sky. As he held it there, one drop–perhaps the first drop–of rain splattered on the mirror's surface and ran down its face.

The mayor sat at his towering writing desk, with its columbarium of little drawers and recesses, deep in a maelstrom of meaningless forms and absurd documents. His wife, in frame of silver looped with ribbons of black crepe, looked down upon him from one of the recesses, but he tried to avoid her eyes. He had still not opened the letter–in fact, he had lost it now amongst all these useless papers. His drinking flask, long since empty, stood next to the picture frame, but he dared not refill it yet, not under his wife's watchful eye. Instead, he refilled his mayoral fountain pen with India ink, tried to focus on the facts and figures before him, tried to shake the fever with the purity of thought and concentration. Distantly, he heard his beloved horse whinny for her supper–but, no, seeing rain begin to roll down his study windows, it might very well have been thunder. He could picture the mare nevertheless, kicking restlessly at her clean whitewashed stall, next to the stall where his wife's toylike little motor car, the only motor car in the entire village, was kept. The mayor contemplated how he could take his hunting rifle, and–if he could get it running without the assistance of the stableboy–stuff himself into the car to drive down to where the Old Ones were probably camping and poaching his deer–and run them off his land.

**Evening on the last day of June.** The thunderstorm had cracked itself open at last. It seemed to rise right out of the steep ravine they were entering, like an immense black beast, and soon the schoolteacher and librarian were running, hand in hand, for shelter among the funereal pines. Thunder rolled and bellowed all around them, off the granite cliffs and the gargantuan boulders like petrified shipwrecks which had been flung down into these hollows eons ago. Great webs of lightning spun themselves across the sky in an instant, illuminating the entire high valley their village inhabited, reflecting off the surrounding amphitheater of peaks both bald and forested. The young people clung to one another under what might have been, in this blackness, yews and hemlocks–for all those boulders beyond now were white as tombstones; the valley had become like a vast cemetery. Above the boy and girl, in the sheltering branches, even the bickering crows could not be heard above the wind and rain. It seemed for a few minutes as though the earth might split and the whole forest, all these lightning-blasted mountains, would tumble into the underworld. But then all at once it grew quiet, the pelleting rain ceased, and a pearlescent glow from the hidden sunset lit the hollow like a small beeswax taper brought into a cavernous chamber. The sky to the east was still black as pitch tar, as a crow's back, but when the schoolteacher and the librarian emerged from behind the dripping curtain of low-hanging boughs, they could see well enough that they were at the edge of the Old Ones' camp. A small fire burnt before each of the dozen wagons, and a larger fire was being built in the center of them all. Tall, bare-chested men were heaping whole tree trunks and great uprooted stumps onto the mounting fire, and once more the strange music had begun, from out of nowhere, from the roiling clouds above, it seemed.

The barber sat at his workbench after supper, carefully lining up the tools of his trade: the gleaming silver scissors, short and dangerously long, one pair with ebony handles, another with carved ivory; the various elegant razors, ingeniously designed with handles which the deadly blades retracted into with a press of a button; the beautiful set of mirrors whose faces shone and whose silverplated backs depicted castles and coronets and ducal crests. It was these mirrors he cherished the most–they had been given to him long, long ago by someone who had once loved him. He dipped his chamois cloth into the expensive polishing paste and rubbed it into the intricacies of these embellishments. Outside, he heard the church clock chiming the eighth hour. It was probably much later. One by one as he finished with the mirrors, he lined them up on the shelf above his workbench, until by the time the rain had stopped he gazed into five perfect images of himself. For a moment, as always, he was struck by just how old he was. How very old. The moment was just a moment, but in that moment whole decades of his life passed by: those dancehalls in a country which no longer existed, comrades he had loved in a war he had hated, years at sea as a ship's barber, faraway harbors and the desert sea, and the past thirty-five years in this unknown place, where still the people were always asking him where was it he came from and why was it he had left.

The mayor stood at his high stairwell window as the thunderstorm retreated over the crenellated foothills, gone to haunt other counties and other realms. The faltering sunset shone through the stained glass of the porthole window, and through the glass the mayor, by shifting his position just a bit at a time, could make the village without turn crimson, then cobalt, then the deepest, the richest of royal purples. It was then that the village, plain and simple as Puritan furniture, could take on the moonlit enchantment of a Bedouin oasis or perhaps become an underwater dreamland aglitter with gemstones and flashing fishes. In his fever, however, the village took on a more nightmarish cast this evening, drowned itself in a satanic rainbow, and the mayor stumbled on the top stair, sick now in his stomach as well as his head. Where was his maid? His cook? His groundskeeper or stableboy? Crumpled on the landing, unable to reach the bell-pull, he cursed the Old Ones, who were even now probably eating his venison, defiling his forests. The mayor cursed them as violently as he believed they had cursed him. _They_ had taken his wife–they would take him, too, if he did not put up a fight.

**Night on the last day of June.** Unlike most nights in June, this one had come on suddenly, as soon as the sun fell headlong like Icarus into the western mountains, with no afterglow or long rays to light the traveler's way home. The schoolteacher had led the librarian to the edge of the ring of hearselike wagons, where it was dark in the shadows but the scene before them was lit by campfires like footlights along a proscenium. Any other girl might have run away, he thought, and he liked how curiosity kept her close by his side. He pressed her small hand now between his own as gently if not as permanently as she might have pressed a lady slipper within a Bible. The music now was most shrill and loud, although it came from just one source–a hurdy-gurdy, she told him, for she had seen a very old one once at the county fair. It was an ungainly, ancient instrument with an ancient, melancholy sound, sadly out of tune, with a melody as repetitious and mesmerizing as a snakecharmer's. It belonged to not just another world, but another time–and so did these Old Ones before them.

But they were no longer old! Where had those old people, tatterdemalion, ragamuffin, gone, the silent old gray people they had watched march wearily along with their horses and wagons that morning–where were they now? Perhaps they had all gone to bed, old as they were, as far as they had come, as late as it was. But then who were these magnificent young people, as elegant in their finery as the pretend courtiers in a melodrama the schoolteacher had seen at the opera house back home? Who were these youngsters in the parrot-colored attire and jewelry of some mystic, mythic land? Perhaps they had been secluded inside the wagons that morning, for fear they should be corrupted by the modern sights of the village and this modern, unchivalrous, nerve-deadening world. Yes, obviously they had been kept like extras in a play, in hiding until just this hour. There was no other explanation. The Old Ones were gone. Their horses and mules with braided manes and tails remained, however, quietly tethered to their wagons and already fattened on green grass. But the Old Ones were gone. That was enough to know. Their children–or more likely, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, were here now, lighting now the bonfire in their midst and singing like children making up nonsense words, to the wavering tune of the hurdy-gurdy. Something sinister lurked beneath their glossy skin, to be sure, but only in that way wild creatures can appear menacing from a distance and so marvelous up close. As they gathered wood and chased each other around and about the wagons, there was much in their movements of wild creatures, something catlike and birdlike at the same time, and their undulating arms and wrists–their ankles and waists, too–were as slender as those the schoolteacher had seen once in a museum, on Nipponese or Daoist figures carved in jade.

Flame and shadow flickered, smoke sweet as jasmine clouded the air, made their eyes water so it was hard to see clearly–yet, still it seemed quite possible that that was a coffin which had been perched at last atop the bonfire, like a narrow black canoe cresting a mighty wave. A coffin topped with branches of hemlock and garlands of summer flowers, and on its sides those same silver and gold emblems, Druidic runes or Coptic talismans to ensure its safety in the next world. Silver chains, too, wound through the hemlock, dangling from the coffin, and ribbons with cameos, beads of sapphire and malachite. It could be, too, that one lone crow circled above the fire, cawing as if it were calling out a name. This was all, apparently, what the fire was for, and the music, the celebration. The wood here was spiced like that of the Levantine, and the smell and smoke and heat were enough to make one swoon.

The schoolteacher held tight to the librarian's arm, though now neither of them feared a thing. For the beautiful youths were dancing, linking arms to ring the flaming pyre, and in their archaic clothes they were a scene from the Arabian nights, or a Minoan vase, or a medieval illumination of a maypole rite. It was too brilliant and lovely a picture to be afraid, like one torn from a book of children's stories. The youths' hair was black and glossy, hanging in heavy serpentine coils down their backs and across their foreheads or done up in twists and knots complex as the one Gordius tied. Their white teeth glistened and the whites of their eyes glistened, and their skin shone like polished stone in the firelight– _porphyry_ , the schoolteacher recalled the word from a book, or translucent onyx, or empurpled marble. Around their necks they wore long ropes and chains strung with beads of porcelain and pearl and glass and bone and amber and quartz. The men wore pirate earrings that flashed in the firelight, and the women had little carbuncles in their noses and a dozen rings and amulets on every hand and wrist. Some of them had filigreed patterns, as if worked from precious metals, up and down their bared arms and shoulders. Others seemed to be spotted with tattoos like ocelots, or striped like the backs of jungle panthers. Their garments were of the stuff magic carpets are woven, multicolored and intricate as tapestries; their silky shirts, sashes, and pantaloons were like those Cossacks wear, or maybe Persian pashas; and their skirts were sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, but always of sumptuous color and contour–gossamer fabrics of the ladies of a harem, or of the _Rubaiyat_ , or the butterfly-brightest maidens of the Coral Sea, in some lost empire of the Indies. The young men and women danced in their ring, wondrous wild, intoning a chant in syllables long and clear but unreal as crows who mock human speech, and one naked giant of a boy, a eunuch or djinni perhaps, painted gold in gold leaf from head to toe, turned the crank of the hurdy-gurdy, all as stars began to peer through the smoke and insects and owls began their nightsong in the endless forests beyond this theater of light.

In the village, too, one could hear the music, though so distant it might have been something else–wind high in the elms, a distant waterfall, a lovesick nightjar. The old barber, at his bedroom window, knew better, though. He had heard this music so long ago it seemed someone else's life, someone about whom he'd read in a book. Music like this he'd once heard at the dark end of a cobbled alley, around the corner of an empty arcade, in abandoned cities after the war. The barber lingered at his window. The only light in town was the illuminated face of the church steeple clock, up the road: its hands read 10:15, but the barber knew the clock was rarely accurate. But, oh, yes–there was a fainter light much farther up the road, a kaleidoscopic light scattered like jewels in the dust. The mayor's house, of course–his beloved stained glass, with its absurd portrayal of a ship upon a wave-tossed sea. _Here_ , of all places, so very far from any port. From his own bed, the mayor could look down the hall toward this window, the hall light still on, and gaze through bleary, feverish eyes at this wonder he'd had sent from another land, across the ocean so far, far away. His wife had ordered it from a catalogue; it would remind her of the fishing town she came from. His wife–where was she, this late at night? Why wasn't she home? She wouldn't be safe maneuvering that mechanical beast, that smoking tin toy, up and down the hills in this dark. The mayor lay stretched out on his bed, fully clothed, the open letter in his hand. Or maybe it was another letter. Any letter. A letter from her, perhaps, written twenty years ago, still redolent of her toilet-water. It was hot in this room, or then again that could just be the fever. There was music, a murmur of music, in the breeze from the open windows, or maybe that was wagon wheels, creaking creaking creaking. The fan revolved, revolved, the rowboat circled in its whirlpool, the rowboat circled. He was sick. He was too sick even to call for help. But all he needed was a glass of water, a tall glass of water. He was so thirsty, he might be dying. But he wasn't.

The barber would start to think in that language he hadn't spoken in thirty-five years when he was this tired and lights were out. The words of the language were little more than half-heard music now, but a wonderful music that would carry him back to that little country that no longer existed on any map. The words would drop in solid form, like rain, like snow, over that land, filling it up with light and movement. And happiness: The word for house. The word for father. For loved one, for one who loves you–mirror words. The word for mirror. The word for lost, as well. A thousand words combined to recreate that bygone kingdom, and as they combined and recombined in ten thousand ways to describe all he had touched, tasted, and seen as a young man, as a boy, an infant–so he fell to sleep.

**Just before midnight on the last day of June.** Other musicians had joined the boy djinni– there were droning strings, hammered strings, reedy pipes, whistling pipes, little drums and cymbals and ankle bells, an asthmatic harmonium. The music whirled and sped, whirled and sped, ever quicker, ever louder. The schoolteacher had never heard or imagined such music. To call it beautiful would be wrong, but to call it anything else would not be enough. It filled his ears–it filled his skull. He never wanted the music or this scene to end. It seemed the librarian understood what he was thinking; she was tapping her fingers against the side of the wagon they sat besides; she was even stomping her foot now and then. He turned to look at her in the halflight. She was smiling, nodding her head, in a trance. She caught his eye, and before he paused to think what she might do if he did so, he kissed her. Maybe she was the type of girl who had been kissed before–maybe she had been kissed many times before–but she seemed to take this as her very first kiss, and the kiss she gave him in return seemed his first, as well. Part of him still thought like a dictionary or cyclopedia: of the magic word "thrall," of "thralldom," of "enthralled," "enthralling," of charmed adders and alchemical spells and midsummer metamorphoses. His mind raced as if he had imbibed strong spiced wine. This was an opiate's dream, a lotus-eater's fantasy, a divine madness. Dervishes must know this delirium; the saints, fakirs, shamans, bodhisattvas of cave and grotto and mosque and stylite must have sought such ecstasy. A bombard of words shot across his mind, like textbooks and primers set free of reason. But the music was so loud now he felt it resonating through his whole body, waves of music spreading from him to her, almost tangible, almost like liquid light. It mattered not what words poured through him and out of him; words meant nothing. He knew at this moment what he must do. What they must do.

Out into the midst of merrymakers the schoolteacher led his librarian, and the strand of gaily colored dancers broke apart only to link again with them. None of them seemed surprised, least of all the two young village people. Where was his new straw boater? Back in the pine grove. Where was her summer bonnet? Lost to the wind. No matter, no matter. Now part of this revolving human chain, they pounded the earth with primeval rhythm, swayed as one nearer and then farther and then nearer again to the mounting flames. They felt the heat; their skin shone, too, now that half their clothes were off, and it seemed thousands of bracelets and brass anklets and rattling beads and tiny ornamental bells were caught up in the same rhythm, too. The girl had let down her shining hair, the boy had long torn off his ridiculous collar and tie. He knew now he was no longer just an earnest young schoolteacher; neither was she just a naive village librarian. Even with their drab country ways they were of this tribe. They belonged to this new world which was more ancient than these mountains. And they would never be happy again back in that dust-blown, forgotten little village. They didn't say this; they didn't think this, but they would know it to be true. They danced and sang as the black coffin burst into flame, and the black bird flew toward the heavens . . . while the music quickened ever more and the valley echoed with bell-like laughter. The young men and women, all these exquisite young men and women around them in their fairytale costumes, laughed with them, clung to them, held tight to their hands and waists, swung them faster and faster around the bonfire. The schoolteacher kissed, was kissed in return, a thousand times, and seemed to feel himself rising like that black crow with the sweet smoke, into the clear night air, where there no words, no memories, and all his past dissolved without them.

**Dawn on the first day of July.** Just a few rings of charred earth and stone where the camp had been, trampled ashes in curious rings, a bronze amulet or a broken bracelet or two, perhaps, among the embers. The painted wagons were already far up the road, high in the mountains, above the tree-line, where snow had fallen in the night and the world was ice-covered and still. They tread on crystal flowers, the old people and their old horses, and their breaths clouded the air like cotton wool. No birds sang here, and even the bells were frozen, mute. They were so high up anyone down below might have thought they were walking in the sky, stepping from bright morning star to bright morning star. In the valley far below, the barber was just rising, happiest as always in that first few minutes of the day before some part of himself reminded himself that he was old now, his own hair was now completely gone. Never mind, though, he was rich now, for a village barber, and today he could spend the daylight hours just whistling in the shade if he wanted to. The mayor had not risen with the rest of the village. The mayor still lay sleeping, snoring, dreaming he was drifting on a boat far beyond islands and all he had ever known, drifting farther, farther. . . . Elsewhere, the world was already moving forward as steadily as the clock-hands on the church steeple. Dairymen were done milking their cows; sheep roamed the hills, hounds stretched in the sun, crows laughed at the world, women sent their children scurrying out of kitchens. But today the village library would not open at nine, and the bachelor farmer would wonder why that young tenant in his attic was sleeping so late.

Quintana Roo

And What the Traveler Found There

" _The sleep of reason produces monsters."_

— _Spanish proverb_

Then the traveler awoke, sat upright in bed, lit a cigarette; in the lighter's flash he caught sight of a glassy scorpion scurrying up the cracked adobe wall. An invisible fly hummed around his head, alighting now and then on the back of his neck. Impossible to see and slap. Outside the room's parallel windows, the hotel's neon sign blinked green and pink and green and pink: the only light in the world. The sky held no moon or stars; the streets below were unlit, the lamps out in every house. Was it midnight or an hour before dawn? No means to tell; his watch, he now saw, had stopped sometime while he slept—its luminous green hands had, anyway, faded into the night. He traced a wide circle in the air with the burning tip of his cigarette.

The distant glow of what first looked like more cigarettes surfaced and sank out of sight again outside the window: a car or truck's tail-lights far off in the hills beyond, leaving this world, heading for open desert, which people here called _infierno_ , hell. If you want to cheat the devil, they were known to say, keep to the coast—it was a proverb; it rhymed somehow.

(In the desert outside this world, at the edge of a village called Ozuama, he remembered seeing a man before a market stall, flaying a pig which hung by its hind hooves from a tree. With one casual stroke, the man had sliced open the pig's belly. Glistening innards spilled out like a cache of jewels, an image from a dream... The thought had then come to him that this country's sad history was nothing but the interpretation of dreams and the book, his book, would fail at even that—those dreams were much closer to nightmares. Upon leaving the village, he had seen the pig again, its naked, waxy body swaying in the hot wind. A swarming armor of flies covered half the pig's body. He had had to press his hand to his mouth. It was true: that place belonged to nightmares, the domain of the devil.)

The watch, when shook, ticked softly like an insect, but (holding it toward the tip of his cigarette so he could see better) there was no movement of the second hand. Perhaps it was moving too slowly to tell, though nothing would have changed even if time hadn't stopped. His notebooks and journals—and the empty bottle—certainly still lay scattered across the floor. His half-unpacked suitcase still sat in the corner. The traveler drew on his cigarette, which was burning itself to the quick. And now the lighter was out of flints. Stretching back in bed, like an iguana under a midnight sun, he stared at a wall, another wall, a third wall, and the ceiling. Far off, he could hear the familiar muttering of palm fronds, and farther off still, the murmur of the ocean, its waves sighing in and out, slow and weak as a dying man's breath. So, he was reminded, the unseen world still existed.

(He had known something of this world before, he knew—in his earliest childhood, his own ancient history, but he did not know how he knew. When he had descended through the cloud-forest in the crowded bus from Veracruz, he had sensed the memory knocking at the back door of his mind. Yes, it was much like opening a door. This world would not let him forget that he was an outsider, though he felt he shared something with these people he couldn't begin to explain. He had felt it when he'd entered that ruined cathedral, and he had felt it again in that airless room in the slums. The door had swung open and part of him had fallen away into the dream of history. In the evenings when he sat at the cafes going over his notes and sketches, he could look down upon himself like someone gazing at an old painting, one you think you've seen before but can't quite remember where or when. And the people he talked to never looked him directly in the eyes, but always seemed to be staring off into the distance—not at the mountains or jungle or blistering sky, but into the forgotten past.)

When the fly touched his eyelid and he woke (again?), he was curled at the end of the bed, more like a caged panther now than a lizard. Somewhere down in the street a radio was playing antique foxtrots, waltzes, foxtrots nothing else. It seemed to have been playing since time began—or stopped. All was still dark, but hours must have passed; his chin now felt bristly.

The sheet was wound around his ankles, tight as leg-irons.

Did he sleep at all? He must have slept. He recalled one last dream: doors opening onto other doors, the hundredth door opening into this hotel room, where he lay awake. Before that dream, only the memory of a close citric breath, the memory of damp, caressing hands. And a naked light-bulb swinging like a pendulum before his eyes, though his eyes were shut tight.

The traveler washed his face in the chipped porcelain water basin, dressed, and descended the hotel stairs into the street. The air was cool and moist, the sky black, though a few amber rectangles glowed in the adobe houses down the narrow and winding streets—lamps burning behind shades. The houses were painted in pastel blues, pinks, greens: the faded colors of a garden after first frost (though this place had never known cold). As the traveler continued down the hard dirt road, more radios came on in the houses along the way. They were all playing the same dance melodies, but there was no dancing or any sign of waking among the people other than the music and the lights. Flying cockroaches and moths beat their wings against the shades; a large white moth struck his face, and with a gasp he brushed it away.

In the east, a strip of phosphorous green rimmed the horizon—the first hint of another dawn. A tang pervaded the air; the wind had shifted in from the ocean, which he could hear better now but still could not see. The air smelled not of fish, but of lemons and sourness, yellow and acrid. The ocean began to hiss. It was raining.

He took shelter on a bench under a pink-and-blue-striped awning. Turning and facing the shop window above the bench, he saw a reflection of the buildings and sky behind him, but his own visage was just a shadow; it told him nothing; it was a phrase in a language he did not know. He was solid, he absorbed the light, he was a silhouette, that was all. The bright festival candies within the window seemed much more comprehensible, more real: rows of glazed wafers in the same pastels as the town's houses; straw baskets overflowing with salt-water taffies wrapped in wax paper; gaudy lozenges and heart-shaped nuggets that might have been carved out of glass; black, brown, white, and pink chocolates; as well as taffy and wax novelties in the shape of crucifixes and mummies. Under the weak sulfurous glow of the display light, a gleaming pile of white sugar skulls was heaped like the bones of a monks in catacombs. The smell here was not sweet, however, but defiled, like spoiled meat, as if this were a butcher's and not a confectionery.

(The traveler felt the last of the bad wine in his head and tried not to think, but thought anyhow of the town to the northwest and its infamous museum. High on a hill, underground, in a narrow white-washed chamber, lined up within glass cabinets, were the bodies of the unfortunate whose families could no longer afford to pay rent for them in the local cemeteries— or so he had been told. The dry climate and lime in the soil, he guessed, had preserved them. The place smelled of soap and stale urine. The tenants' parchment flesh had shriveled on their bones, and their mouths hung open, still screaming the screams begun in other decades. Screams you can't hear, the traveler thought then, are easily the worst. Outside the museum, little barefoot children offered tourists mummy-shaped candy, along with postcards and sugar skulls. He hurried away from them. None of it should upset him, he knew. Such things bespeak the history of a time and a place. Perhaps it was shame he felt, as much for himself as for the children. It occurred to him then that the historian must forever remain only a traveler, nothing more and nothing less.)

How long the storm lasted, he did not know, for he had fallen asleep beneath the awning without realizing it. His clothes were wet from blowing rain. When he opened his eyes onto the town, the world was once more in quietude. The ocean was calm, the wind had changed again, and the odor was gone. Though this place had never known anything but the heat, it was as if a thick muffling snow had fallen instead of rain, as if everything were silenced under ice—a town encased in glass like a scorpion in a paperweight. The sky was clear, a violet color, though the sun had yet to rise. Toward the west, indigo clouds huddled over the jungle (could he hear the distant drumming of rain on leaves?) and a pale morning moon was suspended over the trees. The moon was a bleached shell, a petal, a thumbnail, a pearl button, a watch-face, a skull, anything he wanted it to be. The moon was losing itself to the sky; it was translucent, shining faintly, and soon transparent, all but invisible. Overhead the palms rustled, that hoarse silken shuffling. The traveler stood, shook himself, and began to walk around the pools of water shining in the street; he had dreamt of mirrors—he was sure he must have dreamt of mirrors.

He searched out the poorest part of town and entered the crowded barrio, where the fishermen who rose earliest were hauling their long hemp nets over their shoulders. The men did not notice the traveler, as if he were unnoticeable as a cloud, but looked directly into the sun. When he mounted the crest of a hill, he saw them glimmering in their white cotton pajamas a mile away on the jade-green tropical sea; they stood upright in their tiny rowboats, and, like white spiders unraveling webs, cast their nets into the shining water.

No one who passed him spoke. No one looked at him or disturbed his transparency. The young people skipped past with transistor radios perched on their shoulders. No more music now, though—only talk and static, and a thin quivering flute-like signal that rose higher and higher.

Within the barrio, the cerulean faces of the television sets flickered as if passing secret codes from tenement window to tenement window—flickered and rolled, ominous and whispering. Women and men stood before the sets, open-mouthed, silent; children spun aimlessly about, snatching at gems buzzing in the air. Adolescent girls—young whores in brassieres and slacks—combed their hair before cracked hand mirrors, leaning out of second-story windows and singing down into the street. Even they did not call or whistle to him. One girl, lustrous blue-black hair veiling her face, stood before a window, hand in front of parted lips, looking as if she were about to yawn or break into an aria. She did neither.

(The tall eggplant-black Creole he had met in a rhumba bar in the slums of San Morisco had led him upstairs to a tiny room. There was a mattress on the floor and a bare bulb hanging above it. When he pulled the string, she jumped up from the mattress and declared she would do nothing in the dark. There was no window, no other light. They seemed to be using up all the air. Once she slapped him and once she kissed him. She bit at his neck with sharp little teeth. The Creole burned from within like a coal; he wound a braid of her corn-rowed hair around her neck and thought, and was shocked by his thought, of taking his pocket-knife and splitting her from belly to throat like a ripe melon.)

He did not know the time: his watch still held yesterday's hour. It was important to know the time; even travelers must know the time. Sometimes that is all that matters. Ask people in the street, though, and they ignore you. At last, he knocked on the door of some kind of shop; the words on the windows made no sense, not even in Spanish. The shop was painted a forlorn shade of yellow that was cracking and peeling like snakeskin. He knocked again, louder, harder, and the door swung open beneath his fist. He entered, begging anyone's pardon. The shop, however, was empty—perhaps the words meant "out of business" because dust covered the bare shelves and display cases. From another room he heard a sibilant, insect-like drilling. He moved to the doorway and stopped just as he was about to speak. Nothing in the room stirred but the slow horizontal roll of an image on the television screen: a pale, pale woman in a ball gown drifting up a flight of curved stairs, her lips moving, though the electronic hum was the only sound. She was faint as the morning moon and growing fainter, fading into a sky-blue background, lifted up and up and up.

Once his eyes had adjusted to the dimness he could perceive far back in the room an elderly man and woman asleep on straw pallets on the floor, the man's arms folded around the woman. She groaned in her sleep as if she were being suffocated. Another woman was bent up in a chair with an infant at her breast. A small child lay naked and slowly revolving on a blanket. The blue fluorescence of the television (had it been left on during the night?) turned the room into an underwater grotto; the people appeared wrinkled and bluish as if they had been a long time in the ocean.

No one heard the traveler enter, but when he took a further tentative step into the room, the infant (who, unlike the rest, was white as the woman in the gown) opened its narrow olive eyes and stared searchingly at him. Then, softly, then louder, it began to wail—the traveler slipped quickly back out of the shop, shaking as if he had felt a snake winding up his leg. He heard the child howling for blocks, with more of the urgency of three voices than one. The sound rose higher and shriller, like a jaguar he had once heard in a jungle canyon at midnight, a jaguar that must have fallen into a pit.

The sun had cleared the ocean's horizon and the air was turning sweet and hot. He was close to the beach; the surf masked the sounds he left behind him in the awakening town: the baby, strident radios and menacing televisions, late-risers calling out of open windows to one another, women bent under laundry and men bent under firewood, children bored at play. The last houses he passed had lost most of their color, their scaling hues little more than a memory of richer days, if there had been richer days.

On the edge of town, alone in a barren field unto itself, was a modest alabaster church, nothing distinguished about it. Doves looked down from its bell tower, whispering among themselves like nuns at mass; if dust and time has a voice, he thought, it is this sound. A skinny mongrel with wide frightened eyes dragged a pheasant's tattered wing down the steps leading to the large wooden doors; the dog snuffled at his heels as the traveler opened a door with a shove and went in. First, it looked as if several people stood inside, lined along the walls and waiting for his arrival, but they were only the usual painted wooden statues of saints with garlands about their necks, smiling with homely peasant faces. The church was empty. He knelt briefly at a pew, but found it impossible to pray for or to anything.

He stood and approached a row of votive candles next to the altar. The candles burned deep inside little scarlet and blue medicine jars, giving off carrion-scented smoke. Crossing himself, he lit a cigarette off one of the candles.

(There was a cathedral in one of the southern cities on a plateau between jungles and desert which had been deserted after the last earthquake; he had been thinking, maybe even dreaming, of it for months, its seemed, before he came to it, although he had never seen even a picture of it before. The chains holding the doors shut allowed just enough room for him to enter. The pews had been ripped up, the stained glass stripped away, and a thick cottony dust coated everything. There were private marble chapels, broken but intact, behind wrought-iron gates. Bats and pigeons swooped down from the vaulted ceiling and great bell towers. He felt as if he were in the depths of a hushed, burned forest or an enormous cavern. Statues of saints peered down upon the nave from their alcoves high above—often as not noseless, eyeless, headless. A fractured stone angel's wing on the floor tripped him. Beneath the altar, in a dark chamber, was hidden the marble tomb of a bishop; the lid had slipped off during the quake, and green bones lay scattered in the debris. For a keepsake, he had tucked what looked like a fingerbone into his pocket, wondering why no one had bothered to rebury the old gent.)

In the little church, the traveler discovered a glass coffin set across low wooden trestles in a corner off the altar. Inside slept a wax effigy of Jesus: it had dark skin the color of burnt caramel and black glass eyes, the same haunted black eyes of the mongrel outside. A surfeit of blood stained His brow, palms, ribs, and soles. The effigy's face was contorted—not quite in pain or sorrow; perhaps it was meant to be ecstasy. The traveler stared at the figure a long time, his cigarette ash falling over Christ's face; the glass was cracked, as if some sinner angry at God had brought his fist down hard upon that spot.

The dog with the black wild eyes of Christ followed him down to the surf, dragging along the bird's broken wing; once on the beach the dog dropped the wing and nudged a dead crab with its nose—the crab wasn't dead after all, and the dog ran whining back into town. The traveler was left alone at the edge of the world.

The ocean lapped up his footprints, erasing the only evidence that he had ever been here, in this place, at this time. He felt the dampness in his clothes and it made him shiver despite the heat. The ocean inhaled and exhaled and inhaled, spitting up bones and shells and swallowing more bones and shells. A silver fish leapt out of the water and snapped up his cigarette butt when he flung it toward the sun—which, much higher in the sky now, made a metallic mirror of the ocean's surface, one in which the sky—empty but for two clouds—was reflected without a ripple.

The traveler looked ahead. A group of townspeople and fishermen were at the shore, some standing in water up to their ankles, looking across the ocean. They talked with many gesticulations, pointing at the water with accusatory fingers. A woman with her hair up in a loose coil, a worn magenta sweater over her shoulders, dropped to her knees, pounding the black sand. He saw why: a fisherman surfaced from the water, holding a limp white figure in his arms.

As the man came closer, walking with heavy tread toward the land, his clothes dripping water and seaweed, the figure in his arms became more distinct. It was a drowned child. The crowd retracted from the man when he gained the shore—all but the woman in the bright sweater, whose face remained to the ocean, and who did not turn to look at the child.

The fisherman walked past the traveler, the crowd following a pace behind, silently, and the traveler saw the child's face, though he did not want to. The ocean had bled all color from the victim and its eyes were opaque, saurian. An emerald brooch of flies covered the child's open mouth, to be temporarily dispersed with a wave of the fisherman's hand. And then the traveler could neither look nor think anymore.

Again in his hotel room, the traveler stretched on his back in bed, sheets discarded on the floor. He felt his forehead—was it fever or the heat? There wasn't a single fan to cool the room, and the windows were sealed shut with paint. The pall of heat smothered him like a great body pressed against his own. Yet he was not sweating; perhaps this heat was an illusion, like so much else here. He could not sweat. The heat was sealed within him; he was burning from inside. Water—he craved water, though he knew the water here was bad; you might as well drink kerosene. But he did not want any more of the wretched wine—he'd had more than enough the night before. Strange, glittering flies (large as hummingbirds, it seemed) softly buzzed against the dusty panes of the hotel windows. The palms had ceased their silken rustle; there was no wind. The sun seemed never to move in the sky. Nothing moved. The world had, quite simply, run itself down.

(He had known a silence like this in that ancient Mayan city he had left last week, a city which lay far off across the Yucatan's endless jungles. He remembered the towers and temples blanched by moonlight, the whole place set into the rain forest like a white gemstone. He remembered skulls carved into stone and friezes of hook-nosed priests in quetzal feathers and jaguar skins. Nothing had ever changed in the city of the dead except the always-encroaching forest, which wanted to swallow the tombs back up, to keep the white jewel its secret. In the heart of the largest pyramid rested the sepulcher of an ancient prince. The sarcophagus lid, which weighed a ton, was carved with the intricate image of the young prince entering paradise via a Mayan starship. Underneath, the prince's body and bones had long since disintegrated, and his blue jade mask and jade armor protected nothing.)

The traveler started, as if he had been abruptly broken from a sleep that may or may not have come. The vague memory of a wet clinging mouth, pressed to his own in a lamprey kiss and asphyxiating him, drawing him into a sinister, deathlike body, would not go away. (And neither would the recurring thought of a long vertical incision up her abdomen, between her great round breasts.) He longed for pure water, a cool bare room, and a cigarette with azure smoke to draw on and kiss like a lover. What was the time, what was the time?

(He remembered it now—the clouded window to this world hung above his parents' bed when he was a child: three Incas and their burro on a tortuous Andean trail, the vast sky above them turbulent, bruised. A rainbow like the lifted wing of an iridescent bird seen through the mist. A small tear in the sub-bleached print like an eye in the wall. A silent midnight under the rain-forest canopy. When he was very young he would lie the wrong way on the bed, staring into the faraway scene, far away in place and time... until he was in that world, until he went dizzy from the sensation of falling headlong off those Machu Picchu heights down into the steamy jungle miles and miles below. This unknown world within its gilt frame terrified yet thrilled him; it was his first mystery, his first secret. He had not thought of it in years, but the longing it had instilled in him for unattainable places remained strong. Maybe that was why he was here. "Rainy Season in the Tropics." Now he was another traveler in the rainy season, and falling, fading forever into the green core of this earth, the Yucatan, into sleep, into fever.)

While he fell he could not help but think of things he would prefer not to hear, touch, or see again; neither could he keep from trying to match up the water-stains on the ceiling with the faces he had passed out there, though the stains were not like the white child carried in from the sea, nor the waxen Christ, the young girls before their windows and mirrors, the blunt Mayan faces of the fishermen, the hollow-mouthed mummies, nor the heavy-lipped and pock-marked face of the Creole; the stains matched none of those faces, and yet in them he saw something he knew better than any face, but could not name nor place who or what it was. The face was ultimately as impenetrable and intangible as that history he was until even yesterday trying to write of this place. Then again, perhaps nothing of this place was knowable; its history was impossible. Was there a face or was there not a face in that stain? What was the time? Why must he know? Only when you are falling asleep are these things important. The faces must fade, however, as does everything else, and after they had gone there was nothing left to think once again.

He had touched bottom. All mysteries were about to be revealed. He knew the secret of the dream of time. He had traveled nowhere but in time. And he would capture time on the page. He would write the forgotten history of this world. He would understand it all: the stain of blood, the stain of water. His open mouth was shut. The world ends here...

Then the traveler turned on his side, trying to find and re-enter the door of the dream he'd left very early that morning. (The look on her cold and silent face.) A dull fire was burning up his spine. (A slit like a bleeding mouth.) The flies thrummed against the window panes; a radio was playing in the lobby below, but the words were unintelligible—might as well be spinning the record backwards. In a foreign land the language you learn from a book fails you first. (Shining yet dark.) He buried his head between the pillows. Forget all the words. leave behind time. Find the door. (All will be revealed.) There must be a space between the rhythms around him, he thought, an opening—space for a door where sleep could slip in and fall into the rhythms of the world, as well. There has to be a space. (A scream ending the silence at last.) He opens his eyes, listening, breathless, searching between the slow drag of the radio music, the pulsing of flies on the panes, the flashing of the hotel's neon sign, the useless ticking of his watch... and his blunted heartbeat, the rushing heartbeat of the surf off the coast of Quintana Roo.

from Impossible Musics

1. The Omniphonium

_Author's note:_

Although the Telharmonium was an actual instrument, the first real electronic synthesizer, almost everything else in this story is not to be believed.

A Means To A Prologue

None of its several thousand investors, subscribers, machinists, engineers, researchers, tuners, publicists, or players, not even the whole of the American Telephone And Telegraph Company, could have guessed the true purpose of the famed Telharmonium: that it was invented to facilitate communion with the dead. Thaddeus Cahill had shared this secret with only two other people in the world—his brothers George and Arthur—and of these three, only Arthur was still alive in 1916. At that time the New England Electric Music Company was bankrupt, the new aesthetic science of "Telharmony" had fallen into disfavor, the mid-Manhattan building which housed the gargantuan instrument was up for sale, and the Telharmonium itself lay silent as all the lost tombs of Egypt.

George Cahill had been struck dead by lightning during a visit back home to Iowa three years before; a thunderstorm had caught him unaware while bicycling a country road near his parents' disused farmhouse—perhaps he would not have been struck at all if he had been riding on rubber tires, but he had been testing a recent invention of his: "ever-last" steel rims. Similarly, Thaddeus had been electrocuted the very next year in his beloved Telharmonium Hall as he was connecting two power lines which had not been properly grounded. The final blow had come when a mob of angry New Yorkers, tired of having their conversations interrupted by the Telharmonium's constant telephone-cable interference, broke into "Tel Hall" and proceeded to rip up pieces of the instrument, which were then ceremoniously heaved into the East River.

The sole remaining Cahill brother soon repaired the damages, but his spirit had been crushed. He did not even argue with his lawyers or financial backers when they unanimously agreed, literally as well as metaphorically, to pull the plug.

Never before had Arthur Cahill, now fifty years old, been so alone in this world; consequently, he labored without rest or nourishment to reinvent the Telharmonium and forget how he and his brothers had once shouted in joyful collaboration above the din of the dynamos, in such harmony with one another they seemed to be an entity with one mind and three bodies. Arthur would rise long before dawn, leave the brownstone he'd shared with George and Thaddeus at Spuyten Duyvil, fueled only by strong black pekoe, hop streetcars and subway trains with no notice of his fellow travelers, and would not return from his experiments in the laboratory upstairs at Tel Hall until long after midnight. Having no friends and barely acknowledging messengers and grocery boys, he seldom spoke to or exchanged more than a few words with anyone for weeks at a time; often he felt that in the midst of crowded Manhattan he was living in a city of ghosts.

Of the three brothers, he had been the only one to marry, and then his wife, a concert pianist who had been hired along with a half-dozen others to master the musical intricacies of the Telharmonium (it took two musicians and four hands to coax the simplest music from its bowels), had left him after scarcely a month. Nevertheless, she still sent him threatening letters through her attorney, claiming she had been "driven near-on to insanity" by the Sisyphean demands of the instrument and that "if she were a more religious woman, one might even say she had been possessed by the demon which lived in its electro-magnetic heart." He had little money to assuage her since his brothers had died with vast debts unpaid, and the new instrument he was working on would cost him much, much more than the previous three incarnations of the Telharmonium put together. Sometimes her counsel, and more often, one of her uncles, would pound at the Cahill household at all hours, though Arthur was seldom there to negotiate the costs for yet another spa and another rest-cure. Even if this hadn't been true, he realized that he must depart New York City if he was ever able to complete his brothers' mission.

Eventually (once he had managed to borrow enough money from a former Electric Music Company backer) he had the silenced Telharmonium dismantled and shipped in thirteen boxcars to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where the Cahill homestead was promptly revivified by Arthur and where, once he had sold off enough adjacent pasturage and woodlots, he bought an abandoned textile mill for a song (the only one like it in Iowa) in which to reassemble and augment his life's work. The mill, made of goldenrod-yellow Iowa limestone, took up an entire block just above downtown Mt. Vernon, straddling a wide creek known as the Polecat River. (Don't bother looking for either today.) The creek had long run dry, its waters diverted elsewhere. A fire in the last century had destroyed most of the mill's interior, so Arthur was free to arrange its cavernous spaces however he liked. Although the Telharmonium had taken up the entire first floor and basement of Tel Hall (a former hotel), it seemed much smaller indeed within the mill, which was five stories high and loomed over town and country on the high clay banks of the creek like one of the ancient wonders of the world. Fitted with electric lamplight and soon clattering and clanking with a team of carpenters and machinists, and visited by the occasional physicist or music-theory professor from nearby Cornell College, the purpose of "Tel Mill," as Arthur dubbed it, was never fully explained to anyone. "Just another money-making boondoggle," was the closest he would come to the truth. By now he knew not to trumpet his discoveries in an age of often outlandish or inexplicable inventions. People had enough trouble understanding wireless radio or the cinema. God-fearing townsmen scratched their beards in perplexity when they looked out of their windows and up to where that odd Cahill boy, who had left so long ago with his brothers, was working on something which even the Bible could not have predicted or described.

Deep within the stone walls of the mill, Arthur Cahill would sit dreaming at his drafting board, long after the workmen had gone home to their wives and children for the evening. It was only at times like these, far into the still and solitude of an Iowa night, that he felt he could once more think with that larger mind he had once shared with his brothers. Often as not he would forget they had ever died, but seemed to feel them yet at his side, urging him on with fraternal rivalry. "Thad," Arthur might say aloud to the empty laboratory, as if expecting his brother to hand him a compass or tuning-fork; or "Yes, George," he sometimes said to the wind from an open window when it sent a sheaf of music paper scurrying across the floor. He would not have been surprised if either man had answered, he felt so close to finding the key that would unlock the door to the other side. Nevertheless, by dawn's light he would repeatedly find himself as far from the solution to his puzzle as he had been the previous morning, and he would tear up a notebook's pages with weary hands or throw the whole thing into the coal furnace. Summer faded to autumn and autumn to winter and it seemed the thirteen boxcars had been in vain, for still no music was heard from the banks of the dried-up creek, and communication with the spirit world remained a decidedly one-way conversation. Then, in the spring of 1920, Mrs. Karinskaya, his mother's former aide-de-camp and once-renowned "psychic materialist" appeared at the Cahill farmhouse laden with many bags and a library of arcane literature which she said might possibly be of some small help to him. Arthur thought she had died twenty years before.

History Lesson

Few people still alive in the early twentieth century, and fewer still in America, remembered La Cygnetta, as she had been called on the Continent, mother to the Cahill triplets and once, long ago and far away, the Baltic States' answer to Jenny Lind. It was she of the lyrelike voice and swanlike purity who, recently pregnant by a carefree and careless marquess torn from the pages of Byron's _Don Juan_ , had fled to the States with her faithful astrologist, sometime accompanist, and costume mistress—the redoubtable Mrs. Karinskaya (faith in the Lord advertised about her neck and militant umbrella always at her side), or _Madame_ Karinskaya, as she had been known elsewhere. Their passage had been paid by an admirer in Riga, a Gogolian entrepreneur who had a weakness for _bel canto_ made flesh and who owed the Madame an embarrassing favor. In Boston for an academic conference, botanist Artemis T. Cahill, who had despaired of ever marrying because of a hereditary anemia, met and wed almost overnight the towering soprano and optimistically took her and her sullen Russian mystic aboard the train back to Iowa. It was the end of the Civil War. Artemis was a skilled scientist and lecturer but at a trembling loss with coeds and other women, even ones with mustaches as pronounced as Mrs. Karinskaya's. His prodigal wife did not fit into Mt. Vernon society, perhaps because she reminded too many too much of their own not-so-distant east-European past—though she was perhaps more ignored than she was hated. La Cygnetta spoke English no better than French or Italian, no matter how fluent she was in the language of opera. Throwing things like vases or books, anyway, was more effective than cursing in any tongue. She did not like Iowa or Iowans. She especially did not like people who thought a dubiously pregnant woman should be cloistered in some sort of Protestant harem. Nevertheless her husband adored her, studied vulgar Estonian when instead it was only a rare dialect she understood, and fanned the smoldering fires of her musical career. True, Mt. Vernon, like many sizable Midwestern towns of that period, had an opera house, though it was the sort of place where dramatic enactments of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ or Stephen Foster minstrel revues were more common than Rossini or Cimarosa. Nevertheless, soon after the birth of her triplets (not seven months since the marriage, though he did not seem to notice), Prof. Cahill hired a voice-teacher from the college and the farmhouse came alive with song. Mrs. Karinskaya wielded her big umbrella like a riding crop, and tapped out rhythms on the floor with its Malacca-cane handle.

Cici, as Artemis called her, for her real name was as unpronounceable as it was unwriteable, no longer cared for Rossini or Cimarosa, but would do whatever Mrs. Karinskaya bid her to do, and Mrs. Karinskaya had her own rather Chaldean plans. She gladly took on the autocratic role of nurse and then nanny and then governess, as capable with three as she would have been with one, as happy to hear her mistress practicing her scales and elocution as her mistress was happy to subvert any maternal instincts. Busy as she was with the infants, Mrs. Karinskaya was still in touch with the supernatural and had commenced transcribing a new opera by Gaetano Donizetti, deceased for nearly twenty years. Though a botanist might be considered among the earthiest of men, Prof. Cahill was convinced of the worthiness of the endeavor and eagerly increased Mrs. Karinskaya's salary (for it seemed even the dead did not come cheap). After all, the celibate lesbian who had long nurtured darling Cici was her only real friend. Had the vocal teacher from Cornell heard the first aria from the late Donizetti's new tragedy, _La Donna Della Stella_ , he might have remarked upon its uncanny similarity to any of the composer's many other hundreds of arias, but then all the later ones were very much cut of the same cloth, were they not?

Mrs. Karinskaya could read music and play more than a little piano; she could go into a trance at the drop of a derby, and she knew where her bread was buttered. She invited an old acquaintance then visiting America, a Ruthenian conductor (defrocked) and erstwhile dealer in diamonds, to come to Iowa and attest to the genius of her telepathically arrived opera. A selection of excerpts from _La Donna Della Stella_ was performed by La Cygnetta at the tiny Cornell College recital hall, and Duke Vuytautus delivered an incomprehensible and interminable talk about the relationship between what would become known later as Theosophy and what he termed "electro-somatic harmonics." It did not matter that almost no one attended; Artemis Cahill was caught up in the higher spiritual aspirations of the evening and gladly paid a handsome sum to have the duke and his old friend arrange for an orchestra and a date at the Mt. Vernon Opera Hall. An out-of-work troupe was hired from Chicago (all of them Moldavian, but that did not matter) and sundry other musicians assembled from the college and local dance bands. The opera dealt with a Druidess spurned unfairly by her chieftain husband; she turns to a high priest for guidance and winds up transformed into a live oak—or something like that, for the schoolbook Italian of the libretto was faint and malnourished, to say the least. Who "The Lady Of The Stars" might be was never made quite clear; be that as it may, Cici Cahill looked imperial in her many elaborate garments and one daring, spangled body-stocking, and Mt. Vernon was just curious enough to fill all the seats on opening night. Though offered other babysitters, Mrs. Karinskaya oddly enough decided to stay home with her charges on opening night—in retrospect, she often said, because she'd had a terrible foreboding.

It was said in the local papers and even as far as _The Chicago Daily News_ that the tall, slender, swanlike diva had just stepped under the proscenium when the impossibly long train (historically inaccurate, they also noted) of her Druidic vestments toppled and then became entangled in a lit torchiere onstage, which ignited the highly flammable gold-embroidered costume and almost instantly enveloped her in flames before setting the hall itself on fire. Gaslit, wood-framed theaters burn quickly, but the other players and audience escaped alive and only a little scorched; however, by the time Mrs. Cahill was carried onto the forecourt she had already succumbed to burns and smoke. The world would never hear Donizetti's posthumous work (the only existent scores were also burned) and Artemis Cahill's songbird was silenced forever. They had been married less than six years and Mrs. Karinskaya swore between her tears that she had been but a nineteen-year-old virgin when they had married. Her benefactor felt the large and airy farmhouse closing in upon him; while any other house might seem empty after such a death, this house seemed to shrink smaller and smaller, for her voice was in every room and in every cabinet, cubbyhole, and closet. Mrs. Karinskaya was of the opinion that the souls of those who died too young were earthbound to their last dwelling-place. This did not help the already greatly bereaved Mr. Cahill; the botanist hung himself in an oak tree a year to the day after his wife's immolation. Mrs. Karinskaya was disturbed to find that most of his remaining funds had thoughtfully been put into trust for his sons, the rest to be inherited when they came of age; meanwhile she would have to revert to her previous means of existence. And of course stay in ready touch with the ghosts of celebrated artistes.

By the late 1870s spiritualism was sweeping the country, and if America was one immense Ouija board, Mrs. Karinskaya was its peripatetic planchette, much in demand from coast to coast as medium, mystic, and if need be, magician—for if the money was right she wasn't adverse to materializing a Sioux princess or a Dearly Departed bank president to secure her position in the households of Newport or Nob Hill. The Cahill boys, being in essence a useful triplicate in such matters, helped in the creation of spectral sensations and the manufacture and distribution of ectoplasmic secretions (a little corn starch, wood putty, and extract of eucalyptus as base); now more than ten years old, they felt no moral compunctions, for their governess assured them that these were just minor "demonstrations" to help the spiritually adrift secure an anchor. It was no better or worse than the way others might be comforted by a weeping icon or the synthetic blood of a martyr. One might say Thaddeus, George, and Arthur learned to count by table-tap and that they developed good pitching arms by impersonating crockery-hurling poltergeists. Mrs. Karinskaya, working on yet another extra-sensory opera in yet another parlor, taught the boys how one treats a Bechstein and how to become sensitive to metaphysical improvisations, as it were. But they were not much interested then in either music or manifestations from the great beyond; instead, any free time Mrs. Karinskaya allowed them they spent playing ball-games and taking apart broken typewriters and ticker-tape machines. They seemed to have no memories of either Mr. or Mrs. Cahill. Their "auntie" usually kept the three gravely taciturn children in a nearby hotel with a hired girl while she sized up the locals at casinos and health farms. If it helped matters, she would present them singly, never together, as her poor mute great-nephew (thus in a way abetting their penchant for thinking of themselves as three-in-one). As psychically acute as she was, Mrs. Karinskaya sometimes had to wonder, when picking up platens and detached alphanumerical keys around the suite, if it had been the anarchist clockmaker and not the gouty marquess who had once stolen their mother's heart. As they approached adolescence, the boys became more unruly and could not always be trusted to be in their proper places at a séance; embarrassments ensued and their guardian saw that they might be better off at Groton, after all. Besides, the trust fund would pay for it. In effect, she was firing her assistants, though in years to come they would feel it was she they had let go.

Once at school the boys became more of an impregnable kingdom than ever before; unlike their schoolmates they were not interested in the debutantes down in Concord or Boston, they would only play a sort of baseball with rules they themselves had invented, and they seemed to communicate more with glances and gestures than words. Older boys regarded them as queer fish indeed and younger boys were genuinely frightened, especially when it was said they were the nephews of a witch. Despite their awkward social graces they excelled at their studies, especially the sciences. Thaddeus was the first to take up the piano again and discover music which was not paranormal in origin, though it was mostly through a scientific fascination with sound-waves and Pythagorean theorems. Not only did he love the new art of telegraphy like his brothers, but he also would lie for hours under the telegraph poles on a spring day, listening to the hum and whistle of the wires. Later in life he would call it the most ethereal, the most celestial of singing, and admitted that sometimes, somehow it seemed to be their very own mother's heavenly, half-forgotten voice he heard high in the air over his head, while sunning in that hay-meadow.

Their legal guardian would send them cryptic messages on occasion, written on letterhead borrowed from country estates and expensive hotels, warning them that she had "eyes everywhere" and asking more and more frequently for the "loan of a few banknotes." Soon, assured of enough funding, there would be a cantata at the Metropolitan or perhaps just a recital at Symphony Hall, for surely the world hadn't heard the last of Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn—and hadn't she done so much for them over the years? Eventually they stopped answering her and half-consciously came to assume she had died after the last of her telegrams, likely as not penniless after one last failed scam, for certainly she had been ancient since their births and now they were old enough to enter Antioch, following in their father's footsteps.

At college Thaddeus first revealed his plans for the as-yet-unnamed Telharmonium to the other two: hardly daring to call it a musical instrument, he instead described it as a machine so sensitive to magnetic fields and so precisely calibrated it would be able to translate the electrical impulses left by dying and deceased entities into audible frequencies. It would have a keyboard, yes, like a piano or typewriter (ravished portions of both lay around their dormitory room), but the machine would play _you_ , in a sense, as it tapped into the flow of energy within your body and guided your fingers by occult powers; the rest he need not attempt to put into words, for of course his brothers understood. Mrs. Karinskaya had, after all, shepherded them across the continent for years; she'd taught them to whisper down an ear-trumpet, disappear behind false wainscoting, play a mandolin hanging from a concealed wire; she'd wrapped them in gauze and attached swan's-down wings to their backs so that even flash-cameras in a dark sitting-room could record their angelic presence, much as others were photographing fairies and portrait gallery hauntings. Even though well-versed in her chicanery, they may very well have had a genuine desire, like her, to reach beyond this world into the next—perhaps to touch their long-dead mother or father, perhaps not. At school they might have returned to their father's Methodist assurances, but something of the long-lost marquess's profligate ways (or was it the clockmaker's wicked iconoclasm?) lingered in their atoms, not in the manner of worldly extravagance or bomb-throwing, but in an extravagant delight in deflowering baby grands and disemboweling Royals. Thaddeus showed Arthur and George some tentative sketches and helped them set about reassembling telegraphic equipment into primitive sound-generators that might be able to tune into the legendary music of the spheres. Already Elisha Gray—by all rights the true father of the telephone, the brothers agreed—had invented the Musical Telegraph, ingeniously constructed from telegraph parts and capable of transmitting a full chromatic scale across wires (this ability inspired fresh ideas). Alexander Graham Bell, as usual, was just slightly behind with his Electric Harp. These devices were much discussed in journals of the day, but the brothers felt no sense of urgent competition. Neither inventor, obviously, was willing to go far enough.

It might seem a surprise that after all this quasi-scientific experimentation the Cahill brothers chose to study law after graduating with a triple _cum laude_ from Antioch College, but by this time the brothers had come of age and discovered that even though the legacy left by their father was handsome, it might not be enough, even used most frugally, to last them through the long years it might take to perfect and then market what they first called the Dynamaphone. As peculiar as they were, they wanted to become steadfast and economically comfortable— unremarkable—citizens, if that was what it might take to stay together as three brothers in one house. Giving one's life outright to science or any of the arts was risky. Attorneys, however, seemed to be the most richly compensated professionals besides surgeons (and they had no love of the flesh), so they pragmatically entered Harvard Law School, taking a modest room in the square and settling down for several uneventful but studious years with their books. Now and then in the evening Thaddeus might serenade them on the player-piano in their rooming-house's dining hall, but music of this world or the next seemed an almost dangerous diversion while they worked on their graduate degree. Especially when Arthur and George feared Thaddeus's variations were becoming a mite too unrestrained and "intuitive," they were glad when he finally banged the keyboard cover shut and stood up, shaking but eager to return with them to their room and their three parallel cots.

Not long after graduation they learned of available offices in Holyoke, Massachusetts, hung out their tri-part shingle, and spent the next several years building up a lucrative general law practice there. They acquired a quarter-block of brick row houses—four units, one for each of them plus one for the servants—generous accommodations but nothing extravagant, though they could have afforded much more. Their real interest (and what necessitated a constant flow of cash) lay in the warehouse they kept at the edge of town. This was the reason they said they could not afford to marry, join gentlemen's clubs, or pursue any kind of social life. _It_... the already ungainly Dynamaphone... was growing and growing, almost as if it were a beast kept in the stall to fatten, and consuming as well more and more of their time. Luckily there were three of them, for the complexities of the instrument demanded constant attention from electricians and machine-builders, men who may have seemed bewildered by the behemoth before them but who enjoyed the challenge of helping to create something mighty as a cathedral organ and complex and ungainly as a locomotive. By this time Thaddeus's conception of the instrument had been altered by the suggestions and modifications of his siblings: they helped him to envision a way to harness the Dynamaphone to the telephone company's readily available cables; in such a way, they might feed into the power of a "national communications grid" (as George put it) and deliver its other-worldly music to anyone capable of making the connection. Imagine, George explained to the others, sending musical signals through the wires the way we now send our voices—but more distinctly, for the music would originate within the mothermachine and the wires itself. "We could ring up a hotel salon in Boston or a private home in Wellesley Hills and deliver music like they've never heard right into their chambers." There was the problem of amplification, for telephone signals were weak, but they could enhance the receivers' sound with megaphones such as were used on the new wax-cylinder players. The more the Brothers Cahill worked on their problems the less the instrument became of the spirit world; instead it was taking shape as a very physical object indeed, weighing several tons already, and their boyish interest in devising the means to listen in to conversations among musically inclined angels, however fascinating, began to appear as quaint as the late nineteenth century was already beginning to seem.

By 1906 the Telharmonium (or " _Tele_ harmonium"), as the instrument was rechristened to reflect its creators' revolutionary new ideas in the mass distribution of live music, had been patented and was ready for public demonstration. Through connections at the court house and in the city streets they had attracted a number of bankers, merchants, and fellow lawyers who gathered in the warehouse one evening for a most curious concert. The lights were kept low, partly to disguise the machine's mammoth size, and partly to allow the use of candles placed about the operating room to lend it a somewhat churchlike, if not dungeon-like, atmosphere. The audience was dressed for a concert, in frock coats and top-hats. Though several doubters searched in vain for organ pipes or bellows, they found instead a phalanx of modified dynamos (145 if they had cared to count) attached to specially geared shafts and inductors; these were controlled by seven octaves of polyphonic velocity-sensitive keyboards, 36 notes per octave. Thaddeus had made a great study of just intonation and equal temperament. Two very serious female conservatory students from Boston, who had been training on the difficult control-banks for months, were attired in suitably solemn academic robes and stood before the machine somewhat as Andromeda might have confronted her future, chained as she was to a rock. Although the businessmen might have been content to seat themselves behind the women and attend to their technique, the brothers led them to a series of velvet-lined booths set along the walls on either side. Inside each booth was a modified telephone, and the men were instructed to lift their ear-pieces, fitted with small celluloid trumpets, when George gave the signal. Thaddeus switched on the Telharmonium, which seemed to waken with a monstrous shudder and then hum like a thousand beehives, sending an electric shiver right through the men's spines. At George's command the gentlemen picked up their ear-phones as if they were answering their wives in a distant county, and the ladies began to play Bach's "Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring" (Thaddeus had determined that the clean contrapuntal lines of baroque church or chamber music best illustrated the beast). The music that the men heard seemed not to come from any organ or manmade mechanism but from out of earthly realms, so pure and plaintive was its sound—not like pipes and not like woodwinds or brass, but like all blended together in shifting, shimmering, always mellifluous timbres. At first a few of the men doubted that the sound could really be coming from such a uncomely amalgamation of switchboards, electrical cables, toggles, buttons, keys, and revolving rotors—but once the recitalists began to take requests (repertory works only, please), they were convinced and willingly sat through George's prepared lecture (being the most pragmatic of his brothers, he was also the best at answering the public at large). In the future, George told them, we would not come to the concert-hall, but the concert-hall would come to us. We would not be content with shellac records that were forever breaking and forever, monotonously the same but would demand actual performances by virtuosos on either side of the continent. Music would be there to soothe or enliven us at all hours, at work and at play, more easily accessible than a trunk-call was today. Indeed, the same telephone that keeps us in touch with faraway relations and associates would enable us to hear great masterpieces from the greatest of composers with very little fuss—and for a nominal fee. The audience was impressed, and soon money was flowing into the brothers' research and development accounts as freely as Bach had through the wires. There remained only the simple matter of relocating to Manhattan, acquiring larger accommodations, and advertising the revolutionary services of the Electric Music Company up and down the grand avenues.

Dubious Enterprises

Christ, explained Mrs. Karinskaya, never died; he wanders upon the earth in myriad forms—a beggar, a Pullman porter, a starving mongrel, a barn owl—yes, like that one. Just the same, none of us ever really dies, either, she told Arthur that same evening she had reappeared, resurrected whole, pounding a monstrous Malacca umbrella handle against the front porch floor. She had never seemed so tall, so mannish, so threatening. "You think your little darling mother ever left you?" she asked as they stood together soon after in the bedroom she had quickly appropriated for herself. The lecture had been instigated when Arthur admitted that he didn't know in which town cemetery his mother had been buried and didn't care really because he did not believe in the commonly accepted Christian principles. "Then we are alike," she said. Swiftly, she unsnapped a carpetbag and withdrew a pile of tattered envelopes tied with a girlish velveteen ribbon. "Your mother was burned horribly, it is true—but she writes to me still from the other side." She shook the bundle in his face. "You think I am deluded?" she added, unknotting the ribbon. "The handwriting, it is hers—look!" And she threw the letters onto the bed. The brown ink had faded into the tissues, too faint to prove or disprove anything. He stood before her, as baffled as the boy she had left behind four decades ago.

Mrs. Karinskaya had come across an article about the inauguration of the Telharmonium in an old _New York Evening Sun_ lost between the leather cushions of a trolley in Saratoga Springs, where she just happened to be "passing through." The fact that she had found the article there and then was proof that this was Destiny. She was to go to him, to help him. The cards had told her he would be back in Iowa—the cards and a helpful librarian in Poughkeepsie.

What had she been doing all these years? Cook's Tours, she said, and rest homes, sanatoria and hot-springs. No quack doctors, thank you! Rheumatism, dropsy, the gout—people from her corner of the world were prey to such maladies, but now she felt as strong as a youth of five and twenty. You met a lot of interesting people out in the world, she told him—interesting, delightful, _well-off_ people. At that, she giggled almost girlishly and tapped him on the wrist with an imaginary fan. Arthur had mostly forgotten that theatrical life on the road with her when he and his brothers were young, and did not like the way she sounded so conspiratorial. After all, they had been but boys then, and bound to do her bidding, however much fun they might have had. He was a grown man well into his middle years now, a married—that is, _divorced_ man, a lawyer and an inventor and not one to flout the law.

They were now back in the "sitting room" having chamomile tea to ensure wholesome dreams. Mrs. Karinskaya took hers in a glass and let the honey drip for a long while. "I can read minds still," she said, stirring. "But I can get her back, you know."

Arthur paused, his tea-cup frozen in midair. "Who?" he asked, feigning ignorance.

She took a long noisy slurp of tea. (How vividly he recalled that sound!) "Her photograph in the newspaper was lovely," she said. "You would not have wanted to give her up lightly."

"My wife... she became _unwell_. It was the strain of living with a scientific man. We hardly knew one another, actually."

"Still, you, a respected man, would like her back. That, I can do."

He drained his tea and set the cup down forcefully on the table—or as forcefully as one can set down a fragile bit of porcelain—and, face to face to his old guardian, said, "You are welcome to stay as long as you like; I can use someone to help me out around here, since my last girl ran off to get married. But promise me no chicanery. Promise me you'll not interfere in my work. Do that, and I will not bother you."

She smiled—like the Giaconda, he thought, just as inscrutably, just as infuriatingly, and finished her own tea. "The Turks," she said at last, folding her broad hands as if in prayer, "they burned our dachas, and they drove us from the steppes into Walachia. Later we fought the Bessarabian separatists. Even now, the Bolsheviks are persecuting my people. I live by my, as you say, wits. So I am afraid of nothing. I came here to help you, and I shall. You want your player-piano to play the songs they sing on the other side. This, I know much about. Good, you have your American tools and your American technology, but I can reach realms where all your university know-how cannot."

Arthur had been circling the round kitchen table like a locomotive on its tracks as she spoke, and now he halted, hands in pockets, bent toward her sitting figure. "I can do it on my own," he stated.

She rose before him, elongated as an El Greco, every bit as tall as Arthur, and he was not a short man. Her face, he noticed as if for the first time, was remarkably smooth and apple-cheeked for one so old—and she was old, indeed, though she did not seem any older than she had always been. "Thaddeus and George," she said in a voice gone lower and huskier, "told me you would resist. You are the one who always got his way, they said. Did you know they both proposed to your wife, but you were the one she chose?" Her thick black eyebrows rose and then met across her Slavic nose. "Because she likes stubborn men, they said."

"Yes, she admitted they had before the wedding," he began, then stopped himself, began again. "Thaddeus! George! But how did you know?"

"No one ever really dies," she answered. "Just as Christ walks the earth still. I am here because through me they can communicate to you. I have a notebook already, full of their automatic writing. It makes little sense to me; perhaps it will prove useful to you."

He was at a loss for words; he clutched at his celluloid collar and tore it off, breaking its snap, without thinking. Except for her heavy silver crucifix and amber-glass rosary

(accoutrements he hadn't remembered), she was a solid column of black before him, from her black boots through her long black skirt and blouse to her still jet-black hair, and she was immoveable. In the morning she would show him the book and they would visit his "player piano."

They settled into life between the farm and the mill together. The "automatic writing" proved a curiosity, full of arcane diagrams and indecipherable charts, marginalia scrawled in what might be Hebrew, and puzzling advice in broken English ("all stops be starts," "blue apples at noon"); nevertheless, the notebooks she had kept inspired him, as did the puzzling books she brought with her to his offices, and the machine grew, and he felt he was coming, ever so slowly, nearer to his goal. Since Mrs. Karinskaya could play and he could not, he enlisted her to try out the keyboards while he scurried about, tuning the pitches and turning up the volume where necessary. Often, a tired merchant heading home after a long summer's day would pause on the darkened street below the mill and listen to a lugubrious choir of simulated seraphim toying with " _Wachet auf_ " or a young farmhand and his sweetheart, driving past the mill long after midnight, might overhear one of the entwined threads of a classical fugue. No one listening on the outside could have guessed that through such music the inventor and his psychic amanuensis were trying to tap at the gates of heaven and rouse its occupants into a duet for life and afterlife. This third and greatest of Cahill instruments was now to be known as the "Omniphonium." After the Greek, Arthur explained. ("But can it play a simple barcarolle?" Mrs. Karinskaya had asked when she first saw it snoring like a sleeping leviathan within the bowels of the limestone mill.) All would seem well, but Arthur knew that something was not quite right. Mrs.

Karinskaya seemed to have her own motivations for supporting his research and the expansion of the machine, which gradually was to occupy several floors of the mill building and threatened to break through the very walls and windows in its inexhaustible need for more rheotomes, larger generators, greater alternators, and an increasingly complex system of dynamos and switches that would amplify the music and be able to carry it through cables around the world. Already the old woman was transcribing a new concerto by Vivaldi (indeed, it did sound like several hundred of his other concertos) just for the Omniphonium. She had suggested that they could give public concerts and thus raise more money to shore up their rapidly dwindling funds. That, and she had met certain widows and spinsters in town who would desperately like to hear the voices of their departed husbands and friends. Arthur, who did not want to repeat any of the embarrassing episodes of the past, refused, and told her to stay home when she wasn't needed at the mill. She would fly out of the house, amber beads rattling, umbrella in hand, after they argued and, she warned him before she left, she would send spiders and ravens to spy on him. As he watched her stomp off down the gravel path, the umbrella carrying her forward like a sail, he would be stricken again by another of his terrible headaches, which came as often and quickly now as spring thunderstorms over the cornfields but did not dissipate so soon.

There was something about the Omniphonium which he would not tell even Mrs. Karinskaya, something which he had only lately discovered about it himself; seized by a headache, he had consulted the "transcriptions" of Thaddeus and George once again and now was convinced: the Omniphonium, if completed according to their instructions, would be capable not only of conversing with the dead, but also of communicating with the occupants of the future. The right scale, the right key, the right intonation, and _they_ would answer him, these humans who were not yet born. At first it sounded even more preposterous than a machine that could make contact beyond the grave, but over many weeks he began to understand the enormous potential and practical uses of such a creation. Of course Mrs. Karinskaya suspected that he was holding back something from her, but in this matter he was resolute: his brothers would have wanted this last chance to one-up their conniving "auntie," and he was not going to let her see the new notebook he was keeping. Let her storm and stew; this was their little secret, between the three of them. So despite his headaches, which were only getting worse, despite the many times he would wake exhausted at his desk after another long night adjusting dials and taking measurements, he carried on with his new mission in life: to greet the residents of the glorious future, who no doubt were eagerly trying to reach him by their own advanced methods, as well.

"What is that I see you putting in your tea?" he asked Mrs. Karinskaya one day, as they ate another hasty breakfast in one of the few empty rooms left at the mill. As usual, they heard the cacophony of carpenters and engineers sawing wood and banging at metal below, helping the machine to grow—for it must continue to grow or die. The larger it became, the more seismographically sensitive it would become to vibrations both earthly and unearthly in origin. "It's a wonder you haven't noticed before," Mrs. Karinskaya answered with a blush coursing through her already ruddy face. "And if you must know, it is arsenic."

"Arsenic! My God!"

She chortled and waved her little tole-painted snuffbox under his nose. "Just a grain or two now and then," she admitted. "In the old country, it is a habit of the _moujik_. The peddlers and the cimbalom players always have a little for you. My complexion, you see how healthy it is for a woman my age? That is its magic. You Americans, you would use it, too, if you packaged it like Ivory soap."

He turned away from her and back to his scribbled notes for the day. "I think it's hideous."

She made a rude sound in the back of her throat and then slurped down the rest of her tea.

Decline and Dénouement

By the time Effie, Arthur Cahill's former wife arrived, he was already confined to bed. The headaches had worsened, affecting his appetite and his ability to continue working such long hours, and then one evening on his way home from the mill he had stumbled and Mrs.

Karinskaya had had to help him up the stairs and into his bedroom. Neither of them believed in small-town old-fashioned doctors; for that matter, despite her many complaints, neither Mrs. Karinskaya nor Arthur had ever been seriously ill. Though he had never converted, Arthur had once attended a very convincing Christian Science lecture. Effie suggested then if he did not mistrust the medical profession completely, he should try the sulfur baths in Arkansas or the mineral waters of Colorado; he protested that he felt too weak to board a train to anywhere. Most importantly, he did not want to leave the farm and the Omniphonium in her hands, especially since his startling breakthrough, all documented in his tall, narrow ledger books—the ones he kept locked in his bedroom safe.

Effie herself, for all her own experience with nerves and psychosomatic ailments, seemed remarkably healthy. In the years since her breakdown and slow recovery she had lived as an undedicate nun, darning stockings with the mentally unfit and playing piano at rallies for socialists and utopians. Such dedication and sacrifice had both hardened and dignified her. "You know what I am?" she liked to asked strangers on streetcars and suffragettes at chautauquas. "I am _pamprodactylus_ ; that is, I have all my feet pointing in the right direction!" She was still quite a handsome woman, quite thin, with aquiline features that betrayed Semitic blood and her piles of gray-streaked hair which she had refused to have bobbed. Mrs. Karinskaya had been right, in the end: she had been able to convince Effie to come back to her husband, though it was only because she had been told Arthur might be dying that she had come all the way from Battle Creek. She was fully homeopathic these days and believed that with just the right tinctures and elixirs she could bring her former husband back to good health. Effie believed that her good cheer and laughter alone would be arnica to his bruise, balm to his fever, though, a lover of ipecac and codeine herself, she had trouble staying on an even temper. "Arthur," she told him the afternoon after she had arrived after her tedious journey, recouping her energy in a wicker armchair facing his bed, twisting a drapery tassel in her fingers, "I've known all along that overwork would do this to you. Look how it affected me, back in the bad old days!" Luckily for him, he had managed to keep up her alimony payments even after the rest of his savings had begun to diminish as swiftly as his health, and so she and her attorney were on good terms with him again. "Why this machine has consumed your life, I don't know. I suspect it has something to do with that awful Cossack you have doing housework for you. She has the evil eye, I can warn you, and I don't care how long you've known her. Where was she the night your mother died? Or your father? How is she blameless?"

He spat a high C into the bronze cuspidor, then fell back against the bed once again. "Don't be foolish, Effie," Arthur finally said weakly from within his mountain of pillows and quilts. "Mrs. Karinskaya adored my mother. And when she didn't have to, she watched after my brothers and me."

"She exploited you, and she's given you these outlandish notions. If I were you, I'd order her out of this house, posthaste." Effie pulled on the tassel and the curtains on the window behind her closed, which was just as well, because he needed to sleep.

Arthur did not tell Effie about the notebooks in his safe and his extensive dialogue with the future. It might have been because he did not want to witness a tantrum over them; it might also have been because, like her, he was beginning to fear for his sanity. For the Omniphonium had spoken—or rather, the citizens of the future had spoken through the Omniphonium, and he had taken diligent dictation. Some day, he had thought, he would publish a book, and it would be the most startling book ever written by an American: My Colloquy with the World to Come, he might title it. The conversation had begun one evening after supper when he had gone back to the mill with an idea to make some minor adjustment, when he had accidentally laid his elbow across one of the keyboards he'd neglected to switch off. True, he had been experiencing quite a headache ever since he'd finished eating, but he was certain this was not an hallucination: in the sound the speaker in the "conductor's" listening booth relayed to him, he heard the distinct susurration of human voices, calling him by name. He pressed another key, but nothing—then an approximation of a melody in the Dorian scale, approximating the timbre of a cithara, and he heard the quavering but distinct whispers once again. One hand on the keyboard, the other poised over a ready ledger, he waited for further instructions and then began to take notes.

The future, it seemed, did not deem this a very important endeavor on his part, but would oblige him by answering whichever of his questions they found attractive. No, they would not tell him the outcome of human political or economic systems, and they would not indulge his baser instincts by giving names or dates. Instead, they were more inclined to philosophize and advise, with much the same often frustrating logic the dead are famous for, with their homilies and vague reassurances. Nevertheless, he was happy to appease the future, and if they would speak distinctly enough, he would do them the honor of conveying their every thought and word.

It took a bit of flattery and cautious diplomacy, but they agreed and allowed him to proceed. Over the weeks he filled his ledgers with his nearly (to anyone else) illegible handwriting and shorthand, and so he became conversant with the life and ethics of the future.

First of all, we are no longer "human," they told him; to call them such a thing would be akin to calling a human an ape. Darwin was right, and their ways were no longer ours. Homo sapiens have made a radical transmogrification of sorts, being once barbaric, chthonic creatures, born of blood, eaters of flesh, murderers of life. Our race is now one of transparency and light, the voices explicated, with bodies as insubstantial as those of glassine jellyfish you used to see in your primitive oceans. We convert the light of the sun, in fact, into the food of mental automation; like spores of long-dead lichen upon a rock in winter, the sun awakes us, animates us, nourishes us until we mature, meet one another, and propagate. We have not bodies as you define them; we are born as are the children of spiders, cast on gossamer into the sunlit empyrean. For years, centuries perhaps (if we were to count them by ancient horological practices), we float on the wind, traffic with the clouds, lovers of the sun, creatures of pure spiritual abstraction. Such an existence is pleasanter beyond your wildest imaginings, more satisfying than any of your artistry or intellectualizing, for we exist almost as thought alone. We say "almost," for there are still vestiges of your old human desires and ambitions in us, so we seek out one another, calling across the stratosphere, until we form groups, or coagulations, you might say—and like colonies of coral in your clearest seas, we aggregate a culture, a civilization around us; such colleges of collective consciousness increase a hundredfold our powers of mental divination, and it is our love for one another that binds us together like the cement secreted by your tiny polyps—we form great psychic attachments for one another, delighting in combining our mental prowess the way you might mix colors on a palette. Nothing excites us more than discovering new ways of looking at a conundrum, or seeing the hidden side of the enigmas which once baffled your generations. We are happiness itself! So happy are we that we willfully undergo karyokinesis, a mental mitosis, you might say, so as to give birth to other generations even more advance than our own. However, we cannot say whether or not we shall live forever; that problem has not been answered by even the best of our thinkers, for one day we may indeed be proven mortal yet, whatever atoms bind us together into the airy entities we are might one day break apart like so many marbles in an earth-child's game. Would that be death

or just another step toward a higher level of existence? We are not certain as of yet, but we are eager to learn...

These crystalline entities of the Aether, Arthur further discovered, are on occasion compelled to give physical expression to the boundlessly ecstatic joy they feel, intermingling as they do in their wondrous cities of light: they therefore gather and glimmer across the heavens as does the aurora borealis or australis, casting rainbow-colored fires against the unutterable vacancy of the universe. At such times, their minds mingle as do voices in a choir, striking sublime chords of rapture and bliss that ripple across and through them like a tide over shifting, gleaming sands. Their everyday communication alone produces vibrations which might be perceived as the most paradisiacal music ever heard by the human ear; it is through such harmonic pulsation that they were able to effect détente with our brutish past through this marvelous machine. In fact, one might say that the future of humankind exists as song, _is_ song, as intangible as it is exquisite. In their music, if heard properly, can be divined the combined wisdom of all ages and all saviors, and in their melodies all cultures, all civilizations have met their culmination and termination. For pure sound is as one with pure light in this manifestation of the noble future that awaits us: Music is life! Life is music! (If this is difficult to visualize or rationalize, the rest would be as custardy as flummery to the all but the least skeptical reader.) Such frothy idylls and overwrought examinations filled page after page of his thin-ruled ledgers, and it was not until Arthur had taken to his bed that he realized that he might just have well been describing his idea of heaven.

Meanwhile Effie had set about usurping the duties of the housemistress. Mrs. Karinskaya was a sufficient cook and laundress, but she was congenitally incapable of pushing a broom or lifting a feather-duster; her own quarters were a heap of books, boots, and empty medicinal bottles—there, Effie would not dare invade, but she declared the rest of the farmhouse her sovereignty, and was soon spreading the gospel of borax and Lysol. She was a nervous woman, as has been stated before, but she found assuagement for her nerves in busywork, and now in the nursing of another. For one thing, she was convinced that there was little physical wrong with Arthur: his condition was due to the overly intellectual life of a scientist, compounded with a lack of exercise or fresh air in his limestone dungeon, as well as insufficient nourishment and an hereditary oversensitivity to sound—and especially due to the poisonous presence of that crotchety giantess. She knew that Mrs. Karinskaya both needed her and hated her; she was her and her rival. "Arthur is not dying," she would tell his old nursemaid, "and you needn't have even sent for me, but I am glad I came." Other times, she would tell the older woman, "Look how rosy his cheeks are! That is not a dying man. He will be up and out of bed within a month. Already, he is eating more of your borscht." Mrs. Karinskaya would just stick out her lower lip and make a sort of razzing noise that Effie took to be some sort of Tartar expression of disdain.

Often, Mrs. Karinskaya would be gone for hours at a time, usually very early in the morning of very late at night. If Effie had ever bothered to go into town at such hours, she might have heard an adagio that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of Vivaldi seeping from within the thick walls of the mill, and if she had crept within the gates and hoisted herself up onto a high window-ledge, she might have seen the tall form of a woman in black inside, her ear to a device much like a radio headset, trying vainly to hear perhaps her darling Cici, or perhaps Christ himself, speaking in the reedy tones of an old-world hurdy-gurdy. Once Effie did go up the road to the mill during one of her trips into town for cleaning supplies, and she stood before the ominous castle-like edifice like a knight who has come to challenge an enemy of his kingdom. The gate was padlocked, and workers no longer came to increase the girth and length and breadth of the slumbering behemoth within, but in the tall factory windows she could distinguish glimmers of copper and steel, Hydra-headed clusters of thick electrical wire , and complexly interlocking gears like the innards of a titanic wristwatch. She had been forthright with Arthur early that morning, as he sipped a bit of weak Postum and tried to explain to her once more the conceit behind his machine. "Even Edison," he told her, looking boyish in his nightshirt and freshly trimmed mustache, "devised his phonograph to record the voices of the dead. He believed that in the future we would merely set up a contraption in an empty room and living heirs would soon have instructions from their ancestors on tin cylinders. So I am not so absurd." At such moments, when he explained things like this, she could almost see him in triplicate before her, like a trick photograph, with Thaddeus and George on either side, nodding their beards. She had married him because he was more definitive than they had been; whereas they were often tongue-tied or, conversely, over-verbose, he was the one among them who stubbornly tried to speak in a language those outside his secret society might yet understand. "Like your brothers before you," she told him, taking the empty cup from where it precariously balanced on his knees, "you have lost touch with reality, and I blame your dark companion. Even if one were to make out words among the chords, as you say, who is to say they would be in English, and who is to say they would wish anything for us to join them? There's something of the devil in your machinery, and I no more believe in the devil than I do in all the saints put together."

He nodded toward where the wall-safe was, behind the lithograph of "The Dying Sioux," but of course she knew nothing of the safe behind it, its combination, or the documents within. "In the future," he said, "music will travel unseen through cables spanning the globe, and you will be able to turn a dial and call up your recently departed parents, who will sing you to sleep." Already there was something otherworldly, distant and somnolent, in his voice, as he sank back deeper into his pillows and drew a quilt up to his chin. For a moment she wondered if she were hearing his voice, or that or Thaddeus, or George. She saw them sitting on either side of the bed, smoothing their brother's hair, willing him to join him in that last room at the end of the hall, the one with no visible door and no key. "We have the wireless," she told him, starting to tiptoe from the room, "and an organ that runs by electricity; I saw one in a theater in Chicago." He might have been asleep by the time she closed the door.

It was later that afternoon that, having returned from the general store laden with boxes of goods that promised antiseptic cleanliness and miraculous polishes, she discovered the little round jars: four of them in all, with the customary pirate's flags and made of the usual iodine-colored glass. There they were, secreted behind the pickled beets and canned tomatoes and pig's feet in the cellar pantry, kept where it was perpetually cool and dry, waiting their turn to be consumed. One of the bottles was empty and another nearly so, just an inch of golden grains at the bottom.

"You have discovered my little beauty secret," Mrs. Karinskaya said behind her; she had that way of entering silent as a cat and as dangerously, too, if you were the mouse. "And you also notice that we have no rats on this farm."

Effie found her back up against the pantry shelves, a jar still guiltily in her white hands. "I hadn't noticed," she told the much taller woman who was blocking her exit, "but it's beginning to make sense. Today, even though they don't always fool me, I am going to fetch a general practitioner. I suggest you stay here to answer a few polite queries."

Mrs. Karinsakaya roared with laughter that was deep and hearty and overwhelmingly masculine. "Did you know," she told the other woman as she watched her replace the jar, then, thinking better of it, draw it out again, "that I am 126 years old? And yet I am not the oldest of the Skapetz. Do you not know who we are? Have you never heard of us—the Believers? Once the Tsar Peter the Third was one of us. Rasputin was fearful of our influence. We were the imperial court's droshky drivers! We kept fine Orloff stallions! And we never hurt no one, but we were hounded into the Urals, into Armenia, forced to go live along the Dniester valley with the heathen Gypsies of greater Romany. People of peace, all of us, treated like swine by swineherds!"

"What have you been doing to my husband?" she asked, understanding the old woman to be quite insane but never having felt saner herself. "Why have you been doing this to him, when he gave you a last refuge and a sanctuary to pursue your studies?"

"Look at my face," commanded Mrs. Karinskaya, "the skin of a woman in her prime, and yet—and yet—" She had suddenly fallen to her knees, her caftan-like skirts draped around her, as if she were begging Effie's forgiveness, or perhaps her complicity. "I am a holy eunuch, as are all the true Skoptzi," Mrs. Karinskaya said. "I underwent the rite soon after I married, and my wife followed me soon after. She had already given me a son."

Effie was not too astonished to ask, "Wife?"

"Don't look at me that way. I have not been a man for over one-hundred years; how then could I pretend to be one? Cici, Arthur's mother, was my great-granddaughter; we escaped revolution and famine in Wallachia and found ourselves somehow in Estonia. I raised Cici as if she were my own daughter and I her mother. Why then should I want to harm her only living son?"

"I believe little of what you say. Arthur has told me what a swindler you were, how you cheated innocent widows and widowers."

"Am I to be blamed for bringing a little comfort into lonely peoples' lives? My remittance was small, compared to what I gave them. And I barely survived at times. I was lonely myself; I had lost my lovely Cici and then my three little orphans... Please don't destroy my jars; such medicine is difficult to obtain these days, in such a small town, and I confess I am just a little bit its slave. It is after all what keeps me alive." Mrs. Karinskaya had risen to her feet while Effie stepped around her through the doorway and up out of the cellar. "I want you to leave these premises, or I will have you arrested," she said as she went. "Go ahead, take your jars, if you must. If you were trying to make Arthur as immortal as you claim to be, you must know that you were killing him in the process."

Mrs. Karinskaya called after her: "Your sentimentality I owe to your sex. Christ himself was weakened by his own flesh; that is why he was condemned to earth for all time. Arthur was meant to be one of us, for we live as much in the world of spirits as this one—just look into his eyes! He doesn't see you; he sees a phantom..." She was just babbling now, and Effie was already well out of earshot.

By the time the doctor left, in the middle of a horrific thunderstorm that evening, news had already come in from town of the fire: the mill was on fire once again. The fire department had already been diverted on a mission to save a burning barn, and by the time the volunteers had made it to the mill, the walls had fallen in, the new wooden framework within having collapsed, and the Omniphonium lay in the smoldering rubble, a gargantuan, twisted mass of metal; the fire had been so hot its steel innards had buckled and fused, and all the many rooms of dynamos and amplifying machinery had become an indistinguishable amalgamation of wires, cables, and gears. In the process of trying to save the mill, firefighters had demolished the gates and smashed in the immense front doors, only to find that it was too late to salvage even the ivory keyboards or the velvet-lined listening booths. Of course, all of Arthur's notes and documents were lost, as was Mrs. Karinskaya's library of arcana, her books and charts and sacred bestiaries and gallimaufries of impossible secrets and sects, amphigories and horoscopic, hagiographic nonsense. Effie revealed nothing of this to Arthur at the present—he'd been heavily sedated by the doctor despite his protests, and it was a few days more before she dared to leave his bedside and visit the ruins. She had not seen Mrs. Karinskaya since their confrontation in the cellar, though she nearly screamed every time she saw a house-spider or heard caws from the cornfield. Her room was now empty, all the drawers in the chest yawning open and the wardrobe hangers and hooks scattered across the floor like domestic landmines. In righting the room, Effie found a letter on the floor under the bed, written in faded brown ink on very thin tissues of paper.

"Darling Grandmother," it began in English, then abruptly changed into another language —though it was hard to tell, the writing was so spindly and faint. It was no language or even alphabet she recognized, and she had been a good student of languages as a girl. A little down the page there were other phrases in English and a spattering of French: "Everyone very happy here," " _cher enfants_ ," " _trés bon homme_ ," "Try Pear's soap on your hands," and so on, though

Effie could not really be sure of any of the words, exactly. The signature was cryptic: the graceful calligraphic outline of a swan. She decided she would not bother Arthur with this, either, and without thinking later burned it with the rest of the household trash in the woodstove.

When Arthur awoke from his long slumber, he took a little weak tea and then asked where Mrs. Karinskaya was. Off to an old maid she knows who lives on the Saranacs, she told him, and felt obliged to elaborate further, "She mentioned a will and a buried treasure, I think, something an ancestor might help them find." Effie laughed, the first time she had since she had arrived here, but Arthur looked stricken. "Did she mention when she might be back?" he asked, his teaspoon tapping out a palsied rhythm against the cup. "We shall both have to go back to work soon." Effie seized the spoon and the cup from him. At that moment, she noticed a cobweb she had missed in a window-corner. "I can play you something on that harmonium in the parlor," she told him, just to change the subject. "You know, I still keep up my music a little. I find Chopin such a tonic." Some minutes later, Arthur was lulled back to sleep with a somewhat hesitant nocturne rising from the asthmatic instrument below.

A day or two later, Effie brought him an object she had found at the perimeter of the wreckage: the skeletal armature of a large umbrella, like the fossilized wing of a pterodactyl, its charred Malacca handle still attached. Arthur was not to recover, after all; he did not even make it back to the burned-out cellar where "Tel Mill" had been, never saw the twisted and blackened remains of his life's work. Once he saw a pretty silver spider inching down a clock-face; the coroner wrote "cardiac arrest" on his warrant. Effie found refuge in a church choir and its bachelor minister, and was soon lost to history. As were the wishes of an unconventional man, Arthur Cahill was cremated without song or ceremony and buried in a country cemetery nearby, though I have never found his grave.

Kisses

They were falling over the town, drifting down cool and moist and gentle as the first snowfall of the year. Slow but seemingly heavy, out of a clear blue November sky, they fell, not in an evenly dispersed downpour, but in random spatterings over the entire district—streets, lawns, and fields. Since noon one could hear from place to place the soft wet plopping sounds, like innumerable bubbles bursting in the air, as the kisses landed on pedestrians or anyone else outdoors. For the most part, they went for their targets' cheeks, giving them light pecks here and there, although a good many more daring ones firmly planted themselves on the lips and even went so far as to dawdle with the tongue (these would have to be forcibly wiped away; even so, most of them evaporated nearly as soon as they found their marks). Some people appeared to attract more kisses—not necessarily the youngest or prettiest; others felt nothing at all—it could be they were not sensitive enough to touch—but no one was able to determine whether this was merely a chance aspect of the climatic phenomenon or a definite preference on behalf of the kisses themselves.

Though later there were bound to be many theories, not a soul really understood what was happening at the time, nor was anyone sure at first how to react, if one should react at all. The precipitation had begun so gradually and passed through each area so erratically not even our beloved authorities had much time to evaluate, only time to act. Should alarms be sounded? Geiger counters dispatched to the deputies? Government meteorologists called in? Probably all this and more was done, for there was certainly a commotion in the streets: people rushed out of their homes and businesses to see what the fuss was about—then they too became soaked in kisses, and this either enchanted them in an instant (mostly just children, it was claimed later) or left them maddened and perhaps a little horrified. The town's everyday business came to a near standstill as secretaries left their typewriters, students darted out of classes despite their teachers, motorists abandoned their vehicles, and clerks walked out on customers—not all at once, of course, but wherever their invisible cloud carried the kisses and people exclaimed loudly.

On my walk home from the office where I sit all day I saw my fellow townsfolk running every which way, trying to avoid the incessant kisses or, if they were daring or maybe lonely, racing to the spots where the kisses seemed to be falling thickest (though they were transparent, an indistinct iridescence shimmered in the air over certain blocks, like the sheen of moiré cloth without the moiré). Having listened to frequent reports on the radio all afternoon, I was not shocked but somewhat surprised nevertheless by what I was listening to. I noticed two or three old maids and widowers strike at the kisses as they landed on their persons, run into their homes, and slam down their windows against the onslaught. And I spied comely young women— hairdressers and nurses—wander out of their work-places, cautious with umbrellas at first, until their curiosity overpowered them and they allowed a few darting smacks on their taut cheeks, whereupon a few of them were swept away and turned their umbrellas upside down, collecting the invisible yet mobile kisses to keep for themselves—if that was possible.

In a yellowed field which I pass every day two old farmers were sitting on an oversized pumpkin trying to play cards, even though mischievous kisses kept annoying the stouter of the pair. He would shuffle the deck—a kiss he immediately brushed away would tickle his ear or neck; they retaliated with more violence, drumming upon his bald pate and upsetting his cards, and so on; all the while his partner, unaffected, guffawed and mocked the man's strange affliction, though everyone in town must have known of the kisses by then. Other laborers among the pumpkins were also dodging kisses, the younger men blushing and covering their heads, a few of the more rambunctious married men I know kissing the air and giggling like brides pelted by rice.

Along the narrow hillside path which leads toward my neighborhood, dogs snapped at kisses which had inadvertently landed on their sensitive noses, and cats pounced at the effervescent things—for cats can see ghosts and cats can see kisses. The last of the year's golden chrysanthemums bent under their pressure (or was it just the wind?); stray kisses became entangled in spider-webs (spiders would come trapezing across their threads for a real surprise); other kisses were caught in overhanging branches or rain gutters—-it was possible to hear, at quiet corners, the faint forlorn plashings above. Walking along with my old black valise and my head down, full of other thoughts, I did not really notice many of these things at the time, although one's senses are always, like cameras and tape-recorders, collecting impressions for future reference. In that small cemetery at the top of the hill I paused as I often do and became aware of kisses striking the cold marble and grayed wreaths with some force, making subtle music, like the highest notes of a distant piano. Such a waste, I reflected, though I probably could not explain why that thought occurred to me: it was illogical and I am a logical man, so people tell me, and I had never made a study on the ontology of osculation. But on her grave, which had been allowed to go unkempt for some years, the kisses seemed to be falling with especially gentle ferocity: perhaps they nourished the soil—very well, then.

Nearer my own home the kisses were also falling with rather more intensity, as if a denser cloud had blown through—I could determine this from the sight of all my neighbors scampering about, some of them in slickers and galoshes, as though they were expecting weather of an altogether different sort. (Do kisses bounce off rubber? I suppose so.) Indeed, here was a veritable deluge up the street, and the very nature of the kisses had apparently altered, though in precisely which way was difficult to decipher. In the fading sunlight the kisses took on somewhat more of a substance; there was a rainbow-colored gauziness in the air one could see through squinted eyes at the correct angle to the sunset—transparent and prismatic ribbons not so much descending as scattering in the breeze like the gossamer of spiders. The sound was also more audible, burblings and sighings both. Attitudes had changed as well. Mothers were raising their infants up to the faded blue heavens; middle-aged husbands and wives were out walking bare-headed in the downpour; youths danced about to music in the open air (chilly as it was), giggling and flailing arms about like marionettes as the kisses peppered their skin. The elderly and bedridden were being wheeled out of doors to receive a treatment of kisses, some of them oblivious or confused or critical of what this new therapy could mean, until they too felt busses on their foreheads and hands. The blind or senile among them laughed like children, thinking surely the kisses were the work of spry young lads and lasses who were quick to kiss and flee. The influence of the kisses was unmistakable on all those who came into contact with them—it was easy to see the look of surprised bliss, that look which comes across a child's face when a magician has performed some simple but bewildering trick, travel from face to face to face.

Yet, in all this time I had been walking (a little too quickly, preoccupied with all those foolish documents fan-tailed across my desk like a deck of cards) and observing these unusual happenings, I myself had not felt one solitary kiss. Perhaps it was my wide-brimmed black hat (the one they say makes me look like a parson) which broke the kisses' fall, or possibly I had been advancing too erratically and in all the wrong places; whatever the reason, I had begun to feel a strong desire to know what all these people were discovering with such evident happiness. I removed my hat, handed it to an accommodating branch, and experimented with strolling very slowly and regularly in those areas where the kiss-drops appeared to be falling with most vigor. I could make out a shimmering in the pearly sky and hear that incessant susurration of puckered lips, but could not feel a thing. Was I still doing something wrong, or did I emanate some sort of antimagnetic force which deflected the kisses? If I were a scientist or philosopher I might be able to tell you, but I am neither, and I doubt anyway if the entire professional community would be any more expert at explaining this phenomenon than a mad poet. Stretching out my left hand, I at last detected one—it lasted but a moment, pressing very lightly against the back of my wrist, right below my watch, and it left a nearly undetectable trace of a damp sheen there, as well as an equally slight scent, similar to perfume or the memory of lilacs.

Even if I am not scientist, philosopher, or even poet, I will attempt to explain further:

altogether, it had been a pleasant if all too-fleeting sensation which left only a tingling to the skin as in a mild frostbite. I rubbed the spot with a finger—it was indeed damp and a little bit warm; the epidermis was rosier in that spot, although the color faded rapidly. Like a bee-sting? No. A lover's pinch? Not quite. Just like... a kiss. As I said, pleasant but quick; like a memory it possessed no substance of its own and existed outside of time. Of course I wanted more. Encouraged, I flung out both arms and went as far as sticking out my tongue, but no more kisses came my way.

Meanwhile one couple after another had been passing me by on the sidewalk, holding hands and kissing passionately, eyes closed and sleepwalking blindly along, as if this were the first day of spring and bluebirds spun around their heads. These were couples of all ages, most of them whom I knew or recognized and had never seen kiss before (and were certainly not the sorts to demonstrate any sort of affection in public); they did not notice me as we crossed paths, so intent were they upon each other. They were all like beautiful young lovers in love for the first time—many of them had already stopped to bill and coo on benches and on the grass, exploring the range of kisses they could share between themselves. (We did the same once, I recalled.) In the almost-dark, porch swings creaked all around me: the chirp of love-birds. The smallest children kissed each other as well (more chastely, of course), and if I am not mistaken I saw a few cats and dogs giving each other hesitant licks and smooches. A world of love! Well, this tender interaction was quite charming to observe, but still I could not attract another kiss of my own.

It appeared that the shower was diminishing as fast as the light, and I realized my chances were growing thinner with each fall of a kiss. Remembering the girls with their umbrellas, I opened my small leather valise (the one she mockingly gave me so long ago, saying I carried my heart in a valise), stuffed what forms and letters were inside it into my mackintosh pockets (rain, after all, had been predicted), and began to chase madly about in the streets after the elusive kisses, much as a neophyte butterfly collector might with his net in an abundant glade. It could not be possible not to ensnare at least a few wayward kisses within the yawning mouth of my valise (snapping it shut again and again to keep them in—to alter the comparison, like a frog in a swarm of gnats), and when I felt that the bag had grown perhaps a bit heavier—for even kisses must have their own weight, however minimal—I rushed off down the sidewalk and into the twilit rooms of my walk-up maisonette. There I fumbled at a light-switch and, sitting down at my table with the valise like a pirate with a just-unearthed trunk, very carefully undid the clasp and cautiously peered within. Inside there was something of a dim phosphorescent glow that may or may not have been slowly pulsating—I cannot really trust my eyesight anymore, especially in lamplight. What next to do? With a wild tremulousness I shook the bag over my head... but instead of being sprinkled with divine kisses they sputtered and spattered and stung my nose and cheeks with an almost electrical crackling—there may have been blue sparks as well, for I was momentarily blinded and dazed; I cried out and hurried to douse my burning face with cold water. Naturally, I felt ashamed of my greed and dismayed that I had lost my one chance... and yet... When I returned to the table, I don't know why, but I had the distinct impression there was still one softly glowing, softly pulsing kiss, and one that had not spoilt, in a far bottom corner of the valise—how I determined this I can't exactly explain, though I was sure it was there and was determined to seize it. At first it tried wriggling free like a mouse trapped in a crevice, but I pinched it between two fingers and held it there although it looked as if I were holding nothing much more than air.

If this were to be my last opportunity I was not going to waste it. Steady now. Raising the kiss up to face level in the flickering light of the lamp and squeezing it tight, I prepared to press the kiss against my own puckered lips... and it slipped away. But then something peculiar happened—the kiss must have stayed suspended before my mouth for a moment when suddenly, like a tack attracted to a magnet, it made contact with my lips. And it lingered—if just a second or two can be called lingering, though it felt much longer: a moment's kiss, an hour's bliss, as the poet might say. It appears I had captured and activated a most powerful kiss, one that jolted me with a tremendous bolt more electrical than sexual, but one which was above all human and alive and charged with love. For an instant I felt that warmth and cool dampness (yes, but that's just how kisses are) and smelled those lilacs unleashed with the burst, and of this I can only conclude in the truest hyperbole: that kiss was not without a soul and for a moment I felt that kiss enter me and become me and overwhelm me.

But... there was more. How can I explain? Just to say, her kisses were, at their best, very much like that, they affected me like that—could it be a sign that sentimentality is catching up with my age to admit I felt with that kiss I was kissing her again? Kissing her again in the moonlit quietude of her family's garden on a long-lost April midnight, brushed by lilacs and the darkening leaves... and the both of us harmonizing with an unseen piano, and her cool soft lips, her cool white shoulders bared... years, years, and years ago. Was it her kiss? Was she there?

Am I a silly old fool? It happened all so quickly; I was left so empty.

Again I found myself darting and dashing through the streets and over lawns, in pursuit of more kisses—but they had all dried up in the chill night air. Cursed fate, to think so late! A radio in a window reported that they had finally dissipated themselves in a torrent over a group of parochial schoolgirls leaving church after either choir or basketball practice. I ran to the churchyard, breathless. The last of the parochial girls in their blue and white uniforms floated down the sidewalk in a mist of confused euphoria. The loveliest of them walked with her eyes shut like a saint ready for assumption, the hair around her rosy ears damp and curling from so many stormy kisses. Bright stars illuminated us all in the frozen dark, the girls and the couples still kissing on doorsteps and the children breathing warmth and blowing kisses into each others' hands, and I saw there was no reason, no reason at all to be sad. Kisses may not linger, I thought, but love, yes, _love_ will, hope will remain in the world. Maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow another cloudburst would come, a precipitation of caresses or warm gusts of embraces—blown in on winds of chance or design. Someday soon might come that certain everlasting happiness after all. Let the rains fall! prophets and weathermen everywhere will be crying unto heaven, let them fall! I went up to the pretty schoolgirl with the closed eyes, threw my arms around her, and upon her chill virgin cheek poured kisses of my own; I was not surprised when she dropped her books, opened her eyes, answered in the same way—and she tasted like vanilla cream and smelled like lilacs, lilacs in November. Then we wandered together throughout the town, she and I and whoever joined us, out into the countryside and from town to town, kissing everyone in our joy, male or female, child or adult, like the maddest of madmen.

But we were not the only ones.

A Fever of Unknown Origin

Our father lay in bed, dying, we were certain, and so we had gathered around, bearing candles, sprinkling holy water, reading the rosary, praying—whatever Mother thought would work best. The doctor had done all he could, and since one of my brothers had just been ordained a priest, we were prepared. The illness had started as just a fever which had come from nowhere, but something fierce and vengeful had quickly overtaken Father, and by the time we had all assembled in the room his body lay bloated and stinking like a dead man's. Mother was frightened, for he spoke with the voice of a demon, his teeth grating within his skull, and she wondered if my brother the priest could not do something about it. The fever was consuming Father like a fire, and he did indeed scream out like a man in the midst of flames. Father shouted for cold water, but all we brought him was never enough; his skin was hot as a bed-iron to the touch, and lesions covered his face like moss upon a stone. The sores oozed and seemed to boil within his flesh, but nothing we did, no amount of water or ointments would cool or heal them; it would be best, we all agreed, just to let him die. His body was like a besieged city; every part of him was under attack, and he was rotting away. His hands and feet had withered and his eyes were crusted over and all his hair had fallen out. But, he wailed at us, I've never felt more alive, why don't you all go away, I'll thrash you all when I get up, you'll see. He had always acted like that, and we had always feared him, but never as much as then.

Just when it seemed he would finally die and we could all get back to our own duties, a change came over Father; the fever lost its grip, his sores healed almost overnight, and his body once more was sound and uncorrupted. There were only a few purplish marks, like scratches or old scars, left on his skin, and even these were faint and certain to fade. His appetite returned and he told us old stories about his youth and his years at sea and threatened to knock our heads as he had always done. Mother was hopeful. Truly, he seemed to grow years younger and stronger with each passing day, and though he said he was too tired to get up, he appeared healthy and as capable of thrashing us as he always used to. So all but Mother left his bedside to get back to the spring planting and tending the sheep. She told us later that Father spoke then of feeling as if he were a hawk, looking down upon fields and plains from the clouds, with a desire to keep soaring until he reached his home in heaven. His speech so contented her that she fell asleep, the first time in days, and woke only when she heard her husband crying aloud in pain.

The purplish scars, she immediately saw, had spread and darkened, and he tore at his skin with his fingernails, as if trying to scratch them out. By the time we had gathered around the bed again Mother had bound his wrists with rags to the bedposts to keep him from scratching, and we watched in horror and amazement as Father moaned and the odd markings rose like welts on his flesh, forming odd symbols and signs, like ancient runes carved in rock. They circled his bared legs in a tiny, menacing, continuous line, clear as writing in a book, as precisely detailed as print, and the words, if that's what they were, repeated themselves in a pattern and had risen halfway up his pale chest by the time I looked at them closely. They still seemed to be evolving, and hour by hour their shapes changed imperceptibly. By nightfall Father had fallen into a sleep of exhaustion, though his body still writhed in pain. In the candlelight his scarification looked even more like warnings written in an unknown script; all of us agreed that Father's body was trying to tell us something, old sins and even older truths about himself he no doubt had never dared to tell even his wife.

By the next morning Father no longer seemed to be in pain, though he would not waken.

We unbound his wrists and my ordained brother sent for the old priest in town, who had studied Greek as well as Latin. These words were not Greek, he told us, but possibly something much older-the language, perhaps, which the first angels had used before they were cast from heaven. Mother and most of my brothers and sisters were relieved to hear this, but I remained skeptical— wouldn't the angels be able to write our own language? The old priest left, saying he would have to consult the bishop. By this time the sentences had wound around Father's arms toward his shoulders and they had turned a blood-red; if you touched a mark, it would smudge slightly like half-dry ink and your finger would carry a trace of blood. The sheets were moist and stained all over. But our father slept calmly as a man who had worked the fields all day, and so Mother opened the windows of the sickroom to let in air and light. She took up her scarf, which had been hanging over the mirror, and went to draw water, and the rest of her children went back to their homes as I took up guard in a chair near the bed. There was a smell like lilies and beeswax, like a church, in the room.

I was studying my face in the mirror when Father coughed in his sleep and I thought I noticed something peculiar about his reflection. To test my idea, I held a hand-mirror to his side and gasped when I saw that in his reflection I could read the script on his body, written in Father's own quaky, unschooled hand, and every phrase read merely: _Forgive me for I have sinned_ , over and over again, around and around his limbs and rapidly rising toward his neck.

I cried to Mother to come have a look, and she hurried in with several of her daughters in tow. They took turns holding the mirror, but they could not read, and suddenly the letters were scrambled, as if the message I thought I had seen had been meant just for me. One of the girls, who could read a little, said she was sure the message was merely WE MUST ALL FEAR GOD, though our brother the priest said later that the marks spelled out something too blasphemous to repeat. Another brother who had come in seized the mirror and whispered to me, No, you're all wrong, it's a smutty sea shanty Father used to sing, don't tell Mother. Father's body, which had been so cool and sweet-smelling for the past few days, turned fiery and loathsome once again, and the welts seemed not just to throb, but to sizzle upon his skin. They had now circled his throat and the "words" had become a thick solid line, like a scarlet necktie, and it seemed he was choking. I suppose it all lasted just a few minutes, but at the time it seemed to be taking far too long. Our brother the priest raised a crucifix and anointed his fevered body with oil and Father screamed once—a miserably faint sound, however, as if heard from the bottom of a mine-shaft— and died. There was no angelic rush of wings, no thunder or ray of sunlight, nothing of the sort of thing we're taught to expect, just a hen squawking in the barnyard and one long last loud breaking of wind from our father's collapsing body. When we raised his heavy body from the bed, I saw that the sheets, which had been imprinted with blood from the marks upon his back, now spelled out something so foolish, you see, so foolish and idiotic that it does not bear repeating here.

Lazarus Risen:

Little Meditations

First Meditation

Our primary consideration might be as simple as this: Perhaps he had never really been dead at all! Perhaps behind the mossy stone, within the rough-hewn tomb, a thin current of life trickled secretly deep inside his swollen, ulcerous flesh; or, to explain it otherwise, even if the fire had burnt itself out, it is possible the coals of his heart glowed so faintly one whisper from The Doctor might have blown them out—although, with enough care, enough precision, the last ember might, just might be coaxed into a flame.

This we shall never know with any certainty—though of course all outward signs of life must have been checked before he was wound in a shroud soaked in aloe and myrrh: wrists squeezed, shoulders shaken, hollow chest thumped, limbs massaged with oil and wine, and lastly something silver (if there was anything silver about—if not a mirror, at least the thick blade of a dagger) held for long minutes before his gaping, sulfurous mouth. His eyes must have already been blind, crusted over. One imagines then all the sounds he might have heard, if he was still capable of hearing: the harsh shouts for assistance, several women weeping, someone else praying in great gulping shrieks, even a child's rasping queries soon stifled in the next room. So one wants to ask: if he was not really dead, of what was he aware? And how could he and how did he decipher and order whichever sensations made their way to him, through fog and fever, the muffled distances and clotting dusk? Could he, later, when they heaved back the stone, have been able to put into clumsy words what he felt when searing thunder shook the horizon at the foot of his sickbed, when ice gripped his brain and raced down his bone-thin arms and legs to the antipodes of his body's frail compass?

No, it is easier to imagine him really and completely dead, and all he had known lost to him, seemingly forever.

Second Meditation

My brother's heart stopped somewhere between the elevator and the taxi waiting below. It could be that the swooping descent from the thirtieth floor had felt to him like being inside a cage with its top suddenly removed, setting free that which shot upward—or more likely that the jostling and dragging down the front steps and over the snow-banks, and in through the taxi door, jarred free his last hold onto life. Within the taxi, all down Boylston on the way to Beth Israel, Simon cradled my brother's broken body like one might a fallen fledgling, held tight as he dared if he were not to snap any of his beloved's already very porous and brittle bones. Even if he lived, Simon knew, there would be many ugly new bruises both inside and out; but Simon soon realized there was no longer any breath or heartbeat, only a terrifying limpness, a quickening chill. On a freezing day there was no heat in the taxi, or so it seemed at the time, he told me later. Outside the taxi the falling snow already lay thick on the ground, so there was a strange silence to the Boston traffic, and a deeper silence than he'd ever known in the back of that taxi, a taxi creeping as far as he could tell only further into a tunnel of snow so clean, so pure, and yet shutting out all light.

At Beth Israel Hospital, Simon was forced to wait outside the emergency room, where there lay scattered on the vinyl couch—like symbols abandoned to the elements, he told me later, all meaning worn out of them—only an illustrated children's Bible, a pamphlet on the dangers of STDs, and a year-old _Time_ magazine. He chose the book, opened it at random to the middle of someone else's apocalyptic nightmare, but found naturally enough he couldn't read, and then he nodded off, and then somewhere in the snow-blinded limbo of a dream it was my brother's voice calling out for him... Though by then he had been accepted into the emergency room, after all, and there were my brother's blind blue eyes staring, rheumy, stupidly, and his dry mouth open, dry tongue trying to form words, a phrase, nearly inaudible above the breathing of the oxygen machine: _Did you eat?_ was all he could make out.

Third Meditation

Another proposal for contemplation: that the one called "the leper" had faked the entire thing. This is perhaps both easier to accept and harder (when considering motive) to understand. Profound boredom or utter despair, they could be the same, especially to a sick man, a man deep in sorrow. Suicide is difficult and painful, but to fall into death as if into a good soft bed, so tempting, and he might have been in many ways a very disillusioned, very embittered man, as well. _Leave me alone, I'm dead, go away, let what's left of me rot. Summon leaves to fall and cover me, let the frost hold me fast and the sun scorch my bones, just take care to step gently over my grave, please..._ Still, how could he hope to fool them so long? Still, by asking so persistently to be forgotten, wasn't he guaranteeing that they would remember?

It is unclear how long his family and friends would have believed him or humored him or left him that way before they heard him, one day, some moment, unquestionably, indubitably laugh in a dream or turn over in his sleep, stirring a few leaves. At what point then would they have called in The Doctor?

But The Doctor, too, might have been in on it all. As with any itinerant faith-healer with a steady trade in crooks and canes, such "arrangements" only help prove the parable. We could pause if we like to consider their cunning plot, the props assembled, the timing rehearsed down to the precise second: How long can you hold your breath? Slow your pulse to a standstill? Though it is shameful to say this, as uncharitable as it might seem, we must inevitably take into consideration the possibility that a few coins might have crossed palms.

In the end, everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, would have had to agree it was a good show. A few converts made, possibly, others at least impressed by the showmanship... Then somewhere outside the gates of town, at sundown when dust and flies sting your eyes and nothing is as it seems, both men wrap their burnooses tighter and exchange one last slightly guilty farewell. Impossible, of course, in that light, to distinguish a smile or frown...

Fourth Meditation

Simon had been reading us Mary Shelley earlier in the afternoon, here on Cape Ann. _You know how Frankenstein's monster must have felt_ , my brother says, sitting up in his cot across the screened porch from me and throwing down both his thick trifocals and the mildewed paperback. In their place, he takes up an ugly little Wedgwood cup which he'd found that day in a shop on The Neck (he's burning up his savings on antique ceramics), stares into the Poland Spring as if it were from Lourdes, and prepares to speak: _The monster raged at the doctor for patching him piecemeal from the dead and murdered, you see, so that now he bore the burdens of not just one lifetime, but several. Something so hideous from so many beautiful parts, and all those migraines! At least that's the way I see it._ He gulps down a tiny saffron-yellow pill. _He never asked to be reborn, and Herr Doktor Frankenstein's greatest sin was not in creating life, but re-creating it._

My brother is a lawyer, or was a lawyer, and he loves to argue to an audience, even of one. He continues to do so, between breaths and sips, as he sorts his pills, which are white as well as yellow, and blood-red, too, and powder-blue and purple and off-white and sea-green and black—and they are worth their weight in platinum and he is sick of taking them every eight hours, every four hours, every two hours. He has always been thin, but now he is so thin that in this diffused light he looks almost translucent. His eyesight is deteriorating faster than the new prescriptions can keep up with it. We do not know if he will walk again without assistance. Certainly he will never swim or run. Often he can barely even sit in a chair without sliding slowly down it to the floor, like a marionette whose strings are snipped one by one. Not one of his siblings will speak of death or disease, but he speaks of nothing but, it seems. _Oh, see that my grave is swept clean_ , I have even heard him sing to Simon in a mock-spiritual voice. It is late summer, almost as cool as autumn, and Simon has rented this cabin for us near Folly Cove; we have just returned from fried clams and then a swim in a quarry in the woods, where my brother watched us with royal disinterest from the granite cliff side. This is not to say he is not cheerful; he is exasperatingly so, and that provokes and disturbs us all the more, especially when he speaks "of graves, of worms, and epitaphs." (Lots of Shakespeare on Tape from the village library. _For your majesty's edification_ , Simon told us.)

There was no tunnel, no light, _none of your goddamn baby angels strumming little harps, no radiant face of God_ , my brother has already told me. But he won't doesn't say what there was, if anything. From this porch I can see slivers of ocean between the already thinning leaves, the surf is just a murmur, the air amber-gold. It is one of those hours you think might last forever, all is so still and perfect, and yet which you lose so quickly when trees swallow the sun and blue shadows dissolve all this gold. _Who even asks to be born, yet alone reborn?_ my brother says of the Monster, of himself, cheerfully, and I know some stubborn part of him is back there still, on the cold seat of a taxi, in a swirling blizzard.

Simon and I work hard to match the speed and spirit of his wit, and we both know how he loves being indulged with everything from eiderdown comforters to Messaien CDs while pretending to be annoyed by it all. But sometimes "his majesty," as Simon now likes to call him, goes too far. _Oh, I'm still dying, you know_ , my brother said to us yesterday morning over Simon's special crabmeat omelets served on cracked delftware. We'd been talking about recipes and opera and books, anything but death. Suddenly we were quiet. _I'm still dying, just more slowly..._

Fifth Meditation

The one we call The Lazar wants to find the man who cured his disease and raised him from the grave, it is said. The man is gone, down that road, someone mumbles and points to nowhere in particular. The Lazar looks exactly like someone just raised from the dead: his eyes filmed over like a cat's; his hair and beard in filthy tangles; his bandages blood-smeared and tattered; his bare legs scabrous and muddy. Besides, he smells like a dung heap. No one he has met in this province where he was once a respected citizen wants to have anything to do with him anymore; he is constantly wandering; at night he must sleep outside town walls, and he must fight with the dogs for scraps of food; everyone, even the other lepers, shun him. When it rains, he just wallows in a ditch and laughs, and when it is hot, he lies naked on an anthill, staring glassy-eyed into the sun.

Now, some say he wants to find the man who raised him to thank him, for giving him the kiss of life, for restoring his health and filling his lungs with the breath of all that is holy. He is so happy now to be alive, to have entered the Kingdom of God while still on this earth, that even at its most abject life is nothing but everlasting joy; to watch the weary sun rise for the thousandth time, to see a fly feasting on pig-slop, to feel both smooth pebbles and sharp flint under bare feet, is almost too much to hold within oneself without bursting, without burning up with this newfound love for all things, all people, all the miracles of the ordinary world.

That is one school of thought, perhaps the most popular. Another has it that The Lazar seeks out the man we call The Doctor not to thank him, but to curse him. For, it is said, once someone has had a glimpse of paradise, a paradise such as only a few of the holiest men have dared describing, to return to this earth is indescribably painful—all things look pallid and parched and putrid, all flesh abhorrent, all sound, sensation, and nourishment completely unsatisfying when compared to the marvels of the afterlife. Imagine the once-richest of men forced to prostrate himself in the mud outside his very own gardens, utterly alone, weeping endlessly, brought lower than low—when once he had only to dip in his well for a cupful of diamonds, when once he ate off plate of vermeil and drank from the ivory horn, commanded an army of slaves, and had wives and children as numerous as the pearls in a strand as long as the Nile. Wouldn't you, too, be angry at being banished from such a paradise, when you had done absolutely nothing wrong, and moreover, never asked to leave? So, some do say, The Lazar wants to seek out and find that unwise doctor, to smite him full in the face, to spit at his feet and curse him with all the myriad known curses of his tribe and his country.

This may well be, you might overhear our people saying at the well or in the taverns; it sounds reasonable, and certainly explains his aberrant behavior. But there is one more possibility, which only a very few dare to think, yet alone speak: that The Lazar seeks out his resurrection man for another purpose—not to thank him or curse him, but to strike him down, even to kill him. This is why The Lazar must keep wandering, so consumed is he with hate, why he will never give up until he accomplishes his mission or death once again overtakes him, this time for good. Because there is no reason to believe that The Lazar necessarily saw a glimpse of paradise when he died—after all, if he did, then he can probably be assured that he will someday return to that blessed state, so it is always something to look forward to, something God himself has promised very few men. But who is to say The Lazar saw paradise through a peephole? There is another land after death, some of our wise men claim, a place of eternal woe and misery, of smoke and cinders and sunless sky, where the wailing of lost souls deafens the ears and though you are thirstier than you have ever been, there is no dew upon the blackened leaf; though you are hungrier than you have ever known, all larders are bare, all tables empty. A place so terrible we have no name for it, a place no one would want to witness even for a second, for it would drive you mad, knowing such a place does indeed exist, and to there you must someday return. And so some of those of us who have thought this through blame not The Lazar; we have some inkling of why he might want to destroy whoever subjected him to such misery, he who defied God by playing God. Yes, indeed, a drunkard once said, and what's more, they were never really strangers to one another; they were of the same father, they grew up under the same roof. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, we avoid The Lazar, as he wanders the countryside and the alleys and the marketplaces, begging from no one but so intent upon his quest we are afraid to look at him, for fear of seeing ourselves in the violence of his eyes.

Sixth Meditation

My brother had always been such a prankster, at home and at school, that there are times when I wouldn't be surprised at all, were he to throw down his glasses and crutches and proclaim that he'd only been testing us—our faith, our love, maybe just our gullibility. Once when were nine and ten, he'd rubbed ketchup into his T-shirt and placed himself strategically below the hayloft, so he'd be seen when our mother looked up from her gluing and decoupage. One of my sisters and I hid within a horse-stall, peering through a spider web and breathing in manure and sawdust. Things went as expected, but our giggling gave us both away before she'd gotten within twenty feet. _Oh dear, oh dear_ , she said, with mock solemnity. My brother was the only one who had not broken character. He lay bloody in the stable-yard, neck twisted and arms outstretched. _Guess I'll have to get a shovel and start digging, and won't that make me all dainty just in time for choir practice?_

I remind my brother of that incident as we drive around the rocky periphery of the Cape, listening to Richard the Second's oratory of crowns and mirrors and imagining what it might be like to live in this or that cottage and have this or that humble new job, pretending there are a hundred or more possible lives out there ready for us, were we to welcome any one in particular. He is resting on the safe, soft backseat of the rented Volvo, where he can stretch out his childlike legs, and I catch glimpses of his dark glasses bobbing and mustache smirking in the rearview mirror. His skin is as yellow and creased as the leaves in an old paperback, and his jawbone trembles when he talks, though he says he is not cold, not now. _But that wasn't me with the ketchup, he says, that was you, and our very proper and very nervous mother was more interested in church socials than choir practice, and she never did decoupage in her life, and accidents of any sort were always funny to her, and she would sooner laugh than express grief in public at a funeral, or..._ and I have to agree, at least for the moment, that he could be right.

Simon is in the passenger's seat. _Sounds apocryphal, anyway_ , he says in his most scholarly voice, and I have to laugh. He is wearing a very silly Hawaiian shirt and horn-rims held together at the bridge with a Band-Aid and looks anything but the distinguished doctor of philosophy he really is. _Did you know the word grief comes from an old Norse word for weight?_ he suddenly says, snapping off the tape, which had been blithering on unnoticed about war and murder all this time. Neither of us has a comeback prepared.

Back at the cabin, under the light of one yellow bulb now that it is _l'heure bleue_ (as my piss-elegant brother lovingly calls it, as if such moments were collectible like china), we toast each other with gin-and-tonics (though my brother is expressly forbidden any alcohol) and listen to the night herons and crickets. Simon has a new joke for us all: I cannot repeat it, or any of his jokes, for so many of them rely on Simon's ability to mimic the lumbering cadences of an asthmatic Cantabrigian don or a fire-breathing backwoods evangelist or a typical Long Island I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale _mensch_. (Simon has never been much out of Boston, but I suppose he's as close as the movies get.) Most of his jokes are about religion, dealing especially with what happens when Jews and Episcopalians and Pentacostalists meet on injured aircraft or in runaway trains or lifeboats, and quite often involve fat little lusty vicars, dour rabbis who remind him far too much of his father, and the occasional devil in his Sunday best. I like to see my brother laugh his braying laugh, though too often it ends up in a choking fit, which he himself finds even funnier—and so each joke is guaranteed of at least a solid minute of this sort of macabre appreciation. _Oh, you'd go over big in the Catskills_ , he says, choking and laughing at the end of a long joke, and Simon leans over him and kisses him so passionately on his forehead I must look away.

Seventh Meditation

When his mother and brothers came for The Doctor, or Teacher, or whatever he was known as, they were incensed, outraged, horrified; people ought to know he was insane, he was unschooled, he was a criminal, he was disrupting the natural order of things. You might have thought he had been raising the dead by the thousands, that soon the world would be turned upside-down, no one knowing when they met a stranger on the road if that stranger was really alive or not, no one knowing how to or whether to welcome back those they had buried after so much ceremonial grief. Didn't a family's tears count more than a soul's fear of the afterlife? Who did he think he was, this "doctor" whose work was so erratic, who taught in riddles and didn't realize that death is sometimes the best cure? His mother and brothers beat on the door of the inn, but he would not come out or even acknowledge their presence; _You are my true family_ , he said to the followers around him, who were frightened by all the racket and feared they might be thrown out by the innkeeper or even arrested. At last someone went to the window and convinced his family that he had already gone away. And he'll never come swindling in this town again! one of the brothers said, shaking his fist as he walked away.

Eighth Meditation

The Doctor had traveled far to the East, they said, to a land where God has a thousand unpronounceable names and the humble beasts of burden wear garlands of roses and holy men are always fasting and burying themselves alive. Here he studied and here he observed. It was said that some of these holy men could inhabit their graves for weeks, months, even years at a time, as if they were all trying to outdo each another—until one day, without warning, when the sleep had lasted long enough to call it death, they would emerge whole and healthy and proclaim that they had at last seen the face of God. Then they would tear off their winding sheets and plunge naked, insane with a kind of spiritual lust, into the widest and swiftest and holiest of rivers. Time passed more slowly there. The Doctor sat every day in a temple by the banks of this river, watching how the water turned black and then silver and then black again in shade and sun, listening to distant flutes calling to one another like owls in the night, breathing in the spices and balms and perfumes the women rubbed into their mysteriously luminescent skin.

And it was on one such day, along the banks of this sacred river, that The Doctor saw the stranger approaching through the red dust raised by a passing ox-cart. The sun glared off the cart-driver's amulets, and he was momentarily blinded, yet he heard very clearly what it was the stranger said, running across the dusty road, right arm lifted as if in salutation and left hand shielding his eyes as if he dared not witness who was at last before him: doctor, teacher, magician, messiah, misfit, madman, doctor, teacher, savior, brother...

Ninth Meditation

On sunny afternoons, below the overgrown rose garden, within the cool of the silver beeches, Simon has been reading to us from books my brother says he always meant to read, but never had time for before. His medicines have made my brother ever-more sensitive to light, so it is good to relax here in the shade. We've pulled up two irritable wicker chairs and an equally creaky wicker chaise, filled a majolica jug with a high-protein elixir (tastes like hemlock, Simon attests), and assembled as if at a symposium in an olive grove. Lately Simon, half-glasses screwed down on his pug-dog nose, has been reading from _Madame Bovary_ , and I have been dreading how the pages in the oversized large-print edition have built up on the left-hand side, because I know down at the sordid bottom of that book lies Emma's nauseating deathbed scene.

I'd much rather be hearing my favorite tale from Flaubert, the one about Saint Julian the Hospitator—though once I start thinking of it, remembering it, I realize it is even more disturbing—and I am glad I was unable to find it at the library or used bookstore.

At the end of Julian's prodigal life, when he has finally learned what humility and guilt and grief and all those delightful Christian qualities are really about, he is visited by a truly repulsive beggar, a leper, who asks for shelter in Julian's riverside hut. The beggar is so very, very cold, he smells foul, he is horribly malnourished, he is probably dying—and it is all Julian can do to ease his discomfort. _Take off your clothes_ , the beggar says to Julian at last, _and lie on me to warm me_. This Julian does without even a paragraph's indecision, even though the leper's skin is loathsome and his hundred sores weep freely as a hundred eyes. And so the beggar goes further: _Place your lips to my lips. Hold me closer. Give me all your body's fire._ They embrace, they kiss, and something miraculous happens which cannot be paraphrased or summarized... and that is the wonder of Flaubert's tale and why Julian becomes a saint in stained-glass.

Meanwhile, here on the Cape, it is still ripe summer: raspberries I'd left off picking earlier are spilled across the grass like a lost rosary, ragged clematis and trailing ivy drape the stone fence, sailboats and seagulls flock together in the harbor below us, a tugboat sounds a courteous tucket, and we are all of us very much alive. Emma Bovary has taken to her bed, and the good doctor is only now realizing all those years he has lost because of her, for her, to her. My brother, benevolent Simon, myself, unhappy Emma, her husband, and even Saint Julian and King Richard somewhere are all of us alive, together, on this good green earth. For an afternoon, a moment, an eternity, if all are the same to an indifferent universe.

An Afterword

Guy on the cross to the right turns to the guy on the cross in the middle and says, _Hey, pardner, ain't we met somewheres before?_ This is how some long joke must start or end, I'm sure, but nevertheless, it is the actual situation at hand. Unfortunately, the one in the middle doesn't remember, or else just doesn't want to carry on a neighborly conversation at this time.

The one on the left just looks on, apparently not knowing whether or not to act too interested. _Yep, I betcha_ , says the man on the right— _you're the feller what done raised me up from the dead!_ (I'm not sure where the accent comes from, but nevertheless, it's part of the story.) _Well, howd'ya like that?!_ he goes on, even if the one in the middle continues to look away, across the sunlit rooftops of the city below, so lovely. _Wasn't for your meddlin' 'round, I wouldn't be here, y'know_ , and you can just imagine the sweat, the lacerations, the filth, the flies, the soldiers eating their lunch in the shade of the tallest crosses, even a weeping whore or two—whatever else with which you might want to decorate the scene. _Heck, I ain't surprised one iota to see you here. I done been a good man afore you raised me up again and left me stark alone, and there my kin all around asking me this and that and treating me like I'd gone all funny in the noggin._ This one just won't shut up, and so the one in the middle sighs, whispers something, and drops chin to spindly chest. _Don'tcher remember? Gone to blazes, leaving me high and dry, you did, and me all newly born like and with a mean rumblin' in my guts. So's I leave home, got to steal every crusta bread I eat, and never larnin' nothin useful but how to kick in a door or kick in a haid. So I'm doin' this and doin' that, just achin' to fill my belly, though I'd been better off kept dead, dad blame it! Then 'long comes these bastards up and arrest me, so here I am again, but you gotta say I make one dandy sidekick..._ The merest breeze fondles his spittled beard, a fly lights on his nose, and he realizes just how quiet the place is, quiet as a marketplace after the last stall has closed, quiet as a house just after it's been robbed. _Leave well enough alone, my ol' ma used to always... Hey, you all right? Cat got your tongue? Ah, chin up, feller, can't be all that bad... Still, 'spose I can't blame you, how's even a preacher-man gonna know when things get right out of hand, eh?_

Game Over

There Siddhârtha stood gazing at his beautiful loved ones, and his heart grieved. The pain of parting overcame him powerfully. Although his mind was determined that nothing, be it good or evil, could shake his resolution, the tears came freely from his eyes...

Look about you and contemplate life! Everything is transient and nothing endures.

—from _The Gospel of Buddha_

"Three to four weeks, a month at best."

Too late for chemo, and surgery would, at this stage, be too invasive. "We'd like to say eight weeks, but that would be lying to you." Such a proposal was so ridiculous he almost laughed out loud. Later, crossing back over the Charles River to Cambridge, he did just that, though at the time he had listened solemnly to the doctors, the way one is supposed to, and looked at their tedious readouts and cloudy X-ray sheets and nodded and thanked them. Thanked them for what?

He told no one. Once he and his sister had been close, but that was quite a while ago, before their falling-out over Kai or young men like Kai, and she was back in Nebraska now with her own family and cares. The parents had been gone for more than a decade; something similar had taken them just as quickly, if not so early in life, so what the doctors said wasn't quite the surprise it might have been. The same with two of his grandparents—obviously, it ran in their family. In a way he almost felt relieved, having this chronic pain in his stomach explained, and his medicine cabinet was well-stocked now with palliatives and painkillers to make the next three or four weeks, a month at best, tolerable, even pleasant in a perverse kind of way. When he needed them, the hospice workers would assume control; he'd been promised a morphine drip and round-the-clock attendance. All the wonders of a good health plan. He knew it needn't be like dying at all, but more like being laid in your cradle and rocked gently to sleep. That was the way it had been for his parents, and later he and his sister had honestly felt that they'd done a good deed—like helping a dog or cat which had been struck by a car out of its misery.

As with the doctors, he'd listened patiently to the nurses' aides and terminal care volunteers at the hospital and the clinic. They were kind, they meant well; their cool fingers clutched his fingertips whenever they met. But, all the same, whenever they talked about him— about his body—it was as if they were talking about someone or something else, just out of earshot. Maybe that was why they tended to talk so low, almost whispering at times. So as not to rouse or worry the other—the real cause for all their concern. He took their brochures and books by nurse-practitioners, promised to see clergy if he needed to (he never felt more like an atheist!), left them the way a concerned parent might leave a teacher after discussing a particularly problematic yet promising student. How could he ever let them know how much he wanted to laugh about it all?

This detachment he felt from others, even from his own body, was nothing new; it only seemed to have accelerated since Tsu-Chi had gone back to Guangzhou to teach. That had been late last summer, over three months ago, and their email had already dwindled to cursory updates, sometimes just jokes or Flash animations forwarded from others, once or twice a week. Habitually signing off with "Love" seemed superfluous. Of course, teachers were worked very hard in China, but that wasn't the entire excuse. By July they'd already been going for as much as three or four days without really talking—Tsu-Chi so busy with wrapping up his studies, himself with overtime, as usual, at _Bits and Bytes_. When they lay in bed beside the other, it was as if they'd already parted company. That, he hadn't been surprised by; it had happened often enough with other lovers in the past—but there had been a new kind of poignancy in the stale summer air with the days so rapidly shortening and half of Tsu-Chi's baggage already packed, sitting there in the hall like visitors who'd overstayed their welcome.

Regardless, Tsu-Chi was the one person he could imagine telling now. Distance, both geographic and emotional, would make it easier. Everyone at the magazine thought he was taking a month off because he hadn't taken a vacation in almost three years, and if he didn't take it soon, he might lose all the weeks the magazine owed him, with new management taking over. A few times he'd even dropped hints to Tsu-Chi; he told him that he was "dying to leave" this place, that the pain in his stomach was promised to be gone soon for good. After all, it was Tsu-Chi who had forced him to schedule a doctor's appointment for the first time in five years. In a way, he could even blame Tsu-Chi for any anxiety he was feeling now. Had he not received a diagnosis, he could have just dropped dead some day soon without having wasted any time worrying.

A year previous, when he and Tsu-Chi had both still been like just-unwrapped presents to one another, eager to discover still more surprises, they had flown to Las Vegas together over a long weekend—not to gamble, but to experience what Tsu-Chi thought quintessentially "American." Although Tsu-Chi was only seven years his junior, he looked a great deal younger. Wherever they went, he had the somewhat embarrassing feeling that people were going to mistake them for father and adopted son, as had once happened at a motel. And Tsu-Chi was very boyish with glee, indeed, as they wandered from recreated Venice to Manhattan to Egypt and so on, while he mocked the tourists and the faux antiquities Tsu-Chi loved. "Now I have seen the world," Tsu-Chi said, "I can return to China happy." It was hard to tell whether TsuChi was trying to be funny or not, and they had fought about it soon after at a hotel buffet. It was only later that he realized he had really been angry because Tsu-Chi had already spoken so casually of returning to his homeland.

Gold-flecked mirrors like murals lined the walls of that huge hotel restaurant, and he remembered watching their reflections all around them as they stood at the buffet line. "Maybe imitations can be better than the real thing," Tsu-Chi was saying. "You find everything else amusing, why not this?" He did look like he could be Tsu-Chi's father, with his prematurely graying beard and the slight stoop he'd acquired from logging too many hours in front of the computer. In fact, he could barely recognize himself at all—who inhabits that body? he remembered wondering. Who is speaking these words? Who is thinking these thoughts? "It's nothing but virtual reality," he had said, and the figure in the mirror was monkey-see monkey-do. When he was a boy, he remembered standing before his dresser mirror and willing his face to age, watching it progress through the decades, going sallow and silver-haired, lines emerging and eyes sinking into pouches, as he—his true self—waited behind.

A year after Las Vegas, at his medicine cabinet's mirror, he thought: Now I'll never see this face age any further. That was not I who Tsu-Chi once loved enough to hate at moments like that; that was someone I've already left behind. But Tsu-Chi was right: he should have just shrugged and laughed at the time and bought another plastic souvenir.

The office going-away party was an insubstantial little affair. It wasn't like a birthday or as if he were leaving them for good (how little they knew!), so there had just been sheet cake in the lunchroom and a few pats on the back, not even the usual funny card which would be passed around, signed by all concerned, and left on the recipient's desk. "Bet you're really using this time to send out resumes," he heard at the coffee machine, or "We'll all be out of here soon enough." Somehow, everyone at the magazine could tell he wanted to leave with a minimum amount of fuss, and so that last day at work was much like any other: nine hours hunched before his graphics terminal, with a just a few breaks for coffee or to grab something to eat from the deli downstairs. He was illustrating an article about the latest high-speed CPUs, the usual sort of thing, and in his usual fussy way was searching for perfection even after the art director had told him it looked fine as it was. The picture, which he'd built up painstakingly layer by layer in Photoshop, showed several vaguely humanoid microprocessors running an Olympian race, passing a torch onto the newest and fastest. Perfectly banal, something which he would have been ashamed of had his art teachers ever seen it, and yet he was reasonably proud of how accurately he had captured the way wind would blast against flames and togas, and the way the firelight glanced off the silicon with its copper tracery. Ridiculous, too. As ridiculous, he might be tempted to say when he was this exhausted, as his life was turning out to have been.

It wasn't that he really minded such tasks; he had never thought he'd be another Picasso, and he liked not having to come up with a subject or style himself, which is always half the artist's work. At Emerson, he'd never been one of those punkier kids who would disdain the title "commercial artist." He liked posters and book covers and advertisements, when they were well-designed. In fact, he could admit now that he might even like them as much as Picasso. That used to bother him, but now he liked the way he could dissociate himself from all those old, crude, messy tools of an artist and live—for a few hours a day, at least, not just in front of his computer, but inside it. At times he almost felt a warm, friendly feeling—like saying hello to an old friend—whenever he booted up in the morning and sat down to collaborate with this other, not-so-foreign intelligence. He couldn't say he always felt the same cozy tolerance for people, which might explain why he had so few friends. Yet, he didn't feel too lonely, and suspected most of the people he worked with felt much the same way. That was curious, maybe ridiculous, but it wasn't sad.

Leia, an old Emerson classmate and his closest colleague at the magazine, had been more than happy to give him the keys to her family's winterized cabin in the White Mountains. He'd stayed with her there a couple of times in the past, and he knew it was exactly what he needed now: the last and highest cabin of a series of them on a trail near the Presidential Range, where the mountains seemed almost as high as the Rockies and snowdrifts sometimes lingered on through July. The cabin was regularly used by the skiers and hunters in Leia's family, so there would be heat and electricity and running water, even a TV and stereo if he cared to use them. "We're working on going wireless, too," she told him on that last day of work. "That's ok," he said, "I'd as soon get away from wifi and the internet and all that. I'll just be bringing my laptop to play a few old games if I'm bored." "Primitive!" she answered with a laugh.

He could have told her everything there and then, let her cry and all that, but something still held him back, and besides, the managing editor came along just then to ask her if she'd had a chance to finish proofing an article on handhelds. "Keep the taps at a drip, and call me if you have any problems," she said as soon as the editor left, "or don't tell me you're not going to want to take your cellphone, either."

"Only for your peace of mind."

It had been an especially wintry November, and snowbanks were already three feet high along the highways, higher still in the mountains. Even though he was planning to be at the cabin for at least two weeks, or as long as he could hold off before calling the hospice, he had brought a minimum amount of supplies and entertainments. Skiers had come and gone over Thanksgiving weekend and after, so the gravel road to the row of shingled cabins had been plowed and a broad icy trail wound in and out of the woods to each cabin in turn. By the time he'd hauled groceries and backpacks up to Leia's family's cabin, he was so sweaty he didn't feel like building a fire in the woodstove or even turning up the baseboard heaters. Instead he stripped off most of his clothes just to feel the cold air on his skin, as he looked out through the main room's large mullioned windows down to the snow-covered valley below and up and across to the jagged black and white vertebrae of mountains in the near distance.

Standing there like that, he was amazed to discover how strong his body still felt, how powerful his limbs and flexible his muscles. This, when he rarely did much more than swim at the Cambridge Y. It was impossible to believe that there was a time-bomb ticking away inside him, set to go off in just a few weeks' time. Certainly, he'd been especially tired lately, and though the drugs helped, that spot in his stomach always felt tender—at this moment, however, he felt astonishingly healthy. The hospital volunteers had told him it would be like that: "Some days you'll feel like Superman." But even Superman was powerless before Kryptonite, they would have wanted to add, had he given them a chance.

He went to take a shower in the cabin's tiny bathroom with its little space heater, though the water was cold, and by the time he had dressed again, a fire sounded good. The sky outside the windows was already darkening, though it was only mid-afternoon. The setting sun reflected off the irregular peaks across the way, a sight so pretty it was practically a cliché, he decided: the insufferable prettiness of a first-year art student's initial undertaking in oils.

Tsu-Chi had given him, as a going-away present, an authentic Chinese pen-and-ink set:

ivory-handled and bamboo-handled brushes and a carbon ink block within a lacquered box; several jade calligraphy seals representing "joy," "rock," "cloud," "tree," and "remembrance;" a stone to grind the ink against; a porcelain water-cup and porcelain tray for mixing the ink; and a ream of high-grade rice paper. It was the type of thing sold everywhere in Chinatown, and uncharacteristic of Tsu-Chi, who loved anything dumb as Disney or hokey as Hollywood but had never even wanted to see the China trade collections at the MFA or the Peabody-Essex. Still, it was something new to try, and he hadn't really used pen and ink since Basic Drawing I. The evening of his first night in the cabin he lined up the numerous implements on the rag rug in front of the woodstove: they really were quite nice, after all; Tsu-Chi had obviously not settled for one of the cheaper sets. The polished ivory and jade with gold-painted trimming gleamed pleasingly in the firelight.

Cautiously, he unrolled a sheet of the rice paper, which felt almost as liquid as raw silk under his fingers. Once he had loved paper and the stores which stocked all the rare and exotic kinds: thick sheets with real butterfly wings or petals in them or sheets flecked with gold leaf or strands of metallic fiber, and innumerable others—marbleized or textured like morocco leather or made to look like stone or fabric or pressed flowers. In his college days, he would make envelopes out of such papers or use scraps to make collages and mobiles. One of his first boyfriends, a Japanese exchange student named Kai, had taught him how to make origami cranes and pandas and poppies. With the maturing of computer graphics and the loss of his free time to the magazine, all that had changed. When was the last time he had even drawn something freehand, on real paper?

There was an instruction booklet with the artist's kit, but it was half in Chinese and half in confused English—in this light too difficult to read, anyway, so he plunged in, grinding ink into the little porcelain tray with the stone, adding a dollop of water from the little porcelain cup, and dipping the largest of horse-hair brushes into the mixture. His hand traced loops and swirls above the paper, but he was afraid to touch its virginal surface. What was he trying to draw, anyway—that backbone of stone across the valley, fading into the indigo-stained night falling down from the heavens? Trying to look out the windows and down at the paper at the same time, he made a few tentative strokes, but they smeared and ran in very inartistic ways, and he decided that he'd lost all his talent in this digital age. He looked down at the soiled, defaced rice-paper, sighed, and crumpled the sheet in his hands before throwing it into the stove.

When he was a boy, when you still had to use up your Tooth Fairy quarters at an arcade to play most video games, he'd spent a lot of time guiding little pixilated creatures through primeval eight-bit landscapes while tinny synthesized music and sound effects accompanied the creatures' propagation, their adventures, and their inevitable demise. His favorite game involved an "avatar" in the form of a blocky figure in a judo costume (you could choose its color, sex, and hairstyle) who had to pass through several levels or "lives" of game-play, complete with all manner of dangers in the form of monsters and henchmen, and many "treasures" which you had to collect, before supposedly reaching the hidden chamber of warrior-heroes at the very end, where—it was said—one achieved perhaps not enlightenment, but at least unending free plays. No one he knew had ever reached this ultimate goal, and later, when he had the game on his first Atari, he always got very close to accumulating the requisite number of points represented by one's hoard of icons, but never close enough before his avatar was beaten to death with a studded club or beheaded with a scimitar. (Always accompanied by the sickening sound a robot might make going down a drain.) Eventually, as with most computer games, he had given up and gone on to other challenges. Downtimes at work, he'd tried playing Internet games with competitors across the globe, like everyone else in the office, but found all that simulated camaraderie almost too intimate, and like any good pacifist hated bearing even virtual arms. Self-defense was different. Recently his favorite old game had been ported to Apple and in a moment of childhood nostalgia not long after Tsu-Chi had left, he had downloaded it onto his laptop, eager to play again.

Months later, he had still not tried it out, but tonight, his first in the cabin, he would.

There were two small bedrooms with bunks in the cabin, but he knew he'd be more comfortable on the futon Leia kept here than on those stiff mattresses, so he dragged it out to the main room and unrolled it not far from the woodstove, where he could feel the heat better and watch the flames behind the smoky glass window. He was feeling a little drowsy already as he booted up the white iBook and cradled it his lap.

"Greetings, my friend," the tiny martial artist announced over the laptop's speakers. "Would you honor me by playing?" The figure executed a swift bow, and he was relieved to see that there had not been much attempt to update the game; even though the graphics were sharper and perhaps more colorful than he remembered, the creators had retained much of the jerky movement and ticky-tocky music of this ancient computer game. Suddenly, it was as if he had stepped back twenty-five years into the past, and for the first time in many months he felt genuinely happy, happy as a ten-year-old boy with a sock full of quarters in a cacophonous video arcade.

The first thing he was requested to do was type in his name.

In the mornings, he would go for short forays into the woods. Just a few hundred yards from the porch of the cabin there was a rocky outcropping where one could gaze far out over the mountains and valleys and foothills, where one could almost make out the Prudential and Hancock towers of the Boston skyline far, far in the distance, and much nearer, count the peaks from Mount Washington on down. His first morning, after a long night on his laptop and little sleep, he was amazed to see how brilliantly detailed the world appeared, how it consisted of uncountable pixels in a limitless expanse, how expertly rendered were the intricacies of every pine-needle and vein of quartz, and how the motions of clouds and branches were so cleverly executed that there was no noticeable aliasing even when the wind picked up. Every bitmap was of photographic resolution, with no loss through compression, every ray-traced object modeled with scientific care, every frame interpolated with finesse; and the enhanced surround sound accurately captured the whistling of the wind through the pines as well as the occasional cry of a crow or yelp of a distant coyote. Reflection! Refraction! Absorption! The illusion of light on the surfaces of the world was overwhelming! How many layers in Photoshop, how much Java code or Shockwave trickery would such a creation take, how many terabytes of memory would be necessary to emulate this on the mother of all network servers? With his head full of such thoughts gone haywire, he cast a pebble down the cliff-edge and whistled what he could remember of some pastoral allegro—or maybe it was closer to the Pacman theme. Life was ludicrous, wasn't it?

A few similar mornings later. Farther up the slope, in a clearing in the woods, he lay on his back in the snow, watching the swift motion of cirrostratus clouds across the sky. Such clouds do not look so distinct in shape or outline, but hazy as images on a doctor's radiograph, and the cold felt like a warning. There was a gnawing ache in his side. He tried to imagine what it was like to be dead, forgotten, to lie this way forever. Long enough and still enough for deer or moose to come lick his face, for the snow to cover him, for the night to fall again and again until spring came, the snow melted—and he had simply disappeared. Yes, that was the way to go: to melt away, to dissolve into nothingness. Or like an evaporation into thin air. How comforting, how peaceful, no effort involved. Yes, he could welcome that, he'd go quietly like this.

His cellphone was ringing. Out of habit, he had stuffed it in the inner pocket of his parka. It was Leia, calling from the office in Harvard Square. "Wow, the reception's not so bad," she said. "I guess all those ugly new towers everywhere serve some sort of purpose."

"Please," he said, "I was about to achieve Nirvana."

"It is beautiful up there, isn't it? Are you sure you're all right? Not too lonely? I'd be going crazy. I am going crazy here, with this new regime. Want me to check your email for you? Anything to avoid my own work."

"Let the spam pile up. What would you say if I said I wasn't coming back?"

"I'd say we can't afford to lose another illustrator slash graphic designer slash CAD expert. The kids these days cost too much to take on, they want every perk, that's why they're running us old bogeys into the ground. God, I hate this _infant_ who yanks my chain now.

Mumblety-peg." At least, that was what it sounded like she said.

"I'm losing you, you're starting to cut out. How 'bout we talk another time? I have some clouds to watch."

"Glad you're having a good time while I'm in Hell. Mummichog. Didn't you know I called just to complain?"

It would be easy to slip into boredom, which is why he had brought so many distractions with him, including new _Best of Albinoni_ and _Best of Pachebel_ CDs, a favorite Hesse novel or two, and old manuals of Zen he'd always meant to reread and really understand this time, instead of pretending to: _Zen and the Art of Archery_ , _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ , all the Zen _Greatest Hits_. But the truth was he didn't feel like reading or puzzling over koans; the exertion was too much; it was easier to stare into his laptop and follow his miniscule kickboxer from one plane of existence to another—though after a while, the sampled kotos and gongs proved too much, and he had to lower the audio. That was better, just the incessant wailing of the wind outside and the slow dissolution of the embers within, and the figure dancing across his screen, pursued by histrionic dragons and samurai. Hours passed rapidly as he accumulated his treasures (goblets, scepters, swords, rings, coins—nothing particularly anti-materialistic or spiritual about that!) and neared the sixth and penultimate level. His avatar persevered, heroically, defying death, night after night. "Save game," and he at last could take a nap.

He had enough boxes of brown rice and bags of frozen vegetables to last a long time, but he seldom was hungry. As often as he took the painkillers, he would be reminded of that indefinite pain which now seemed to be traveling inside him, making it sometimes difficult to draw in enough air to breathe, but always subsiding after he lay down for just a few minutes. He would stretch out on the futon beneath the big windows and watch the ever-changing skies and have thoughts that would start to shape themselves almost like incipient haikus. Sometimes his mind was one with all he saw: clouds and sun, other times stars and moon, sometimes the clouds shining like mirrors, or the stars glittering like his grandmother's best jewelry inside a vast black velvet-lined jewelry box. Memories, broken fragments of his childhood, would often rise up from his consciousness like that as he lay there. His first storybook left out in the rain, a dog who'd run away from home and never come back, his father's eyeglasses fractured in an accident, a fallen robin's egg—small images like that rose up from the ocean depths. He'd watch the windows, moving in and out of sleep as if caught in a revolving door, happy to be where he was now, even if it would only be for a short while. And in the dark, his I-Book would purr and its photo screensaver would display random digital photographs from last summer: Tsu-Chi skinny and bare-chested on Crane's Beach, Tsu-Chi serious in his lab coat, Tsu-Chi's reflection in the shark tank at the aquarium, Tsu-Chi grinning with a gooey pizza slice, and even one of himself taken by Tsu-Chi, though he hardly recognized himself without his glasses or beard. (After the summer's heat, he had recultivated the beard.) In that photo, before it dissolved into another of Tsu-Chi at the ferry pier in P-town, he looked young enough to be someone else, a boy lost at the ocean's edge, grimacing and stupid.

After deriving what he could from the scrambled instructions which came with the pen-and-ink set, he set to work another evening on a simple still life: an iron tea-kettle, an oversized apple, and a stack of moldering spy novels from the cabin's bookshelves. He trained a reading lamp onto the scene, unfurled the pristine rice-paper across the bare planks of the floor, and kneeled like a proper Chinese artisan before the paper and the tools. A moment of silence as he closed his eyes and tried to see the objects clearly and solidly in his mind. Deep breath in, deep breath out. This time, he made several bold strokes across the paper, trying to duplicate curves convex and concave of kettle and apple, as well as the jagged edge of paperbacks, but his composition soon became one more of shadows than light; it ended a tangled knot of inky spatters and whorls, more of a bowerbird's messy nest than an uncomplicated domestic arrangement. He should have known better: a true Chinese artist would have painted a nightingale singing by a simple spray of blossoms or perhaps a ragged mountain chasm lost in the clouds, something purely from nature or memory. But not something that meant so little to him.

Exhausted from such concentrated effort gone awry, he once again crumpled up the rice paper and tossed it into the fire. Was he no longer an artist? Could he only create with the help of a computer and the electronic tablet tethered to it? Sometimes he felt he could no longer really see outside the confines of a glowing LCD screen; at the end of a long day at the magazine, when he at last lifted his head and gazed out into the empty office, it would appear curiously flat and colorless compared to the bright and dazzling world he had inhabited for the last eight or nine hours. If someone else happened to be on the premises, too, and spoke to him, it would be like an oracle's from the underworld, speaking a name he had forgotten.

At last he had to go into town for fresh soymilk, if they had it, and other perishables. Although temperatures had descended lower and lower for the past couple of weeks, it had not snowed, so the roads were clear and the steep drive navigable. The small town glistened under its coating of ice and snow, so bright in the noon sun it was hard to look into shop windows or across empty, shining parking lots without blinding oneself. Before loading up supplies, he decided, he would have lunch at one of the town restaurants. He remembered its cheery atmosphere from last summer—the laughing vacationers, the friendly townsfolk, even the plastic flowers on every table. Although he'd been often been called a "loner" since he was a small boy, he suddenly felt like seeing people again, hearing them gossip and flirt, engaging with them in the mundane business of life. He imagined what it would be like to chat with a waitress, to linger over the menu, to watch skiers huddled over their hot cocoa, murmuring with delight. Maybe he would tell the waitress what he had not dared to tell anyone else. "By the way," he might say, "tell the cook to hurry. I'm dying, you know." What would begin with chuckles and awkward pauses would end with the waitress listening to his long, sad story. "You take real good care, hon'," she would say with a catch in her throat after she had brought him the check, while he was counting his change. Their dialogue played itself out like a scripted drama in his head as he drove down the commercial strip, searching left and right, trying to read signs in the glaring light. All three restaurants were closed, even the tavern. There weren't even any other cars on the road, here at midweek just before everyone else would take off for their Christmas break. It might as well have been a ghost town. He turned on the car radio just to end the silence: news of Iraq and Israel, effigies burned in the streets and car-bombs and unemployment rates. Apparently, the world had decided to go on without him.

At the convenience store, he tried to talk to the teenage girl behind the counter, who was counting up his cartons and loaves. She looked too frail, too young to be out of school, but he imagined she might already have a colicky baby her mother was taking care of that afternoon, or even a husband who was driving the town plow out somewhere toward Lincoln Gap. There was a flag pin on her blouse—a leftover from 9/11 or in preparation for upcoming events? She wasn't unlovely. "Yep, it's cold all right," she said, paying more attention to the soap opera on the little black and white television set on a shelf beside her than to him. Before his eyes, she seemed to age—she became puffier and rounder, her hair grew lank and gray, her skin paler and blotched, her eyes lusterless. She became her grandmother. He realized he was watching her as she would be long after he was gone from this place. And she was not really listening to whatever he had to say. Maybe he had said something about the imminent war, maybe just the weather—he could no longer hear even his own voice, which seemed to echo down some long corridor of the past.

"I need another dollar," the teenage girl said in that glum, flat way all teenage girls seemed to talk like these days.

"Sorry, here you go." She was not even looking at him. He was less real to her than the characters in that soap opera. What if he were to touch her hand, just to let her know he was alive? He suddenly felt sadder for her than he could ever feel for himself, and he carried his groceries out to the car and drove home the way one might in a dream, executing all the motions, but looking out from a body that was as insubstantial as smoke.

The sky above the cabin was already turning the color of one of his overripe Bread and Circus plums at the edges, and the little light he had left on above the sink shone out like a beacon. Once he put the supplies away, he would take a much-needed nap.

The cabin was so high up, and the mountains surrounded it so closely, that the already shortened days were constricted even further; the sun would not make it above the eastern peaks until almost ten, and sunset would begin to announce itself around three, not with any glorious colors, but with that rapid darkening from plum-purple to inky blackness by four-thirty. After dark, he would become even more aware of the wind howling through the fir trees, the creaking of the cabin as it settled further into the cold rocks beneath it, and the skittering of small creatures under the floorboards or within the walls—or, occasionally, a larger animal (a porcupine, most likely) gnawing at a corner of the cabin outside. It was then that he would brew himself some strong green tea, pry open the clamshell of his computer, and disappear again into the herky-jerky rhythms of his perpetual game. "Do you wish to continue our adventure, master?" his avatar would ask, and he would take up where he had left off the previous evening.

Although the clock on the wall watched the hours for him, he had already lost track of days of the week. That was surprising, how quickly the five-day work-week no longer meant anything to him—but he estimated that soon it would be the shortest day of the year. If he bothered to count, he might be able to estimate just how much longer he could be here before his body began to give out and he would have to reenter the real world, just to finish things up in the medically advanced and socially approved fashion. But what if he didn't? What if he were just to stumble up the mountain some evening like a dying Iroquois, into snows ever higher and air ever purer, until he simply disappeared into moonlit snowbanks bright as noonday? He'd read that freezing to death was supposedly the gentlest way to day—your body actually seemed to grow warmer as its nerve-endings deadened and tissues froze, and you merely slipped off into a deep, all-enveloping sleep. If so, how did anyone know this was true? Who had ever come back from the other side to file a report? He didn't believe in an afterlife, hadn't since he had left the church at the same time he left his hometown, and somehow, the idea or its promise appealed to him even less now. When his father had died, he had been alone with him in the bedroom; it was nothing dramatic, his father hadn't opened his eyes in ecstasy at the vision of heavenly gates, even though he been a lifelong believer. He had merely... gone away, so gradually that it was hard to tell when he had exhaled his last breath, when exactly his pulse had slowed to nothing, when his fingers no longer clutched the crucifix the priest had earlier placed in his palm. Otherwise, in those first few minutes, he was exactly the same in life as in death: his skin was still warm, his eyes were shut like a dreamer's. He remembered staring down into the drained pool of the condominium complex and thinking it remarkable how unremarkable such a death was.

The seventh level of the game was drawing nearer, but was possibly unattainable: the sixth level was replete with more cartoonish ghouls and goblins than all the other levels put together; every time he came within grasping distance of a golden coronet or jeweled dagger, a three-horned beastie would swoop down onto the path between his avatar and the treasure, and in the ensuing battle of karate kicks and fireballs, the crown or knife would tumble into a crevasse. The counter at the top of the screen kept score of both his arsenal and his "energy level;" if he lost too many points, he would be kicked back to the fifth level or worse and have to begin his arduous climb over again. He had learned long ago that the best approach to the game was to go slower just when it seemed you could speed up as you tripped over pinnacles and precipices—it was when you were going too fast that your adversaries could more easily spring into your path and knock the last icon you'd won right out of your hands. All the same, going too slowly meant you might run out of energy before you could seize the key which you needed to unlock the door to the next level. What sort of bored software engineers had first designed this game, long ago at the dawn of the digital age? Now only did they have mixed-up ideas about Asian mythology, they violated the usual ethics of labyrinths and rewards. If you were to rescue a princess from

the evil Mikado, she might run off with your precious golden grail. The hidden chamber at the end of the seventh level might be apocryphal, for all he knew—he'd never heard of anyone who had ever actually attained it, and the screenshots he'd seen in a cheatbook once looked like they could easily be fakes, created just to tantalize and infuriate even the most dedicated of players. The pictures showed a skeletal Buddha-like figure wearing a loincloth, ascetic and darkly Indian in its features, inside a grotto or cave. The figure levitated above the petals of a giant lotus flower, and the colors were the cheap and lurid ones of a Hindu devotional poster you might see in an alley of Hyderabad. And what was your reward? Why, eternal life, of course—and your name on the list of all-time champions. Such an end would be tawdry and anticlimactic and useless; nevertheless, he wanted to see for himself. He wanted to defeat this silly game, not let it defeat him. That was the only reason for playing.

The cheatbook quoted the old proverb: "If you meet the Buddha upon the road, slay him." Was that the only way to play the game, like a warrior and not a scholar?

"Save game," he would choose yet again some time long after midnight, after subduing the latest poorly animated chimera, then put the laptop to blissful rest, and likewise himself. Lying on his back, looking outside the mullions which broke the sky up into squares the way a painter's grid would, he saw the stars blinking like faulty pixels, forming no comprehensible patterns except perhaps to astronomers and the ancients. The wind curled around the cabin with its lulling moans, a low-hanging bough scraped the tin roof, something crystalline would snap in the forest beyond. Snow on the distant peaks shone with a pearly light as if lit from within, and like any artist anywhere in any time, he wondered how he could ever dare compete. And then he would sleep.

Days he now spent with ink and brush, and despite his missteps he was steadily improving. He remembered what one of his early drawing teachers, coincidentally a former propaganda artist for the Peoples' Republic, had once told the class: "Become one with the brush, then become nothing. Then your hand will do your eye's bidding." Had he really said that, or had what he originally said become merged in his memory with the advice in a book of Zen teachings, or even the hackneyed sayings of the dojo master in a movie? It did not matter; the secret really was in seeing the subject at hand not as it was before you, but in your mind's eye. Memorize contour and shadow, then let your hand move across the paper as if it were guided by no more conscious effort than that given one's Ouija planchette. In a few sure strokes, the subject could be suggested—not duplicated—upon the page. It was more in what you left out, knowing when to stop. Daily, his sketches were tacked up under the windowsill, until they formed a row of pennants, like Tibetan prayer flags, that would flutter in the draft and curl from the heat of the woodstove.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, he found it easier to draw from memory, rather than from any solid household objects he might set before himself. He had begun with a branch of a balsam tree that hung over the edge of a chasm, leaning into the void as if to see the tiny steeples and cupolas far below. There was one much like it off the same trail he would take to see the sun as it mounted the lowest of the eastern peaks. Too pleased perhaps with his ability to capture the spiny needles of the branch, he became careless with the gnarled branch itself, miscalculating the angle with which it must jut over the cliff. Hardest of all was conveying the sense of deep space opening up beyond the farthest frozen tip of the fir-branch; suggesting vast expanses of nothingness so convincingly was the greatest achievement of ancient oriental artists, and so he was left with just a faint smudge at the bottom of the picture that might be fog rising from the depths, or smoke from distant chimneys. No, it didn't look enough like either of those, although the painting was not a complete failure, and over several attempts at the same or similar subjects, his efforts improved.

Another time, he tried to portray himself, though he had only a small pocket mirror to work with, and so could catch glimpses of just one eye or one ear, or a bit of cheek or chin, at a time. Nevertheless, he succeeded admirably in putting himself together like a puzzle, and the end result looked realistic enough; if it wasn't himself, exactly, it was someone who looked familiar, a close relative, perhaps—and so he decided he would mail this one to Guangzhou. He thought of how in about a month or so, Tsu-Chi would open the mailing tube in his teachers' dormitory; having forgotten by then how different the portrait was from its actual subject, he would be fooled. Tsu-Chi had no eye for art, but he would be proud to have an original inkbrush painting: would he display it for his medical students to see, or would he keep it in its tube, only to draw it out of seclusion when he was feeling especially lonesome? In a month, he would be gone, but Tsu-Chi wouldn't know that; Tsu-Chi wouldn't know he was looking at something akin to a sarcophagus rubbing. Oddly enough, that amused him immensely; he liked this melodramatic image of Tsu-Chi holding the smooth rice-paper to his even smoother cheek, like a royal concubine who kisses the blood-soaked sash of her fallen shogun.

Just as he was completing the self-portrait, the cellphone resting on the kitchen table came to life like a whirring insect out of hibernation. He hesitated, wondering whether to answer it, but it continued to chirrup, so he put his brush into its porcelain cup of inky water and rose to its summons. Someone was calling him from the magazine; he hesitated still longer—he hated to think the new publisher might have questions about any of his projects about to go to press. It was only Leia. She was calling from the office Christmas party—he could hear the music turned up over the ceiling speakers and the mingling of voices and laughter; it was harder to understand her words. Was he all right? Was there enough firewood? Had he remembered to keep the faucets dripping? Was he certain he didn't want her to check his email? And had he heard the latest about Bush and Romney?

He assured her that everything was fine, but that he hadn't even listened to NPR since he got here. "I've gone back to drawing freehand," he told her, trying not to sound annoyed.

"You sound so... faint," she said, raising her voice above a new burst of laughter and applause. "It must be the connection. How's your, uh, stomach?"

"I hardly notice it anymore. You know, the light here is astonishing. The way everything, these mountains _glow_ at night. And the stars! You could touch them."

"You _must_ be going crazy. Everyone else is. Watch some TV and you'll see why. At least read a newspaper once in a while and keep in touch."

He looked over at his portrait, drying by the stove. It might as well be a stranger. And having to talk on the phone like this was being back in the confessional: do this, do that. "Maybe I'm just discovering what sanity is like. You start feeling, I don't know... ready to leave some things like all the news behind."

She had apparently moved away from the mayhem and spoke in a more confidential tone now. "I get this hunch you're holding something back," she said, a close whisper. "Is it about Tsu-Chi? Are you dwelling on him? It's awful lonely up there, isn't it. Aren't you maybe going to want to go to your sister's for Christmas this year? Just for a change?"

"You know I hate the Midwest in the winter. It's so bitter and bleak—and I'm not even talking about just the weather."

"Then you should get away to somewhere warm before you come back."

"Who says I'm coming back?"

"I do. I miss you here in the office, making me laugh. These new guys are all so young and serious. Bottom line this, bottom line that... Besides, my brothers are coming up there New

Year's to ski. You won't want to have to entertain them!"

"Hey, I've got my _Pachabel's Greatest Hit_. Ok, ok, I promise, I'll be gone before then.

Besides, I have to get things settled back in Cambridgeport." He wished he hadn't admitted that.

"You sound like you _are_ going somewhere else. Did you run into a lumberjack or a Mountie or something up there? What do you mean 'settled'?" People were singing "We wish you a merry" in the background, overpowering her again.

"Nothing. Listen, I forgot to charge this phone—you're starting to break up."

"So are you. Mumble mumble. Well, I'll call you another time, then. Just wanted you to know that despite these damn frat-boys running things, things are going on pretty much as usual around here—it's just not the same without you."

"I appreciate it. This time up here has meant a lot to me. You've meant a lot to me, Leia. I owe you so—" But the line had already fizzled away into pure static, and he was left holding the little phone in his palm as if it were some fragile, lifeless bird.

The seventh level was not at all what he had expected it to be. It was a dark featureless tunnel, or maybe an arid empty plain; synthesized wind sounded from the speakers, and his avatar's footsteps echoed eerily, as if sounding off unseen canyon-sides or high stone walls or the fortifications of an immense castle. Once in a while light of an indeterminate origin illuminated an abandoned pickaxe or broken vase or cairn of skulls. All was loneliness. Why had his avatar ever left home—to seek riches or spiritual illumination? Why then was the little fellow content to stumble about blindly, the pawn of his programmer; did he never stop in the middle of the game to curse his fate or to cry out loud? Strangely enough, no malformed creatures, no deceitful maidens or hoodwinking sorcerers came his way—and that was all the more terrifying, for the further his avatar progressed on such an uneventful course, the surer he was to run into evil in any shape. Was this a bug in the software? Perhaps he was caught in some kind of loop, doomed to wander forever without reaching the hidden chamber. No matter which direction he guided his alter-ego with the laptop touchpad, he saw only shades of blackness and heard only the low insinuations of the wind. He checked his hoard of icons and his energy level: all was as it should be. The simple face of his avatar betrayed no concern. He wandered and wandered, desperate for anything to happen, even if he should be flung back to the bottom level like a sinner into Tartarus. He pressed keys at random and fiddled with other controls. Still, nothing happened. Perhaps the lesson was in being patient.

Bored at last, he snap the laptop case shut and flung himself back on the futon. He seldom ever thought of Nebraska or his childhood—he had left when he was eighteen, and soon after his parents had both gone south to Sun City to waste away—so it was with some surprise that he found himself thinking of his grandparents' old farmhouse at the edge of Kearney, a place he hadn't seen since his grandmother had died almost twenty years ago. And yet he remembered every element, every quilt and doily and Jesus calendar of it, precisely; the whole place had been stored complete in some hidden cache of his mind, the front parlor of the house, especially: its faded wallpaper with black swans on it, the enormous peonies floating in cut-glass bowls, the lamps with their fringed and tattered shades, the lilac bushes rustling against the screened windows, the scratchy camel-backed armchair, the occasional car passing by on the gravel road, the smell of Grandma's rosewater, and Grandma herself, upright in a creaking rocker, adorned with her costume jewelry, unaware that he was even there. As a matter of fact, he wasn't; he was here, in another decade, another century. She had died a long, long time ago—but she was there in the past, too, rocking and rocking and rocking. She knew he was there, she knew the camel-backed chair wasn't really empty. Her eyes were blind with glaucoma, her limbs were gnarled by arthritis, she had suffered a partial stroke, and yet she saw into the future. His grandmother was no longer able to talk, but she called his name. She called to him and held out her hands to take his own between her palms. Her hands were as dry and brittle as a bundle of dead maple leaves. She was dead, too, or almost so; it was only the wind through the screens that rocked her chair. He was there; he was only sixteen, he'd been reading to her from the local paper. Could she understand a single word? In another month, he would be standing at her graveside in a little cemetery surrounded by wheat fields. But this moment, this late afternoon hour at the end of a long-ago May, they were together in life. He held her hand, he read the obituaries. Did she nod at the names she knew? Time passed. The peonies shriveled in their bowls, the hands on the mantelpiece clock whirled around until they were a blur; the wallpaper came down in great shreds, a snail raced up and down one window-pane after the other, dust blanketed them like snow, the days and nights blinked outside the windows like a strobe light. Grandma's hands were only bones, then nothing. Time passed that way. Years melted into each other. He moved away, he grew up, he changed irreparably, and then he was here, in this cabin high in the mountains, looking down at that long-abandoned parlor as if from a great height. He wanted to shout down into that room, to anyone left alive, but no one was there now. In such a way his dreams came and went, and in the morning very little was left of them to remember, just a few shattered jewels that had slipped from a long necklace.

It might have been the solstice, the morning he rose early enough to see the dawn-light flooding the sky and reflecting off the granite outcroppings all around, pale as the colors of bleached seashells. Somehow, the more he worked in the black and white and gray world of ink and brush, the more sensitive he became to color, the more he relished these hourly transformations of hue and shade outside his windows. The carbon-block ink itself had proven to be the origin of a limitless number of colors—the longer one worked with such a simple medium, the more one discovered these colors, colors that just a dip and tap of the horsehair bristles could create. So, yes, bleached seashells—that was it, and already the tide was turning them onto their shinier side, the sun was rising, the fog was rolling back from the mountainsides to reveal the glare of snow and the black brushstrokes of bare crooked branches. He ate a slow breakfast, watching the mountains burst into flame and heavy clouds fall from the sky like so much ballast, and he took a long time preparing for his hike, as if he were performing a well-rehearsed ritual. It was well past noon, then, before he left the cabin.

Out on the forest's edge, it was fiercely cold and windy, but the gusts had swept snow back from the rocky edge of the trail, so he was able to climb with relative ease, as long as he was careful. Once in a while his boot would slip, though there was little danger of falling far; the slope relied on switchbacks, and uphill progress was slow but steady. Despite his lightheadedness, despite his increasing frailty, he had rarely felt so vitalized, with this fresh air in his lungs and Boreas whipping his back and the whole sparkling world around him, glasslike in its clarity. The sunlit summit loomed above him like the outer ramparts of a vast ruined fortress. The sunlight, even on this shortest of days, felt warm on his face. Having hiked now for over an hour, he could look behind him and see the snow-covered roofs of the cabins in a row well down the diminishing trail, a chain of toy dwellings from an elfin village you might see within an old-fashioned storefront. It was almost Christmas. He had only a couple more hours of daylight left at most. The year was coming to an end, and he would soon be approaching the limit of his doctors' sentence. One week, two weeks more at most...

He had not gone much farther, just around a bend so the rooftops were no longer in sight, when he came to a flat slab of granite bare of snow, where he could eat the half-frozen plums he had brought along and rest. It was growing cloudier once again and for the first time he wondered if he would make it to the lookout point up ahead and back again to the cabin before night began to fall. Last summer Leia had taken him to the same lookout; then, it hadn't seemed so far from the cabins, and the trail hadn't seemed so steep. You could see four, maybe five states in the boundless panorama, as well as the Boston skyline and, it seemed, nothing but endless forests from here to the Atlantic. In fact, it was hard to believe humans actually lived down there, endless miles below, and that innumerable towns and villages lay between these mountains and the coast. Was it worth trying to make that prospect today? He lay on his back, staring into clouds and the pale blue shards between clouds, munching his sweet plum and trying to regain his strength. Something vibrated against his chest, deep within his parka—not his heart, but the cellphone once again. Habit. He begrudgingly dug it out from layers of down and Gortex, and, squinting, tried to read the lengthy number of the incoming call.

A small, very tinny voice shouted up to him from across half the width of the northern hemisphere: "Is this you, cuddly bear? Have I made a surprise?" The voice sounded more British than Chinese, which was the result of a good Hong Kong education. "Hallo, you there?" There were a few attempts on both ends to start a proper conversation with proper greetings, but they kept stepping on one another's words due to the long international delay. "Hallo, this is you? Hallo!"

"Tsu-Chi, isn't it late there?" he was finally able to get in before being interrupted. It was the first they had talked on the phone since September, and now, here of all places...

"No, it is very early, actually! You I cannot hear so well."

"I'm at the top of the world, that's why. New Hampshire. How unlike you to bother to call."

The voice grew fainter, wobblier, was lost for a moment in a crackle of static, and then came back much louder than before: "...had to call you, Bear, and warn you about the virus. Am I too late?"

"Virus?" He felt that sickening lull before panic sets in. "Are you all right?"

"Well, my computer is screwed. That's why I had to call, to warn you about the virus.

Don't open that last email from me. Sorry. Some new bug."

"Oh." There was silence on both ends, though all around him the wind flung great fistfuls of snow down the rock-face.

"I haven't heard from you in so long, I though uh-oh, you must have it, too. But am I wrong?"

"No, I'm sorry, I've just been away from my email for a while. I should've told you, I'm taking a little vacation." He tried to picture Tsu-Chi, with his big trustful eyes and blunt little boy's haircut on the other end, but instead, maybe because of the crackling interference, he could picture his former lover only as an old man, a stereotypical Asiatic sage, with acolytes gathered around his feet—an ancient mandarin in a saffron kimono with long chin-whiskers, puffing on a long ivory pipe. If it weren't so cold, he would have laughed. Baby-faced Tsu-Chi an old man!

"How are your classes?" was all he could think of to ask next.

"Terrible! This equipment they expect us to do with here!" The voice went on to mention something about the effect of electromagnetic fields on neutrinos, but it was as lost on him as when he used to try talking about fonts and kerning with Tsu-Chi. After that came a long rant about Guangzhou hygiene and overpriced nightclubs. It was apparent that even though Tsu-Chi might have aged fifty years, he could still rattle on about nothing very important for as long as one allowed him to do so.

"Listen," he interrupted Tsu-Chi at last, "you're fading again, and my hand is freezing. Why don't we talk another time, ok? I'm feeling a little—a little out-of-sorts. Or better yet, send me email when you get your computer fixed. I promise I won't open anything that came in the past couple of weeks."

"I am sorry to have called at the wrong time." He could tell now that Tsu-Chi was feeling a bit hurt, but he would get over it. He wasn't one to pine. "I also wanted to wish you a merry Christmas."

"Christmas? I almost forgot. You should be receiving my present in about a month, if the boats aren't too slow."

"That is exciting! You never gave me a real present before."

"Well, you know, I'm not that sort. Not that I don't love everything you gave me. Hey,

I'm wearing that red shirt right now, and... and I think I'm beginning to understand Celine Dion's appeal."

"You are teasing me, Bear."

"Listen, I miss you."

"You said it first! _You!_ "

It took him a moment to respond in a cheery manner. "I'm not so bad. You're the one who left me, remember."

"It was my student visa's fault, you knew that." He could picture the aged Tsu-Chi fluttering a silk fan, one embroidered with butterflies. Better yet, the acolytes would be fanning him, and the smoke from his pipe would whirl merrily to the ceiling. Absurd. Even if Tsu-Chi had aged fifty years, he would be just another old Chinese man grown thick at the waist and thin on top, living in a high-rise pension and recalling a bittersweet love affair in America decades past.

"This is costing me," Tsu-Chi suddenly said, as if he had consulted a timer, "and I don't make American money. We'll talk again soon, won't we? You call me."

"Sure," he said. "Sure. Hey, it was nice hearing from you, Tsu-Chi."

They ended with further pleasantries, but by the time he had hung up something inside him was raging. This might be the last time he ever talked to Tsu-Chi, and he had squandered the call with petty complaints and guilty excuses! Tsu-Chi had seemed as petulant as ever, and he had thought of nothing too important to say in return. And here he was near the top of this mountain, and the sun was already quickly going down, and he'd forgotten to take his pills that morning, so his stomach was complaining, too. For the first time since he'd left the hospital tests behind he was feeling anger—not just at Tsu-Chi, but at the whole world. And ridiculous—he felt ridiculous to be so alive today when he might be dead the next. Catching himself as he automatically began to tuck the cellphone back into his parka, he seized the phone with his other hand, as if a separate half of himself had taken control, or someone else entirely, and hurled the device as hard as he could down toward the valley. It splintered against a boulder a hundred feet or so down, and its myriad pieces fell soundlessly into the snow like spent shrapnel. He staggered back against the stump of a tree, astonished at what he had done, feeling he had broken something even more fragile inside himself. The sky was completely overcast now, the color of —oh, the color of whatever, and even if he did make it to the lookout this afternoon, it would be too dark by the time he reached there to see beyond the immediate vicinity. He leaned against the stump for a long time, breathing heavily, until the first of the snow, thick and heavy as felt, began to fall around him.

Steps had been cut into the bare rock of this highest slope long ago, to make it easier to attain the summit and also, perhaps, to give one the feeling that one was ascending the winding stairs of a tall tower, perhaps, or a vast Olympian palace. Trees had given away to bushes and those to frozen weeds and granite alone. The air was purer, antiseptic even, as it always is at great heights, but also thinner, more difficult to breathe, although these mountains were far from Himalayan in stature. The sky was dark now, and the snow was falling fast, but a brilliant half-moon, like a boat with a high prow bobbing between the clouds, could be glimpsed now and then, and was enough to illuminate the endless snowfields and snow-covered crags around him.

He was not afraid. He was no longer angry, and he was not afraid. The stairs wound on...

Later, deeper into the night. Only after climbing much higher did he notice that these were not snowflakes any longer, but plum-tree blossoms, white as snow and almost as cool to the touch. And in the air was the faint scent of jasmine, sandalwood, or some other token of the Orient. Incense? He cast off his parka, feeling warmer now; he trod no longer over snow, but across a field of tiny alpine wildflowers. It was then that he noticed that these were temple steps, and the temple—a sort of pagoda or shrine, all filigree and flourish—lay directly ahead, chiseled out of solid rock, polished so that it gleamed like marble in the moonlight. Melodious as a garland of little bells, a spring trickled down the rock-face above and into a series of decorative fountains along the pedestal of the temple, and theirs was the sound of flutes and pipes. Torchlight reflecting off the pools brought the very stone to life, casting rippling, golden shadows like the aureoles of a restless panther. Doves fluttered out of carven dovecotes in the cliff-side, and sacred hamadryas baboons scampered over the boulders. The perfume in the air was enough to make one swoon.

The Buddha was in the likeness of the great recumbent Buddha at Chaukhtatgyi Paya in Burma. (He had seen it once, during his year abroad in college. It was enormous, over two hundred feet long, polychrome ornamented with gold-leaf. Pilgrims left great quantities of flowers and fruits all around his dais, and fortune-tellers mobbed him for the chance to read his fate in tea-leaves and smoke.) This Buddha was very young, very pretty, his skin smooth as jade, his hair like black silk, pulled straight back and up from his forehead and plaited into a tiara like that of a Cambodian prince. He wore a long shantung robe, cinched with a brocade girdle at the waist. Between thumb and middle finger of one hand he held a lotus blossom, with his smallest finger pointing upward, the way a very genteel lady might hold a dainty tea-cup, and he seemed to be drinking deeply of the intoxicating scents within that lotus. His eyes were closed, as if in thoughts of the most serene kind, but still the Buddha sensed that he was there, and so the Buddha reached out one small delicate hand, around whose wrist jangled a silver bracelet hung with tiny bells, to grasp his own hand gently and reassuringly.

He was surprised to find the Buddha's hands so soft, so fleshy—and his were fingers which surely had never worked any tool cruder than an ivory paintbrush. It was the moist hand of a spoiled child's. As would be expected, he knelt and kissed the back of the Buddha's hand, and he tasted strong scented honey where his lips had touched flesh, honey which had been mixed with rare oils and smelled of heaven. The Buddha stretched himself further in his recumbent posture, still contemplating the lotus, and he smiled his placid, enigmatic smile, eyes still closed.

"So this is how I am to, to... depart?" he asked the reclining figure, but of course the Buddha would not understand English, and merely smiled.

"I mean, is this all there is to it? Is it really so simple?"

The Buddha smiled even wider and opened his enormous, dark, lovely, almond-shaped eyes.

Seeing such beauty, lost in such unutterable beauty, he—or that ghost of himself, his avatar in the game—could only collapse into mirth, could only dissolve into the merriest laughter one can imagine. If _this_ was all he had to fear!

He exited the program, shut down his laptop, and sat for a long time in the dark staring at nothing at all.

The Flight

So this then is death (think, think hard!), a sudden death under these leaves; it happened when you closed your eyes and did not hurt a bit. They've buried you deep and run off to play— hear them shrieking now out by the burning refuse pile, like blackbirds, like schoolgirls, fading now fifty feet now ten thousand miles away. (Think harder still!) Death you have found to be still warm moist with the smell of leaves drying dying curling brown in November. This is after all peace and coolness, yes it would be fine to sleep here forever and a day like time in a storybook. Feel the grass bristling under you, and above you pinpoints of gray autumn light through the leaves, like summer in the hayloft, dusty light between the rafters. That was a different kind of death lying there in the straw—sunnier, dizzier. No dancing no singing _Have you seen the ghost of Tom long white bones with the skin all gone_ —Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen around and around and merry-go-round this pile of leaves, then gone (gone? think!), the world gone away with them.

So think—death! To be dead and buried, tasting the earth soft and black and bitter in your mouth for all time. Sinking deeper deeper year after year endlessly—first flesh then bones then earth itself. Think: thinking nothing dreaming nothing you are nothing. Nothing at all so we must become nothing at all. Like an empty room an empty glass just a breeze that came and went in the dark empty sky. Not even a breath not a sound nor song. Only silence and silence and silence.

They went away without you, then: _Have you seen the ghost of Tom...._ Though your ghost is still inside you, afraid to come out to show them—trapped like the Holy Ghost in the golden box at church. Still it is better this way, to be dead and no one to know, trying all the same not to breathe in that sour wet dead smell, that sad lost smell which is autumn which is the year stamping The End upon itself. Months will have to pass, the snow will bury you again, rains and spring come, sending weeds winding up through your hair, and summer sun, bones powdering away in the heat. By then they'll have all forgotten, gone away with the world. Years will pass and things will change out there, too: everyone will be different or dead themselves. For good. They will forget sure enough; you will forget them. That's reason to cry, but there will be no more crying now. The dead don't anything. Too tired too cold too hungry for crying or even thinking (but still you will) now.

Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen used to take turns locking each other and you into the hall closet when Mom and Dad were away—that was a close space, a confinement like this (more inside the mind than out there). Among the tree ornaments and shoeboxes and smelly old mothballed clothes and rattling hangers, cobwebs and must in the eyes and nose and throat, trying to think nothing nothing, of nothing. Outside they'd count the minutes—who would last longest? Squeeze your eyes shut tight—don't want to see what or who's (here in the darkest dark—and if your eyes are shut ghosts can't scare you. Blind as a mole buried deep underground, like now, the victim unable to stand or stretch or, finally, breathe. A little rehearsal for death it was, learning what it's like in that box, that coffin they shut you up in sooner or later. Then they expect you to fly sunward toward heaven—but how could anyone nailed tight shut like that? Just think, though, of God's Holy Ghost in that golden tabernacle in back of the altar at St. Paul's, a smaller space by far than a closet or a heap of leaves, yet God is the biggest thing in the world is the world and heaven both (hell you never believed in, or tried not to). He sees all with eyes sealed and knows all within that puzzling little box. The same with the priest who knows all your sins, especially your deepest ones, even in the dark when you can't see his face or your own hands. He shines his flashlight into the blackest depths of your soul: no place to hide. Which is why they make you sit in that box in the first place. Inside there is like this, under these leaves, no place to hide, trapped, dead.

But they say you rise again anyway. Imagine rising up out of the leaves like smoke from a bonfire, the soul toward heaven. Enough to make you dizzy-sick like on a merry-go-round. Leaves in autumn smell like burning tobacco; you long for the smoke in your lungs like Mom and Dad's cigarettes. Which they say will be the death of them. So think of them: going from lap to lap as they sat and smoked in the backyard last summer, watching the bats rising from the chimneys at dusk, following them up and up into the farthest invisible, or with sisters and brothers out on the fence-rails, craning necks to see the most distant clouds or fireworks over the drive-in or satellites or falling stars, knowing that is not even half the way to heaven. Once you thought you might see that far, however—late at night on your back on the cold metal roof of one of the junked cars in the yard, staring into deepest blackest space, trying somehow to penetrate with bare eyes as far as possible between and beyond those stars those distant lost galaxies. Getting dizzy then, too, a little queasy in the stomach, feverish in the head. Yet space goes on and on and on and on for all eternity like death. And only like death.

That's what we're told but you always come up against a kind of wall out there—and never never can you see over it or through it to what's on the other side, though it might be heaven; there must be a heaven. (That's what they tell you in church, that's what you want most and can't have, at least not now.) Thinking after all is really only remembering, so you try to remember back back as far farther than you can go. All those years went whirling down somewhere; they might be revealed again with strong eyes searching. Try, but you can't. Only an emptiness is there, space without space, darkness without the dark, not even silence. Before memory before birth, then—death or something like it. And the future—trying to think of it only shows the same, a void. Things are spliced up in life into past/present/future, but in death of course they're all the same and impenetrable. Think think think but you can't you've reached the limit—and failing that, the farthest thing you can remember, the last thing before it all drops off into the unknown, is a bed. Yes, that's right—sleeping in a big cool bed in a strange room with the curtains of tall windows (ghost curtains) and a white face outside looking in or maybe it was the moon. You drifted out to sleep on that big boat of a bed, hit a rock in your dreams, washed ashore at an odd hour, terrified, wondering where am I? who am I? what was I? A snail clinging to a rock at the lake or a god as broad and blue as the sky? Right then you got an idea of what life before birth is like, or after death—neither snail nor god. Things stop at that point, though, at the brink. But there's no reason now to try to remember and know, not now when death washes all the you in you away. (And they look at you, asking what you must be thinking when your eyes look away—such a serious growing strange boy but no wiser no more talented than the rest.)

Brothers and sisters crying to each other like blackbirds over the fields have run through the pasture among the horses among the cattle and out again into the barnyard still louder. Please please _please_ someone's trying hard to be dead, though noises shouldn't bother you; they should everyone and everything remain on the outside of it all, like when you're falling asleep, ear pressed to another, becalmed world. If death is like sleep, then, the dream to come will be filled with blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds.... Walking through the fields early last summer to the woods, you came to a space a darker shadow within the trees, an opening in the darkness into a deeper darkness, where a black storm-cloud of birds had descended with a roar a great whirring of wings—you walked into the jet-blackness, the heart of the flock, felt yourself being lifted up into their twittering screeching midst, up and up like madness into deafening restless thousand-eyed blackness, thinking this could be like death although death must be silent, silent as fear. Your soul should instead go up with a sort of rustling like leaves, into the heart of' the heart of it all on a wind that comes pauses and goes....

Maybe you have slept here forever and a fairy tale day. Or haven't; when you don't wear a watch there is no use for time. Before or after no longer count because there was before a home and a bed and a school and a church and that's over for good now you're dead forevermore like the first day of a summer vacation in a year with no September, and after there will be supper on the table, potato soup and hamburgers, whether you come running or not; it's all finished now—unless.... unless maybe it's not true no matter how much you maybe just maybe wanted it to be true. Maybe you're in a dream in bed dreaming this or maybe you're in the basement next to the coal bin.... yes, with dirt and black water on the floor reflecting bits of yourself an eye an ear, yes in the cellar among the spiders and cobwebs and rats with red eyes in the flashlight stare: It's a tornado alert, everyone's sealed in down here with a board across the door against the power of the storm outside-might as well nail you in. Here is that queer bad smell which is somehow good to breathe in like gasoline or like in the abandoned outhouse after a rain. The family is sitting in transplanted kitchen chairs in a campfire circle around Dad's transistor radio now crackling now gone dead now bursting to life. What do they play but sleepytime music, Lawrence Welk, and no one to assure you they're still alive out there, this isn't the end of the world with the records still playing on automatic. Imagine the twister beyond that door, descending from heaven like the very finger of God to trace a giant's furrow across the earth as you would in writing your name in the sand at the county lake. Meanwhile Mom is working the rosary hugging the youngest closer closest lighting another cigarette—so very very calm! Lights go out with a bang and everyone is in the deepest darkest cave (remember when they switched off the lights in that crystal cave in the Black Hills and all around nothing but the drip-drip of stalactites patiently extending themselves there in coffin-tight darkness alone with your heartbeat going drip-drip, too), only that glowing cigarette like the catechism spark of God in the void, that smoke curling in the lungs which means not God but Mother for comfort, able to see it all, however, the twister touching down, the sudden swift end to it all with the biggest bang of all or maybe no bang not even a rustle of leaves, snuffing of the spark in the catechism class void at the end and/or beginning of time, sealed off from life down here down in this basement holding us safe as a mother. No one will cry, everyone too is hungry and cold for that now (supper waits on the table upstairs cooling). Mom has sprinkled holy water before her in every room but that will not save a soul now. But Dad! Dad has gone upstairs outdoors to the end of the drive to check the growling black and purple horizon, thoughtfully eating a peach. You know—we know—because we have run up in our terror our joy up out after him.

So let the storm rage; you are unkillable, immortal but hungry for a peach too and so this could be death but it isn't is it and the leaves are not stones or earth after all—breaking through (laughing to burst) is easier than throwing back a blanket. Oh—and the world, the light and air of the world! Eyes blink, blinded again. Ah, it's the world at last, life so bright so big too big to hold in the heart or mind. Life, this is me! Let me swallow it up or let it swallow up me—for the sky is too wide to embrace, the earth this farm this countryside this world I love too broad and far to run the length of—but I must you must we all must run with all our might with dirt and leaves and twigs in our hair and eyes and mouth and mud on our clothes and hands and faces.... around the yard across the pastures through the big red barn the little blue barn the gray and green sheds. Running you are moving through space the world merry-go-round dizzy and blurred, fresh cold air against the forehead—like driving down the interstate in the convertible last summer in the twilight under trillions of stars whizzing by over your head on the way faster than light to the end of the universe, Dad's hat blowing off into the cornfields and the radio pounding with guitars. Then as now I say to myself life is freedom! I am free! So I am alive!

Alive! Alive to race to the edge shout to the top fly far and away from here and now.

Where have you gone Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen in your blue and white school uniforms? Over the hills and far away like in a story? On your balloon-tire bikes and scooters and skateboards? (is that you fading into the dusk at the far end of my desk, twenty years gone by, two of you to your deaths?) or have you returned to the front yard, behind the lilac bushes, under the Chinese elm? I shout _Olly olly oxen free. Olly olly_ —but they don't answer, only the last of the year's crickets, a distant red-winged blackbird. The light is burning itself out in the sky; grayness is wafting in over us. _One two three who's afraid?_ Supper's cooking. Smell the dull rawness of the potato soup, picture Mom paring the big white Idahos, rinsing them under such cold cold water, always nicking herself, and the blood-red trickle down the white spuds in the water. Something horrifying, worse than the paint on any crucifix; I won't look. Can't look. Better not to think not think of that. Forget hunger. Don't think. Watch the cars coming going down the busy country highway since time began for me. So many times I've stood by the front windows looking through the cobwebbed screens trying to count them all, getting up to the hundreds but always losing track. Sisters say white cars are good luck and black cars bad and they come in color clusters and at least one car from every state passes by each day. Once there was a funeral procession honking its horns like it was a party. Once there was a bad wreck and a car that went up in flames. And that red and white convertible must be Dad heading home at last maybe with something in his briefcase for me. In the summer I would run out to greet the cars on their way home from the plants, or the cars backed up on a weekend night, slow as a funeral, on their way not to the cemetery but the drive-in right down the road— as the sun cooled down and the locusts started up in the dark of the trees and the beautiful giant faces glowed on the screen in the distance, their beautiful giant lips saying nothing we could hear or guess.

The first lamp of the evening has gone on in the house up the way, the first star probably out now too behind those clouds. The road is strange when it's this empty and quiet and we are all alone together now—brothers and sisters appearing out of the trees the sheds the parked cars the dark rooms of the farmhouse. We look at each other, link arms, me and Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen as crack the whip around and about the house we go singing _Wouldn't it be funny with no skin on?_ And a little while later softer _Oh Shenandoah I love your daughter away away...._

The very happiest you can ever feel is always so very close to being sad knowing this will not cannot last nothing ever does no matter how you wish and try to hold onto it. Except death, the death you met in Grandfather in his coffin forever and a day, never to see or hear him speak again but in dreams. But no more death! We are alive and racing life itself! We're sweating but getting colder at the same time—hair damp on our foreheads, eyes moist, stinging, our fingers hot and sticky in each other's palms, our school uniforms no longer so bright so birdlike in the passing light. Our voices rise higher louder now goodbye to the day and louder shouts then screams leaping up from song—like blue jays and blackbirds like crazed country children. One two three.... one two three—who's afraid? The spooks come out at this hour. The afterglow of a burning car. The unseen hand down your back, the wind. Later after supper we'll play Frankenstein and search for each other with flashlights in the dark calling to each other unseen _Have you seen the ghost of Frankenstein?_

Got to scare away spooks so let's pretend now—pretend to be—to be.... birds! Now now now. And now—imagine your arms growing longer stronger growing feathers—shriek louder flap your arms laugh with fury dance madly—as we scatter out from our center like frightened starlings toward every corner of the front yard and backyard and barnyard. Crying loudly to each other across the dark lawn and orchard _Where are you going? how far can we go? when should I come back?_

Into the wind the sharp cold wet November wind (with rain just starting to fall with the coming of the true night) we go, our bodies becoming airborne as our wings grow wider, beat faster. And soon we are flying, up toward the chimneys weathervane clouds to the heaven of heavens. I am a hawk; I am circling out where they drift on a still summer daybreak, around the windmills and over the pond. Just gathering speed I can see everything with my hawk eyes, everything down there (why haven't they followed me? Look at me brothers and sisters come with me escape, one two three...). The world is spread below me like a map: house and yards and farm and pastures and fields and countryside with gray trees and blue-gray hills and streams and ponds then the river then lakes then ocean then the rest of the blue and green planet spinning slowly in blackness beneath me. (At school we study astronauts and how they danced on the moon and they say someday we'll all be up there but in the meantime they snap up the projection screen and waste time filing us out into the halls on tornado drills.)

Feathers are shed, no longer enough; this body is now an airplane now a rocket ship soaring faster farther than light toward the sun the invisible sun behind that big bright moon blinking between the clouds. We are going there now—who's afraid? _Away, away...._ Toward stars (we are starlings in space) planets comets constellations galaxies other universes lastly to heaven where we'll sing and dance forever to wild guitar music, radio music. Escaped from the world I will try not to love anymore but to forget. A place where we'll never ever die and be buried on earth in earth a trillion billion light-years—because we've flown past death singing _Have you seen the ghost of...._ So hahaha and tralala and goodbye all you below goodbye blackbirds and horses goodbye church and school goodbye brothers and sisters goodbye Mom and Dad goodbye goodbye goodbye forevermore. _Olly olly oxen free...._

Behind the screen door under the yellow porch light Mom calls _Supper! Supper! Tommy hurry up soup's getting cold!_ But no no _no_ I won't. Let the rest. They can't won't fly like me. Let them run to your table. Not me. Mom don't you call me don't you stand there yelling for me your cigarette pinpointing you in the dark when I am up here too far away to see or hear you. Tag and you're it but not me. Your flashlights can't reach me up here. One two three who's afraid not me. Not me. (Think no don't think.) Away away across the wide universe.... From up here it's all just diamonds and marbles careening dizzy through space. Don't call me standing now under the yellow porch light a ladle in your hand because I am really trying not to be afraid up here so high flying toward the sun toward that wild music into heaven into God over the wall and beyond. (Don't say I'm that boy who never combs his hair, who rolls in the straw and dirt and leaves, not that small boy on a farm in the center of the world who will die someday too, die to become a man, but let me be ageless unborn unremembered.) So Mom go back to the table and all your children, don't call _Supper's ready come home!_ across these darkening fields. I am flying so high high high high high high high above you no one will ever see me. And I am never never coming home again.
