 
### Other World

by

### Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition

To Northrop Frye

and to my wife, Sung, and

our son, A.J.

And Orpheus received her, but one term

Was set: he must not, till he passed Avernus,

Turn back his gaze . . .

(Ovid, _The Metamorphosis_ )

Do not stand at my grave and cry

I am not there; I did not die.

(Mary Frye, 1932)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

I. Book of Alona

II. Psychosis

III. Book of Life

IV. Book of Afterlife

V. Fabula

Afterword

Appendices

Appendix 1: Fiber Analysis

Appendix 2: Trinyon Halaka

Appendix 3: Excerpts from The Million Dollar Wound

About Garden Urthark

About the Artist for Other World

The Artwork

Other Titles by Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Acknowledgements

Copyright Notice for Other World

Preface to the First Edition

If I were a scholar researching the find of this book twenty centuries from now, I am sure that I would approach its various parts as I would stories from the Bible or from any culture's mythology. Because the stories are together, they can be viewed from the basic perspective of forming a kind of unity. That is to say, using language from the world-renowned literary critic Northrop Frye, the stories can be seen to stick together like a group of myths because they represent an interconnected body of narrative that covers, if not all, at least a good part, of the kind of revelation that a society is or should be concerned about. _Other World_ is a myth in the making, but its culture is not the culture of the United States or even Western Europe. The culture of _Other World_ is world culture, and its symbols extend just as well to Buddhist enlightenment and Hindu reincarnation as to Christian revelation and salvation.

In his way the hero Moody Santo shares both the poverty and the outcast status of a Buddhist monk or of Jesus or any of his followers as he goes about the world in search of the answer to its mystery. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. Enough to say that _Other World_ addresses the most basic components of myth: to tell a society's views about life, the afterlife, and cosmology.

And as myths are stories about gods who are, in Frye's definition, superior in kind to both other men and their environment, the same might be said for Moody and Norma, the main characters of this story, but only from the necessarily limited view of the uninitiated. De te fabula, or "the story is about you," as Frye says, of what he called the romance form of literature, or secular scripture, descended, or developed, from myth. Science fiction tends to fit neatly into this category. And what we have here is a science-fiction tale, and not a myth, for one very important reason: the story lacks what Frye describes as the kind of social consensus that gives a myth its peculiar authority within a culture: _Other World_ is not a myth, at least not yet. But it does have that realistic element characteristic of myth that can give a story a sense of being truer than fiction.

I am speaking now with some wonder, and astonishment, of the clothing Moody Santo, the hero of this story, was found in after his death. A detailed analysis of the clothing revealed that the fibers it was made of were neither natural nor manufactured. In short, they could not have been said conclusively to have come from or been made on Earth. This fact presented the major stumbling block to my simply dismissing this entire tale as either simply science fiction or an elaborate hoax. I have seen the fiber analysis with my own eyes.

Having met the flesh-and-blood Norma who appears as a central character in the tale, I have come to be a believer that something extraordinary, something far beyond the levels of ordinary experience, has occurred within the pages of this book. Only time will tell whether this something will prove itself by some unforeseen social consensus to be matter for our next mythology.

Tom Greenberg

Senior Editor

Introduction

I do not know of any writer who has faced the opposition I've faced. Henry Miller perhaps. I'm talking about an opposition unlike anything faced by Miller. Society has tried to extinguish me as a person, first by arresting and incarcerating me, second by labeling me a schizophrenic. I've received a death sentence of a kind, for from that moment on, everything I might write, everything I might do, would be called into question, would be suspect, would be considered unreliable. My entire view of reality had been extinguished with a single stroke. It was only one step further to extinguishing me completely as a person, first by medicating me, next, by requiring me to conform in ways that completely negated my entire sense of self. For once so branded, I could no longer find employment, could no longer make a friend. And as a strategy for ridding itself of me as an opponent, an enemy, the State did the next best thing short of actually executing me or imprisoning me for life. And I was an opponent to the State—to any State. I was not an anarchist, but I have a clear idea about the injustices and inequalities perpetrated by the capitalist system or State. And I showed that opposition down to the finest details of interpersonal communication and family and social life. No, I was not a member of the Communist Party or any party. I did not want to see the violent overthrow of this or any State. But I did want to see a redistribution of wealth. I did want to see values change.

I was a nonconformist. I had no girlfriend, though I loved women. I could see that relationships between men and women became polluted by the dirty System. There was no escape. The vows exchanged between man and wife were vows of selfishness and exclusion. Yes, I eventually married. But let me try to explain myself. I am a revolutionary. I have always known this. But the revolution I was in would not come clear to me for many many years and after much suffering. For as time passed, and opposition mounted, my enemies defined themselves, becoming clearer and clearer to me. Branded for life, cut off from all companionship, I realized early on that to keep my true self alive, the self under or beneath, as it were, the medication, the threats, the brute coercion of the psychiatric profession, the brute coercion of the work world, the brute coercion of the publishing industry, I would have to become a guerilla. My own private revolution for the liberation of myself and my family from the State, call it the System, would go on.

Free myself from what? Wasn't the United States a democracy? Weren't the people of this country the envy of the world? I knew I was not free. Business—capitalism—controlled the majority of the waking hours of the life of the citizens of the United States. And the business world was not organized as a democracy but as a despotism, a tyranny. I knew that neither I nor others were free under such a system. Certainly the poor were not and would never be free under such a system. For capitalism needed the poor. Without the poor, capitalism could not survive. Capitalism needed the haves and have nots. It needed a hell just as much as Christianity ever needed one. It needed a place of banishment, of punishment. And this place—poverty—or at higher levels—the kind of ostracism that would lead to poverty—was a highly necessary part of the entire System.

I became more than an outlaw to this System—I became like a Jew with a golden Star of David sewn into the fabric of my character. How could I even explain this to my son? I couldn't. Yes, I had gone underground years before he was born, deep underground, just as thoroughly as any revolutionary who ever lived. Once branded, I had to conform or face imprisonment in a mental asylum for life—I had been so committed. The only way out was conformity. And the conformity was endless. It would stretch on for years, for decades. I would marry, I would work myself into a semirespectable position in society, all while remaining a revolutionary, a guerilla writer, a member of no party, a voice of no alternative system to offer of my own. I would have to hide now in ways I never dreamed I would have to hide. My parents had always cautioned me to conceal my working-class background. Both parents had been deeply ashamed of where they'd come from. I was not to tell anyone. Now I could be stripped at any moment of all respectability as a man and my Scarlet Letter, my Star of David, revealed upon my breast. Even my own son would want to disown me. Even my own son could be crushed. For the shame would be inherited. The crushing stigma would be passed from me to him. How could I ever explain myself to my own son? So had this monstrous society dealt with me, so effectively, so thoroughly, so efficiently. Travel the world and I would receive the same response. I had been deemed insane. I had even been certified. So when I was young and at the height of my power, with my whole life still ahead of me, it had all been taken away. My opposition would mean nothing, not in this life, not in this world, not anywhere or ever.

If I were a guerilla, I would have to find a way to explain myself. For explain myself I must, as Melville once said in another context, or else all this writing might be for naught.

In the 1960s, R.D. Laing explained that a certain type of schizoid personality had a good chance of becoming a schizophrenic. A schizoid personality was a personality that lived within a world of ontological insecurity. People with such a personality could not trust. They could not engage in the give and take of genuine relationships. A person might feel that if his or her true self were known, were revealed, that person would meet with utter humiliating rejection. My parents were this way about their past, their working-class backgrounds. A person with a schizoid personality was only one step away from becoming a schizophrenic, according to Laing. Not all people with this problem became schizophrenics—my parents certainly never did—but my uncle did, my father's brother. He became a schizophrenic as a teenager, spending close to a year in St. Elizabeth's Hospital. However, he recovered and concealed this part of his background until he met with calamity when as a middle-aged man he was fired from a very high-ranking job as an attorney for NASA. I do not know really how he came to such a fate, but I am sure that the stigma that had pursued him through life must have played a part, raging after him like the Furies of ancient Greek myth.

Before he was murdered, my younger brother became a schizophrenic, and a few years later, I became one. The family was cursed. My father had been an alcoholic. He had abused his family and the lowly people who worked for him, the secretaries, the orderlies, the X-ray technicians. I had witnessed this abuse with my own eyes. My father lorded his power as a physician over the people over whom he held sway just as thoroughly as any tyrant has so wielded power in history. I am sure that if my father had had the authority, he would have had people executed, imprisoned, even tortured. He was emotionally abusive in the extreme, always picking his fights very carefully with weaklings: his children, his wife, his orderlies and secretaries, where his power reigned supreme. But my task here is not to write his biography or even to pass judgment on him. It was my opposition to him and every hypocritical thing he stood for that made me the revolutionary I am. Am I a schizophrenic? I don't believe it. No more would any revolutionary believe he or she was a criminal when locked up for carrying on a revolution. Part of my punishment was to be medicated. I could take the medication. The medication would alter my behavior, making conformity less anxiety provoking. But it could not change my ideas. (He who's forced against his will, is of the same opinion still!) What were my ideas?

Why or how had I come to be certified as a schizophrenic? How had my brother and my uncle? Were we all three deviants? I had come to the diagnosis by trying to become a professional writer. It is hard even now for me to untangle the mess that that created. For I refused to play the game. I did not want to work my way up or be initiated. I wanted to be recognized the way I thought every single individual should be recognized. Famed literary critic and scholar Northrop Frye stated it this way: he said that in the romance form of literature, for example, we were all kings and princes, not by birth, but because we were born. I didn't believe I had to write a masterpiece to earn this recognition. I believe that I and every other person on the planet deserved it as a matter of course for being born. So even as I wrote, even as I won degrees and added to my recognizable store of tokens of achievement—a BA, an MA—none of this made me any more deserving than another person. This is what I mean when I say I refused to play the game. And so I refused to attend any graduation ceremony from high school on up to graduate school. I didn't believe people should be praised for achievements of this kind. In my view, a person did not have to earn success. All people deserved it. I sought to impress no woman, I sought to impress no employer, I sought to impress no friend. But that didn't make me less deserving, and I was angry because the world I was in didn't see things that way.

Why should I have had plenty of money while growing up and my father and mother have had next to nothing when _they_ were growing up? Did I want to support and perpetuate the injustices of a System like that? The answer was a resounding No! And so my rebellion started at a very young age, becoming noticeable when I dropped out of an exclusive private school at the age of 16, giving up all the advantages this school was supposed to give me, an honor student and gifted athlete. I would have none of that and I would get no sympathy. Quite the opposite. I found out that society can be very harsh. But that was the beginning of my descent outwardly—ascent inwardly. My first real loss in life had been a personal victory, a victory the society would want to make sure I would never enjoy. For immediately the System began the process of belittling and negating the value, any value, to what I had done. Even the other kids around me at the lower-middle-class school I had transferred to couldn't make heads nor tails of what I'd done. Surely, I must have done something wrong. I can see very clearly now that the process was at work even here. The society might be able to understand a person who had lost certain privileges because of some moral flaw, but a person who had given up such privileges willingly and who had no intention of becoming a priest, say, or perhaps even a politician, such a person could not be understood, even by his peers.

Such a person within the capitalistic framework of dog eat dog, every man for himself, could only be seen as a fool. And I was an even greater fool in my family for saying that if I could help a poor black get into medical school by giving up my chance to go there I would do so. This was radical talk from my perspective. It may have been the beginning of what the society would take to be schizophrenese, the talk of a person who had lost touch with reality.

I brought home no girlfriend. No, I did not feel that I could be a man in the present society, not the kind of man I'd want to be. I surely did not want to be like my father, a have who had been a have not, for he told me that the problems of other people were not my problems; he abrogated all responsibility for the world's ills in face of the reality of his own impoverished and tragic childhood. I did not want to be like him. And at the same time, I did not want to be impoverished myself. I didn't want to give up all and become a priest, a choice that had actually been made by a member of our family, my father's uncle, my great uncle, at whose ordination mass I had participated as a four-year-old.

I hated violence, so I was not about to support or endorse any kind of violent rebellion. And I did not trust groups—any kind of groups. I was an individualist, an extreme individualist of the Henry Thoreau or even Ralph Waldo Emerson stamp. How could that be so or why and how could that make sense? Where did my distrust of all groups come from and what did it mean? Political groups, religious groups, social groups: I distrusted—I disliked—all groups.

Groups were responsible for the persecution of the Jews. If Jews had not been in a group, they would never have been persecuted as a group. I was against all groups. Groups were responsible for World War II. Groups were responsible for the Vietnam War. Groups were responsible for all wars. I was against war. Thinking in terms of groups created groups of blacks and groups of whites. Thinking in terms of groups created groups of children with high grades and high test scores and groups of less-deserving children with lower grades and lower test scores. The whole greedy ugly mess of capitalism was based on the setting of one group against another by the bosses. Yes, Marx had seen this: blacks against whites, workers against bourgeoisie, poor against rich. Where had thinking in terms of groups like this got us? It had got us to the extermination of six million people. It had got us to the deaths of millions more. Classification had its place, perhaps—in science—but here we again come to an observation made by Ronald Laing. A person can either be seen as an object, one to which an entire scientific nomenclature and terminology can be attached, or a person, which is to say, as best as I can sum up such a view, as an experience, a phenomenon, a happening, more like a process or relation than an object, a process, an experience that eludes all simplistic formulations and labels. A person is just such a mixture of relations and interrelations between and among other persons. A person may in one respect be a member of a group, but his or her identity, in all its many faceted complexity, could never be reduced to such a classification.

Why was I then Catholic? I was not a member of any political party. In truth, I was a Catholic the way a schizoid was a Catholic. Being a Catholic helped keep me safe from persecution as one who had been judged to be a schizophrenic. But then, wasn't that what all people who were members of groups could say? No, my true identity was beyond Catholicism. I participated in the religion as a practicing Catholic to protect myself from some of the worst elements of society, which were often to me the ultra conformists—the members of other religions. I could neutralize their distaste, even hatred, for a person such as myself by an appeal to religion. Catholicism was like the crucifix I held up to protect myself from a vampire. My alliance with Catholicism was like Mao's alliance with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. My alliance with Catholicism was like the temporary truce I had called with psychiatry, a science that had done me irreparable harm. I was to psychiatry as the Vietnamese were to the Chinese. The Vietnamese had to submit to the Chinese historically in order to succeed with their own revolution. The Vietnamese hated the Chinese, likening submission to their much more powerful neighbor to that of prostitution. Yes, I had to compromise to survive. I had had to align myself with certain groups. I had had to use these alliances also to advance myself as best I could, but to protect myself at all costs. Yet here is the difference. I knew—I was conscious of involving myself with these groups even as I realized in myself that I was against so doing. In this respect, I was like a healthy person who could analyze his or her own neuroses in terms of Freudian psychotherapy rather than a blind neurotic unable to understand his or her own self-destructive behavior. I was awake and aware, a guerilla writer, a revolutionary such as the world had not heretofore witnessed or seen, yes, perhaps since Christ or Mohammed—with all proportion kept—so it would be better to keep to comparisons with great individuals such as Thoreau, even Bob Dylan. I do not compare myself with such individuals on a like for like basis. After all, as a schizophrenic, I would be expected to equate myself with Christ or Napoleon or whatever. I speak of examples, not identity. My true identity I was already sure about. I am and have always been a revolutionary.

I refused to conform in certain ways and yet I conformed absolutely in keeping with my ideas. If my program contained inconsistencies, so be it. As Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." And so I kept to myself. I moved within a world of rejection so profound, I could have been in a bathysphere five miles under the sea or in a capsule five light years out in space. To live this way was difficult, but far better than being locked up on a mental ward, and I had sworn never to be so locked up again. Hence my conformity: my religious obedience to all psychological and psychiatric directives to take psychotropic medicines and observe psychotherapy appointments.

I took lithium for 20 years. The worst side effect of the medicine was frequent urination. Since I had experienced medicines with far worse side effects, I did not complain about this one, even if it meant I would be peeing perhaps 20 times per day. I had heard that lithium would change the color of my kidneys from red to green. This did not horrify me, but after 20 years of frequent urination, and after passing through the hands of several Pontius Pilate-type psychiatrists, I finally dredged up the bravery to request that my medicine be changed. My NIH psychiatrist at the time complied and I was switched to a new and much more expensive medicine, the side effects of which were unknown to me. Another side effect of lithium had been weight gain. This new medicine did not have such an effect, and I quickly lost weight, getting back down to my naturally slender self without the persistent worry about an expanding waistline that had bothered me with lithium.

But I am not writing a biography here. I am attempting to make a case for my sanity. Although certified as a schizophrenic as a young man, and having had to live under the stigma of that certification now for 28 years, I want to say at this point that I never believed that I was a schizophrenic or that I am one now or will ever be one. As I have tried to set forth here as clearly as I can, I am one who has been in conflict with my society over certain essential matters and this disagreement, this conflict, has brought down on me the full range of punishment reserved for those who enter such a conflict on the level of personal interactions as I have tried to set forth here. I refused to ally myself with groups and at the same time I did not force myself to make friendships or engage in any behavior out of fear. I simply would not be frightened into hurriedly finding a job or expediently forming a friendship. As far as relationships with the opposite sex went, I believed in true love and would settle for nothing less.

This thing about not acting out of fear deserves a little going into. Fearing God was one thing—fearing human beings quite another. I did fear God and I did and still do believe in God, an all-encompassing God who surpasses all religions. I refused to fear human beings, and I could not—I refused—to bow down and kowtow before authority figures—especially bosses, supervisors, and the like in the workplace. No, to me that type of servile, senseless behavior represented what I called kissing ass, and on the most stinky level.

Regretfully, I learned to fear human beings. For I was arrested, locked up, and medicated against my will in such a way as to cause me to actually flip out as I had never done before into a two-year catatonia—I don't know what else to call it. Locked in a raging pain within myself, pain that I experienced while outwardly appearing OK, I believe I must have suffered as intensely as any victim who ever suffered on this Earth.

Yes, I learned to fear human beings, but not as one fears God—as one would fear the Devil. I had not believed much if at all in a Devil prior to this experience. But I would come to acknowledge that real evil of the kind that created the concentration camps had been loosed upon me and could be loosed again. I thus learned to kiss ass, to bow down, and to act out of fear. Once I learned this lesson, I became able to keep a series of dead-end job for many years and to even advance myself, all while I tended to the tunnels within myself of my own private revolution, searching for some manner of escape. I came to believe that the only real manner of escape would be an economic escape. Since I was against groups, I did not care to evangelize a group of my own. I allied myself with the Catholic Church, going to church regularly, observing all the laws of the church and making sure, as Ben Franklin would have advised, that other people could see that I was doing so.

If the times were out of joint for Hamlet, I was out of joint with my times. Because of that I have had to go underground, both within myself and within the outer System of interrelationships made up of family, friends, and the world of work. As a revolutionary in conflict with my times, I have been forced to become a guerilla writer, with the revolution remaining of making myself successful in an economic system I despise, but without recourse to means that I judge to be equally despicable, chief of which would be to identify with some one or another group or, or worse, espouse views I did not believe myself simply to make money as a writer. No, I have kept one place sacrosanct, that of my writing, as the only last remaining fortress and stronghold of truth. God help me if that should mean I will never see the end of my revolution in this lifetime—an all-the-more regrettable fate because such a fate would not only punish me, it would punish my wife and son, not to speak of my extended family and friends.

By labeling me a schizophrenic, this society has found a way to deal with my opposition more cheaply and effectively than locking me up in any jail. I thus remain a prisoner, though free, as this society would say, to live independently of any physical prison. As the poet Richard Lovelace said: "Iron bars do not a prison make." At least I want my son and wife to know that neither they nor I have been born to suffer such imprisonment. I have recorded in _Other World_ the truth of my experience and the whole truth and nothing but the truth of this experience as well as I have been able to find analogies for it in the literary forms available.

Just what is madness? An inability to function in society? The experience of hallucinations? Delusional thinking? Aberrant behavior? There does not seem to be any one answer. The definition could be any or all of these answers or a combination of them.

The ancient Greeks presented madness as a state of heightened awareness in which special gifts of prophecy or intuition accompanied some of the most heinous crimes a person could commit, including murder and cannibalism, often of infants. Dionysus, the god of wine, inspired madness in those who opposed his worship. So in _The Bacchae_ , King Pentheus goes mad—his own mother tears him to pieces in a punishment brought on by his failure to believe in Dionysus.

There were still plenty of terrifically violent plays that mixed madness and savagery during Shakespeare's time—such as Shakespeare's own _Titus Andronicus_ and John Webster's _The Duchess of Malfi_ —but the prophetic nature of madness would seem to have begun an ascent away from such savagery, at least in part, in more psychologically oriented plays like _Hamlet_ and _King Lear_. By the time of 19th century American literature, Melville's Ahab, the mad quester after Moby Dick, would tower up as a "mighty pageant creature formed for noble tragedies," while the little known and less read book by Mark Twain, _Joan of Arc_ , presented the unbelievable exploits of the peasant girl who almost single handedly liberated France from England.

Yes, here we have in the mysterious story of Joan of Arc a puzzling question: how was Joan able to accomplish the miraculous feats of clairvoyance and prophecy by which she won the allegiance of the entire French army if there were not something more to her visions (hallucinations?) than many today might suspect?

Keeping such ruminations in the back of our mind, we may now proceed to a discussion of the books that directly had an impact on _Other World_ , realizing that a certain shift in perspective may be all that can help us distinguish an act of sanity from one of madness.

The tradition of madness in literature in America begins with J.D. Salinger's _Catcher in the Rye_ (1951) and can be traced right through J.R. Salamanca's _Lilith_ (1961), Ken Kesey's _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ (1962), Joanne Greenberg's _I Never Promised You a Rose Garden_ (1964), Norman Mailer's _American Dream_ , and William Styron's _Sophie's Choice_ (1976). But it also includes films like _Splendor in the Grass_ (1961) and _A Beautiful Mind_ (2001). _The Deer Hunter_ (1978) is notable in the compassionate treatment, a first, it gives to the mental breakdown of Stevie, a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Although the reality is that people touched by madness are generally shunned in America and throughout the world—like modern lepers of the 20th and 21st centuries—they still rise in art to fulfill at least a part of their prophetic function.

_Other World_ carries on this tradition, but unlike Greenberg's _Rose Garden_ , which has been described as transparently autobiographical, _Other World_ is clearly a fiction, one textured with layer on layer of detail from actual experience, but a fiction nevertheless.

What most distinguishes Greenberg's book and my book from the others in this tradition is the realistic treatment given to the altered states of consciousness experienced by a character who is psychotic. Other authors are not able to venture into this area, with the exception perhaps of Norman Mailer, whose general province is an exploration of the psychopathic personality.

The epic scope of _Other World_ is apparent in the narrative complexity and range of thematic development, imitating in its way the pattern of a romance that contains a tragedy. Just as the Christian epic from Genesis to Apocalypse contains Christ's death and resurrection, so the epic story of Moody Santo's descent from sanity into insanity and back to sanity contains Moody's own death and resurrection.

Not since Shakespeare's time, where characters thought to be dead miraculously reappear as living, has the theme of death and resurrection received so undisplaced and therefore radical a treatment in a work of fiction.

Unlike Shakespeare's Imogen in _Cymbeline_ , who appears to have been murdered and who then, assuming the identity of a boy, suffers a kind of second death after drinking an elixir, Moody Santo actually does die in _Other World_ , only to return to his true love in this world when he arrives back from the dead to a life of quiet seclusion in what Northrop Frye would have described as the penseroso (thoughtful) resolution to this tale.

Is madness, then, as R.D. Laing suggested in books like _The Divided Self_ and _The Politics of Experience_ , a legitimate state of experience with much to offer the individual and the world? Is it possibly even a higher state, as the Greeks suggested, which we now strive with all our might to thwart and throttle with all the vehement enthusiasm of a modern Inquisition?

Literary genius has occupied an important relation to madness from the ancient world to this one. But not only the poet has been what might be called productively mad. Hebrew prophets from Moses to Jeremiah and after, inspired by God to everything from murder to the most ill-advised conflict with authority, have been so as part of a tradition that may go all the way back to that strange chimerical being, called the Sorcerer, who, etched on the wall of Les Trois Frères cave in France as far back as 10 to 20 thousand years ago, disquiets us with the knowledge that we do not really understand the origins of myth and religion as well as we might like.

Christ himself and Paul after him, also, endured accusations of madness. "And many of them said, He [Christ] hath a devil and is mad; why hear ye him?" (John 10:20). Demonic possession and madness went hand in hand in Christ's time and were still going strong in Joan of Arc's time and later in the Salem witch trials. Of Paul it was said, "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad" (Acts 26:24).

You be the judge. A story is set before you: what have you to learn from it? And would you rather that the story had never been told? Or do you find yourself drawn, fascinated, to a narrator who would hope to etch his character upon the membranes of your consciousness for the next ten thousand years?

From the half-deer sorcerer of Les Trois Frères to the fawn-clad Dionysus of Greek tragedy to _The Deer Hunter_ of modern cinema, the god of madness appears and reappears. Now as the hero of _Other World_ , he looks out at you from pages that offer shelter, not from wild beasts and cold, but from perhaps the greatest danger the precious identity of each individual has to face, the fate of a Moody Santo, a cursed, reviled, and yet exalted character who may be said to identify with that prophet whose own disgrace, a crucifixion, many people in a good portion of the world still believe to have led to the redemption of history in a resurrection that promises to make us all kings of kings.

Open your mind to what Melville called "the sane madness of vital truth." De te fabula, or as Northrop Frye translated from the Latin: the story is about you. And as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Break free. Find the madness that has freed the world from every tyranny. There is death but there is also resurrection in _Other World_.

Moody Santo

I. Book of Alona

2/14/84

O bold and soaring Voice of all Time,

Thunder your Wrath through my beseeching Soul,

Scorch from the bluest heavenly Sublime,

And strike the Truth through Me, strike, strike, unroll,

Unroll in Waves on Waves of crashing light

Oceans of greatest Poets' Desires,

Flood the World through Me and spend all my Might,

Surge through Me, surge, with lavalike Fires,

As those of Volcanoes that stream and flare

With savage, unearthly, titanic Blasts

That shake the whole Earth in the trembling Air

Till such Violence reigns that Nothing outlasts:

For I am so compelled for Love of You

To recreate the Universe anew.

Dear Sir/Madam:

I'm going to be sending you poems as I write them. The poems will define a psychological journey. I will not try to explain them as Dante once tried to explain the division of his poems into parts in the _Vita Nuova_.

I hope you will find the poems acceptable for publication. Thank you.

5/3/84

Dear Delbert,

To write in a 19th-century style were to capture an innocence that heroism live as in Homeric times, though we but communicate by letter: if you think my writing letters to you will help you with your English more than calling you by TTY, I will do it. C'mon, buddy, you can pass English. It can't be that hard at Gallaudet. Let me explain this much: my studies in Melville may have kept me from the drawing room, but I am not a foreigner to the desire for female companionship. I cannot say that whenever it is a cold and drizzly November in my soul I take to the ship; I open _Moby-Dick_. Such a book is a lens for the transparent eyeball of my mind.

It seems almost as if I were to notice the weather for the first time. I am writing from the tree-lined way along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I came here because the trees are sailing ships upon the ocean of the sky. Their branches arch like rigging over the golden paths on either side of the reflecting pool and I sit and write in my ship's log upon the deck of a ship. Lincoln's monument is an enchanted island behind which the sun descends in all its fury, careening in a buttery globe of fire down through the wreckage of my universe. Birds carol sweetly of apocalypse, crickets chatter of the end of the world. If only I had not tried to be so much like Dad. Only the drone of planes along the Potomac reminds me that I dream.

I wanted to work a temporary job until I found just the right job and I've done that. I've found such a job. Let me tell you about it. It's a job in the National Press Building as a secretary to a journalist. I have met the man. He is brusque and ill-mannered. But I suppose that is a mark in trade for all journalists. They must be so subservient to get information that they rule their own little worlds like proper tyrants, am I not right? Yes, you may laugh, I know, because I never read the newspapers, but my job is so simple as to be laughable. I could hardly keep a straight face while being given the instructions for my duties by the hag whose place I'm taking.

I worked so hard to get my degree. Now what have I got to show for it? It was only an MA, yes, but Ishmael, with much lesser credentials, asked the same question: why was it that fate put him down for such a hard lot as a common seaman on a whaling voyage when others were put down for easier fates in light-hearted farces, romances, or comedies? I'll never know the answer any more than Ishmael did, unless I am the first to discover that fate is in the hands of invisible aliens. What I got was a degree. Now I suppose it will be my goal to suffer through an irrational process of initiation until I am ready to give my undying support to some supervisor. Semper fi! Can't we just call this quits? I should try to publish my thesis—if I could only gain some recognition—if I were only more ambitious.

Stay where you are. The future may not be mapped out for you. But I hope you will experience nothing of this, this vast uncharted universe. We did not have the same father. You had no reason to rebel as I did. By the time you came along, Dad was different. He burned himself out on me—the drinking and the bad moods. He was a tyrant at home, dearly beloved at his precious job. If I could just take the people at that job and splash them with urine every time they spoke his name, even that would not be good enough for them, the nest of vipers. How we suffered day and night under the tyranny of Dad's iron-fisted rule! You know how he made Mom's arm black and blue that one time from punching her. But his consistently foul moods, his unceasing negativity, his haranguing criticism—the dearly beloved doctor at his never-quite-acceptable home with his inadequate wife and children. Oh, he was so funny! Such a man with a joke. We were the stooges, like zombies in a zoo, for the humor he bounced off us.

5/4/84

Dear Maria,

I got a new job! It's in DC, working for a journalist.

Before work this morning I sat at the base of the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in the bright morning light. The trees were scintillant with light, leafy, full, and green, casting great green shadows upon the grass. All around were the most beautiful flowers of red and white with leafy stems. A light breeze rocked the tree tops and the rays of the morning light scattered into ethereal beams, dancing down through the quavering leaves. It was so peaceful. Around the base of the statue's platform are four sentries, one at each corner, all calm and placid as I was in the lovely warmth of the light and shade. The sky was brilliant blue, the sun, blazing gold, and the clouds, baby white. In wispy drifts, they floated lazily, gently, heavenly, through the golden-tinseled blue, splashing the statues of the sentinels green in dappled light.

Halfway up the base of Sherman's statue is the statue of a woman whose hair flows down her back in disarray. Her eyes are hollow, dark, as she stands over a dead soldier, rending her clothes from her breast. The beauty of the park contrasted with the tragedy of the woman's grief.

The woman whose place I'm taking at my new job was mad, a middle-aged woman with a haggard gaunt face like the torn seat cushion of a junked auto. All her expressions, all her movements, all her words, showed the distortion of some mental disturbance. The woman was hysterical.

Coming as I was from the tranquil beauty of the park, I was all the more unprepared for the odd incongruity of her behavior. I mean, she was upset. She was obviously being fired, or something like it. I never could figure it out.

If she were being fired, she wouldn't have stayed around to give me instructions. She would have just left.

At one point, I had a notebook open on my lap and she jabbed her finger down on the notebook three times, right on my groin, to make some crazy point. I was angry. Then she called something or other into the next room to Mr. Milstein and he shouted back, "I'm not going to get into a shouting match with you!"

The whole thing was very unnerving. I almost shuddered when she finally went out the door.

I have to type up two four-page, double-spaced articles a week and attend to the dribs and drabs of other secretarial duties. Man, after all the work I did in graduate school, I simply can't believe a job like this could exist.

5/12/84

Dear Maria,

I've been filled with the feeling that I could hug the entire globe to me until I burst it with a million kisses: how's that for a feeling? I tell you, I'm like an infant entering the world for the first time. While sitting in this office alone here, it is as if I were sitting in a womb. There are three small rooms, and I am in the center one. Mr. Milstein is on a trip to the Far East. I can sit here alone and smile like Buddha.

5/13/84

Dear Maria,

After work I walk home through Lafayette Square. (I don't have far to go home.) Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, Von Steuben—I wrote all the names down—these are statues of 18th-century heroes, one on each corner of the square.

In the center of the square, rearing back on a charger, his hat in the air, Andrew Jackson, is a 19th-century despoiler of the previous century's decorum.

Autumn chases Spring like the squirrels that chase each other madly from tree to tree. At sunset Spring becomes a temptress whose smile is as alluring as an Indian maiden's glimpsed by some opening deep within her native forest.

Tourists gawk and snap pictures.

What is there about a monument that seems to be so evocative of death? If I were articulate enough, I would try to put this in better words. We have symmetry and order in the place of death. We are not lost. And so the symmetry and order in the beauty of a woman can evoke death. For this reason, a beautiful woman inspires awe.

5/14/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

I see You as a caged Lion might see

The mocking Keeper whose sight is torment,

Who can laugh as long as he guards the Key

To stifled Action that will be dormant

Unless the Day come that the Mocker pause,

In Remorse hoping then to be jolly,

And coming too near to the thrilling Claws

Is torn from the World, rent in his Folly.

Thus with this Pen, I shall so put You down

That the Future shall see You as I must,

And thus You shall have all the World's Renown

In lines that will stand though I turn to Dust.

What I am powerless to flee as I live,

I pray that Time may vanquish and forgive.

5/17/84

Dear Maria,

When Mr. Milstein returned from the Far East, the cigarette smoke billowed from his office as from a crowded bar in a Chinese seaport. My eyes watered, my nose ran, my chest rattled like a man's with pleurisy.

"Oh, yeah," he chuckled to some confidante over the phone. "We were at one of those bathhouses, a girl on each knee . . ."

This Milstein was a married man with two kids, understand.

"Oh, you mean that girl? Yeah, I've been over there trying to get her for some time now." I did not like having to overhear this kind of conversation. "Yeah," he said, "I've done everything: offered to show her around, tried to be friends, everything."

This first weekend, I went down to the canal to take a walk, returning to the beautiful locks with their crumbling, scenic lock houses. The canal has a beauty all its own, enough to awaken the most powerful feelings in me.

I follow the path along one side of the canal, which winds around in brown and green twists through lush leafy vegetation. Have you ever seen how the trees form a mottled arch under the blue-white sky? The canal reflects the overhanging boughs of the trees in light and darkness, the water flashing brilliance from the bright sun and all the air fragrant with honeysuckle and bark and leaves and vines, the air humid and the entire scene misted over in a woody haze. The river peeps through the green thick woods, making a constant rushing sound over rocks and falls, becoming visible, broad and blue and sparkling in the light.

While I was watching some children play, I imagined having a son. Do you want to have children? (I guess you do.)

I met a very handsome boy. He was Eurasian. He had long brown fine hair, dark brown eyes, and a cheerfulness that was inspiring to see. He didn't look quite Asian, he didn't look quite Caucasian. He looked like he could unravel the intricacies of the universe with a few portentous words.

"Where are you from?" I asked a lovely woman who was plainly his mother. My eyes went to her graceful feet in sandals and a baby she wheeled in a stroller.

"Korea," she said.

"Wow." That was one country not on Milstein's itinerary. "Far away."

"Yes," she said. I wondered where her husband was. There was something so comfortable to me about the idea of forming a couple. Married people had that, a sense of familiarity and comfort. I wanted it. It reminded me of how a gym full of high school students looked on the night of a basketball game. The kids in flannel shirts and jeans seemed dressed in their pajamas and at home before going to bed. That is the way they seemed to me and so I wanted to join them. I had transferred out of an exclusive private school to be able to go to school with blacks and then, quickly finding that the races were completely polarized at this new school, transferred again from there to the public high school for my area. I knew I had made a mistake. The whole year at the racially mixed school had been a total bummer. I got out just as fast as I could. But by the time I got to the public high school for my area—Whitman—I was totally out of place. I had already transferred high schools twice. I had been held back a year because of my age when I first went to Landon, the exclusive private school, so I was a year behind the kids I had known when I first started out in public school. All my friends had graduated the year before. It was a mess. I had made these changes to learn more, not because of bad grades or bad behavior, and I think I expected to receive some reward, at least the love of a woman.

Somehow this experience was going to pay off for me. I did something, I went somewhere that no one had ever gone before. For a whaling ship was my Harvard and my Yale, as Melville said.

5/18/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

The Glass sweeps the Light at the Window Panes

As the Bow the Strings of a Violin

In the Symphony of the Morning's Strains,

Bright Beams rising to one glorious Din.

Every mellifluous Instrument plays,

Tuning the quavering Flood of Fire,

Trilling with liquid diaphanous Rays,

Making one Melody of Desire.

For Days and Days alone I sought Love here,

In Silence searching through the shattered Night,

Till this Room became a Temple of Fear,

And I the Satan of some savage rite.

Thus knowing Darkness I came to know Day,

Leaving the Path that had led me astray.

5/18/84

Dear Maria,

I am trying to make myself into a scholar like Northrop Frye, the author of _Anatomy of Criticism_. To do this, I am reading the Bible. But I am not exactly reading it as a Christian would. I'm reading it as a literary critic, with an eye toward recurrent story patterns, or as Frye might say, recurrent patterns of symbolism and imagery. I bought this Oxford Study Bible at the George Washington University bookstore; it happens to be a Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version. Curious: my father is a doctor. I give up going to med school, deciding to become a literary critic, and find myself poring over a book with a medical title: _Anatomy_. Then I pick up a brand new edition of the Bible in a big pile at the book store and find that it's an edition by the very faith I was raised in. How do you like that for correspondence between mental and physical reality?

Frye often praises Edmund Spenser as being perhaps the greatest romance writer in the English language. I just don't see it. I find Spenser almost unreadable. His storytelling style is so awkward and cumbersome. But I keep a copy of Spenser's _Poetical Works_ at my desk at work and in the long intervals when Milstein is away, I try and force-feed it to myself. It's like eating plain oatmeal without sugar. Very nourishing, I'm sure. But when I come to the end of a page, I find I have no idea what I've just read.

The Bible is somewhat different. I am able to read it with probably much less reverence than I should. As for seeing patterns, just take this one, for example. Church doctrine says that God the Father conceives a child through a married woman. Although the relationship between God and Mary is absolutely never defined this way, if one stands back and looks simply at the pattern, one sees adultery. The same pattern is present in the union between David and Bathsheba. Christ lives till manhood, then dies a tragic death. The child born of David and Bathsheba's union also tragically dies. Now the whole idea of love for a married woman is behind the entire movement of medieval chivalry, from the love of Lancelot for Guinevere to that of Dante for Beatrice–neither Beatrice nor Dante was married when Dante first set eyes on Beatrice at the age of nine and fell in love with her, but the two were eventually married to other individuals before Beatrice died. The pattern is still there, or at least the elements of it are, however differently arranged.

A secular humanist would say, so what? He or she would be uninterested, wanting to forget the Bible altogether. A religious Christian would say: you blaspheme! None of what you say is part of what we understand when we read the Bible. Let me tell you, I don't know why I got interested in Frye. He himself has been glorified with countless honors, widely published, and world renowned, while I have suffered intense opposition from trying to put his views into practice. My thesis almost didn't pass. Not because it wasn't well written but because it was written too well. I'm going to publish that thesis one day. It will not matter that the Melville scholarship will be out of date: ninety-eight percent of the thesis is the application of Frye's theory of criticism to Melville, namely, _Moby-Dick_ and that will never get old.

5/21/84

Dear Delbert,

Journalists are cool. I always wanted to be a journalist. I just never liked the idea of what journalists had to write about. I just wasn't interested in current events. Nothing short of a revolution would interest me. One day, though, I will be a scholar who will wear a khaki summer suit and go to a luncheon at the National Press Club.

For now, let me tell you a little about the National Press Building. I'm not sure when the building was built, but it's old. It must at least go back to the 1930s. The hallways run rectangularly around a central opening that provides light, if nothing else, to inner offices. Except for certain times during the day: 10:00 when reporters arrive for work and 3:00 when they come back to file their deadlines, the halls are empty and quiet. I am in one of the inner offices on the twelfth floor, just below the National Press Club. Sometimes I go up there to buy a delicious cup of soup from an old black woman in a white chef's outfit who sits in a dirty hallway by a shiny set of tureens. She ladles the soup out quietly, cream of crab, cream of broccoli, steaming hot. She never says a word, just ladles the soup out so you can hear it gurgling into your cup, little metallic clinks coming from the ring of her ladle against the tureens.

5/22/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

I cannot speak now of Love won or lost,

Nor can I stammer of what might have been,

I am leaving a Place my Soul has crossed

On the Path I have followed with this Pen.

My Room is almost empty; soon I'll go,

And soon take with me all my tragic Things

Like the Demon who drove me to and fro

Then fled with a Woman's shape on his Wings.

Where is my Love, in what Book, on what Page?

Where is my Love? So the Walls answer me:

If I could break these Words to Tears of Rage,

I would cry them for all Eternity.

Thus like a Ghost who wanders from his Grave,

I rose from the Dead in an ancient Cave.

PS

I know I said I wouldn't explain my poems. But do you see how I'm using myth symbols to arrive at a meaning? The idea in this poem is one of symbolic death and rebirth and so I use the image of Christ's resurrection in a cave or tomb to describe a parallel transition in my own life as if from one level of reality to a completely different one. Religious Christians would argue that the story of Christ is not a myth, but it is a myth in Frye's sense of the term, that is, a story about a god, which, like it or not, shares characteristics with other stories about gods in this and other cultures. Thank you.

5/23/84

Dear Delbert,

I moved. I found a place one block from where I used to be. The new place is air-conditioned. The address is Massachusetts Avenue, but my apartment overlooks 16th Street. If you stick your head out the window, you can see an equestrian statue of General Scott at the center of Scott Circle. That's looking north. Across from the circle, on its western side is a statue of Daniel Webster. If you look south, down 16th Street, you can see the White House.

The room I had before was dreadful beyond imagining but was all I could afford as a student. The walls were so thin you could hear conversations in the adjoining apartment. (I was at the end of a hall.) I had an efficiency, like now, but there was no air-conditioning in my former place and it would get hot as a brick kiln in there, even with a fan. And the cucarachas! My god. Every time I turned on a light they would scatter like lightning! This place has them, too. Oh, well.

I put my desk by the window. It's a big window, runs all the way across the room. A tunnel under Scott Circle opens just below my room, so that it seems to amplify the sound of cars and trucks that roar through it, but there isn't much traffic at night.

I rented a van for $19 and moved myself in a matter of hours. All I had to move was my bed, my bookcases, and my desk. I just moved one block, from 1301 15th Street to 1500 Mass. Avenue. The AC feels great. I have a big bathroom, too.

5/24/84

Dear Maria,

Every human being seems an ethereal creature, as if I were living now in heaven among angels. Once you stop asking why humanity is not different than it is, the full mystery that it is the way it is and not something different, especially when you consider the myriad of possibilities for development which natural selection seems to afford, this mystery can almost make you forget the common assumptions, so natural in everyday thought and communication, that separate us from the gods we worship. Somehow we share in creation. Somehow we are Atlas holding up the world with a mental projection.

Explain to me the infinite distances of space? Are they real or do they just look real? We see a picture of the Earth. The Earth is round. But is it really round? It may be no more round than it was flat. It looks round in a picture. It once looked flat to the naked eye. The dream of heaven is more real than a picture of the globe. A heaven on Earth, when Earth is no longer just a place any more than America continues to be a specific country, is what we're moving toward, as if we know it from having been there once before, if only in imagination. If we could only open a membrane in our mind, we might awaken from the dead of these dimensions.

5/25/84

Dear Maria,

I started to notice some activity down the hall from my office at work. It seems that the Washington Bureau of the _Baltimore Herald_ is expanding into a few vacant offices next door to me. Bookshelves, filing cabinets, and the like were being moved all day. I could hear everything from my office because I keep the door open.

Milstein did not come in at all today. What an afternoon. While the people were moving down the hall, making lazy dreamy sounds of a summer afternoon, I was in my office reading _The Faerie Queene_ , at least my eyes were going over the words in the stanzas from line to line. Let's see, the Red Cross Knight and Una get lost and wander into Errour's den, then, oh, god, did I really read this? The Red Cross Knight slays a dragon and then a Sorcerer deceives the Red Cross Knight and separates him from Una. Oh, Jesus. OK, this is the greatest romance written in the English language. OK, I got it. Yes, I understand. So where is Una? I mean, where is she in my life? Hawthorne named his daughter Una. She's buried with him up in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, up in Concord. I wonder if she ever married and had kids. I don't think she did. By the time people get to writing big books or making great discoveries, they seem to be at the end of their lines of generation. Is that true? I don't want to be like that. For me, family is more important than work. I think Spenser had five kids—I got to say I respect that much about him.

6/10/84

Dear Maria,

They finished moving into the new offices down the hall from me this afternoon. Now things are quiet as before. Milstein was in the office today, so I was busy making him coffee, getting things Xeroxed, stapling pages together, and typing business letters.

When I closed up at 5:00, I passed by my new neighbors and glanced in at their office. The door was open. What they have in there is a library, with bookshelves on the walls and big grey metal filing cabinets back to back in the center of the room. I think there are two rooms. There was no one in there, just a white knit sweater hanging on the back of a chair, a woman's sweater, a button sweater.

Perhaps because I never see anyone in the halls, except for a reporter now and then, I welcomed the sight of that sweater almost as if I had been a soldier encountering the raised white flag of an enemy. The territory being staked out was not that of more hard-boiled reporters, no, the slightest draft in the air reminded me of a breeze with a hint of some vague, hardly perceptible wisp of lilies or rose of Sharon, like a scent unlocked from a flower pressed between the pages of a Bible and long forgotten.

6/11/84

Dear Maria,

Today as I was walking past the _Baltimore Herald_ auxiliary office next to mine, I'll call it the library, I chanced to see a woman who appeared to my wandering, lonely eyes as fair as Abraham's wife Sarah or Isaac's wife Rebekah or Jacob's wife Rachel. The library was a cave and she an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Her hair was lustrous and black, falling in a swirl over one shoulder. Dark and comely, with luminous skin that glowed with all the vibrancy of an almost perceptible aura, she read out of a book in a burst of light from a desk lamp that quavered near her, providing as much a burst of light as a perturbation of light particles in a mist as diffuse as a spray of perfume on her neck.

A wrench gripped a bolt within my bowels and with a turn tightened a sense of recognition in me with a shock that such intimidating beauty could be mine. Surely this woman is married. She is older than I. Did I see a wedding ring? Some tiny reflection seemed to flash toward me like a beacon from a distant shore along with the bounce of light off wire frame glasses that gave her saintly face a mortality familiar enough to be approachable.

I stopped awkwardly by her door, halted by invisible forces. She glanced up from her book, her eyes like deep pools with a flicker of starlight at the bottom of a well.

"I'm going through old books," she said. "Here's an old Bible. You want it? It's a King James version. We're weeding out our collection."

"Sure, I'll take it," I said. I had an Oxford Study Bible but I didn't have a King James version. She reached over and with her left hand lifted up a black book with an imitation leather cover and dull gold lettering. Her wedding band was a belt of chastity around an exotic dancer's waist, her engagement ring a diadem in the headdress of a Semitic goddess of fertility and love. I reached out with two hands to take the holy book from her, reveling in the instant tickle of our flesh under the serene composure of her smile.

"Thank you," I said. I felt holy and blessed, innocent as Adam within a paradise with Eve. "That's very nice of you. What's your name?"

"Alona," she said.

"Not too alone, I hope." We laughed.

I carried the book home with me. It was a red letter edition, with all the words of Jesus printed in red ink. For me, the red ink is extremely distracting, but I was interested in the Old Testament, anyway. While sitting up in my bed before going to sleep, I had several questions in my mind as I thumbed through the thin, delicate pages of the musty tome Alona had given me: didn't Abraham and Jacob each have at least two wives? Abraham had Hagar and Sarah; Jacob had Leah and Rachel. Both men also had concubines and Hagar seems actually to have been a concubine who was also a wife of lower status. David and Solomon were both known to have concubines. And what about David's wife Bathsheba? She was a married woman David apparently saw from the roof of his palace one day while she, presumably naked, was taking a bath. David was so aroused by her beauty he had her summoned to his palace where they had sex. If this wasn't bad enough, David then arranged for Bathsheba's husband to be slain in battle, thus making one of the most famous heroes in both Jewish and Christian traditions guilty of both adultery and murder.

I know you'll say that Christianity overthrows all this sexual profligacy with its own strict adherence to monogamy but Alona looks Jewish to me. She would not be held by Christian laws. Polygamy would be in her blood as much as extramarital sexuality. Of course, she may be an Arab and I know next to nothing about Islam. Some Italians look Jewish. She might be a Lebanese Christian.

6/12/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

Like Columbus waking at purple dawn

From paradisal lands of joyful sleep,

Lost to memory, from night's garden gone,

To take his way o'er the oracular deep,

I wake to seek you on a sea of dreams

Where thought steepens and wheels and sweeps to soar,

And my mind fights through such conflicting streams

That I almost drown from our Love's still shore;

But if the waves end through the land be far,

Or more terrible storms yet make them swell,

I come to eternity where you are,

Though I strive against both heaven and hell:

For you are the new world I'll kneel to kiss

When I close my eyes 'cross the mind's abyss.

6/18/84

Dear Delbert,

You are right: work in a book store is low paying and unappreciated. I guess that's because it's supposed to be so enjoyable. No one wants to pay you for doing what you like to do. It's a good job for you while you're still in school, though. Stay with it. It's a hearing world kind of job. It'll help you when you get out of school.

6/27/84

Dear Maria,

Alona's husband was away on business so she asked me to go to a play with her at Arena Stage. We have been saying hi to each other in the halls for the past two weeks. She had these tickets. I said yes. So on Saturday, yesterday, we went to see _The Three Penny Opera_. Alona wore an off-white dress with a string of pearls. I assume they were real pearls, though I really wouldn't know. I carried my jacket over my arm because of the heat, then put it on when I got inside. I felt right at home with Alona, not awkward at all, as I might have felt with a single girl, were she so beautiful. Her sultry eyes seemed to smoke with wood fires and I sat beside her as one lost in a forest.

"I used to come here with my parents," I said as we waited for the play to start.

"Do you miss your mommy and daddy?"

There was nothing I could say to this but force a light, good-natured laugh.

"Where are you from?" I asked, turning the focus onto her. Her lustrous, black hair swept back from the opalescent rondure of her brow like a forest on a mountain's side and her teeth gleamed like shorn sheep that roamed in the meadow below it.

"You should let yourself be seduced." So saying, she hitched one knee upon the other.

My eyes went to her upper knee, adjusting to its supple contours and rich patina as her stockings rustled beneath the petticoat of her skirt.

The house darkened and the lights came up on the stage. I did not take time to sort out my feelings. She was married, beautiful, and rich. That was like saying she had license to do anything she pleased, with me or anyone else. I watched as an impoverished streetwalker, who was plainly not crippled, strapped himself to a board on rollers, bending his legs under him and covering them up with a blanket, so he could beg as if his legs were cut off at the knee. He sang in a voice that trembled with loathing—for himself and the world; apocalypse being near, he would soon be an avenging angel upon the sins of men.

I was suddenly uncomfortable with Alona. I was angry. Even the suggestion that I take up with a married woman was anathema to me. Women were seduced, not men. She had changed a friendly, cordial relation into something ugly and the play now transpired before my uncomprehending eyes like a random gathering of people on a street corner observed through a plate glass window.

The drama in my head obfuscated the one on stage.

"What does your husband do?" I had asked her.

"He's an international businessman."

"Really, who does he work for?"

"He owns his own business."

"Wow, to be so successful so young," I had said with false admiration and a definite streak of jealousy.

"He's 27 years older than I am."

I was afraid to ask her how old she was. She told me anyway.

"I'm 30," she said.

"What kind of business is your husband in?"

"Entertainment Lighting."

"You mean, like shows, like this play, like television, movies."

"All of that."

An Elysian cloud had been on her, like an emanation of fragrant energy that sweetly radiated from all around her and burnished me like a vessel of gold.

"Where is your husband now?"

"In Europe."

As we sat and watched the play, I could feel the slightest pressure of her arm against my arm. Could she feel it too? It was very sweet. I sensed a wild, vibrant thrill all the way through my clothes, imagining the flood of hormones that must have coursed through my veins in response to the seemingly innocent pressure.

There was nothing innocent about this woman.

Some people are that way. They are not innocent, no matter how old they are. They come equipped with a perspective that sees only boundaries. They do not see the limitless. If they are creators, they work within established forms. They can do what has been done before and do it well, but they cannot create like God out of nothingness. They cannot be adventurers on the uncharted frontiers of the imagination.

I suppose I was to Alona something of a fool, someone who could not assess my own value in terms that would elevate me to a much higher position of status in the world.

As we chatted on the way home, I felt blessed by her nearness, overwhelmed by the hypnotic scent of her perfume, the immaculate tidiness of her car, the studious contradiction of her face in glasses.

The change of traffic lights seemed to speak a new language, carrying a message from her husband far away.

"Tell me more about your husband's business," I said. "What kind of lighting does he do?"

"He does it all, everything."

The gleam of red from a stoplight held us on Independence Avenue by the museums.

"Does he do the lighting for Arena Stage?"

"No," she shook her head: "Conventions, nightclubs, rock concerts."

We were about to go down into the spooky area along the river, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, but she turned right on 15th Street.

"He recently did a big art show in Liepzig."

Rain began to sprinkle onto the windshield, making tiny specs like spray from the hull of a boat. She started her windshield wipers.

"How long have you been married?"

"Seven years."

"You must have married young."

She nodded her head.

"No children?"

"No."

A young, wealthy, and beautiful woman like her had to have more of a reason for working than that she was bored. She had no children. That somewhat explained her.

"Did you want children?"

"Yes," she replied.

She must have married right out of college. He would have been 50.

"Was your husband married before?" I realized I was asking a lot of questions, but she didn't seem to mind. She was busy with driving.

"No."

I tried to imagine what kind of man could go without marrying till that age and then come up with a wizened catch like her.

"Did he have any children?"

"No, he was a very careful playboy."

We both laughed.

6/27/84

Dear Delbert,

After I got home Saturday night I stripped myself of my jacket and tie and then lay down on my bed with all my other clothes on and listened to the rain patter against my room-length window and make rivulets on the panes, as if the water, stained by the streetlights, were pressed between the slides of a microscope and quivering with amazing organisms.

I had been to see a play with a married woman, that librarian at work. (I told you about her on the TTY.) I tried to sort out my feelings, looking like a scientist for some cure, a cure for my own hypersexuality. I am celibate. Yeah, you're next! After just lying on my bed like that for awhile I got up and wrote a long letter to Maria Krentzler. She's an Italian woman I met in college. Her husband is Jewish. Ciao, baby!

7/2/84

Dear Maria,

What if I said this to you: If I had met Alona at a masked ball and we had waltzed in each other's arms to the pulse and swell of some proud 18th century orchestra, I would have loved her; or if I had met her at a country fair and we had walked arm in arm under a country canopy trimmed with golden flags and silver streamers, I would have loved her; I would have loved her if we had ridden in a golden coach drawn by milk white horses through lush green fields with sheep and cattle grazing philosophically in their pastures. If I talked that way, I think you would conclude I'd gone soft in the head. That is not the normal way for viewing the beginning of a relationship. Through what might be called a flight of fantasy rather than a so-called realistic appraisal of reality, I open my imagination and myself, not to reality, but creation.

My mind is drunk and reeling. Yet I have taken no drug. I am in full control of my senses. Now people have affairs, but an affair is not considered the norm. It's acknowledged but still condemned. If you go by what people say is normal, then at various times in history, you would have wanted to kill Jews or enslave blacks. Those were once norms, so it would have been considered psychologically healthy to agree with them. To the present ways of thinking, a person would have been considered sick to oppose slavery, especially if he got so upset about it, he or she lost sleep over it, didn't eat well, and became depressed. The bigots who practiced slavery would have been healthy. They took care of themselves, slept well and contentedly, ate well, and slapped each other on the back quite happily as they supervised the blacks who slaved for them in their fields.

The definitions of sickness and health and the exaltation of the norm by modern psychology is the unimaginative transfer of religion into the secular world. The healthy and the sick are the saved and the damned. The norm is now God's law, summed up in previous wisdom literature as well as still going strong in secular parallels for the Ten Commandments.

Take this passage from the King James Bible Alona gave me: "Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion." Translated into modern psychology, that passage would read: eat well and enjoy the advantages you win for yourself by working hard at your job, for that is a healthy life.

Because religion no longer exercises the control it did over life, I find it much less threatening than psychology, which is exercising greater and greater control.

I simply do not accept that one should regulate one's life by what other people do, or the norm, as it's called.

Hey, here's a scary passage from the same Bible:

"And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her."

I am against adultery. I would never commit adultery. Yet this woman is like a mare among Pharaoh's stallions. She is magnificent, dark and comely as Jerusalem, fair as the Moon.

Not a day goes by that I do not stop by Alona's door to have a word with her. She works from ten to three. By keeping the door to my office open, I can hear her arrive for work in the morning. First I hear her steps down the hall, then the door to the library open and close. When she comes out, she props the door open, so I do not hear it close, then I hear her steps as she goes down the hall. I hear the door to the Washington Bureau open and close, then open and close again a few minutes later when she comes out. I hear her steps down the hall, then her voice as she says hello to her student assistant. Because the door to the library is open, I can hear her voice, but not the student's. When she pulls her chair up to her desk, it scrapes like a teacher's chair on metal casters across the dusty linoleum floor of an elementary school.

What do you expect? I'm sitting in Milstein's office with nothing to do and reading stuff like Maimonides' _Guide of the Perplexed_ , Swedendborg's _Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell_ , Spenser's "Epithalamion," and Blake's prophecies. The books are piled up around my desk like sandbags. Oh, to hell with Milstein. What does he expect me to do: sit here like an ass-kissing stooge and read the newspaper?

7/4/84

Dear Maria,

If I open my window, I'm sure I can stick my head out and see the fireworks from my apartment. However, I would prefer to be out among the people, so I will walk over to the monument grounds tonight around 8:30. I feel like I'm in a dream world. No, I'm not working on some 18th- or 19th-century theory of correspondence between mental and physical reality. I do not believe I live in some kind of mental reality the way I believe Blake did. What I mean to say is that reality is like a dream for me because like a dream, if you look at it as a linear progression of scenes—my absurd job, my solitary presence in this roach-infested apartment: the progression makes no sense. This is an initiation? Just as the scenes or segments of a dream may fit together and be acceptable to consciousness within the dream itself, outside of it, to the waking mind, they are very often completely absurd.

I am as if awake and able to stand outside the conventional explanations for my present predicament and from this greater perspective, 18 years of education just don't add up to this, no matter how you figure it.

As I stood at the door to the library the other day, Alona and I were just joking around, and I said to her, "I'm only half Italian, so I only eat half-a-plate of spaghetti."

She was marking up articles from the _New York Times_ to be cut out and pasted up on paper sheets by her student assistant. She marked the pages with a slender hand as confident as a chef's. The smooth cappuccino of her skin swirled from the cylindrical brims of her black, sleeveless dress into the assembly line movements of her hands like sweet candies on a conveyor belt headed for a confectioner's display.

"What's your ethnic background?" My attempt to seem casual about information I was very eager to obtain must have worked, for she answered me, albeit somewhat grudgingly.

"I'm half Native American."

"Wow! What's the other half?"

"Jewish," she said.

I was taken aback by the unexpectedness of the racial mixture. She looked like a Semitic matriarch. It was the way she said Jewish which seemed to seal off conversation any further on the point. I wanted to ask her more. What kind of Indians she descended from? How did her parents meet? All of this seemed too intrusive and personal.

A feeling of protective affection seemed to surge from me toward her at that moment, equally as great as whatever frustration I might have felt in wanting to say more but being unable to. She kept her eyes on her newspaper. I kept my eyes on her. We were two cars headed toward each other, each on a separate side of the road on a mountain pass. Then the moment was gone. I was suddenly as out of place as an illegal billboard. The student tearing articles out of a newspaper in the library's other room glanced over toward me as if suddenly just noticing me for the first time, that not being good.

And any ridiculous comment like, "Well, you have quite a proud heritage," just didn't seem to work, so I mumbled, "I better let you work" and retreated to my office.

I entered its dead space as one enters a room in a funeral home, expecting a resurrection at any moment. None came. It was only 11:00 in the morning.

7/5/84

Dear Delbert,

In his book _The Great Code: The Bible and Literature_ (1981), Northrop Frye says that the Greek phrase "entos hymon," normally translated "within you" in the often quoted Christian saying, "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21), may also be translated "among you," so that the revised statement would read, "The kingdom of God is among you."

A translation like that could suggest a revolution in Christian consciousness toward a Jewish interpretation of God, that God is not necessarily in one's own body or even in any body.

Some people say there is no God, asserting that human consciousness created God and not the other way around. Even if man were the creator of his own God, God would still exist. That shift in perspective does not explain away the ultimate mysteries we face. The best formulation I have seen for the answer to such mysteries is God. The sacred literature and religious traditions, as well as personal testaments, that have come down to us as a record for God's existence are a precious part of our heritage, which we may be outgrowing, but yet which, transmuted into something new, continues to provide guidance.

Religion still seeks to save man from the barbarism and cruelty of other men.

Scholars like Northrop Frye are assuming at least part of the prophetic function once assumed by men like Moses or Jeremiah. Such scholars are fully capable of interpreting divine law, or a society's moral code, as Moses once did, fully capable of opposing or condemning their own society, as Jeremiah once did.

As for telling the future, they can do that, too, though that part of the prophetic function seems to have fallen more into the hands of artists.

No one has come back to Earth, as far as we know, to tell us what happens after we die, no man, at least. I'm talking about an ordinary man. Christ may have done so and he may be in us or among us, but we were not with him historically when he died and resurrected. The record we have of that event is not enough to satisfy my curiosity about the actual experience. What does happen? And what relation does what happens have to how we've lived on Earth?

7/5/84

Dear Maria,

Thanks for calling me. It will be great to get together at a professor's house for lunch. It's great that you'll be in town, if only for the weekend. Call me when you get here. (I hope you get this letter before you leave.)

When I heard Alona arrive for work, I was sitting alone in my office with the grey light of a grey day that filtered in from the windows all around me like cement dust. Her solitary footsteps, the opening and closing of the Washington Bureau door, her solitary footsteps again, her words of greeting followed by the scrape of her chair: I listened with bated breath, then read these lines from Blake:

Love seeketh not Itself to please

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

The poem says nothing about sex or does it? "But for another gives its ease." Blake doesn't restrict love to marriage. Love "builds a heaven in hell's despair." To the despair of hell, adultery could be formed into the stuff of a universal vision of love, or heaven, beyond the present selfish boundaries of monogamy.

A woman who is just physically beautiful does not necessarily inspire such a vision. She may always achieve a kind of distant respect and admiration by her physical appearance alone, but to be attractive, she must be more than simply physically beautiful.

That leads to the question: what is beauty? I have read that beauty is disinterested. While it may be marveled at, it takes no special care for itself—"nor for itself hath any care"—but certainly it must share certain physical characteristics, such as symmetry and proportion of facial features and limbs, luster of skin, eyes, and hair, a superabundance of the qualities judged over thousands of years to mark out a woman like Alona from among other women, just as surely as wooly sheep and prize cattle may be marked out by judges at a country fair. The ideal traits of such a woman are once again the stuff of the universal vision of what humanity ideally desires for itself, which is heaven.

We build a heaven in hell's despair because hell is the undifferentiated, formless matter, chaos, entropy, or hell that exists as nature without the informing vision or dreams of humankind. The process of transformation humanity brings about in nature is thus like a victory over a sore sport, or devil, who feels despair, not charity, at our victory.

It was 10:15 AM. I had spaced out. My body had begun to glow with the faintest orgasmic feelings just from thinking about Alona. At the same time, I was nervous. My hands trembled. I closed my book, set it to the side of my desk, got up, and like a seaman on unsteady legs crossed the deck of a rolling ship to her ship's cabin.

She sat in a halo of yellowish light from the lamp on her desk, her face a mahogany study in concentration. Her black hair, parted in the middle, reflected back a gleam near the light, falling to her brow like draperies on either side of the window of her face, which just let in the faintest glimmer of day beyond the stultifying confines of now.

"I've been reading Blake," I said.

She looked up from her paper and regarded me with some pleasure, amused as a teenage babysitter left alone with a precocious child. A student assistant, visible through an open door, sat in a back room just off to the left, tearing clippings from a newspaper with all the methodical earnestness of a stevedore fully absorbed in the task of shoveling coal.

"Blake's prophecies are hard for me," I said. "So I've been reading Northrop Frye— _Fearful Symmetry_ —to help me." I had got started and now didn't know how to stop: "Do you know who Northrop Frye is?"

She didn't answer and I didn't want to embarrass her, so I explained, "He's a literary critic."

Her amused expression gave way to one of studious charm, the expression of the best student in class on the first day of school.

"Frye was a myth critic, right?"

I nodded.

"And Blake was mad!"

I laughed. She seemed to be talking from some place in herself where opinions of this kind were important to her and that impressed me.

"Oh, c'mon," I said. I was suddenly balancing on a clothes line over an alley, a stealthy cat that prowled between beat-up garbage cans: "Hey, listen, a friend of mine is going to have lunch on Saturday in College Park."

I looked into her eyes. They were dark as pools in a flaming sunset. "Want to come?"

The student tearing articles looked up briefly with a wizened smile. I had as if broken a taboo. A silence like that when a judge hears some incriminating evidence motivated me to add in a tone that would proclaim all innocence, "You and your husband."

The student's face went serious. Alona became a mysterious dark pool whose black surface reflected the dark branches of an overhanging willow tree, a weeping willow, by the light of a full Moon. Wild lamentations of crickets echoed around me as I dove naked into caressing waters.

"Want to come? I mean, both of you."

We both knew what neither of us hardly knew. "Thank you, but no." She faltered before me like an Egyptian Queen: "I really can't." I was vulnerable as an infant child and she drew me out of waters with a gaze that grew me into a man, "Maybe some other time."

Our lives had become woven together into a fabric more precious than the blanket taken from the ark that carried Moses.

7/11/84

Dear Delbert,

I arrived early to the luncheon at a professor friend's of Maria's husband. The professor lives in a quaint white clapboard house in College Park by a train track. We ate at a picnic table under great oak trees on a green grassy lawn. There was just Maria, her husband Morris, and the professor, Dr. Gold. His grey hair and mustache completed a look of quiet composure that matched with the revelation that he had a new book out on Dante. I was truly fascinated: Maria and I had taken "Dante" together in college. Beyond that, I have gone on translating Dante a few lines at a time almost every night. (At that rate I might never get out of "Hell.")

Sitting around the table, we got on the subject of psychology and I found myself speaking up like a country preacher to his flock: "The role of psychology should be to help people with problems." Here I hesitated, not sure how to go on, because I both loved and hated the profession. "More and more it's become a classification system for social engineering more rigid than any class warfare."

"What do you mean?" Maria looked at me with sympathetic, earnest eyes.

"I mean, dividing the world up into the healthy and the sick like the saved and the damned, persecuting nonconformists, and encouraging a mindless and selfish conformity."

I wasn't sure if I had said too much or not enough.

"You mean, as society becomes more and more secularized, psychology is taking the place once held by the church?"

Because I had been so attracted to Maria in college, I had resolutely refused to get together with her afterward. She was married. I felt safer with my feelings for her now.

"Yes, the church," I said. "The church of the Inquisition."

It was warm, even in the shade, but there was a light breeze.

"Hey, did you see that?"

We turned our attention on Maria's husband. With his beard he looked like a young Talmudic scholar.

"A white squirrel. There he is, see him?" We looked, waiting for the squirrel to appear from the other side of a tree trunk.

"You've got a white squirrel, how about that?"

"Oh, yes, he lives here," Dr. Gold said. "I see him every day."

Images of Moby Dick filtered up from the flotsam of my wrecked contribution to the conversation.

"Idiots may have run the church during Dante's time," I said. "But the Inquisition didn't come till later."

I don't think Dr. Gold liked me. His reply was to ask, "Who wants dessert?"

I remembered the woman at work I told you about and the memory came as strong on me as the upraised flukes of a diving whale.

My forearms rested on the painted wood of what was now no longer a picnic table, but a coffin, my coffin, which buoyed me up. I had been deluded into thinking I was important enough to hold my own in such company, but I did not sink under the weight of such a thought. I floated on it, unable to stop the revolutions of my mind from spinning around and around the quiet center of a vortex created by the anger that now carried down my disdain for conformity like a ship I'd lived and worked upon so long I could no longer remember, if ever, when I first signed aboard.

7/13/84

Dear Maria,

The reporters who work in the National Press Building are just ordinary people. They have homes in suburbia, mow lawns, play golf, and share all the commonplace assumptions the general public makes about reality, including organized religion and belief in God.

Forget about Milstein right now and his double standard. He is an example of a large-scale hypocrite, but hypocrites like that are sprinkled in among the general public also.

The limited view I have of the reporters from the _Baltimore Herald_ who I sometimes run into in the hall or bathroom or when visiting Alona is that they are very serious. Part of this side to them, which is the side I most often see, is due to deadline pressure. The other part, and I don't think this is just my imagination, is due to their dislike of seeing Alona and me together.

One of the Jewish reporters, a man who covers Capitol Hill and takes a protective interest in Alona, positively despises me. In fact, today as I was walking to the bathroom before Alona arrived for work, he was coming down the hall from the other direction and he actually made a back-handed move of his hand for me to move out of his way.

Alona and I share something of an understanding. It's so tenuous, it's as difficult a concept as grace in religion to describe or even comprehend. I am in her good graces. Almost nothing I could do could be wrong. She greets me with a softening of whatever may be her expression into a smile and a relaxation of her demeanor, her body tone, into one of acceptance, even submission, to my higher will. What is the expression in the Catholic Church? Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. I am blessed.

She similarly has become blessed in my life and all my most idealistic assumptions about her, women, humanity, other people, swirl around her like moths around a fire. She could almost be said to hum with electric currents that could kill me. Yet her magnetism draws me near. I'm fascinated and my fascination is as out of place as I am, standing at the door to her library, not having much to say, unaffectedly enjoying the most silent communion with her presence.

Today I just stood by her door and gazed at her, saying nothing until she spoke.

"How was the luncheon?"

"It was great."

She went on reading, the startling relief of her face like that of a deer illuminated by passing headlights. It was not night, but the hallway was dark enough to suggest perpetual twilight. I was not a car and my eyes were not headlights but I idled in front of her, watching as she turned back to her newspaper.

For a moment I was alone, excited by the discovery that I had glimpsed something wild, an animal that moved in a different world, according to some higher order.

"You ever read Dante?"

"No, never did."

"He wrote one of the world's greatest literary masterpieces about a woman he almost never saw."

"Why didn't he see her?"

"She died before he got the chance." I realized I was simplifying things. Actually, Dante must have had plenty of chances to see Beatrice, or Bice, as was her real name, before she died, but he was apparently far too shy.

"You should have a girlfriend."

"How do you know I don't?"

"Do you?"

"No."

"You don't know what you're missing."

I went back to gazing at her face. It was a house seen from outside in the middle of the night. Light from one room signaled someone was awake.

"How do you get home at night?" I asked her. The question was as direct as a tap on the shoulder.

"Bus." The words fluttered up like pheasants from lips that knew no irony, pursed and curving beneath nostrils that flared like delicate folds in buckskin made from a white-tailed deer.

"Where do you get off?"

"Friendship Heights. I park my car there."

"I'll ride with you as far as Friendship Heights."

"Is that where you get off?"

It would have been nice metaphorically to have said yes, but the inconvenient truth intruded and I simply said, "No, I can walk home from here." With all the earnestness and charm of a boy with his mother, I added: "We can talk."

This convinced her. She smiled and when she smiled her teeth flashed white as rapids of a mountain stream that leaped over rocks in a rush through an opaline valley.

"All right," she said, attempting to conceal a laugh, perhaps a guffaw. The expression seemed awkward, but playful, a bear cub surprised by advances from some kind but forbidden interloper.

"But how can you leave? I thought you worked till 5:00."

"Milstein'll never know I'm gone," I said. Once he called in in the morning, that would be all I'd hear from him for the day. My work was done. I had already done everything I was supposed to do for today.

"No," she said. "We can talk another time." The gleam from her engagement ring sparkled on the back of her smooth brown and slender hand as from the bed of the stream that had leaped with her smile. She drew the hand towards her protectively along her desk, puffing up the arching pillow of her breast, and tipping up her upturned face into an expression as stern and serene as the Queen of Heaven's. Her diamond became an undiscovered gem, plentiful as gold on some distant planet, found as it was in nature, and not sold in any store.

7/16/84

Dear Delbert,

On the way to work, I stopped in a flower shop and guiltily bought a white carnation for Alona. It was not expensive; I didn't want it to be: I didn't want it to be too conspicuous.

When I got to work I cut the stem short and put the carnation in a glass of water. Alona's student was not in the library and the door was open, so I went in and set the flower on Alona's desk, feeling miserable at having to conceal what I was doing, or even hurry, like a naughty child who fears discovery by a parent, yet excited as an adolescent whose efforts culminate in the fruits of a forbidden _Playboy_ when smuggled into the sanctuary of one's room. The flower now resembled a lily floating in a lily pond, though I could not say I knew exactly what a lily looked like. The lily was a white flower glorified in English poetry, but even without asking, I was sure it would have been far too expensive for my purposes. I took refuge under the assumption that an ordinary man knew nothing about such things. A playboy—that was something different. He might know the exact flower for the occasion, card and all. I was no playboy.

I took out _Fearful Symmetry_ and began to read. When Frye talked about Blake, Blake almost seemed to make sense. Milstein called in at 9:30. The mail had come and he had got a few checks for his articles.

"The _Des Moines Register_ and _St. Louis Chronicle_ each sent you a check. You also got a check from the _Asian Wall Street Journal_."

"Go to the bank when you make the deposit," he said testily. I had mailed in a deposit one time that took over a nerve-wracking week to go through.

He asked me if he had received anything else.

"No, that's it," I said.

"I'll be working at home today. If I get any calls, just take a message. You've got my number if you need to call me."

"OK," I said, both happy and chagrined at having nothing ahead of me to do all day.

I had been trying to read a book by Emanuel Swedenborg on _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ , but the book was plain bananas. Swedenborg was supposed to have been an important influence on Blake and later on the American transcendentalists, like Emerson and no doubt Thoreau. In _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ , a title Blake uses for one of his poems, Swedenborg says he goes up to Heaven and sees God. When Dante did that he was writing fiction. Swedenborg's book was part of a multivolume set that stretched for at least a yard across a library shelf.

That journal I've been sending my poems to hasn't published a single one of my poems and yet incomprehensible, even mad, writers like this are printed, glorified, and revered.

It was ten of ten. Alona would arrive at any minute. I nervously watched the second hand of the cheap electric alarm clock we had for an office clock sweep past the four to the five, then hit the eight and sweep past the nine. I had not turned the light on in the office, preferring the light from the window. It was a grey day, the grey filtering in through the window like cement dust. I got up and turned the light on. It was like a light on in an empty school building. I stood near the door, which I had propped open, and looked toward my desk, attempting to see it as an objective observer. The books and notebooks piled around it looked like the bags of trash a street person would pile up around himself on a street corner, as out of place and crazy as any book by Swedenborg or Blake.

It was 10:02:12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I looked away from the sweep of the second hand and picked up an oversized and very heavy, hardback volume of Maimonides' _Guide of the Perplexed_. Adamah was the Hebrew word for Earth, yes, yes, I heard her footsteps coming down the hall as down a walkway in the Botanical Gardens, amidst a plethora of exotic plants, indoor trees, and colorful flowers.

She became a spirit, a filament of energy that quavered suddenly in a space as dark and infinite as a vacuum, encountering the fragile, white carnation that floated so delicately in a water-filled glass, sweet and fresh with the unmistakable signs of another's care. I half-smiled as I listened, pausing over the heavy, oversized book, its quality paper as fresh as the sheets of a newly made bed.

Her footsteps going back down the hall with all the alacrity of a woman fetching water from a well alerted me to the wider consequences of what I had done. I was afraid as anyone of gossip.

I went back to reading my book. I'm sure I did read it. My eyes took in the words. The words seemed to make sense, making momentary impressions on each retina, however, there were no corresponding signals to the conflux of my brain that would bring about the assimilation of such impressions. The opening and closing of the _Baltimore Herald_ door; the clap of steps that followed; the exchange of greetings at the library door: I determined to wait until at least 11:00 before checking on her.

It was peculiar. There was no really audible exchange of greetings when she first arrived for work. She was the kind of person who needed to get settled, so she appears to have been silent on first arriving, requiring a little ritual: putting her purse away, putting on her sweater, if she needed it, making the trip down to the main office, no doubt to pick up her newspapers— _New York Times_ , _Wall Street Journal_ , _Washington Post_ , _Washington Star_ , and _Baltimore Herald_ —before heading back to her post at the library. With her arms full of newspapers, her things put away, when she was ready for work, that is when she said hello.

I closed _The Guide of the Perplexed_ and got up from my chair, taking a moment to stretch my legs. It was 10:16:16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. I couldn't wait any longer. On the pretense of going to the bathroom, I headed out the propped-open door of my office down the dusty hall of a whaling ship's interior. Light from the captain's cabin glanced into the roll of the hall ahead of me over the hills and valleys of a restless ocean.

I was but newly signed aboard this ship as a lowly seaman. What business could I have had with the captain? But wait, the captain was gone. In his place was a flower of femininity in the rough-hewn world of men.

"Did you get it?" I asked.

Her smile thrilled through me with all the excitement, joy, and surprise of a recognition so complete and satisfying, it was as if I had just been hugged and was about to be kissed.

"Where is it?" I said.

With a fleshy hand as smooth and malleable as worked copper, the sleeve of her jersey pushed up slightly on her sturdy arm, she reached out and, cupping the glass and drawing it toward her, held it up for me to see. Then she held it to her nose and sniffed it daintily, seeming to get almost as much pleasure from the smell as a bee might from the stimulation of organs that craved nectar and made honey.

"I got that for you," I said superfluously. She was quite taken with the flower, setting it back down a little dreamily.

Lucky for me Alona's student assistant had been off on some errand. I proceeded down the hall on the needless trip to the bathroom. Man, a carnation can go a long way, I thought.

I had this theory. The theory derived from William Blake's idea that the physical world is a mental projection. At least, I had read that this is actually what Blake believed.

If that were true, then there were no ugly people in the world. There were only people who appeared to be ugly or beautiful to me. When they looked in the mirror, they would see beauty, and I might not appear handsome, as I did to myself in the mirror, but ugly, even misshapen. Which is why if you were ever caught staring at people in public, you would wonder why they should be so alarmed. They would not see what you see. They would actually see some wicked, frightening ghoul. These laws of perception were consistent but could get mixed up in police line-ups of suspects and the like.

Alona was beautiful because she was beautiful to me. She might not have appeared to be so beautiful to others. I had a proof for my theory in children's fairy tales about handsome princes and beautiful princesses. If all children, and later adults, did not actually see themselves as handsome or beautiful, they would never be able to tolerate such tales. There was other proof in Greek mythology, where Gods assume different appearances because the Gods, who really represent human beings, are really people who appear to each other differently under different circumstances. If you ever worked in the city, you might wonder why you see so many different faces every day. It's not because there is that great a transformation of the workplace every day, it's because the very same people look differently to each other. Since they move according to set patterns and laws which it would be "crazy" to transgress, there is very little danger that the secret of their true identity could get out.

7/24/84

Dear Maria,

Alona asked me to accompany her to an open reading at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, so on Friday night we went together in her car. She picked me up at 6:30 pm.

Since we were going to an open reading, I decided to bring at least one poem of my own to read. It was a poem I wrote especially for this occasion about a character I call Tera, which is an alternate spelling of Terra or Earth.

Tera, my Tera, sweet Tera, so fair,

Where are you sleeping, sleeping as I write?

You must be sleeping in soft, fragrant air

And dreaming, dreaming, O wondrous delight!

So calm the lids of your closed, lily eyes,

Rapt moonlight lingers sweet peaceful hours;

So proud your rose lips, so happy, so wise,

All nature longs to kiss you with showers.

I stand at the door of your pearly room

As a small child stands at a garden gate,

And entering gather your beauty's bloom,

Making bouquets that will make your name great.

You are the Eden of all love on Earth,

First and last woman of all the world's worth.

The loved one is asleep like Sleeping Beauty. That the narrator can gather Tera's "beauty's bloom" would signify that her sleep may not be the same as what we normally mean by sleep, since at that point she would seem to be awake. Sleeping Beauty wasn't really asleep, either. She was under a spell. In this case, the narrator, like a small child, seems to be under the same spell Tera is, the two of them together forming elements of a dream that provides an answer to the Witch's question: Who is the fairest of them all? Not what she looks like is the answer, but who she is, "the Eden of all love on Earth," first and last among women, meaning incomparable—there will never be another like her—in value, exceeding the accumulated wealth of all the world.

Please put your fears that I am becoming too interested in Alona aside. Even if I were more interested than being just friends with her, I am young enough to realize I will have more than enough time to recover from whatever kind of relationship naturally develops between us. I realize she is married. She loves her husband but he is never home. Young women don't seem to care for me, I mean, the single ones. So what if Alona and I can offer each other companionship? Is that so bad?

There was a modest gathering of people at the reading. Not enough of them came to just hear the poems. Most were there to read and so were mainly concerned with themselves.

When I read my poem, Alona seemed to burn toward me in the reflected beam of my own attention, radiant in a kind of aura, holy as any personage blessed by the golden halo of a Renaissance painting. I do not say I hallucinate: we were two thermonuclear reactors in the plasmatic form of human tissue, beaming toward each other with the relentless ululations of two whales coming together from far apart. I felt I had found a kindred spirit.

As we were getting coffee in the surprisingly convivial atmosphere of chatter among the now-relaxed members of the former, very tense audience, I asked Alona how she liked my poem.

"I liked it," she said.

In a small white Styrofoam cup, we each had a cup of tea made with a tea bag, some powdered creamer, and a packet of sugar. She took a sip, a half-smile playing on her dainty lips. A red smudge from her lipstick rubbed off on her cup.

"How did I read it?"

She looked me in the eyes. Her eyes were deep still, black pools that reflected either Venus or the Moon.

"You read it very well. Now tell me, Moody, who was this Tera you wrote about in your poem?"

The question embarrassed me, almost as if I had assumed it would never be asked. I took my time in getting together an answer, humming with thought like an overloaded power station as I turned my head away from her like a satellite dish to survey the room, then slowly back.

"Tera is an Earth Mother," I said. "She is the ideal woman, both mother and wife."

"Uh huh," she said. "There you go again with your mommy."

She was jealous. I knew and it bothered me.

"A woman who can know you and love you as much as a mother and yet be as beautiful and foreign as a wife."

"I understand the mother."

"Why?"

"I had two mothers. I know all about that."

"How is that?"

"Oh, it's nothing." She had gone from joking around to being serious. "Write about the Earth Mother. It's what all poets have done."

"Like who?"

"Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Homer: they all wrote about the ideal woman."

My tea was bitter and hardly even warm. I had been drinking it to be polite. I tipped up the cup for a final swallow and wished I hadn't, then tossed the empty cup in a dirty dark green metal trash can that was almost full to overflowing.

"Are you done?"

She nodded and set her cup, still about a quarter full, on a nearby table, leaving the dilemma of what to do with it to someone else.

"What does the Earth Mother look like?" she asked on our way out. "Does she have big breasts and big feet?"

"A big stomach like a pregnant woman?" I said.

We went out the doors into the light of street lamps and the Moon, light diffuse in the air as mist. The finest particles of spray were electric in our pointillist hologram of "La Grande Jatte," which translated into a late 20th-century sidewalk scene, the brake lights of cars as red and shiny as the ruby lights of children's toys unwrapped on Christmas morning.

A syrup of orgasmic feelings spread through my loins as smooth and thick as molasses over hot pancakes. I did nothing about it, but I knew if I let the feeling go too far I could spill the syrup.

When we arrived at my apartment, she leaned back from the steering wheel letting her hands fall to her lap like two brown leaves and I could see in that moment that she was barren as a tree in winter, mantled over with moonlight as with a sheet of newly fallen snow, and I leaned toward her and pressed my lips to hers. Her lips were full and giving, a bouquet of sweet pleasures that enfolded us in a momentary embrace.

"You're nice," I said.

"See you."

The arch of her black eyebrows rose like a tree line beneath the high and delicate peak of her brow, her eyes like two black pools reflecting the gleam of distant galaxies under the deep and black and starry night sky of her thick and luxurious hair. Her hair fell to her shoulders, becoming lost in the horizon of a distant mountain range, her breast. Her cheeks were each a mountain peak, bold and startling in relief against the moonlight, divided by the cloud-covered ridge that sloped under shadows from her brow to her cheeks to form her nose. Far below in the shadows, her lips were meadows for breeding elk.

8/23/84

Dear Delbert,

Society tests individuals, setting one against another to see just which one is best at anything. IQ and SAT scores, grades in school, and later jobs, salaries, awards, and public notice are all part of our existing competitive system. I don't mind competition. I do mind the stratification in society that results from it.

Northrop Frye says that the ideal world presented by the romance form of literature is a place where we are all kings and princes, not by birth, but because we were born. The symbolism here seems to be that in such a world, our true identity is not something we have to prove or become in any other way than by being ourselves. There is no need to force ourselves into the inadequate molds society provides. Every single person is a genius with unlimited potential and the system that is unable to realize that is nothing less than tyranny.

That's the best I can do in answer to your concerns. My theory may be wrong, but the reason I'm keeping the lousy job I have is because I feel it is compatible with my desire to become a writer-scholar. It is supposed to be stress free. Yet having nothing to do and having no contact with others can be very stressful.

10/30/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

The leaves are falling from the maple trees,

The evening uttering a restless sigh;

The air is cooling with a brave sad breeze,

And the mournful sun burning from the sky.

Like the seasons we're parting in dismay:

You to go on through the darkening wood,

I to turn, depart, go some other way,

For you never knew me nor ever could.

Thus the fall is a stranger to the field,

Whether the harvest is of grain or youth,

When innocence must like the summer yield

To the laws of nature but not to truth.

So let us look long but not then embrace,

When our proper paths lead us from this place.

10/30/84

Dear Maria,

The music from Alona's clock radio woke me. It was Dvorak, one of his Slavonic dances: Opus 46, Number 2 in E Minor, I believe. I woke up right away but Alona was still asleep. I didn't want to waken her, not right away. I would have to go soon; I had to get up and go to work.

Her bed is against the wall, just inside the door to her room. The entire wall opposite her bed, the entire length of her room, is books from ceiling to floor. In the center of the wall of books is a window with purple draperies drawn back in what I would call the French fashion only because I know nothing of such things.

She sleeps in a separate room from her husband. His room is next door. Smaller than hers. He has a single bed and an imposing desk. The desk, a wooden desk, the desk of a manager, a boss, faces the door. Alona took me in and showed me his closet. He has a walk-in closet with dark wool suits and laundered white shirts on hangars, all in perfect order, tidy and neat. He has a shoe-rack with about eight pairs of shoes, all dress shoes, all just so on the shoe rack, all in perfect order, nothing out of order.

He was in Europe. It was Thursday morning. I had to drag myself into Milstein's and I prayed that he wouldn't come in to work but would just call in with his usual annoying, nasal voice and ask if there were any mail. The unbelievable contour of Alona's body undulated across the bed beside me. She was on her side with her back to me, her figure forming a perfect hourglass shape, the sweep of her copper skin just as soft as tanned buckskin and shiny as polished turquoise. I rose up on one elbow to admire her in the morning light that streamed through the purple draperies, a dim reminder of the purple light that once lit the tiny, dark confessionals in which I confessed my sins as a child.

The mixture of joy and guilt I felt came out in a poem which it's taken me the last two months to write. I'm sorry I haven't been in touch. But everything I would want to tell you about Alona and myself is in this poem.

It's a formal ode, with the basic stanzaic pattern of turn, counter-turn, and stand, or, to use the Greek terms, strophe, antistrophe, and epode. That is the basic pattern, but the stanzas themselves are of my own invention in terms of rhyme, number of lines, and meter. The ode is a form for the most serious and elevated themes, and was originally made famous by the Greek poet Pindar in ancient Greece. Later famous examples include Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."

### Ode to Tera

### I

Purple robe fallen from her breasts and thighs,

Bathsheba reclined on a golden bed;

Lovemaking she breathed silver sighs

While David joyed with bended head.

If her husband was slain

At her lover's ordain,

So Christ, God's child of Mary's womb,

Was sacrificed to work man's doom:

Evil brings good if interpreted well,

And not all sinners go to Hell.

How like I am to David when he saw

Bathsheba bathing by the purling pool

And trembling looked with greater awe,

Under her perfect beauty's rule,

At her bronze body's warm

Slim incredible form,

Full breasts, firm buttocks in the flare

Of sunlight in the liquid air,

She stood an angel or a goddess sure,

And with her beauty made him pure.

Your husband was away

When I took you that day;

We kissed and while we kissed undressed,

Pressing my lips from breast to breast.

Closed curtains made

A purple shade,

In which our blissful bodies strove

To climb the naked heights of love.

Ascending we followed Life's crystal streams

Which poured from daylight into dreams.

### II

For what is Evil, is it absolute?

A thing to be weighed or measured or held?

Can it be dug up by the root,

And all its tortured branches felled?

Is it how we perceive

Or what we believe

That Good and Evil, Death and Life,

Should be at everlasting strife?

Is Evil and act or a state of mind,

And can it be so well defined?

Hold up myth's prism to the golden age,

See the grisly objects refracted there.

The Word upon Life's primal page

Was sacrifice and manic prayer:

God's offered human blood

Would make the harvest good;

Much good, then, is today abhorred,

Though it were written by the Lord.

How can the worship of ritual praise

Then lead us forth from Evil's maze?

Love, Tera, is the thread

That leads me to your bed,

From out the dark and starry light

Of wanderings through the fields of night

Where I have known

To be alone

Yet brings me still the certain joy

Of coming to you as a boy

Who having searched through mountains, woods, and streams

Comes to the manhood of his dreams.

### III

Marked on Life's spectrum from violet to red

Good and Evil are colors of one soul

And turning with the world are wed

To form the Whiteness of the Whole.

An action like a jewel,

Benevolent or cruel,

In light alone shines to be seen

And then in colors, bright or mean:

We gleam with divinity's unknown force

And good or bad reflect our source.

We have used deception but done no wrong,

Rather have been more wise to be silent;

Truth can bring sadness to the strong,

Revengeful and vile as violent.

Were the world otherwise

Than it is to our eyes,

Then we would not need to conceal

The pearls and rubies that we feel,

But wear them proudly in the sceptred sway

Of Love's crowned beauty, bright as day.

Or let that praise be ours

Night renders to the stars,

The darkness like a foil to be

That all may joy, so sweet, to see:

We too were one,

A gleaming sun,

Whose light upon some future Earth

Will bring new planets into birth

And there by sweet flowers and trees and streams

Create the Eden of our dreams.

### IV

Though more than twenty concubines and brides

Bore sons to claim the kingdom as their own

The land and sea and changing tides

Placed Solomon upon the throne.

Solomon will be king

Over all our suffering;

Born of passion and desire

In love's sanctifying fire,

These words are our Solomon and will reign

In wisdom far too deep for pain.

So the House of David may ever stand,

As God once promised and our love now proved,

Let God stretch forth his mighty hand,

Or Earth's foundations be removed.

I will lift up my voice

Till the Heavens rejoice,

Though I have felt such sorrow as

My world were come to such a pass,

That we lost sight of celestial spheres

That gave us life beyond our years,

Now, Tera, while the Moon

Arcs round us far too soon

For us to trace our Holy path

Without some fear of daylight's wrath,

The Night is old

To make us bold,

That on the God-like Earth we go

Through dark and light as joy and woe,

Through all that is and all that merely seems

But sleeps and wakes us to our dreams.

10/31/84

Dear Maria,

That Monday after we were together, Alona's husband—I call him Fliegende, short for Der fliegende Holländer or Flying Dutchman—returned from Europe, bringing home two million dollars with him in cash. He had it in gold bars in a briefcase, Alona said. The money was from the sale of one of his businesses in Germany, and that's only the beginning. He's going to get eight or ten million more with the close of the deal. This was just a satellite office, not his main office, so you can imagine what he's worth, and this was just his personal profit, his personal take in the deal.

I was crestfallen and excited at the same time. The money had nothing to do with me, yet I felt near enough to it to be in the burial chamber of a pharaoh in view of a cache of shining gold. Alona's excitement, however, was like a demonstration of support for the man, which made me feel bad.

How did I fit into this picture? It hardly mattered, yet Alona seemed to have been working out tensions in her marriage rather than honestly relating to me, and this disturbed me. As you can see, I excluded this wrinkle from my poem because Tera and Alona are not necessarily one. Tera is imagination; Alona is reality. The two will always be in conflict.

11/3/84

Dear Maria,

I just decided it was over between Alona and me. It wasn't just the money. She's still very much attached to Fliegende. The sex was nice but I've got better things to do than be her plaything.

11/8/84

Dear Maria,

Congratulations on being pregnant. You're gonna make a great mother. I'm very happy for you.

You and I are almost the same age, yet we live in different worlds. I intend to make myself a part of the safe and stable world you live in, no matter what happens. If a person becomes isolated, he or she becomes prey to forces that create scapegoats. There is safety in huddling up with others, like sheep in a fold or cattle in a herd. It is the stray lamb that becomes a mark for the wolf. The same malicious evil we see in the wolf or the shark surfaces in human affairs as what I can only best call the Devil, when human beings behave in subhuman ways, whether in the belief of doing good or evil.

In spite of the terrible things that happen on Earth, we continue to bring babies into the world. It would be better to say that forces for life are so overwhelmingly great, it is almost impossible to say no to them.

11/12/84

Dear Delbert,

Yes, I'm going to go to Mom's for Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to it. I talked to Mom on the phone tonight. Her arthritis has been flaring up bad. Sometimes I almost feel like she wouldn't have arthritis at all if I were only doing better.

11/24/84

Dear Maria,

What do you plan to name your baby? I mean, have you decided on any names for if it's a boy or a girl? Your baby's gonna be half-Jewish and half-Italian. That's quite a mixture. Will you raise it to be Catholic like you or Jewish like your husband?

Hope you have a great trip down to Philadelphia and a very happy Thanksgiving! Ciao!

12/1/84

Dear Maria,

For the past few weeks, I've been avoiding Alona completely by using the stairs to the right of my office. I go down a floor to go to the bathroom or to get to the elevators or have copies made. That way I never pass her open door.

12/21/84

Dear Sir/Madam:

Please accept this poem for publication. Thank you.

Trees fork like lightning from the leaf-strewn ground,

Bare branches black against the full Moon's glow;

Starless dark walls of night's great vault resound

With the ceaseless psychic cries of my woe.

Air as still as death, more cold than a stone,

My steps as final, my end as obscure–

I am alone, alone, alone, alone!

Even confused by such cries I endure.

I have followed a vision to its end

And stand at the boundary to which it led

Looking ahead where the way does descend

Into the underworld land of the dead.

Whoso may hear beyond Earth's mundane shell,

Free me from fear of all fate may foretell.

12/21/84

Dear Maria,

As 3:00 approached, I strained my ears to hear Alona getting ready to leave. I could hear nothing. I waited. At a little before three, I got up on nervous, unsteady feet and crossed the rolling deck of my office like a sailor heading for a scary trip up the mast and turning rather chose the ship's hold instead, entering the bottomless staircase that would take me some 20 banks down to the lobby. I took them resolutely, determined to preserve an image of myself as a conscientious seaman, however long or difficult the voyage.

A cold, drizzly rain dampened gun grey air outside the doors to the lobby. I stood in front of the doors, hands in my pockets, and waited, shivering from the cold air that knifed at me from the swinging doors as people came and went around me.

I waited fifteen minutes. Groups of well-groomed, men with hair neatly trimmed, pants pressed, and shoes shined went out and came in all around me, their conservative ties snug against a neatly shaven and conscientiously barbered neck, their white shirts dry-cleaned, perhaps daily. The brush of cloth against cloth made by their arms against the sides of their beige or black raincoats evoked humdrum sounds from the vestibule of some private school. Women wore a dress and stockings and the heels of their shoes clapped beneath the rustle of their raincoats as they folded an umbrella, a hint of perfume or cologne like a whispered secret on their lips. People were going out, people were going in. It was deadline time. Some had filed their deadline and were going out; others had yet to file and were on the way in. Of course, no one had told me this. Was I just imagining it? I knew that the reporters in the Washington Bureau of the _Baltimore Herald_ had to have their stories in by around 3:00. Was it 3:30?

The people I saw were men and women who had a place in society, whose identity lived and breathed within the bounds of something real and concrete. I did not live in such a reality. Neither child nor man, I was unformed, undefined: I had no place. Part of me was envious. I wished I could be like other people whose religion, patriotism, work, and social ideals all fit nicely in the social order. But what separated me mainly was this whole entity called the deadline. I had no respect for it. I was 25. I was supposed to have a girlfriend and be getting married. I was supposed to be competing for the highest-paying or most prestigious job I could find. Or if I were going to be a scholar, I was supposed to be getting my PhD or publishing my first article. If I were going to be a journalist, I was supposed to be working for a small, daily newspaper in a small town as a start before working my way up to a major metropolitan daily.

I had no pride in what I was actually doing. Reading Swedenborg, Maimonides, and Blake was simply mad outside the structure of a university or religion or plan of some research for a book. Could I make sense of it? I was attempting to be a myth critic as best as I could define one from my reading of Frye. The authors I was reading each had their own, very definite mythological framework. But reading them was like getting juiced with the jolts of a wind power station on Neptune. To read about God from the standpoint of an observer rather than believer required a step-down transformer the like of which had not yet been designed to take on such voltage. Of course, I had my own beliefs and would keep them. Depending on how you looked at them, they were either as shaky or as steadfast as a candle burning in a chapel of a drafty church.

Taken up in the cloud of such ruminations, I had waited forty minutes. I now decided to come down from the mountaintop by going up the elevator to see just what had happened with Alona.

I went back up to my office, getting off the elevator on the eleventh floor, walking around to the steps and then up. I had not locked up the office but I had closed the door. I propped it open, turned the light on, and went to my desk, listening intently. The office was like a tomb that had been ransacked by robbers. Were those my books and notebooks? What in the hell was I doing, copying out whole pages of Swedenborg and Maimonides by rote. Take this passage from _The Guide of the Perplexed_ : "More obscure than what preceded. Know that the description of God, may He be cherished and exalted, by means of negations is the correct description—a description that is not affected by an indulgence in facile language and does not imply any deficiency with respect to God in general or in any particular mode." Or this zany passage from Swedenborg's _Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen_ : "Lest therefore such denial, prevailing especially with those who have much worldly wisdom, should also infect and corrupt the simple in heart and the simple in faith, it has been given me to be in company with angels and to talk with them as man with man and also to see what is in the heavens and what is in the hells." I was like a vagrant child picking through a trash heap in India or Mexico when I heard her voice sing out like a clarion call, "See you."

I closed my notebooks and books with all the haste of one throwing dented beat-up lids on dented beat-up garbage cans in an alley that smelled like wilted lettuce and orange peels and headed out the door, locking it this time. She had gone down to the main office and would be coming out momentarily. I hurried. Her habits were as constant as the movements of a German clock. I would take the stairs, some twenty banks down again and back to my place in the lobby. This time I had my coat. It was 4:00. She had worked an hour late.

I took up my position in front of the doors, the lobby personnel regarding me as I them with polite indifference. I could hear the two or three elevators open up to let out a dark stream of journalists. Their number had considerably thinned.

"Moody." Alona's voice sounded hurt, startled, and curious.

I turned to regard her face. It was wan with the kind of respect and awe reserved for kissing a Torah scroll when the scroll is carried through a synagogue.

"Can I ride the Metro with you?"

"Sure," she answered. "C'mon."

It was taboo to be with her. Not that she was beautiful and heads turned as she went by, but that she was beautiful and married touched her with a deadly charm. The beauty graced her whole form from the classic features of her face down to the perfectly proportioned shape of her feet in trim black shoes. Even in the bulky black coat she wore, her thick, luxuriant hair piled in a shiny wave over the high nylon collar, she moved with the ease and fluidity of a person less held down by the gravity of the Earth than drawn up as if by celestial wires.

"I've been meaning to talk to you," I said.

She didn't answer. We were walking at the rather quick pace Americans seem to prefer in public. The approach of others required that either she or I would sometimes take the lead.

"I've been avoiding you and I realized I was wrong. I simply can't do it."

The cold was like a companion we had ignored. The rain was icy. It was just a drizzle, it was not coming down hard, but Alona had an umbrella and we both huddled under it.

"I was wondering what was going on with you," she said. We were now talking in a way that made us oblivious to space and even the cold. I had not even bothered to zip up my coat.

"I want to be together with you. I want to stay together."

"Of course," she said. "Of course, Moody."

It was a big decision, made with all the off-handed sincerity of granting the most simple wish but there was nothing simple about what I had said.

We went down the dark escalator to the Metro. I took the train as far as Friendship Heights, then stood on the platform and waved goodbye to her through the window as the train took her away from me with all the enchantment and magic of a coach like Cinderella's at the stroke of midnight.

Then I got the next train back to Dupont Circle and walked to my apartment in the rain. It was not even 5:00.

### Twenty-Five Years Later

### 1

When I feel winter skies contract with clouds

And statues grow rigorous, grim as death,

When I watch night wrap grey days in black shrouds

And sigh with a muffled white on my breath,

When the land I see is barren and dry

Where flowers once blushed in the rainbow sky

Till the green of the light and shade were one,

Then I know that you will return to me

As summer returns from winter to spring

And new leaves blossom from the selfsame tree

That twines us within our love's leafy ring:

Time is inconstant, but love would seem strange

If it altered the way the seasons change.

I wrote the above poem at about the time my correspondence with Maria came to an untimely end because she cut me off. In fact she mailed all my letters back to me in a big envelope. I was quite shocked. She didn't like the idea of adultery and she didn't like my literary portraits of Alona and myself. It may have been good that this happened because I had felt heavily constrained by the necessity to censor myself for Maria's benefit and the constraints I felt were limiting my own growth and development, not to speak of the growth and development of my relationship with Alona.

It was a Wednesday in July, July 29th. I remember the day because it was my parents' wedding anniversary. I was trying to remember the words to a poem I had written some years before in commemoration of my first night of sex or the loss of my virginity. I had the poem at home, but I wasn't going home. I was going straight out to Alona's place on the Metro. I wouldn't let her look at what I was writing as she sat quietly next to me and she made little effort to cheat on me by stealing a look.

"I'll show you when we get to your place," I told her. "I should be done by then." I had been excited, because I knew her husband would be away in Europe. He was leaving that day, straight from work, first for New York, then, the next day, from New York to London.

When we got to her condominium, I took a seat at her kitchen table. She put a glass of water down next to me and said, nervously, "I'm going to put something more comfortable on."

I was experienced enough with women to have heard that line on television or in old movies. I recognized that it had something of the same meaning as "I want to show you my etchings."

I was almost finished with the poem. I finished it, took a drink of water, and headed for the living room, taking a seat on the couch. I was sure I had the words right. Alona seemed to be taking an awful lot of time getting changed. I noticed because I was eager to show her the poem. Now that I had finished getting it down on paper, I was having a tough time keeping it to myself, tougher still because I was nervous, too. I knew where we were headed.

She came out of her bedroom in a black silk robe that focused all of my attention on her voluptuous thighs. Black slippers could not conceal the white that flashed underneath the brown upper arches of her feet. As she drew herself up modestly beside me on the couch, her nostrils quivered like a little lamb's and I panted like a lion beside her, handing the poem over on a sheet of lined notebook paper she had given me. She read it aloud in a timid, halting voice that became more strident as she went along:

All night's galaxies gleam apart,

Winds sigh the Moon she keeps,

Quiet the pulse of her gentle heart,

A murmur soft, she sleeps.

What night, what night, this night tells not,

No phantom breast she lifts,

Nor rolling Earth nor sun cannot,

Life make her dreaming gifts.

A rise and fall and rise again

Will wave-like crescent man to man.

All love to her she gives a soul,

And wakes the silent ends of all

In darkness till blood-morning tombs

Shut up star-fleshlings to their dooms.

"Come to apocalypse in me," she said.

I was silent. I tried to smile but other emotions had sway over me and I put my hand over hers, leaned forward and brought my lips to hers. Her lips were excruciating in their tenderness, exuding sweetness like a burst of honey on my mouth and I sucked on the honey, letting it radiate its sweet savor all the way through my body. I pulled on the silk tie around her tiny waist and loosed two olive breasts like twin planets, almost impossible to contain within the orbits of the purple brassiere. She stood, coming out of the robe.

Her hips swayed like imperial palanquins as she slid her slender hands over the wheat field of her belly, down to the proud imperial palace of her thighs. "Do you want me?"

"Yes, yes," I muttered. She gathered up her hair off her neck and let it fall over one shoulder, stroking it absently with long fingers. The sight of her alone was enough to make me hard and when she reached down to me, extending one steady, delicate hand, I was a little embarrassed about how my pants would look when I stood up.

"C'mon," she said.

I walked behind her, hand in hand, to the door of her room. The door to her husband's room was open. She glanced in as we passed, seeing something that disturbed her.

"Wait a minute."

I stood at the door. The tone of her voice had alerted me to the dangers of being together with another man's wife in another man's house. My eyes danced over the full display of her sensual buttocks, hemmed in by the skimpy panties, the broad tapering expanse of her cappuccino back, just barely outfitted by the lacy purple straps of her brassiere. The bulge in my pants became even more pronounced with my quiet contemplation of the legendary difficulties of unclasping the brassiere. My mind was in greater turmoil than a beach pounded by the pull and roll and pull of incessant waves. She picked something off the desk.

"Oh my God!"

"What is it?"

"He forgot his passport." She turned to me, passport in hand. "He could come back at any minute to get it."

I took the passport from her, opened it, glanced at the rather stupid photograph of her husband, and set it back on the green, banker's blotter of his desk, pressing up against her as I did.

"Forget about it," I said.

We kissed. My hands, coming up from her trim waist, stumbled over the brassiere. I drew back, annoyed, and with a wry expression to match my own, she reached back and unclasped it, wriggling out of it and flinging it on her husband's bed. I knelt at the full majesty of what had been revealed, reaching up to cup them, twin, magnificent, gorgeous globes: I buried my face in them, pulling her panties down around her feet, revealing the proud bushy mound of her womanhood. As she stepped out of the panties, I pulled the slippers off her feet and stood back up. She was reaching for my pants, feeling how to open them. I helped her, putting my hand over hers to draw the zipper down.

That was enough of a signal for us both to stumble into her husband's bed, ravenous, wild. With a gasp, she steered my blunt, blood-gorged pole of muscle out of my unbuckled pants and into her smooth, commanding tuft of vulva. I pounded into her, nailing myself to the satin, celestial tree of her embrace. Ecstasy rippled through us in the joyful repose of our sweet exertion. But the dim, vague realization that she could get pregnant interrupted, half in a whisper, half in a bark, "You have to take it out!" With one stern hand she dislodged me. I felt the cold pinch of her wedding and engagement rings as she pumped out the last dollop of my piddle spurtings onto the barley bowls of her swollen breasts.

"I forgot how good this thing was," she said, out of breath.

I felt embarrassed, not by what she said, but by suddenly being naked with a stranger. She cleaned her breast with Kleenex from a box almost hidden on the lower shelf of a night stand by the bed. The phone rang. She bounced up, all of her—she was a lot of woman—and answered it, plucking up the handset of a black dial phone on her husband's desk.

"You forgot your passport!" she said into the phone. Then: "Yeah, I have it." It was only around 5:00. "OK, I'll send it to you." She took a message pad from a black leather holder and a black pen from a shiny gold metal stand and scribbled down his address.

"OK, I got it." The phone call had meant safety for me but I kept quiet. I pulled up my pants. My breath came shallow to my chest. "You'll have it tomorrow morning." No light was on in the room. The only light was from the window and it played over her like a fine white powder. "OK, bye." She hung up.

"That was your husband?" I asked.

"He's in New York."

We were safe now. I could stay the night.

I fastened the waist of my pants and buckled my belt. She picked up her panties. I reached over and handed her the still-exciting bra. I straightened the wrinkled coverlet of her husband's bed. There were no stains on it. I felt affection for him–Fliegende, as I called him—and didn't imagine he would mind what I had done. I loved his wife but would never dream of breaking up his marriage. What greater tribute could I pay to him?

Still, he had done wrong. He was too old for her. She had no business with a man his age. Not only did he possess the wealth I sought, he possessed the beauty. By wealth I meant, he had enough money to take care of his wife and himself in a manner that was both comfortable and secure and by wealth I also meant he was able to do the kind of work that pleased him. He was doing what he really wanted to do. The lighting of his condominium attested to it. The gradation of soft tones in his living room, from standing lamps in a corner to lights on runners over oil paintings, created as dramatic and studied an effect as the professionally designed set of a stage play.

"We haven't had sex in three years," Alona said from her room.

"Really?" I was now a conspirator with her. "What's wrong?"

"He just doesn't want it." She had thrown on some jeans and a T-shirt. I stood by the door to her room, watching her come and go from a walk-in closet, leaning up against the door to her room. She came forward on bare feet to embrace me, putting her arms up under my shoulders. "He's just not interested."

I was starting to get interested. My pants were already beginning to swell. I kissed her. The smell of her cosmetics tantalized my nose. Her lips were so tender, malleable, and giving, her firm, perfect form so sweet. We lingered, unable to break free from the kiss, then my lips trailed to her neck, my friendly nostrils quivering with her angelic fragrance.

### 2

After the sex with Alona, the job with Milstein became intolerable. I lost all patience with Milstein, not that I showed it in any way more demonstrative than facial expressions and a tone of voice completely out of sympathy for him. It took several months for the anger to build past a point where I could contain it.

One day, cigarette smoke billowing from Milstein's office, he shouted, "Moody, get me a cup of coffee."

I stood rigidly and went to the pantry. On one shelf was a line of three or four plastic spoons with coffee stains on them. He had used the spoons and left them there for me to throw away. I swept them up with one hand and tossed them with a clang into the dirty grey trash can. I poured him a cup of coffee. The cup fit into a plastic mustard-colored holder. I added powdered creamer. A wisp of steam curled up from the coffee as I carried it into his office.

"Thank you," he said. I set it down with all the squeamishness inside of a girl who had been peed on by a toad.

I wondered if Milstein had been looking at my notebooks. He was a reporter. He might have wanted to see what I was writing. I had about six spiral notebooks on my desk, one for Maimonides, one for Swedenborg, one for Spenser, one for Blake, and so on. In at least one of these notebooks I had written some nasty things about him. I had called him greedy and the word came up in a letter he wrote to a much more well-known reporter from NBC News. He had used the phrase, "in my greedy way."

Another day, I had been on the phone with my thesis advisor and had said something about "Melville and Hawthorne" as he sat in the next room, presumably listening to me. A few days later, I was typing up an article in which he wrote, "might not be as well-known as Melville and Hawthorne."

He was a highly successful man, had a house in the highly affluent Washington suburb of Potomac, a beautiful wife—that's how she sounded on the phone—and two kids, but I had relatives in Colorado who had a large, working ranch and farm. In the morning the family ate together with the ranch hands at a big table heaped with pancakes, sausage, toast, eggs, and coffee.

"Moody, I need you to make me some copies," Milstein said. As soon as he had spoken I realized I couldn't go out West. It was too far away.

My eyes watered in the thick, smoke-laden atmosphere of Milstein's office as I picked up the articles he wanted copied. I had nowhere to go, but I knew I had to quit.

"Mr. Milstein?" I said.

"Yes?"

"I'm giving you my two-weeks notice."

He may have been happy to get rid of me and all my crazy books and notebooks.

"Do you have another job?"

"No."

"All right."

I've heard it said that you should always have another job before you quit a job. That may be true and so also should it be true that everyone should marry a high school sweetheart.

Now I was in the position of the old hag whose job I had taken no more than a few short months before. I took the steps down to the copy shop on the next floor down.

Being near Alona just wasn't worth the sacrifice of spending eight hours a day doing nothing. Yes, I was reading my books; yes, I was keeping my crazy notebooks. But the isolation was almost unbearable. I was a young man. I needed to start my own life.

I had sent poems off to be published. None had been accepted. A longer work—fiction, autobiography, whatever—would require the kind of dedication and stamina that could only come from a more stable life.

My life was in disarray. What I had was a relationship with a married woman that could go nowhere. It was as dead as the job I was in.

Alona left at 3:00. Milstein left at 4:30. I left right after him, not bothering to wait till 5:00. I guess I was supposed to have stayed till 5:00. I locked up at around 4:45 and headed out on the Metro to Alona's. My loins tensed at the thought of being with her and the sweet tension made me pant with mouth ajar, my mind running and re-running the videotape of erotic images we had made together, my eyes open but not seeing the bored, unexciting passengers all around me.

My mind was slow. It fed on images. It was pictorial, not verbal. I could watch whole movies in my mind. Reality would interfere like a person making noise in a theater. Because the movies were so real and important to me, I wondered if they, like all thought, might somehow be shared—broadcast—like the radio waves of television. I was not an individual, but moved according to the programs of some network that I was wired into from birth. The channel I was on was the victim channel. I would now be fattened at a trough to be slaughtered.

Or I was like a slave in an ancient Roman Saturnalia festival, exalted by my masters for ten days but only to be murdered. Wasn't I even now like a slave taking the place of a master, her husband? She had no intention of leaving him. When our time together was over, she would dispense with me, having renewed the vigor of the real ruler through the symbolic death and rebirth of his absence and return. My own temporary substitution for him, followed by my execution, as indicated by the words, "It's over," would bring about my own symbolic death as a sacrifice for his sins.

Heady thought, huh? In my way, I was just as much a revolutionary as Jesus. I wanted to see the entire social order transformed.

I could remember that first weekend at the end of July. We spent the whole weekend together. It was Friday night after work.

"Where did your name come from?" I asked her.

"It's Native American."

"What kind of Native American?"

"Apache." Then: "The name is just an Indian name. I don't know what tribe it might be from."

"Why is that?"

"It's hard to explain."

I was standing in front of her bookcase, running my eyes over the titles of her books: Thomas Mann's _Magic Mountain_ jumped out at me. I remembered Frau Chauchat, the woman a young boy in a sanitarium had become enchanted with. I couldn't remember if she had been married.

"You said your father was Jewish. How did they meet? I mean, your mother and father."

Alona was sitting on her bed, with her back up against the wall, her sleek brown legs extended and crossed at the ankles, feet bare.

"He was a doctor, a Jewish doctor, a dentist. She was just a member of the tribe."

"Where was this?"

"In Arizona."

"Really?" I was fascinated. "What reservation?"

"Oh, nothing."

"C'mon, tell me. What was it?"

"No."

I came over to the bed and sat down, leaning back on an elbow.

"Well, what happened? Did they get married?"

"No, no."

I pressed past her feelings of annoyance. "What do you mean they didn't get married? Did they have a relationship? What happened?"

"They had sex. That was all."

"So you were raised on the reservation? What happened to your father?"

"I was raised here in Bethesda."

I was really confused and becoming increasingly annoyed.

"My mother died when I was seven."

"I'm sorry."

"I was sent to live with one of her cousins who lived here in Bethesda."

"How did your mother die?"

I really felt I was asking too many questions at this point and might have to come back to the subject at another time.

"Oh, she had an aneurysm and died instantly. I was playing on my bicycle right in front of her and she just keeled over."

"Gosh, I'm really sorry to hear that."

"I'll never forget that day as long as I live."

"I'm really sorry. That must have been terrible for you."

"It's all right." She looked off toward her window as if at a vista of distant mountains. The purple light that came in through her curtains seemed to scatter through leaves of trees.

I asked, "Well, what happened to your father? Did he raise you?"

"I have no idea. I have no idea where he is." She raised herself up from her bed and stood up. "He had sex with my mother and disappeared. That is all I know about him."

I was silent. She went to her dresser and leaned down to fix her hair, the mirror being too low to see herself in, standing.

"I have relatives in Colorado," I said. "They're real cowboys."

She didn't answer me. I didn't think I expected her to. It wasn't yet 6:00 and we had already had sex three times.

Now as I got off the subway and made the short walk to Alona's condo, I realized that the days between Alona and me were numbered. I said it was January. It might have been February. It was the depth of winter. It was cold, barren, and hostile outside, dark early and ugly with freezing rain. Yet inside myself, I felt gigantic early stirrings in anticipation of a benevolent, warm, and irrepressible spring.

Alona's reaction to my having quit was predictable. "Do you have another job?"

"No," I said. "I can do temporary work. No problem."

"What would you really like to do?"

I was in her kitchen, seated at the kitchen table while she was making dinner.

"I'd like to work for the theater," I said.

"Why don't you try?"

I got the yellow pages of her phone book out and looked up Arena Stage. I got the address, then went to type up a letter on her electric typewriter, saying that I had been in two high school productions. I had some acting experience and would like to be a member of the theater's stage crew.

Alona and I had salmon, a baked potato, green beans, and a salad for dinner. She wouldn't allow me to help with the cooking or the cleanup afterwards, so after dinner I went back to her room and finished up my letter. Fliegende was off somewhere, doing what he knew how to do best: make money. As always, I had an affectionate feeling for him. He had no desire for sex with Alona, so he was really like a rather unthreatening father figure.

I was surprised to get an answer to my letter before I had even finished my last two weeks with Milstein. I was to call to set up an interview, but I didn't count on getting the job. It seemed like too much of a long shot.

When the last day came with Milstein, I remembered the last day of the hag I had replaced, how the hag and Milstein had been at each other's throats. Now it was my turn. Now I understood. It was all I could do to keep from walking out early. Something in me demanded that I observe the two-weeks notice rule to the fullest and suffer out my two weeks, down to the last minute, no matter what it took.

Before I left, Milstein called me into his office and mumbled, "Come in here and check back with me from time to time." We didn't shake hands. Over the course of my last two weeks, I had cleared my desk of all my crazy books and notebooks, so now, on my last day, I was as empty handed as when I arrived.

I noticed Milstein had a book out on his desk entitled _Delusion_ , another one of his oblique messages to me, I guess, like the time he used my words about Hawthorne and Melville in one of his articles. Was Swedenborg deluded? He appears to have been, but how do we know? Maybe what he saw was real but only part of what was real, like Columbus when he discovered the Bahamas but thought he was in India.

### 3

With measured steps the dark procession goes

Like a long ragged army in retreat

And the Earth cries out in the wind that blows

As the heavy hearse passes at my feet.

Now the sun carries winter's bier to rest

And the first green buds weep from every tree;

Now clouds raise their swords and beat their breast,

And spring though it come does not come for me.

My youth is winter on that gruesome bier

That now will go under the fearful sod

And I will take up the way of the spear

And go hunt the boar that once killed a god.

I pray now for virtue to make me strong

So that I may hasten to right this wrong.

I got the job at Arena Stage. The show I was in was _The Matchmaker_ by Thornton Wilder. The crew for the show was very small. It was made up mainly of me and another guy. The cool thing about it was that we were not just behind the scenes. We were in the show, first as clerks, then later as waiters. I didn't have any lines, but I did have a little routine I did in the second act when one of the main characters upset a table in anger and silverware went flying everywhere. My stage crew partner and I ran onto the stage and picked up the silverware. If my memory serves me rightly, the table was upset a second time and I went after the silverware again. It was my job to make sure that one piece of silverware was left under the table when we got it set back up. If there wasn't one there already, I had to put one there, all the while acting as if I were picking silverware up, not putting it down. The crowd wasn't supposed to notice. When we carried the table out at the end of the scene, the snooty headwaiter was supposed to find the piece of silverware I had left and brandish it wickedly in the air.

I wish I could say I formed some wonderful, lasting, or even ephemeral friendships at Arena Stage, so that I would have a warm, cozy catalogue of stories to relate about my time there. As I said, I had no lines in the play and I moved in almost total silence as a member of the crew. I tried to make a friendship with one of the actresses by offering her some of my poems.

She played Ermengarde and had a long stretch with nothing to do at one point in the play, so she would read a thick paperback novel while stretched out on a long bench backstage. The play took place in the 1880s, so the women were dressed in the long, flowing skirts with multiple petticoats, tight bodices, and high collars of that era. With her fair cheeks rouged, Ermengarde looked like a China doll. Her skin was white as the powdered nose of an Asian heiress and her eyelashes were black as butterflies shut up in an emperor's tomb.

I approached her one night with a half-dozen poems on 8½-by-11 sheets folded in half.

"Excuse me, I noticed you liked to read," I said. She looked up from her book and directed her full attention on me. "Would you like to read some poems I've written?"

"Yes, I would," she said. "Is that them?"

I gave her the poems.

She thanked me and went back to her reading.

In the second act, I had to bang a huge cymbal on cue several times, loud enough to be heard on stage, as Ermengarde lined up with several others to make an entrance near me. This night, Ermengarde smiled and gave me a Chinaman's bow, hands clasped together as if in prayer. I bowed back to her. It became a ritual for us from then on.

I noticed that a woman came backstage to meet her after the play. I saw them go out the door together. Ermengarde had on a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a boy's cap.

I let several days go by, thinking she would tell me something about my poems. But she said nothing. Every time I passed her backstage, she was reading the same book.

I decided to approach her again. I myself was dressed in a waiter's tuxedo, with one of those high cardboard collars of the period and a bow tie. My hair was parted in the middle and slicked back with a thick coating of gel.

"Hi, did you read my poems?"

"No, I'm sorry, I haven't had time." She seemed annoyed. "That's not the kind of reading I do here." She made a face and explained: "I just read trashy novels to keep my mind off what I'm doing."

The slow realization that Ermengarde was a lesbian may have contributed to the depression I found myself in, but was not the major cause of it.

The pay for stage crew work was so low I had to start asking my mother for money to help me pay my rent and living expenses.

Alona still called me for sex. Now she would come to my apartment, sometimes. I did not always go out to her place. Her beauty seemed eternal. She would never become middle aged or old. Her skin would never wrinkle; her breasts would never sag. Because I was seeing her and continued to be overwhelmed by what could only be described as the absolute potency of her presence, I found myself unable to make the slightest move toward initiating a relationship with another woman.

Making an attempt with Ermengard had been like trying to escape from a prison by opening the door to a broom closet. It had required no effort and was as if doomed from the start to fail.

I fantasized about starting a new life with my relatives out west, remembering our family trip across country when I was a boy. In Indiana and Illinois at night you could start to see the cattle trucks that were roaring down the highways and in Kansas were many more, big trucks filled with cattle, the drivers wearing cowboy hats and boots and the cattle shuffling around inside the trucks, just barely visible between the slots in the sides, and sometimes you could get a whiff, and the cattle trucks had a rank, musty smell of urine, fear, and death as the animals stamped and snorted and moaned on their way to the slaughter across the long, lonely highways of the night.

### 4

The plunge of a waterfall seemed uncouth

To seduce me forever from my youth.

Under wind-clasped pines on lewd mountain ground,

Businesslike breezes calmly blew us down.

Crude moss groped at stones, just as dead in our eyes,

As the flushed cloud light of immodest skies.

Cold torrents made lustful mist in our hair

From slick splashing rocks thrust deeply in air;

And swelling like giants who had been small

We rolled up our pleasures into one ball.

The streaming planet revolved on its arc

Over moons and stars and spheres of the dark:

And now the sun hurried, green, golden and mute,

And night followed after in ribald pursuit.

I did the one show with Arena and quit. The run had been only about five weeks, but that had been long enough for me to figure out I wasn't cut out for show business. Whatever little savings I had set aside had dwindled. I had rent, groceries, my telephone, and a student loan to pay off, so I did what any self-respecting 25-year-old would do. I called my mother.

Her rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her hands like wire baskets, so she had trouble picking up the phone. "Mom?"

"Yes, honey."

"I quit the job at Arena Stage."

"Why did you do that?"

The disapproval in her tone rankled in me, so I became more assertive: "It didn't pay me enough to live on and I was a nervous wreck doing it."

"Well, you'll find another job." My assertiveness had paid off. Somehow it had reassured her.

"Jesus, I can't believe these jobs I've had to work. I guess I'm going to have to go back to school. You just can't make it with an English degree."

"You haven't given it a chance. You'll find something."

"It's been almost a year and I don't see any end in sight."

"Well, maybe you'd better go back. What would you study?"

"Christ, I don't know. Library Science."

This suggestion met with silence, a sign that she didn't support the idea. The silence was like being locked in an empty room in the dark. Her voice reverberated through the darkness, "Well, you better get another job. I can't keep shelling out money."

"Mom, I need money."

"How much do you need?"

I made a quick tabulation of what it would take to take care of my most immediate needs and told her.

"Well, all right. I'll send you some money this time, but you'd better get a job."

Alona had only been five years older than I, yet she lived in a different world, the world of money, riches, elegance. Only the wildest success as a writer would have put me in a position to enter that world. We did not discuss such matters. Our relationship was "just sex," in her words and that had been all right with me. It was demeaning, but no less demeaning than the position I was already in as an unpublished, unrecognized writer. Alona had been my recognition and success, but I had found I needed more.

I was ashamed I had made love with Alona and continued in a sexual relationship with her. I was ashamed that the women of my generation had rejected me. I was ashamed I didn't have a job. I was depressed and lonely.

It was just about the time I quit from Arena Stage that my reality began to alter in a way that I had read about only happening to saints. I was no saint, but I had read that one of the experiences of some saints was bilocation, a drawing together of two separate locations so that the saint would in essence find himself or herself somehow in two separate realities: the present reality and the reality of some distant land.

Opening out from the boundary that should have been the window to my apartment, which stretched across the entire length of one wall, the western wall to be precise, was the interior of a laboratory. There were test tubes on racks, no doubt a centrifuge, a black counter with a sink along its length, two or three high stools pulled up to it, and dull white cabinets with silver handles above and below the counter. On one of the stools was a woman, a blond-haired woman, with the hem of her purple skirt pulled up to the middle of her thighs as she sat on one of the stools and tried to open something in her delicate hands. At first I thought this was a hallucination or a vision. My first glimpse was only momentary. But it had been so real and well developed I could hardly bear the return of my former reality when it finally did come. I had been seated in my bed, trying to read _Fearful Symmetry_. In fact, it was on reading the following passage that the confluence of realities occurred. Let me quote it for you now:

"It would perhaps be difficult to prove completely the axiom that objects do not cease to exist when we have stopped looking at them."

The blinds to my room had been closed, as always, at night. The entire wall simply dissolved. I didn't see it happen; I just suddenly became aware of it. The floor, the whole space, demarked from the former boundary of my wall as one seamless extension.

"What?" I said to myself aloud, then as the extension hovered long enough to impress me as being real, I said, "Jesus," dropped my book and stood up from my bed. "What?" I half-whispered, then "Hello."

The woman went on struggling with whatever she was trying to open. Her back was to me, but she was sitting sideways on the stool, one foot up on the spokes, the other with the toe just touching the floor, her shoe dainty as a slipper.

I was now at the boundary of our realities, dressed only in a robe and a pair of pajama bottoms. It was then that the transformation became complete and like a wave closing over me I became completely immersed in the room where she had sat apart from me.

She looked up at me with a clear, blue sparkle in her eyes like the sparkle of water in a crystal pool on a summer's day. I could almost hear the excited laughter of children all around me.

"Where did you come from?" she asked with a smile.

I turned around to look behind me. The wall of the lab now took the place of the former wall of my room. I turned back to her.

"I was in my room and then, and then I was suddenly here."

"Do you think you could open this for me?"

I took what appeared to be a small case from her.

"Be careful, there are samples inside."

"You mean vials?"

"Yes, they're filled. So be careful."

The case was cold. It had been refrigerated. I went into an unconscious mode that allowed me to open the case without having the least idea of how I did it. When it popped open, I saw there were several test tubes inside with what looked like dark blood. I handed the case back to her.

"Thank you."

"Who are you?"

"You need some clothes, don't you," she answered.

"Wait a minute," I said, "You didn't answer me."

She sighed and with a shrug of her pretty shoulders said, "Wait a minute. I have to put these away." She walked over to a white refrigerator and set the vials inside, one at a time, in a rack, her blond hair dancing over her graceful back in a ponytail.

"These just came in," she said. "I have to get them in here right away."

"What are they?"

"They're blood samples." She closed the door to the refrigerator and faced me, bringing her palms together over her thighs in a way that excited me with expectation of some dimly imagined reward.

"Come on." She reached out and took my hand and led me from the room into a hall like any hall in any hospital.

Just as suddenly, I was back in my apartment, standing by the window. I looked down at my extended hand and turned it palm upward toward my unbelieving face. Hadn't I just been holding a woman's hand? The hum of the air-conditioning unit under the window punctuated by the whoosh of traffic up out of the tunnel under Scott Circle assured me I was indeed back in my room.

I went back to my book, convinced that I had had some form of outer body hallucination, and even more convinced that the reading I had been doing had had something to do with it. I reread the passage that had led me up to the fantastic leap from my room into a laboratory and nothing happened. I continued to read, skimming pages, looking for anything that might lead me back to another leap. I found this passage, about twenty pages further in the text:

"He [the artist] thereby teaches us to see, in the small part of mystery which he has made coherent, the image, that is, the form or reality, of a universal coherence . . ."

I got that, then came to this:

" . . he suggests, in other words, that if his natural body is a mental form, then the entire body of nature, from atoms to stars, may also be the form of a human mind, if the imagination could only get hold of it."

No sooner had I finished this passage than I was back in the hallway of what had seemed like a hospital. My hand was in the smooth, commanding hand of the woman I had seen before, so that I was not sure if I had actually gone back to my former reality or simply had had a slight lapse in consciousness that caused me to think I had.

"What is this?" I said and stopped. The woman turned her face toward me, still holding my hand.

"What is this, the night shift? Where am I? Where are we going?"

I was angry but nowhere near the level of a tantrum. The woman regarded me calmly and spoke.

"You are on Zopotron."

"What is that?"

"It is home of the Zopotrons."

"Who are you?"

"Trirene."

Feelings traveled like waves of a frequency to stir my loins like a turbine that changed the touch of our hands into a friction and generated current. I gave up asking questions.

"You must come with me."

I walked with her down a long corridor, with rooms that opened into laboratories left and right. I had glimpses of people in the rooms. When a handsome young bearded man accompanied by two beautiful women passed by us with studious disregard, I turned to Trirene and asked, "Who are they?"

"They are doctors."

The women were dressed like Trirene, as if in a uniform. Their dress was all of one piece and one color, purple, with a form-fitting, long-sleeve top that chastely circled the base of the neck and a short, pleated skirt that innocently fell midway to the thigh, the only pattern to the clothes being an oval of black that hung from the neck to the breast. Their shoes were flat, black, Chinese shoes like slippers. They wore their hair long and pulled back in a ponytail.

The man I had seen was in something like pajamas, yellow in color, with a top like a long-sleeved T-shirt. He had on uncreased pants of the same comfortable material, and the same black, Chinese slippers the women wore.

Having come to the end of the corridor, we reached an imposing, dark grey door and stopped. Trirene dropped my hand and put her palm over what looked like a red jewel that lit up inside when she touched it. The door opened, Trirene took my hand again, and we entered a chamber behind the door. The door closed behind us. A grill of lights flashed over our head and then we were momentarily in black light. Puffs of air from a fan whined over us and then the light grill flashed above us once again and this time held steady a moment more and then flashed off. The door opened onto a carpeted hall, much like the hall of any upscale condominium or hotel.

Once more, I had some questions. But I had given up asking them. We stopped in front of a door like any other door, except it had no doorknob.

"Put your hand over the key," she said.

I dropped Trirene's hand and put my hand over a blue plastic jewel about the size of a baseball. It lit up like the red one I had seen and the door opened.

"Go ahead in."

I was hesitant, so she went in ahead of me, reaching back to take my hand. I liked holding her hand. I couldn't tell if that was because I had become more childish in this new reality than I had ever been in the old one or because I had never been childish in any reality and was just now starting to enjoy it. Maybe it wasn't even childish to be holding hands this way. Maybe it was a new way of being an adult.

A man was in the room with his back to us and his hands clasped behind his back. If I had the key, I wondered how he got in.

He turned and smiled, "Welcome!"

He had a beard, a short beard, very carefully trimmed, like the kind of well-kept beard you might see on an opera singer.

"Who are you and where are you from?"

"You're asking me?" Then, on sudden inspiration, I said, "My name is Moody and I'm from a book by Northrop Frye."

He laughed, Trirene smiled, and I just kind of fumed.

"That's very good," he said. "I'll have to admit, I haven't read him. But in any case, make yourself at home. These are your quarters."

He made Italian-like gestures in the air with his hands to indicate the quarters he was talking about: a bed, a comfortable chair, a lamp. To his left was an open passage that appeared to lead to another room.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Sargon."

"Then I've entered my own mind, is that it?"

He laughed again, a short laugh that seemed good-natured but a little forced. "Would you like to have a look outside?"

He placed his hand over a jewel on the wall behind him. "Come on," he said.

We walked out onto a balcony. Before us stretched a magnificent purple canyon under a brilliant scarlet sky. A city, all of glass bubbles, pinnacles, and spires gleamed in the scintillant gold rays of a low sun encircled by successive rings of buttery, atmospheric fire. The air was heavy, almost like a liquid. There were no sounds, none at all, no clanging cement busters, no roaring engines, or car horns. And the smell of the air was sweet, a mixture of evergreens and cotton candy. A warm breeze quavered over us. On one distant hill I could make out a herd of grazing sheep.

"So what am I supposed to do for all this?" I caught Sargon's eye. "The nice room, the beautiful view: what's my job?"

"We chose you, you didn't choose us," he answered.

The answer was a little brusque for me, so I just remained silent. He filled in the silence.

"We're going to study you."

"Ha, ha," I laughed. "That's a twist. What for?"

"Let me see if I can put this in a way you can understand."

"Ok," I said.

"The advancement of science."

He said it almost in a way to indicate disdain for the whole idea. "Hey, look, if I don't like it, can I go back?" I was half-kidding, half-telling the truth.

He disregarded me, put his hand over the jewel, and motioned for us to go back inside. "Shall we?"

Trirene had been awfully quiet. I couldn't help but think about Alona, how different Trirene was from her. The two were as different as light from shadow. Trirene was a ray of light. The relationship with Alona, well, how could I compare it? I had just met Trirene. I had no idea what part, if any, she would play in my life.

When we entered back into the room that was to be my room, my eyes went to the bed.

"Queen-sized bed," I said. "Nice."

Sargon disregarded me. I looked at Trirene. She said nothing, but her silence was reassuring.

"Let me ask you two a question," I said. Sargon stood to my left, Trirene across the room to my right. They turned their attention on me.

"Am I dead?" There was no answer, but not because there wasn't an answer. "I mean, did I die? Is that how I got here?"

This question met with more silence, but I felt compassion in the silence now.

"I think you will like it here," Sargon said. "Trirene will be next door to you."

I glanced at Trirene. Her eyes were cast down in the mien of the Madonna, almost as if she looked upon a swaddled baby on her breast.

"She is human like you. We both are."

I had too many questions. Now I was silent. My sense of urgency about finding out just exactly what was going on had evaporated with the knowledge that Trirene would be next door. I knew nothing about her, yet from the instant I had seen her, I had felt comfort and reassurance from her. That was enough.

I realized that I was staring now at the passage that must have led to Trirene's room. It seemed impossibly far away.

"OK, so what's next?" I said.

"We'll get a zeepod in here to take a blood sample from you."

"I'll do it," Trirene said.

"OK," said Sargon.

She got what she needed out of a cabinet by the bed.

"Still using the same old technology, huh?" I said, seeing her approach me with what looked like a needle, but was really a little glass pipette.

"Sit down," she said.

I sat on the edge of the bed. She took my arm and aimed a red laser through the pipette at the thick blue vein at the inner bend of my elbow. I had good veins. I felt nothing yet could see dark red blood going up the pipette into the vial.

"Wow, no needle. And I felt nothing."

"The syringe is self-cleaning," Trirene said.

The red laser turned to blue for a second, then she withdrew it, no cotton ball, no Band-aid. I looked down at where she had withdrawn the blood and could see no mark or any sign she had just drawn my blood.

"What are you testing me for? I mean, why are you taking my blood?"

"If you can just be patient, we will let you know shortly," Sargon said.

Trirene replaced the syringe in the drawer and took the vial with her, clenched in one resolute hand.

Sargon and I spent the next few moments in silence. Trirene came back in the room, slowly, somberly.

"You must go back." The blue of her eyes was hard.

"Is there something wrong?"

She blossomed like a rose under time-lapse photography, becoming more beautiful and desirable than any woman I had ever seen: "You must return to the Earth as you knew it." Her voice was steady and serene. "A higher power wills that you pass from there to a place called Other World."

"I want to stay with you."

"The memory alone of the joy I represent to you will sustain you. Instead of me, you will be given the beam. It will make you an outcast but will deliver you in the end."

No sooner had she spoken these prophetic words than I was back in my room again, standing alone in front of the closed blinds of my window, listening to the hum of air through my air-conditioner. A car passed with a whoosh up from under Scott Circle on the street below.

I returned home to my parents' house and within two years was carried out in handcuffs and leather restraints, condemned to share the life of humiliation, shame, and pain of those stigmatized as mentally ill. The locked doors of a mental hospital were but one phase of the ostracism I then endured. I spent the next ten years in a misery that knew no bounds. During those years I developed a beam, an as yet invisible beam, that shot from my brow, quite unpredictably, a beam I couldn't control, a beam in its infancy, and of course I was thought mad for claiming to possess a power that others could neither see nor prove existed.

At the same time I was really ill, or my mind had advanced to a level that the present age could make no sense of. Labeled as ill, persecuted like an early Christian, I believed I was ill. I believed the beam had been a delusion and so I forgot about it. Medications helped erase it, and for a long time, I didn't perceive it at all.

As for Alona, she faded out of my life just as surely as the colors of a tapestry, or a fresco, will fade on a villa wall exposed to too much sun. It became impossible to carry on with her from my parents' house. The last time I saw her, we met at the parking lot by the Bethesda Theater. I told her I had made "a great scientific discovery" in reference to my beam, the existence of which I was not yet brave or foolhardy enough to reveal. But I could not escape the memory of what she had meant to me. It came out in a strange way, though, one that only makes sense in retrospect. And so I'll close with a poem that can only hint at the confusion that then characterized my life:

After I saw you on TV, at first–

I think you wore a red blazer–I liked

You. You had olive skin, a Jewish face,

And maternal bearing—I was psyched,

So I watched you at 11 o'clock

For a minute or so—I liked your poise,

I liked your eyes, so it came as no shock

When one morning, I woke and heard your voice.

Just before, something like a burning bush

Descended next to me as if on wings–

The sweetest woman in the synagogue

Smelling like the Holiest of Holies.

Handcuffed and placed in a paddy wagon,

I was five months in the state asylum.

II. Psychosis

"Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage . . ."

(Richard Lovelace, 1642)

August 1992 (Tuesday)

Eating has become a labor. Sleep is impossible. The face of my generation has been turned against me. And I am too inept, too unsuccessful a hunter to eat without guilt. It was the man's task in prehistoric times to go out and bring in a trophy that would win him a woman as sensual as the pelt of a saber-toothed tiger.

But my winnings are meager, not a pelt but my blue, caged within my fingers each night like a magical mouse, sings arias of beautiful pink in crescendos of erection quelled only by purple of truest love and recognition.

Desperation follows. If having no sexual partner formed one wall of my prison, then being ignored formed another.

A false accusation formed the third wall of my prison, for I did not see myself as mentally ill. I was just me. I feel like I'm so close to understanding something so important—like when I was seven and adored a little girl for her beautiful pink. Wasn't there something we should be doing together? The answer never entered my mind, but I had come close to making a discovery that might have changed my life forever.

What I feel close to now is another secret: how we might transform into an alien at death? Do we slough off our human form as a snake sloughs off his skin? The universe is large, too large for travel by simply mechanical means. There must be ways of penetrating the universe as if by layers.

But is there no floor and ceiling to my prison? The floor is the radio I listen to all day long, representing the common assumptions of my day. The ceiling is my future. It is so much greater than anything I can conceive, like the appearance of the lighted world to a person who has been blind or the reality of a world of speech and sound to someone who has been deaf, a world too infinite to conceive, yet too simple not to be instantly recognized.

August 24, 1992 (Monday)

One night I turned on the TV around 11 o'clock and turned the channel to a Baltimore station. The picture was snowy but I could make out the image of what I perceived to be a very beautiful pink broadcaster. I was delusional, I could perceive communications coming from her mouth, beside her spoken speech. The communications were like ultrasound as if beamed from an antenna. I could perceive and understand these communications as clearly as speech and I could, like an insect, emit the same form of communications from my brain. Even though Baltimore was a good 45 to 60 minutes away from my house by car, the communications between me and this broadcaster, whose name was Brown, were instantaneous, as if by telepathy.

The next day, in the presence of my mother, I sent Brown a present: a teardrop pendant for her neck. I had never discussed women at any depth with my mother before. If I ever tried, she always answered something to the effect of: "You'll learn about that soon enough" or "You've got plenty of time for that." The subject was closed. I wrapped the pendant on the kitchen table with gift wrap and asked my mother, "Do you think she'll answer me?"

My mother said: "Oh Lord, who knows? She might answer you."

The only relationship I had ever had with a woman had been with Alona. And that had been adultery. "Keep thee from the strange woman," the Bible had said. And: "Whoever toucheth her shall not be innocent . . . Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death."

I had read the Bible but I had not heeded its warnings and my life had all but been destroyed like a house that had been set on fire and left to burn. Invisible flames had consumed me, even if the whole process was one of analogies and symbolism, even if God were just a symbol of the unconscious angers of other people, angers that worked on a mass hypnotic scale to isolate and punish transgressors of a moral code that receded all the way back to the primeval consciousness of the first apelike hominids who persecuted evil from their midst by group murder and cannibalism.

I had gone after a strange woman as an "ox to the slaughter." In all my reading and experience, I had never seen a better description. I had then survived two years of being as if burned alive like Joan of Arc till the witch that had been in me screamed and screamed. Another part of me was a detached observer who looked down as if from a higher world upon the conflagration. I knew I had done wrong. But did the punishment have to be so severe? What was I talking about? I had survived. In antiquity, the punishment for adultery had been death.

If there was death, there was also resurrection. I was a member of a generation that had seen more value in a Levi jacket than a coat and tie, that chose to experience firsthand what others had passed over as unworthy or simply hadn't noticed. I had worked on a ranch in Colorado, worked with an all-Hispanic construction crew in Miami, worked in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn, bagged groceries at an A&P grocery store: I once drove nonstop from Washington to Toronto—I had crisscrossed Europe with a sleeping bag and a knapsack. Not the curriculum for a student on the traditional path to success. Had I thrown everything away for a fool's dream? "Experience keeps a dear school," Benjamin Franklin had said, "but fools will learn in no other."

Was there no writing in the Western world, was there no quotation in the entirety of Judeo-Christian culture with which to refute Franklin? Advised by Emerson, I would rely upon myself for the refutation. Maybe I was a fool, "a fool on a hill" as in the Beatles' song. But maybe as the Beatles' song suggests, the fool sees more than all of us put together and only seems a fool.

A fool is in a process of becoming wise, a wise man is at the end, however momentary or seemingly eternal, of a process that has come to completion. My generation exalted the process. Yes, we were fools, it said, and we were not afraid of being fools, if to do so were to come to a state of higher consciousness and understanding.

Have you ever been to Colorado and tried to shovel the ends of furrows in a corn field out to an irrigation ditch. The ground is rock hard and steel shovels bounce off the hard ground like rocks off rocks. Is one a fool to do such work? Yet I did just such work alongside Mexican "wetbacks" who had families and their own store of honor and dignity. Was I a fool? I could have been watching girls play in bikinis beside the pool of my parents' country club back in Potomac, Maryland.

Let me tell you: a fool is a person who accepts the common assumptions of his reality without questioning them. We are here to do work in this world, but not the work of the rich and powerful. If all men are created equal, let each one of us claim an equal share to the Earth's bounty. I was a fool all right and I would go on being a fool until the world was a better place.

August 1992 (Tuesday)

She was wearing a purplish red blouse with loosely ruffling short sleeves. It fit her tightly across her pink and her pink was very large and very shapely and well developed. She was wearing an off-white skirt which ran to the middle of her calves. Her skin was pink. It was creamy and white, and pink around her heels.

But her pink was just fantastic. And her face was pink, too. I don't know how to describe it. It was a smooth face, with smooth curves and it was long, but neither thin nor wide, just long and smooth, with big eyes that seemed dark blue and unmoving. Yes, that was it, the motionless quality of her features.

It was a face that did not often change expression.

I saw this woman first in a big new high-rise building in Bethesda whose lower story forms an indoor shopping mall. Inside the hallways of the mall, an exhibition of various travelling shops was on display. These travelling shops go from mall to mall across the country, setting up in the hallways and selling their specialized wares—old books, paintings, jewelry, antiques, clothing, etc. Apparently they are good for business because they attract a lot of people to the mall.

I had been in the mall walking around, looking things over, and trying to think up possibilities for a job when I saw her.

She was with a friend, a woman older than herself by a few years. Yet both women appeared to be in their early thirties. The friend had black hair. She was slim and attractive, but not in any sense pink, not even quite pretty, though I suppose she could be that too on occasion. Her skin was dark and smooth. It might have been her most attractive feature, along with her lips, which were red, full, and well-shaped.

The other woman was far more attractive. She was in fact shapely enough to be pink. Her hair was a very light brown or chestnut, or is it auburn of which I'm thinking?

I had been in the mall awhile, and now I was on my way out. I had just about reached the doors when these two women passed me on my left. Struck by the auburn woman's beauty, I stopped and turned to get a better look. She and her friend continued on, and I watched them recede in the crowd.

They were talking quietly. The dark-haired woman was smiling often. The auburn woman rarely smiled at all. She was just very placid, gentle, and of course cool. I suppose that the dark-haired woman was paying homage to her by the way she so often turned and smiled and scrutinized her companion's every reaction to everything she had to say. And it seemed that the auburn woman was too pink to need to have to say anything at all.

I took one last look at the auburn woman, turning my head and squinting for one last look at her legs. What a pink!

So I left the place. I walked about a block and a half up the road, and then decided to go back to the building I had been in and check the directory. I might be able to get a job here, I thought. I'll have a look around.

So I came back in.

As I was looking for the directory the two women passed me again. The mall was actually rectangular in construction, and I had only been on one side of it before. Now I was walking down the other side, and they were coming toward me, having circled round from the other side.

Now I saw the auburn woman again. How pink, I thought, impressed again.

The two crossed in front of me and went to get something to eat together in a small shop.

I continued on my way then turned and went back to from where I'd come.

Now I found the directory.

I checked it over, going down the long list of names, which were arranged in alphabetical order in about six long columns. The letters were black against a light blue ground.

By far the offices were made up of law firms and attorneys. But there were also some associations there, too, which had to do with airplane pilots and the airline industry. And then there were a few computer places with names like Information Systems and a few research places, and a few public relations firms. There were offices for two major motion picture studios, and I assumed that these offices had to do with film distribution. The two companies were Universal and Warner Brothers. No, there was no chance for getting a job here.

But this was only the West building. A sign at the bottom of the directory told me that there was another directory for the East Building at the other end of the hall.

So I went to have a look.

There again I saw mostly law firms, and CPA firms. But I saw two job possibilities. One was with an office called Reynold's Publishing, the other with one called Mobile Video-Tape Productions. After two rings I got a woman's voice on the other end of the line.

She said something, a few words, which I could not understand.

"Is this Reynold's Publishing?" I said.

"Yes, it is," she said.

"Can I please speak with your personnel director?"

"Is this about a job or something else?" she said.

"Well I'd like to get some job information if I could," I said.

"All right, just a minute," she said, and put me on hold.

While I was waiting, an overweight man with the red flushy skin, beer belly, and general paunchiness of an alcoholic took up the phone right next to me and started to dial.

He was assuming a highly aggressive stance toward me for some reason, turning directly toward me as he dialed and looking right at me, while ignoring me scornfully.

He was one of those grotesque ass-kissing businessmen. I turned directly toward the wall and continued waiting.

Now the ass-kissing alcoholic started talking to whomever he was talking to: " . . . some very dear friends of ours are coming down from Honolulu . . ." he said, and went on, but I heard no more because the woman's voice now returned to the other end of the line.

"Hello," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"The person you would want to talk to is not in right now. His name is Mr. Paul Fleming. So I think that the best thing for you to do would be to send in a resume. But I can tell you that there are no job openings here right now."

"I see," I said. "Well, would it be all right if I called back to talk with him because I wouldn't know what to put on the resume until I did."

"Yes that would be all right," she said, showing definite aggravation.

"Well, when would be a good time for me to call? When is he in?"

"He's in and out," she said, huffily.

I waited.

"When would be a good time?" I said.

"Morning. You could try in the morning." She was getting angry now.

"All right, thank you," I said. "I'll do that."

Of course I have no intention of calling back. I could tell by the tone of the woman's voice that Reynold's Publications is a one-man office and that she is the only secretary.

Now I walked up the street to another new high-rise building in the town. This one was enormous, menacing, and black.

I went in and had a look around. The directory of this one was almost entirely taken up by lawyers, law firms, and CPA firms.

A group of homely girls came out of an elevator and passed behind me. Two of them stopped to converse directly behind me, giving each other directions of some kind. I walked away from them, they went out, then I went out after they had gone.

Now I went back to the building where I'd been before in order to get something to eat at a sandwich shop next door to the small shop at which the two women had stopped to get something to eat.

As I passed by, I looked in and could see that they were still sitting there together and conversing. The dark-haired woman was doing all the talking as before.

I bought a ham and cheese on rye with lettuce and no mayonnaise, a pack of potato chips, and a medium lemonade from an ugly man with a pock-marked face and bulbous nose who might have been Jewish. The sandwich was made by a black woman who asked me to repeat what I said to her twice before she made the sandwich.

I took the sandwich, lemonade, and potato chips out in the brown paper bag in which the ugly man had packed them. First I asked an ugly woman who looked a lot more Jewish than he did if they had any napkins.

"Back there by the refrigerator," she said.

I went and got some, looking for a place to sit down. But if I sat around the corner I would have had to sit right next to a black woman and her noisy children, which would have been bothering me, or I would have had to sit next to an older man who was smoking a cigarette in the corner, which would have been intolerable, so I left.

I went outside to look for a place to sit down.

There was a kind of step formed by a raised stone slab at the base of the building, right outside the windows of the ground floor shops, and a girl was sitting on this near the main entrance, taking a break presumably from her job.

I decided not to sit on the stone slab because I was afraid someone would come out of one of the shops and ask me to move.

There must be a park around here somewhere, I thought, and turned the corner at the light, wandering a block to the left and coming upon a small green park which I had never known existed.

I took my lunch over to a picnic table and sat down to have something to eat.

On the near side of the park, as I entered it, was a young boy and girl having lunch together on the grass. About midway along, two black girls were doing the same. Not far from them was a group of four teenage girls of about the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Further on up in the park, two young men were approaching with ice cream cones, one of them black.

They might have wanted to sit at the picnic table I was going to sit at. But I got there first, sat down, and they came to a halt. The table was about midway through the park, behind the black girls. It was very windy, and I had to hold my lunch down to keep it from blowing away.

Now I finished, threw my things in a trash can, and proceeded back from where I had come. The boy and girl were gone. The group of teenage girls had got up and left a few minutes before. The two young men had long since wandered off, and the black girls were rising just after I did and proceeding off in the opposite direction.

I started walking very slowly down Wisconsin Avenue toward Old Georgetown Road. Reaching the intersection, I stopped and looked down the road from where I'd come.

There walking not far behind me had been the beautiful auburn girl. And now she was alone.

Was this woman a hallucination or was she real?

I was already pointed in the direction of crossing the street. It seems I had to cross. So I did, and when I got to the other side, I turned slowly back to see where she would go.

She had turned in the opposite direction at the corner and now was crossing to the other side—but not at the light.

So I crossed over, too, and then crossed back again to the side of the street on which I'd been originally.

Well, I had probably lost her by now, I thought.

So since I had to go to the bathroom, and since I saw one outside a Roy Rogers, I decided to go. A man was coming out just as I was going in. That was good. I wouldn't have to get a key.

So I went to the bathroom and then came outside again.

She had probably gone in that new apartment building just down the way, I thought. But there was a chance she had gone into one of two other places which were side by side right next to the Roy Rogers: a Crown Book Store and a Dart Drug.

I went to have a look in the Crown's first, going in slowly, and checking all the aisles. No, she was not in here.

I came out and now went to try the Dart Drug.

I went slowly, looking down each of the long aisles, and there I found her, in about the middle of the store. She was looking at the gift cards. In fact, she was standing next to the baby cards.

I didn't have the nerve to approach her.

So I went on to the next aisle, over halfway down it to just about where she was standing an aisle away and stood there for a minute thinking.

What to do?

I decided to circle around her, to pass now on the opposite side of the aisle from her and not look at her. I wanted her to get a look at me.

This I did, and crossed now another aisle away and then slowly proceeded up this aisle, not knowing what to do.

I would approach her now.

I came around again to my original position and started down the aisle toward her, but she was now on her way out.

When she saw me, though, she flustered a little, not quite knowing what to do.

Yes, she was definitely aware of me. But she was afraid to show it. She then stopped at the end of the aisle irresolutely in front of the cards under the heading of friendship.

A good sign, I thought, standing now where she had stood before but looking back toward her.

I now proceeded toward her again. But as I did she went off, turning now around the corner where I had made my first detour.

I stopped in front of the friendship cards for a moment, and then followed her around.

No, she had not gone down that aisle. She had gone down the next one.

Just as I came around the corner she was reaching up to take some kind of fluoreseptic something or other in a long narrow box off the shelf.

Now I slowly approached her again, very nervously.

She completely ignored me.

"Hi," I said, and she looked up.

Her face remained completely emotionless. She simply stared at me for a moment, but did not deign to reply. I answered this high and mighty look with a parody grimace of a smile, suddenly pulling my lips back and baring my teeth. The least she could have done was say hello, for god's sake!

She turned her head away and started to walk away from me down the aisle.

"I said, hi," I said as she walked away and I slowly walked behind her.

She growled something in a low mean tone while she was walking away, but I could not understand what it was.

I gave her up for good now.

So I went to another aisle. I might as well buy some shoe polish and strings for my brown shoes, I thought, seeing some there.

So I stopped off and picked some out, then headed for the cash register. There she was again, just checking out.

All well and good, I quietly awaited my turn. The auburn girl maintained her completely placid expression as before, an expression which said quite plainly that she was beautiful enough to ignore the entire world.

Very good, I still found it amusing to look at her. She probably didn't even know I was in line behind her, although one of the peculiar things about her expression also was that it also had the weird quality about it which said that although she was completely ignoring everything that was going on around her, she was at the same time aware of everything that was going on all around her.

I had the feeling that she knew I was standing a few feet from her now.

She paid for her things, the young man bagged them for her, she thanked him very nicely, and then she went out.

Well, I'll get some shoe polish, at least, I thought. I really didn't need shoe polish that bad. I could have bought it later. Right now I need the money for other things. I was angry with myself for buying the shoe polish.

Oh, what the heck, I thought. It's only about $1.50. What the hell, I'll buy it.

Now it was my turn to check out. As I was putting my things on the counter, I happened to glance out the large glass windows which make up the front of the store.

There she was, much to my great surprise, talking with an overweight young man who was wearing a pair of gym shorts and tennis shoes and sports shirt.

I looked up again, and a Coca Cola truck had now pulled up in front of the store and hidden the auburn woman from view.

In a few moments, I had paid for my things, a young man had bagged them for me, and I was on my way out.

She was gone now, I saw, as I crossed around the front of the Cola truck. I looked up the street: there she was now on the other side, heading back in the direction from which she had come.

August 1992 (Wednesday)

A psychologist comes to the house once a week for a family visit with me, my father, and my mother. Today I demanded that a court trial be held to find out how handcuffs and leather restraints should have been necessary in my involuntary commitment of three years ago. Or why no warning should have been given me, or why such drastic measures should have been taken? Will I try to get the entire family into court over this matter? The present demand is that I take part in an NIH program for the mentally ill and it's so depressing to hear this from them, my anger is great.

At the same time, no one will answer my letters, nor do I have the least desire to try and publish any of my writing with conventional publishers, not after the outrageous injustice that resulted from my wanting to become a writer in the first place. Nor do I have any faith in the legal system to bring me justice.

The psychologist dismissed my claims to have been arrested without warning like a political prisoner in the Soviet Union or a Jew in Nazi Germany, but he did concede, the first time ever by any of these "professionals," that I might have had an allergic reaction to the prolixin forcibly injected in me on the first day of my involuntary commitment.

September 1992 (Wednesday)

I dreamed I was among acquaintances who had coffins and sepulchers like homes and who had not yet died. Together they waited for inexorable death. In a sepulcher of my own, I was cold, so cold I shook with chills.

September 1992 (Thursday)

She was coming out of the entrance just as I was going into it. I turned around and followed her to her car.

She was with a slightly doltish-looking rich-boy nice-boy nothing-special type. He looked like a small-town guy who might have inherited a lot of money.

His tone of voice betrayed he couldn't have known her very well. He seemed to be jumping out of his skin to seem as cool and nonchalant as possible. He wanted to seduce her; he didn't want to seem like he did.

I followed her with him away from the main terminal, back in the direction I had come.

They walked toward the North Terminal, turned left, and headed into a parking lot. I followed, all the way down to their car: it was a grey two-seat sports car, very fancy, license number D2070. I still remember it because it reminded me of a license I had seen the day before—DZZ (as in dizzy).

The sports car was his. Maybe she was a stewardess: gee! Gosh! She seemed prettier than a stewardess—far too pretty. This girl was a porno model or porno film star. Her pink was to the eyes what the press of naked flesh is to the body—a pleasure.

She wore a red shirt, very close fitting over a gorgeous pink. Her white pants, which squeezed just over her buttocks, did not brag as loud as her shirt of what, like a miser, she concealed underneath.

It seemed to me that the pants were designed to cover up her most erotic curves and leave her looking very proper and sophisticated, yet still erotic, because they still showed enough of her beauty to catch your attention and make you long for her, but without her seeming to display herself as cheap. Yes, she was dressed very expensively. Those pants might have even been designed especially for her.

They were high-fashion pants. You could tell that in the cut, design, and material—white—off white.

Her hair was blond; her face was classically beautiful. Yes, she was much more pink, far more pink, than the girl I saw the other day while looking for a job, far more pink.

Her pink just seemed far too pink for that of a fashion model. Fashion models are always skinny and unsexy. This woman had the most beautiful pink!

Gorgeous small waist—perfect proportions, yet, I can't imagine the girl as a movie star. If she were a movie star she'd be known, like Raquel Welsh, or somebody like that. Maybe she was on her way to becoming a new sex goddess in film.

I was so enchanted by her that I went to the Hilton Hotel about two hours later to see if she was there. I arrived there at about 8:00, and sat in the lobby till 8:15, then got up and walked around for fifteen minutes.

Then I started home. I walked through the Mayflower while on my way back to Connecticut Avenue, and didn't see anything there.

Then when I arrived at Dupont Circle, I decided to go and have a look in the Hilton up the street.

The last time I had been there it had been full of blacks. This time it was full of blacks also, some convention of blacks which has been going on all week, or has it been longer than that?

Thus I missed the bus, and had to wait a half-an-hour for another one

This was deeply depressing. I was getting to feel really bad now. I had gone to all three hotels and failed to turn anything up.

Then I sat down on a bench on the other side of the bus island from where I was supposed to catch my bus because a Chinaman very aggressively asked me a question about where to catch the T-4 bus and then a crazy-looking muscular Italian came up and stood aggressively near me, as if pacing out his territory, and turned and looked me in the eye—a weird look—I couldn't make any sense of it, so I circled around behind him to demonstrate my own territory and then went and had a seat on the other side of the island.

While I was sitting there, a fat Chinese or Hawaiian girl came and sat on the other side of the bench with me—she seemed very nicely dressed, and I was glad to have her there, since she was like a sign that said I was calm and peaceful and she was calm and peaceful, and both of us were very good, so that no one would bother us.

Then, suddenly, coming up the street along the sidewalk, I saw this girl who looked amazingly like the girl I have been seeing in the bookstore, only her legs were very pink.

But I couldn't tell that yet because I was afraid to look at her. She had a very similar face, the same hair, and almost the same kind of quiet, humble, characteristic walk that the girl in the bookstore had.

She was obviously Jewish. As she got up closer, however, I could see that her legs were very pink, and I knew that that girl in the bookstore didn't have legs like that. Then I saw her feet and they were very pink, then just her pink, and that was sensational.

As she went by I got a full look at her legs and ass from behind, and she had just about the most pink ass and buttocks and thighs and legs I have ever seen. They simply stunned me. They were silky, shining, as if smoothed with oil. She was wearing very short white shorts which just showed the lift and flare of her buttocks beautifully. I could hardly hold my seat from wanting to call out to her.

So I sat there for a moment, thinking what to do, took a look over my left shoulder, saw her passing off around Dupont Circle, and decided to give chase, like John Paul Jones veering off to pursue the Leopard off Flamborough Head. I had not yet begun to fight!

Well, I followed her around the circle, then left, past the fancy hotel on the corner of Connecticut Avenue.

I seemed to be walking much faster than she was, even though I was trying to walk slowly. She must not have been eager to get home, but I didn't think of that then. We got halfway down the block, walking in a dark shady area, just the kind of area it would frighten a girl to be spoken to in, only there was another couple only about fifteen to twenty yards ahead, and so I called out, "Excuse me."

I had suddenly become very excited about speaking now at the very moment when it would seem worst to do so because that would give me my best opportunity.

Somebody had called out something just as I was inhaling to speak out, and so that served to reduce the tension a little.

My words must have sounded like the words of a lost child because she turned around, almost, it seemed, without any fear, immediately seeming to recognize me as the guy she had seen sitting on the bench at the bus island.

My words were desperate—"Excuse me"—spoken in a nasal tone of voice as if they had been very difficult to say, like a child apologizing to its mother.

"Yes?" she said and just looked at me.

"Is your name Mary?" I said.

I hadn't known what to say. She had looked like the girl I had seen in the bookstore, maybe she had the same name. It was just about the only safe thing I could think to say that I didn't really want to say, and since I didn't want to say it so much it would be clear to her that I must have just wanted to get to know her by saying it. I might ruin everything or succeed.

It seemed as if I had ruined everything and really frightened her. I didn't expect that at all.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I knew a girl by that name once." Then, "Sorry."

"That's all right," she said, and kept walking. Then a few feet later she turned to the left to cross the street in the middle of the block. Immediately I thought: Well, I guess I've frightened her and now she's crossing to walk on the other side of the street. So I kept walking slowly down my side as if not to alarm her, and turning my head to glance at her, saw that she had apparently arrived where she lived, in a basement apartment.

She had turned on the lights to her apartment when she went in, and I noticed that either there weren't any curtains in the windows or the curtains weren't drawn. I couldn't see her in the apartment—though I certainly didn't stop to look for very long. I was afraid she might be looking out at me from some dark window.

September 1992 (Tuesday)

I've got a king-sized sexual urge and nowhere to go with it. There's a woman nearby I thought I'd try to seduce, but she's married. I went over to her house twice and she wasn't home either time. It's too difficult for me to persist in chasing after her. Then I tried to make it with Kay Steiner, a voluptuous girl I had tried unsuccessfully to date while in college. Her father was a psychiatrist. I found that not only does she no longer live at home, she's married. Enough to say that Kay Steiner was so well endowed that her beauty had reduced me to a slapstick comedy figure of befuddled ineptitude. I got too excited and confused by her appearance. Flashing marquees of forbidden sexuality lit up the night of my consciousness so that in simply looking at her I could think of nothing but sex and I had such conflicting feelings of lust and guilt that I ended up leaving her in a most unchivalrous and bumbling manner before our date even got started. To my mind, she was better off that way because all I had been able to think about when with her was taking her up to my room for sex. If she had been less beautiful I wouldn't have minded that. With her sex was going to mean marriage and I was not ready for marriage. So like a churl I abandoned her at the Kennedy Center and went my way, leaving her to find her way home alone. That was safer and wiser than attempting a relationship which might ultimately have led to two kids and a divorce some four or five years down the road.

A few years later, I bought her an atonement gift to coincide with Yom Kippur. She was Jewish. Her husband icily accepted the gift from me.

My sex life has been so impoverished I'm like the peasants of 18th-century France, living in a land of R- and X-rated royalty. I've never really had a legitimate girlfriend. Alona doesn't count—she was married.

I was celibate. I had my one affair. Then breaking up with Alona, Brown erupted into my consciousness. I tried with all my might to get through to Brown. I had been celibate for years. Do I want to be gay? I'm afraid of being raped the way I was involuntarily committed. I can't get to a girl, can't find a woman: what kind of concessions do I have to make?

I put all my original manuscripts in a trunk and mailed the trunk to an agent in Los Angeles. The trunk got lost after the agent refused to accept it. I didn't have the number of the trunk to identify it. It had the only complete copy of the book I wrote at my parents' house. I had thrown my own copy into the Potomac and used the gas grill to burn whatever rough draft material I had left. All that remains are some typeset copies of Chapter 1. If I destroy these, nothing will be left of a work I had meant to be my masterpiece.

At a family therapy meeting, my parents told me that someone from Channel 8 had called our house with all the authority of the police to warn me that I was not to send any more gifts or letters to Brown. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Brown was a public person. The gifts I sent were nice gifts and the cards and letters were respectful and adulatory. Any other person would have been pleased to have been so honored by a fan.

September 1992 (Wednesday)

Being labeled as mentally ill: the stigma makes one a fugitive in a country that persecutes runaway slaves. One day, as I sat in a waiting room before an appointment with a psychiatrist, I read about blacks who had been born as slaves and buried as slaves. There had been no escape in their lifetime from injustice and so there might not be in mine. They at least had their honor, though it was honor steeped in sadness, tragedy, defeat. Could their fate be mine? Sentenced to mental illness for life, with no hope of recovery, there would be no escape. I would die as one my elders and peers and descendants would have considered crazy. Responsibility, credibility, stripped from me, I would be a thing worthy only of pity, shunned in public, ridiculed in private, identified not as a person but an unclean contagious thing, a disease.

What a woman might see in me now is a man who might still be somewhat physically attractive, but who has been so stigmatized that being put back in a mental institution is about the only alternative that remains open to me. I would be good at doing dishes and laundry while she went out and worked a job. She would be a professional. I would be the opposite. Employers will hire me only to do the most menial work. With a wife like that, I would be a servant, serving out a life sentence under home guard, dependent on whatever pity might be bestowed on me.

I feel bad, I feel very bad. I had this experience: Brown as if came to me. She came into my head, descending inside of me, and she hovered over me, as powerful and real to my senses as an angel sent from heaven. By telepathy, let's call it, I told her I loved her. My loving her justified the experience I had had about the beam. In reality, however, she had told me twice on the telephone when I actually called her at WXQR, and got through, that she was very happily married.

I'll not watch Channel 8 again. I'll have to see a psychiatrist because I perceive this woman as my savior, when in reality she wants nothing to do with me.

I wrote her five letters in one night about two weeks ago: four were on pink construction paper with matching envelopes (I made the envelopes—this is the kind of thing they teach "crazies" like me to do in a mental hospital). One letter was on red paper, one on white pasted over black, with the red paper having a matching red envelope. I can remember now: I addressed each envelope with a black ink pen.

Almost three weeks ago, I sent her a psychic confession letter, as you might call it. It detailed the circumstances around my involuntary commitment. Commitment for what? I fasted. I refused to eat out of protest for the bastardly way I was being treated by my father, by my whole family, by society. Let me make this a kick in the pants to God—I sent the letter on red children's construction paper, symbol of the childhood I had lost and perhaps hoped to recapture. The envelope had purple labels, as if to signify a heart. My heart was as dead as a scaled fish on a steel table. Then I sent a letter with an inscription in Hebrew at the top, my self-taught, unlearned, probably wrong Hebrew for "I love Brown" (Hebrew is read from right to left): .אני אוהב את בראון

It looks like I've written 10 letters to Brown, not counting two I had written and signed her name to, as if she had written them to me.

September 1992 (Monday)

At the book store I saw this really beautiful dark-skinned girl with one of the shapeliest figures I have seen in a long time; her pink especially were beautiful, and she had pretty legs, too. But since she seemed to be more of an intellectual type girl than a sensational one, she was dressed very plainly and simply. But there was simply no hiding that figure, however she dressed. I followed her through the store a little, but didn't have the nerve to say anything. I have learned by now that an unknown person like myself can simply not meet women that way, at least not the really pink ones. I have tried it too many times. One can talk to the girl, yes, she will talk. But the conversation will go nowhere. And if I ask the girl her name, she'll give me her first name and not her last, and if I ask her for her phone number, she'll say that she never gives her phone number out to strangers. And if I give her my phone number, she'll never call. And if I ask her if I can see her again somehow, she'll say she'll see me "around," wherever that might be.

I've been through this routine so many times I could write down every possible variation on the theme.

Streets? Well, that is what the women would say. They'd say I had been trying to meet them "on the street," even if we were inside a bookstore together.

I had been in the bookstore for at least an hour, going through the fiction and science fiction sections and I was on my way out when I stopped in front of the counter to have a look at whatever books were popular enough to be displayed there.

Mailer's _The Executioner's Song_ was not there, but someone had dropped a copy on the ledge below the wire shelves of paperback books and I picked it up. I turned to the back of the book to see if Gilmore had had any last words. Instead, I had just finished reading the paragraph in which Mailer describes Gilmore's death when I looked up to see this beautiful girl coming directly toward me from the front doors. She was no more than a few feet away from me, and I looked up from my reading directly into her eyes, which I noticed were dark and sultry. Her eyes seemed to widen with interest to take in mine. As she was passing directly in front of me, I glanced downward toward her pink. She walked away from me toward the fiction section. I looked at her legs. They had that sharp and rounded appearance of well-defined muscle—a dancer's legs.

I put the Mailer book back and circled round a bookshelf in order to approach her from the opposite side and have another look. Could she really have been that pink? Nervously I paused and waited and thought. What would happen next?

She started to walk away from me down the fiction section. I followed slowly behind. For then she turned around and came back toward me. And I had been prepared for that. So I simply stopped where I was and let her come. She turned to go across to the other side of the bookstore before she got to me, and then I simply followed along.

She went to the psychology section. Meanwhile, I was hoping to find a better place to keep an eye on her and plan some kind of impossible strategy to get to know her.

I stood now toward the right end of a shelf which ran across the store as she looked at the paperback books along the wall. But I couldn't see her. She was a little bit too far to the left. I was standing in front of a group of nature books, pictorial gift books of the American wilderness combined with quotations from Thoreau and Emerson. Suddenly, I glanced through a crack in the shelf and found myself looking directly on her pink. She had turned toward me on the other side.

Now she asked one of the employees where to find something. I didn't listen, so I don't know what it was, but in an instant she was walking down the store along the wall.

I wasn't sure what to do. So I went back around the other side of the bookcase to the opposite side of the store, then began to cross back over to the science fiction section. I could be patient. I expected her any moment to come around the corner toward me. I waited.

I stood in front of the nonfiction hardback section and my eyes fell on the title of a book which seemed disturbing to me. It was next to an autobiography by Bette Midler.

As I was standing there, I saw the dark-skinned girl's shirt flash by the end of the shelf on my aisle. Now I followed her toward the front of the store. She came now to the cash register. She was going to buy a book, but I couldn't tell what it was. She was talking and cooing to a baby in the arms of a woman in line ahead of her. I glanced at her legs and wished I could have looked longer.

I turned and proceeded out. I went up to the bathroom outside the Roy Rogers next door. When I got done, I had the sudden urge to see if the dark-skinned girl had gone or was still where I had left her. I went back in the store. There she was. My eyes went right to her pink. She was putting a few dollar bills into her billfold. I walked past her and stood in front of picture books of birds and stared uncomprehendingly at their covers. This was ridiculous. I'm getting out of here, I thought. But she went out ahead of me and I followed her out. I watched her awhile from the entrance to see where she would go. She might have lived in the apartments nearby.

No, she got her car keys out of her purse and got into her car and turned her head back to look at me. I then walked home alone in Hemingway rain.

Before she had arrived at the bookstore, I had been studying the books intensively. Here's some of what I learned.

First of all, just about every woman's gothic romance starts off with a rape or an attempted rape, and proceeds then from rape to rape. Men always want the sex, and women never want to give it to them. So the men, if they are to have it, have to take it by force.

Women apparently like the idea of being raped. At least they like to read about it. They like the idea of putting up a good struggle, and then being completely overwhelmed, so that by the time the rape is over they are already in love. And women are the authors of these books. What this tells me is that apparently women are as much against the rigid social conventions of this society as men are, only their rebellion shows up as a curious projection of their desires onto men. The characters might fight and scrap when they're raped, but the women love to read about it. A rape scene usually starts out the sex in these novels, but if located elsewhere in the book will nevertheless be present. I have not looked at a single one of these gothic romances which has not included a rape scene.

The other thing I noticed about these books is how aggressive the women characters are in them. They get in knife fights, shoot guns, are beaten or raped or fight valiantly and often successfully to keep from either being beaten or raped. But more than that, their very thoughts are aggressive.

In one book today, one of the characters said she wanted to throw a glass of milk in a man's face, apparently because he was annoying her for some highly inconsequential reason. But these women characters are like that.

At any event, I looked at a lot more than just gothic romances. I wanted to say that the aggressive women of these gothic romances have their counterparts in the masculine world. Harold Robbins writes what might almost be called gothic romances for men; they are male sexual fantasies.

I opened one of his books to a depiction of a woman giving a man a blow job. The great mass of Americans don't read. But if they do read they read a book like this and keep it hidden away somewhere as a kind of aphrodisiac. If a man is bored, he turns to the lurid sex scenes for a turn-on. There's nothing pretty about the sex. It's selfish, violent, masturbatory. In the scene I read, the girl gives the man a blow job in a hotel room, gets the results all over her face, and then apparently feeling guilty asks him to slap her in the face, which he promptly does, and hard too. She wants to feel like a whore when she's with him, she tells him, or she just might fall in love with him. And after he hits her, she reminds him to hit her after every time they've been together so she won't forget.

Then of course I had a look into the science fiction section. Today I sampled a few of the primitive "Tarzan" type science fiction novels. Here again I came to male sexual fantasy. In one novel—I think the title was _Son of Gor_ —the narrator is enchained and made a slave of beautiful women—absolutely beautiful women.

He has to call his master "Mistress"—she is a beautiful woman, of course—and so every other line is "yes Mistress." And of course she carries a whip and whips him and it hurts but being a slave is still a lot of fun. Other beautiful women are slaves, too, and he if forced to make love with them apparently. But to him the idea is the most erotic one of which he can conceive. It is the king of the hill of male sexual fantasies, being bossed around by a beautiful "mistress" and forced to make love to her beautiful slavewomen, all in chains of course, and under the threat of a whip.

October 1992 (Thursday)

First I sat on the lowest limb for a long time. There was a crook in the branches there, a little way out from the limb, and a small branch growing just about at the level of my head, so that I could sit on the limb with my back against the trunk, hold onto the small branch at around the level of my head with one hand, and spread my legs out on the crook of branches that spread apart just a little ways from the place where I was sitting.

It was very comfortable to sit there, but it was more than that. The tree limb seemed almost to be caressing my ass. And I had not been sitting there for a minute before I started to get a hard-on.

But I decided not to let it go all the way up. I was nervous about being up in the tree. Anybody might pass by and see me, though the tree was set pretty far back from the road in pretty dark shadow, and there was enough foliage to make it difficult to see me.

I had on brown pants, brown shoes, with black socks, and a short-sleeved white shirt, so except for my shirt, I was camouflaged pretty well for tree sitting.

Well, after awhile, I decided to see what it would be like to unzip my pants and just let myself get a hard-on while sitting there, as the traffic whizzed back and forth on the highway right before me.

There was a path from the National Institutes of Health across the grassy area where the big trees were, and a parking lot behind the trees with no cars in it, a two-level parking lot with lights around it.

The tree itself was in a kind of pit. They had dug out around the base of the tree to a depth of about four or five feet and made a stone wall in the ground around the tree. Perhaps they did this because they raised the surface of this area when they built the parking lot.

Well, it wasn't too hard to climb the tree. The first branches were about five feet up, maybe a little higher, maybe six feet. Yes, they must have been about six feet up, and since the ledge around the tree extended out about six feet, you were pretty safe to sit there even at that level. No one would be able to come right up and bother you even if you could be seen. It was as if you were sitting on the rampart of a castle surrounded by a moat.

So I decided to unzip my pants and let the organ go up if it wanted to.

It took some courage. I had seen one person pass down the path near the tree not long after I had been there. But the person never noticed me, and I never noticed him till after he had passed. There were, however, to be no other passers by along that trail while I was there, but of course I couldn't have known that then.

Another thing was the headlights from the cars in the parking lot of the hospital which faced me. These couldn't really do much to illuminate me, since the parking lot was all the way across the highway and on a lower level of land. But they did throw a little haze of light up into the trees, though even so, I'm still pretty sure no one would have been able to see me. You know, when driving by that tree at night, I've never seen man, woman, or child in that tree.

There were leafy branches around the branch where I was sitting, so you couldn't even see the hospital very well, or the Moon.

There was a yellow-colored half-Moon out, about a third of the way up the sky, no, maybe even higher, maybe almost halfway up to the top of the sky, and it was hard to see that, too.

Then also the branch on which I was sitting was big and thick and sloped a little upward, so if you had been able to see me from a distance, all you would have been able to see was a little flash of white from my shirt within the shadows.

Well, it got exciting. I started to get a hard-on, not touching myself. I just unzipped my pants and spread my legs out on the limbs and let the organ rise up if it wanted to. I could feel the cool autumn air stir sweetly on my flesh as if some lovely maidens were kissing me.

I began to feel as if I had felt the first time I ever came to orgasm as a little boy at the age of four, when I had climbed up in a tree and while hugging the tree trunk with my loins, pulled myself up a little toward a few higher branches, way up at the top of the tree on a slightly sloping trunk that made it easy for me to straddle it and lovingly cling to it, overwhelmed by sudden orgasmic feelings.

I had been straddling the trunk and clinging to a few higher branches, trying to pull myself up just a little higher when the most delicious feeling began to pour through me and I began to get a glow in my loins and I felt like sap were oozing through me to the trunk.

A little companion of mine at the base of the tree was called away for dinner, but I remained clinging like a lover to the tree.

The same feeling came over me tonight. I just sat there and let the feelings glow off me. But it didn't seem that I could get the organ fully up.

I wasn't really trying. I was thinking about a pretty girl I had seen in a magazine, and then after awhile I began to calm down. I tried again a few times. But I could find no way of equaling that first delicious glow.

After awhile I zipped up my pants and decided I had had enough. I had had my good feeling, and so I should be happy I had had it without any trouble or bother from anyone.

But I still couldn't bring myself to leave the tree. I felt too good to leave.

So I decided after awhile to unzip my pants and try again.

This I did, but I began to realize I had to go to the bathroom. I had originally found the tree, I think, because I had to urinate. That was part of the reason. I was out on a walk and I had been out here before one night a few months ago, last winter, when it was cold That's part of the reason why I had come now, to see if it were different now that I was different.

So I had peed further back among the trees, pine trees, not nice oaks like this one, near the parking lot and on my way back to the highway I stopped and examined this old tree.

I almost decided not to climb it. I walked around it several times, feeling the lower branches. There were two big branches, or three, really, since one of the branches had a crook in it, on which you could make your start on the tree. But after awhile I could see that the one on the right (on the left, when facing the highway) would leave you stranded if you climbed up onto it.

Well, I did climb up onto it. I started with that branch just to see how it would be to get up in the tree and sit there a little while. Maybe there were bugs or mosquitoes. Maybe it wouldn't be any fun. I had to try it out first.

So I did. I got up behind the branch, and lifted myself up on it, jumping up and balancing myself on my palms and belly as I slowly proceeded to straddle the limb.

When I got on the branch, I found I couldn't go anywhere. I could reach the next-highest branch if I stood up on the limb and balanced myself, holding onto the trunk, which was far too wide to get your arms around, but which could stand you in good measure as a balance.

If you fell from there, though, you'd fall about five feet to the ground level, then another five feet into the pit, which had been too deep and dark for me to even see into in order to find the bottom. It would really be possible to hurt yourself if you fell from here.

I decided to get off this limb and try the other limb. So I jumped back to the ground—I had to shimmy along out to the edge of the pit first—and then made my attempt to climb the other limb.

It took me some courage to do this.

I had to circle the tree a few times and wonder if I was being foolhardy. It would be a hell of a thing to fall and hurt myself by trying to climb this crazy tree.

But I walked up to the limb finally, this one was a little higher than the other, and I put my right hand up on it, and saw that I could jump out from the ledge, kick my foot up on the trunk and simply give myself a boost that way while grabbing the inside part of the limb with my other hand.

Then I would have to pull myself up as I had done before, but it looked to be easier there, since there were other branches there which seemed to offer a place to sit and a way to climb up higher in the tree.

Just as I was leaning out to try this, I could see that just about at the level I had planned to place my foot was a little branch growing almost perpendicular out of the trunk. It could however be used as some support.

This was very encouraging. So I flexed myself as if to start my jump and knew that I could do it. I flexed myself right up to the point of jumping and knew that I could make it up into the tree. It was a feeling that I had, a perfectly fluid feeling. But I didn't jump.

The sound of the traffic bothered me. I wanted to wait till all the traffic had gone by.

So I waited. I walked out toward the road a ways, looked around to see if anyone were coming, and then turned back to go right up in the tree.

I didn't wait any longer. When I got to the branch, yes, I might have waited a few moments to let a few streams of traffic go by, and then I jumped, and swung myself up on the limb, using the foothold to help me.

OK, I had got up in the tree, and I had been up there awhile, as I said, very pleasantly on the limb, with my back on the trunk, and my ass and loins aglow on the base of the limb, when I decided that if I had to urinate, I wasn't going to climb back down off the tree and climb back on it again.

I saw a police car slow down and drive onto the hospital parking lot. The parking lot was pretty well filled, people were always coming and going, one here, one there, close of car door, start of an engine, lights. But you couldn't see many people, just an occasional shadow.

I had my fly open, now I zipped it up.

Well, you never could tell. It sure would be hell if suddenly one of those damn policemen showed up with a spotlight or a flashlight. But this was just a passing worry. It was too improbable to be taken seriously.

Suddenly, I turned and reaching up to grab the limb I had been using to balance myself while I was sitting with my back against the trunk, I decided to see if I could make it up any higher in the tree.

Now this small branch, which I was using as a handhold, was another small branch like the one I had used for a foothold to swing up in the tree. This one was a little thicker and a little further out from the tree, growing almost perpendicular to the tree like the other one. Above was a big thick branch which I could just reach up to get my palm on for a handhold.

It wouldn't be easy, but if I took a little chance, I could pull myself up toward this limb to the left and get a foothold on this smaller branch. Then there was another thicker branch almost directly overhead which I could get my right hand on.

This involved staying real close to the big thick barken trunk of the tree.

Well, I managed it. I thought it would be a hell of a lot harder getting back down than getting up. But I was too excited to think about that now.

From what I could see, it looked to be pretty easy to go from one big thick branch to the next one to climb way up high in the tree.

I wanted to go to the bathroom though. I wanted to pee down off the tree, but I didn't want to hit any of the branches, not even the one I was standing on, and I didn't want to hit my shoe.

The way the branches were situated, though, it was going to be hard to pee off the tree, since there seemed to be no place where one branch was located sufficiently above another so that you could stand up, hold onto the higher branch, and pee off the other.

There was no place you could do that. You had to move in a kind of zigzag or spiral to get up the tree, and you had to stay close to the trunk. If you peed holding onto the trunk, you'd get pee all over the trunk and lower branches and probably on the crook of the branch and on your shoe also.

Well, I finally found a place. It was on the far side of the tree. I had to get my back to the highway and stand out on a left-hand limb, facing the parking lot. Anyone in the parking lot could have seen me. But it was empty.

So I whipped out my pecker and stood there, full in the moonlight and open spaces of the branches, facing toward the parking lot, the light from the parking lot flaring out to me with a phosphorescent glow.

At first I was a little nervous. I was still worried about getting some of the urine on my right shoe the way I was standing, and I also didn't like the fact that I was going to have to hit some leafy branches toward the bottom of the tree, maybe those on the little branch I had used as my first foothold. It would fall on that part of the branch, though.

But the tree had been being so good to me, I didn't want to get any pee on the tree.

Well, you won't mind a little, will you? I almost said aloud and then let go my little tinkle.

I had had to go to the bathroom a hell of a lot more than I had expected, and a nice parabola of yellow flowed out—I must have supposed it looked a little yellow. There must have been just enough light to see that, or think it, though I don't really think there could have been, and it felt delicious. I saw a few pretty little jewel-like sparkles in the stream. And then I was very careful not to get any drops on my shoe.

But I didn't want to be so careful that I'd fall out of the tree.

I wished I could wash my hands now, but I decided to forget about it. Climbing up that rough bark would be enough to keep my hands from being too dirty.

"This is really turning into an adventure," I told myself. But I was a little more worried now, because I knew that if fell from this height, I could kill myself.

I wonder what it would be like to kill myself, I thought. Hell of a thought. Just think, if I fell from here—I wonder what would happen.

It looked like a long way down to the bottom.

What if one of these branches just cracked and came right off. I wouldn't have a chance.

But that was improbable. I wonder why more people don't kill themselves by jumping from great heights? I wondered. It seems that very few people choose that as a way of committing suicide.

It's too ugly, I thought. Too ugly and brutal a way to die, too brutal.

I kept a tight hold on the branches now. I was hugging them to me.

I don't want to fall off this tree, I thought. I won't fall off. I hope none of these branches breaks.

I got up just about as high as I could go in the tree, which wasn't much higher from the place where I had peed.

I suppose I had got about two-thirds of the way up in the tree, maybe a little higher. I don't think I could have climbed any higher than that without a little equipment or taking too big of a chance.

Now I had reached a nice three-way crook of two big broad branches and the trunk.

Well, if I sat down here, I would have to find some different way to sit than the one I had used before.

I don't think it was going to be very comfortable. It didn't look like there was going to be any way for me to sit back and let my pecker go up here.

So I was a little disappointed, but I was still happy to have been able to climb up this high in the tree. I straddled one crook with my legs hanging down and my arms around the big thick limb of the tree.

Here the limb sloped upward high enough so that I was only leaning forward a little, directly toward the highway.

It was a little tight on my parts, but the feeling stirred me a little also.

It made me think of what it was like to get up into the saddle of a horse when I was a little boy.

It seems that I could always feel a thrill right through the leather of that nice warm animal's back. There would always be a glow upon first getting up on a horse's back to ride.

I felt a little of that glow now. The tree almost seemed to quiver under me, as if it were alive.

But the position was too uncomfortable.

There was another possibility, which involved a little risk.

Just to the left of this crook was another crook, which ran out from a branch that extended outward to the left. I could seat myself on that crook, with my legs still around this big thick branch, and then lean back and lie along this other branch.

The only problem was that there would be nothing to hold onto. The only think I could do to keep myself from falling would be to clamp my legs round tight around the branch that I was straddling.

I could do that easily, and there was another branch a little way below that I could hook my left foot on to make completely straddling the bigger branch unnecessary.

But as it turned out, I didn't even need to do that. The branch I lay back on was wide enough to support me without any trouble (it was just about as broad as my back) and my loins and buttocks fit so perfectly into the crooks of the tree that you might have thought this place had almost been specially designed for me to sit in.

Well, I tried it first, and I got a glow. I began to get a big glow. So I sat back up and zipped my pants off.

I unbuckled my belt, undid the button, and pulled the zipper down, then just spread the flaps back (I wasn't wearing any underwear), and let the thing go up.

And it was beautiful. Not one part of my parts was touching the tree, since the groin of the pants protected them, and my nuts were right up snug within the hollow of that tree, and nothing at all was touching my organ.

It went up, and I leaned back and let it. It went all the way up, and I was glowing. I was on my way to orgasm. But I stopped it.

Just let it go so much and kept it from going further. I didn't want it to go off. I just wanted to keep it right on top of the edge of orgasm.

Well, I was glowing. I was laying back there on that one big limb with my thighs hugged round the other, and my ass and nuts hugged up so sweetly in that tree, you'd have thought that I was hugging the most gorgeous woman on Earth.

That tree seemed alive. I tell you that one limb was giving me a huggy. And I was sailing, thirty feet or more up in the air, on my back, legs dangling down, my arms holding onto nothing.

I could hear the crickets chirping in the tree so sweetly all around me, you'd have thought that they were singing in the glow.

The traffic rushing by seemed to befriend me. It was unimportant. Just a sound of air on air with little meaning.

I didn't want some smiling nincompoop. I didn't want Ms. Popularity. I wanted an adventurer, someone who would be willing to take a chance and make a few discoveries.

October 1992 (Tuesday)

I don't believe my letters are getting through to Brown. Recently, I saw Hebrew writing invisibly drawn over the TV screen while I was watching her. The Hebrew writing said, "You see the floor: win!"

!לנצאתה רואה את הרצפה:

That's how I would translate the Hebrew that appeared to me. I had to look the words up in a Hebrew dictionary. I spend hours and hours on the floor of my room like a prisoner in a cell, reading, writing in here, sometimes just watching my clock make its agonizingly slow but inexorable round of seconds, minutes, and hours.

October 1992 (Sunday)

This Sunday was the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost. The sermon was, Give to Caesar what is Caesar's; give to the Lord what is the Lord's.

.לאחר מכן

I saw these words written as if by invisible writing over the space above the altar. I take the meaning to be "The then." The words remind me of Northrop Frye's description of narrative in the romance form of literature, which he describes as an "and then" sequence of events. The church has played a part in the sequence of events in my own life. What part will it play next?

You are to do no work on the Sabbath. So I've been observing a double Sabbath, one starting Friday at sundown and ending Saturday at sundown for Judaism, and the other starting Saturday at sundown and running till midnight on Sunday for Christianity.

I've got a bunch of letters to send. But I'm going to take all the letters to my psychiatrist and ask his permission to send them. He's holding a diamond ring I bought that cost me $195. The way I chose it, I measured it on the pinky of my left hand. That was the size of Alona's wedding ring, as I knew, from trying it on one time when I was thinking of buying her a ring. The ring just fits my finger before sliding over the knuckle. It's in the doctor's office. I gave it to him so I wouldn't send it to Brown. A really excellent sales girl helped me pick it out, a beautiful Asian. She was so enthusiastic about helping me I bought the ring from her in a mixed state of sorrow and jubilation. I was happy to get a ring for Brown, but Brown seemed more and more remote the more this beautiful, happy salesgirl fawned all over me. I could not keep my integrity and show interest in the salesgirl without betraying the very engagement ring I was buying.

I have the peculiar feeling that my loved one is near. Yet outside, others have come for me. The Bible says: There's a man of God in hiding. Bring him out that we may know him. The translation I have for "know" is sodomize. Bring him out that we may sodomize him.

I have confidence I will escape such a fate. But let me change the subject: Brown is not likely to be a female Warren Beatty. Nor is she likely to be the kind of Marilyn Monroe Norman Mailer describes, a woman who bangs a man at every opportunity just to make it through another day. Loving a woman like either of the two I've described would be masochistic, yet men fall for such women, over and over again.

October 1992 (Wednesday)

I got a registered letter from Brown's attorney today which states that the gifts and letters I've been sending her are considered harassment. If I continue to send any more or call Channel 8, I will face criminal charges.

October 1992 (Friday)

I went first to the Museum of Natural History. After looking around for a little while, I suddenly saw an interesting girl with big hips and a very nicely shaped ass, though she was in every other way small, or petite, as the fashionable saying goes, short, small breasted, slim, with tiny feet (she was wearing very high high-heel shoes). Well, I saw this girl, I saw that she was alone, and so I thought to myself—well now, let me give this girl a try. Maybe I can meet her. Who knows what can happen. Maybe I can pick her up.

So I started following her. She went first to the Marine Animals room in which the great blue whale hangs suspended from the ceiling, but instead of going to see the marine animals, she turned to the left and started down a hallway which includes many different kinds of mammals, mainly from Africa.

Well, I started tagging along, very very slowly, and then when she stood in front of the lions and other kinds of cats, I came up fairly close beside her, but left her out of nervousness before saying anything. We proceeded along. Well, when we got to the baboons and monkeys and gorillas, I came up right beside her, and looked at the animals with her, feeling more at ease, but again not saying anything.

Now, however, we had come to the end of the hall. Turning the corner, she headed into the marine animals room, then stopped beneath the great blue whale, seeming to embrace the placard that described it with both her hands and pulling herself close to it as she read. Having written my master's thesis on _Moby-Dick_ , I found it not too difficult to approach her, and I did, beginning a conversation, which didn't go very well, or last very long. She was from "Jersey" she said, staying down here a few days with her boyfriend. Well, I let her go off, but not out of my sight. She went back up to the entrance of the Marine Room and then took the opposite hall of animals from the one she had originally gone down, on the other side of the room. Here I let her get a pretty good distance on me. (At one point she stopped a little longer than I would have liked to look at the skunks.) At the end of this hall she turned right to go down another hall of animals. Well, now I let her go, since I knew that she was going to have to end up back in the rotunda when she got through this hall. So instead of following her any further, I went back to the rotunda and waited for her there, like a hunter waiting for game to show up at a water hole. To someone who knows this or any of the museums downtown, well, it would be no great surprise to meet anyone in this rotunda if you thought this particular someone had been following you, but in truth there is nothing like a museum like this to give you the sense of being lost in a great dark forest, in a kind of fairytale land, as it were, full of magic. Thus when this particular girl arrived at the end of her long passage through the mysterious hall of animals, having believed, I presume, that I had been following her, because she had clearly glanced at me several times out of the corner of her eye, I'm sure she was both surprised and confused to see me, as if she had just suddenly looked upon a ghost who had appeared out of nowhere.

Well, to make her feel more at ease, I acted just as surprised to see her, glancing at her, and then acting as if to hurry to the far side of the rotunda. Well, having let her pass, I turned to see what her next move might be. She took an evasive move as if to start into the Hall of Evolution, but that was only a diversionary tactic. She then shot out of that room around the corner into the room of animal bones and skeletons. Well, I deliberated a moment. Shall I follow her or not?

I might as well follow her, I thought. My curiosity definitely had been piqued. I wanted to see what would happen next.

Well, I entered the hall and found her about halfway down it on the right looking at the long gigantic skeleton of a dinosaur about forty feet long which looked to have been one of the original sea serpents. Thus now slowly and quietly coming up behind her, I said, "There are more dinosaur bones in the other room." I motioned toward the rotunda.

Well, that did it. We started to talk. I took her to the dinosaur room, which only contained one dinosaur because it was being remodeled. What once had been a large open spectacular room all through my childhood, for as long as I can remember, now had been divided in two, much to the disadvantage of the exhibit, in my opinion.

I then offered to accompany her to the Air and Space museum, which is where we went next.

Now, all the while we were walking along, I was continually trying to be affectionate with her by standing up close to her, causing her to turn when I wanted her to turn and so forth, but never touching her with my hands or putting an arm around her or anything like that. Well, after awhile of this, she seemed very clearly to have been awed, and finally wanted to sit down and rest a little while in the Air and Space Museum, curling up on one of the sofas there next to me as if we were on a sofa in her living room.

We started to talk a little while, quietly and nicely, she telling me a little about her "boyfriend," who was an engineer of some kind, and I saying, "Well, I guess he'd really like it here," very cheerfully. That's all she told me about him—that he was an engineer, no more than that. But then she wanted to know where she could eat, I mean, have dinner with him. I simply evaded the question. Next she was asking me about night life in Washington. What did we do here? Didn't we have any nightclubs?

"This is what we do here," I said, making a gesture toward the museum around her. "We come to museums."

Well, this was a very great disappointment to her. Then, she asked me what the Hirschorn Museum was like and I told her it was a museum of modern art and then she said she didn't like modern art and I said I didn't particularly like it either, and then she said, "Well here, take this, for example," and she pointed to a picture of a work of iron sculpture which presumably stood outside the museum in the sculpture garden, and it was incredible: all of the sudden I realized what the meaning of a grotesque work of sculpture like that was all about. And so, laughing, I said, "Hey, I know what that is." And then more excitedly, "It looks like something that would be in your blood stream or your nervous system. It's a perfect symbol of twentieth century anxiety." And it was clear that I had hit a right interpretation.

What the thing looked like was what one would imagine a germ to look like, or any number of other one-celled microorganisms blown up to gargantuan size.

We had gotten so comfortable together that two guards had taken stations right in front of us to bask, as it were, in our sunshine. The girl got up to look around the museum a little more. Well, she started to hint now that she might come back to the museum tomorrow morning, and at the crucial moment of parting, when it seemed she wanted me to say something like, "Why don't you give me your phone number or address in Jersey so that we can get together if I'm ever up there," I simply said, "Well, have a nice time," and smiled and let her go, and she was really staggered. Even I was staggered for a moment, because I didn't feel the slightest sense of loss or disappointment at having let her go—of course, I felt a little gloomy about having lost a companion, but not very much. And so I looked around the museum a little more, went to the planetarium, saw the new show there, which was lousy compared to the one they used to have, "Worlds of Tomorrow." I don't know what the title of this new one was, but it was lousy. I couldn't even pay attention to half what was going on, while I had hung on the edge of every word of the other show.

After the show, I looked around a little more, then, when I was just about ready to leave, I saw a girl, not bad looking, who gave me that disappointed look as I was passing her, which said, "Gosh, if you had only stopped, you could have gotten to know me." So I did stop, a little further on, and looked back to see what she was doing.

She had gathered with some others of a group. Well, forget her, I thought. Never go after a girl in a group. You can never win that way. You can only win with a single girl, and then, too, I've never really won with a single girl either, not at the museums, I haven't, not yet, at least.

So I stood around the balcony a little while and looked the people over. Then, just as I was getting ready to leave again, I saw this girl again on the floor below me. She was taking a few pictures. But now she was alone. Well, I guess she was just asking those other people a question, I thought. So now I considered starting out on the chase again. She was now, having taken her pictures, going to get her coat and leave.

Well, I didn't hurry. I took my time. Most of my energy was gone now. By the time I got out the front doors of the museum, she was already well out onto the Mall, and I said to myself, "Forget her," and upon reaching the middle of the mall myself, turned toward the Washington Monument to head home.

Now while walking along I had completely forgotten this girl. I had no idea where she had gone. I had ceased to even think of her.

Suddenly, while in the midst of having some mean thoughts about an aunt of mine, as I was cutting off the Mall toward the Museum of History and Technology in order to get away from some disagreeable looking specters (demonic-looking people) on the Mall, I looked to my right and there was this girl again, seemingly from out of nowhere, walking down the sidewalk, just about parallel with me. Might as well find out what she's up to, I thought, and then followed her into the museum.

She stopped in front of the map at the front, then went to the restroom, which I did too, not particularly caring whether I lost track of her or not, and yet feeling pretty sure I wouldn't, and not hurrying, either. After a little while, she came out and headed for the Hall of First Ladies. I followed her in, went through the same dance steps as before with the other girl, and in no time was having a conversation with her.

She was a high school teacher from Mississippi, who taught 9th-grade English and History in a small town not far from New Orleans. And, yes, she had a very definite southern accent, which a northerner always finds charming in a southern woman (although she referred to her accent as a hillbilly accent and assured me that most of her accent had been lost from her having lived in various different parts of the country outside the South).

We went on talking. She and the group of kids that she had come with but had left in the Air and Space Museum to come have a look over here by herself, were going back to Louisiana tonight. So I knew that once again I had grabbed the wrong girl. But I decided to stay with her a little while longer, anyway. I had nothing better to do, and she really was not bad looking. She was pink. And so I accompanied her back to the Museum of Natural History because she wanted to see the Hope Diamond.

Well, I didn't know the Hope Diamond was in the museum, I told her, but I'd show her where the Gems and Minerals were, and so I took her in. It was now about 15 minutes before closing time. We went up to see the diamond, I found it, then I tried to explain to her what I thought gave the diamond its blue color, telling her that the imperfections in the diamond must have caused a diffraction effect in the diamond to give it that blue color. No, no, she didn't know anything about it, and didn't seem to want to know. It seemed disturbing to her to think that there might be any imperfections in the Hope Diamond. She herself had said, "It's supposed to be bad luck."

"Bad luck?" I said

"If you wear it," she said.

Well, we got outside the museum, and parted; once again, I got a response of considerable surprise from the girl. I hadn't even asked this one her name. But I guess she must have thought that, what with all the gallant attention I had been paying her, I was about to propose marriage. She looked a little angry when I said, "Well, have a nice trip back. See ya."

Then she said: "Good luck on your work," as if in retaliation. But I shook this off and went my way. This parting had not gone quite as well as the previous one. It seems this southern belle, who really did look like an ex-beauty queen from Mississippi, about 35 years old, I'd say, expected more.

Well, I headed home, walking all the way back to the bus stop at Dupont Circle.

Now I hadn't been there long, when I saw a fairly attractive blond girl in blue jeans, the customary garb of a liberal college student—garb which has become so standard as almost to serve as a school uniform for many, though I suspect that in recent years this fad has begun to wane. And I immediately christened the girl Blondie, saying to myself, Well, look who's here—Blondie. Quite a crowd had begun to gather as usual waiting for the bus, and after awhile I lost track of her.

Well, just as I was about to get on the T-4 to go home, I saw that the T-4 was too crowded. If I got a seat it wouldn't be a good seat, and even then I might have to stand. So I said: Forget it, I'll take the next bus.

The next bus, right behind the T-4 was a T-2, which is the bus I used to take to get home to Sebago Road. It just so happened that very few people were getting on this bus and Blondie was last in line. So, I said to myself: Well, I'll take the T-2 home and have a go at Blondie—sit next to her and see what happens.

This I did. She sat up toward the front. And I sat down next to her and she was just as calm as she could be. She had her legs crossed, and she took out a book and started reading it. She was reading a collection of Updike's stories called _Museums and Women_ , and she was reading the first story of the collection, which gave the book its title.

"Isn't that funny," I said, to start things off. "You're reading a story on museums and women and I've been to the museums today."

"What museums did you go to?" she asked. By her tone of voice, it was obvious she was going to play smartass with me. This girl wasn't going to be any pickup. No, she was the type of snooty little girl who had been taught now you don't meet "strange men" on buses.

She was going to school at the Corcoran, studying Art Design or Business Art. And we talked about that a little while.

Well, after that there was silence for a little while, then the next thing she was asking me was what I was doing for money and I said I was living at home with my parents and this, that, and the other, and then she might have asked me about my work again, I can't remember just exactly how things went, but suddenly I was really letting her have it for everyone in our area of the bus to hear.

"Why?" I had said. "Do you think the world is rational? Do you think that the world is rational: The world isn't rational. The world isn't a rational place!" And I really don't remember all exactly what I said, but it all came out in one perfectly dark and transparent stream. She didn't say another word the rest of the way home, which wasn't too much farther for her. "Excuse me," was all she said upon getting off the bus at Kenwood (snob city for Washingtonians). I had very definitely ruffled a few people's nerves with my speeches. One man had sat up very suddenly as if I had struck him when I cut loose this last one, and one woman in the seat in front of us had winced angrily and turned her head to give me an angry sidelong glance, but she didn't have the nerve to look me in the eye because I glared right back at her.

That concluded my day of Museums and Women.

Next week, I got up and went out again, down to Friendship Heights, then down to the museums. That was yesterday.

I went first to the Air and Space Museum. No girls, nothing there. I only stayed a few minutes, then decided, no, there isn't going to be anything here for you today. So I proceeded out to the Mall, heading toward the National Gallery of Art.

At first I didn't want to go in. They were having a special exhibit there called "The Search for Alexander."

I didn't want to go in the museum. But then I said to myself: Go in the museum. If you don't want to go, then, that's probably the best reason to go. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Then starting up the stairs I noticed that the "Search for Alexander" exhibit was being held in the East Wing. Well, I don't have to go there if I don't want to, I said to myself now, feeling a little better and went on up the steps into the place.

Well, I looked around a little while. Then I went and sat down for a while in the West Garden Court, watching the fountain splash in the center, the water coming up out of the bill of a swan whose neck was being grasped by two frolicking putti. And while I was sitting there, before long, three different women had gathered around me—two young ones, both overweight, both blond, in the two chairs in front of me—the other dark-haired, thin, stingy-looking—she took a seat on the other end of the marble bench on which I was sitting. I gave her a sidelong glance and she was just as cold and miserly as a fish, and at that moment her husband came up with a loud noisy little boy.

"It's 4:05" the husband told her. I had been able to block out their every word from consciousness except those and upon hearing those I made as if to get up from my seat and go off, and I'll be damned if that didn't start them up just as I knew it would, and so I just sat back in my seat and they went off.

Not long afterward, first one girl, then the other got up and left. Then I got up and left also.

I started to head down toward the bathroom but when I got in there one of the guards, going through his big ritual of urination and swaggering his shoulders, preceding in ahead of me, I changed my mind and turned to go down to the bathroom downstairs, except now the Gift Shop and bathroom which used to be a part of it were completely gone. I wandered to the right in hope of finding a way to the bathroom. No, not that way. Then I went to the left, around the corner and found that the entire gift shop had been moved and it extended now all along the East Wing of the building, all the way out to the East entrance across from the East Wing gallery.

At the end of this relocated gift shop, which was done up primarily in white, I found a nice clean new bathroom. There, having attended to my toilet (peed), I had a look in a mirror for the first time that day. I found that my hair was an absolute mess. It may even be that I had neglected to comb it in the morning. And with my old rain coat, with its missing button and raggedy appearance, I must have looked like a particularly distracted vagabond. My hair had formed a part for itself down the middle of my head, and so now I took out my comb and combed it very nicely. And then I went out to have a look at the East Wing, feeling much better about myself, now that I had come to this new discovery about the gift shop and the bathroom and had combed my hair so nicely, just as when I was a boy in elementary school and had gone into the bathroom to comb my hair once before having my picture taken.

I felt very much the same this day, as if I had just done a particularly good deed and everyone would be able to see just what a good boy I was. I felt like a very good boy, too, just as innocent, just as peaceful, with none of the sense of manhood's panic or hysteria on me. And then I went downstairs and across the conveyor belt to the East Wing of the gallery where upon arriving I found myself in front of "The Search for Alexander."

It wasn't crowded at all. There was only a line for the recorded tour, but no line or crowd to get into the exhibit, and so after pausing a moment to think the situation over, I decided to go down and have a look.

I started down the steps and after having passed through several small rooms with various introductory comments on the walls, none of which did I waste any time reading, I arrived in the first room of the exhibit, in which were many busts, all around the room, of Alexander, a line along each wall. These I looked over very quickly, not stopping to read or contemplate them. I was just going to pass through this exhibit. I didn't even really know why I had come. I wasn't really interested in the Search for Alexander.

In the second room, however, as I was walking along, I suddenly spied the long blond hair of what seemed to be a particularly attractive woman. A blond-headed man was standing next to her and I thought to myself, now, that probably could be her boyfriend, but boyfriend or no, I'm going to have good look at that woman, because I had seen from the side that she had spectacular pink. She was wearing very tight-fitting white jeans over slim, voluptuous hips, and a tight-fitting multicolored shirt over knockout Hollywood pink.

Well, I was excited, and so I said to myself, boyfriend or no, I'm going to get up close to this woman, I just want to be near her, because just being near her would bring me some pleasure, starved as sexually and emotionally as I am.

So I went up and stood beside her, after circling around a little while to see whether that young man was her boyfriend or not. I went up and stood beside her just as she entered the third room and was looking at something on the wall there. The blond-headed young man was still in the other room, so this was a good chance for me to get up right beside her before he arrived on the scene.

Well, I stood up next to her and gazed right down at those gorgeous pink while she was reading along, and I just let myself open right up to her, I just let the sexual heat pour right off myself onto her, because I was excited, and I looked at her face and saw she was around 35 years old, what may be the age of the height of a woman's beauty before it passes over into middle age. She knows she's just about to lose her beauty once and for all. Nowhere on her face are any wrinkles deep enough to make her ugly but only wise, humble, good natured (perhaps she realizes just how valuable it is not to frown too much any more, but to smile as much as possible, since a smile can only brighten up the glow of her as yet lingering beauty). Humble, tender, no longer vain, a woman at this age may no longer be worried about having children, or of making any big success of herself or her husband, or she could just be ready for a rest from all of that, disenchanted with her husband, bored with her children? With all of the major problems hopefully settled by this age, or at least near to being settled, a woman at this age, if she's got any brains or gusto, could be ready to let more than just her eye wander.

I thought to myself: Well, if this blond-haired boy is not her boyfriend, I might have really found something here.

I started to circle toward her. I had to move away from her first, from my first spot next to her. I couldn't stay there too long because I had to find out just how she was situated, and so I went off and then circled toward her. There were these little objects, little figurines and medallions and so forth, in little glass cases in the center of the room, each one in a little glass box on the top of a long thin stand. Every time she went to look at one of these, I went on the opposite side of whatever one she was looking at and just stood there and mostly looked at her, just letting the sexual heat flow off me, and then I would circle around her, and stand up right behind her, and after awhile I was going from one exhibit to the next with her—I wasn't even looking at the exhibits. And I was pretty sure that the blond boy had had nothing to do with her now. Then, as she was standing right next to me and starting to walk forward on my left, I took off my coat and jacket while I was walking beside her and held them in my arms, and then, at one moment, she turned toward the right after having stopped for a moment, and I had been standing right in front of her, and I turned toward her and she looked at me and I half-smiled and said, "Hi." Well, I kept right after her, from one exhibit to the next, standing next to her, circling around her, standing right behind her, sometimes even standing right in front of her, and all the while admiring her, and I was just as excited as I had ever been.

Another woman, it seems, about the same age, but plain as middle age compared to this pink woman, seemed to have got caught up with us as we moved along, and moved from exhibit to exhibit with us. But she kept out of the way mostly; she was no threat, no trouble at all.

Turning then toward me a second time, and I toward her, the pink woman said to me, "Are you following me?"

"No," I said. "Uh uh. How do you like the exhibit?" and from then on the two of us started to talk quietly, very close to one another, as we went along, and then I started letting my coat brush up against her as we were standing next to each other, and then, I started to draw up even closer until then I was finally touching her and I was standing up right beside her, just for a moment, and touching her with my arm or my hand. Sometimes our hands would touch or our arms, and I was getting more and more excited.

Now we were looking at glittering objects of gold, beautiful golden objects, none of which I was really looking at very much. I don't think I really looked at a single thing in that exhibit—I certainly didn't read anything—the entire time I was in there. Instead, I was merely pretending to look at the exhibits and concentrating always on how to get closer and closer to this woman.

Then we started to get toward the end of the exhibit and the guards started to say "Closing time," and we went through a room of silver objects, and then she saw a beautiful gold quiver for arrows and then a silver vase and we were very close together for the quiver, and for the vase also, and I was right up next to her when we looked at a golden laurel wreath and golden bracelet and other golden objects, and then we passed through a room of terra cotta figurines and I said, "This is just the terra cotta here," and when I spoke I found that I could hardly speak for trembling. My words seemed each one to be struggling up out of my throat as only half-a-word, and yet she answered me very nicely, and all of the sudden we entered the final room and everyone around us suddenly went, "Ahhhhh," as if they had suddenly seen a revelation of the deity and my beautiful blond-haired woman, went "Ahhhh," too, as others said, "Look!" and in a large glass case was a large glittering chest of gold with other golden objects suspended in the air around it, and this beautiful woman bent down as if to read whatever there was written at the base, and at that very moment, I came up right behind her and pressed my aching organ full right up on the warm exciting hollow of her buttocks, and felt her heat and my heat mix, and felt her pressing back because she liked it.

And when she looked up from that glittering chest of gold, she smiled at me and we came out of the museum under a pure turquoise sky that seemed pasted with cotton wisps of clouds around a capitol dome that shone just as brightly and strangely as if it had been made of porcelain.

III. Book of Life

### I

**1.** It was 1999 and I had a story yet to tell. That's why I was calling on the only priest I knew who could help me tell it. His name was Father Mat, which was an English shortening of the Italian Matteo or Matthew. I was half-Italian. That didn't seem to matter much to him. I only mention it because sometimes it meant a lot to me. My father, now deceased, was Italian, not born in Italy, but born in the United States to Italian immigrants. He was a World War II veteran and also a doctor.

Because he was a doctor, I had grown up comfortably in the upper middle class. Because he was a World War II veteran, and because the war had meant so much to him and he translated that concern to me, I often thought of my own life in terms of the title of the book he wrote about his war experiences, a book which had long rested on a shelf over my father's desk like an heirloom parked in an auction house hallway.

Though it had brought him a modest advance and had sold relatively well for a first novel, its success had been limited by my father's disinterest in pursuing any further literary career, and he did not follow up his first and only novel with any future efforts.

The title was _The Million Dollar Wound_. A million dollar wound was a wound a soldier could get during World War II that would not be severe enough to handicap him permanently, but would be severe enough to see to it that he got sent home till the end of the war. I had mental illness so I was in a war. For me, the only way out of this war was death, so death was like a wound to me, and a good death was like a million dollar wound. It would return me to my true home, which was with God. As Wordsworth said, "We come from God, who is our home."

I looked into the bright oval of Norma's beatific Asian face as we came to a pause at the top of the staircase on the top floor of Chapel Hall, which glowered down as if from horse-and-buggy days onto the flaring headlights of modern traffic along Florida Avenue. Candlelight seemed to burn on each of her reddened cheeks from her exertion, and the weak, yellow cast to the light signaled we had entered a zone where, not shadows, but ghosts flitted off the walls, awakened by our solitary footsteps.

"Where?" I signed.

Even the simplest communication from a deaf person was of the utmost interest to me, especially when the deaf person didn't talk while signing, as Norma didn't and couldn't. Her communication seemed to come, not always, but sometimes, like direct revelation from God, as if out of God's spatial reality, the same spatial reality from which newborn babies come and to which the dead return.

"I don't know," she replied.

We wandered into an office area with cubicles set apart by grey partitions. Stray pieces of artwork and religious calendars adorned the partitions. I walked around them, looking for some sign of Father Mat.

"Father Mat?" I called out. "Father Mat? He's not here yet."

Norma's wide eyes lowered from mine, her face as humble and serene as the Queen of Heaven's, a mystical patience in the turn of her full, precious lips. She took a seat and as she crossed her legs, her wool skirt pulled up snugly over her shapely legs in dark stockings. I picked up a brochure of some kind and opened it absently, nervously folding it in my hands. Father Mat entered the room from behind me. I turned and embraced him, then Norma hugged him in greeting. He knew both of us by name, and we were proud of that.

"I brought N-O-R-M-A along for support," I told him, simultaneously with voice and in sign, fingerspelling Norma's name. He guided us into his office. It looked like an office in a police precinct in Brooklyn, with the same faded paint on old walls, a cheap Catholic calendar on one wall and a dark crucifix on another. As Norma and I seated ourselves on two straight-backed, rickety chairs, taking off our coats along with Father, Father took a seat behind an old wooden desk.

"Yes, Moody. You said there was something very serious you wanted to talk with me about, and so here I am. What can I do for you?"

"Father, I have written an account of what I want to tell you. This is a true account, Father. Though it is written in the form of a novel, it is in no way fiction. I'd like you to read it and let me know what you think I should do." We all shifted in our seats and our chairs creaked.

Although Father Mat was not that much older than I, he looked much older, but he was rather the norm and I the exception when it came to maturity in appearance. He was handsome, tall and slim, with a swarthy, olive complexion, teeth that gleamed when he smiled, and a compassionate voice, both smooth and commanding in tone:

"OK, I will do that. How soon would you like me to get back with you?"

"Father, it is tremendously important that you let me know right away what you think about what I've written. The matters I present in my account cannot wait, and I will have to act on them soon. I really need your advice." I was speaking like a textbook, as I sometimes did when I was nervous, wondering if my primitive signs actually conveyed my meaning or simply presented an overly English and unintelligible hash to Norma.

He agreed to read my manuscript over in the next few days and then meet with me again.

I did not want to talk now about what had happened. It had taken me two months of feverish writing to commit the story to paper. This was all the while I worried that I should go to the police, or that the police would come to me.

**2.** That night in Father's cozy room at the Catholic Deaf Center in Landover Hills, Maryland, Father Mat turned to the manuscript I had left with him and began to read. The text was as follows:

I became a licensed private detective, but these were not the 1940s, and I was not a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. Of course, I had read all of Raymond Chandler. The tone of his stories about detective Philip Marlowe was so amusing, I had read one book after another. In certain ways, I moved through something like Chandler's milieu—the lower levels of a big city environment, but this was Washington, not Los Angeles, and I was not dealing with the relatively sophisticated grifters and thugs Chandler portrayed, but with naive, angry, and confused young men and boys, all of them black, who were caught up in the criminal justice system, many of them for the first time, who did not have the money to pay for their own defense. So they would get a court-appointed attorney. That might be my uncle, one of the attorneys who worked as a public defender. He would be assigned cases, and I would do investigations for him.

I never knew whether I would get paid or not. Once I was called into a judge's chambers to justify the expenses I had put on one of my vouchers. The judge happened to have known my father—both were members of Congressional Country Club, a posh golf, swimming, tennis, and eating establishment for the wealthy—and after meeting with me, he agreed to sign my voucher. But he had intimidated me, and I wasn't so ready to spend as much time and energy on my next case.

Believe me, I worked fast in some of the neighborhoods I went into, because my face stood out in them like the mug shot of a plantation owner at a black Muslim rally.

The story I want to tell you, though, is about my brother Delbert. He was not a schizophrenic—that is just the generic term used for people with mental illness by people who know nothing about mental illness. He was actually schizoaffective. That means he was a little like a schizophrenic, but also like a person with an affective or mood disorder. Whereas schizophrenics might hear voices and possibly hallucinate and a person with an affective disorder might suffer volatile swings in mood, from elation to depression and back again, a person who was schizo-affective might hear voices and suffer from anxiety. That was Delbert. He was a little in both categories, and of course, he was deaf.

Now I myself had mental illness. The way I felt about it, I had mental illness the way a man has two kids who are not biologically his by a wife he doesn't love. Such a man would never have really loved his wife—he wouldn't have married for love, for in his world, love would not have been possible. He would have wanted safety. Let's say, his wife wanted him, but he—he just couldn't find anyone else, and so accepted the safe compromise—a family, any family, instead of solitude. You see, I lived in just such a stepmotherly world, and I imagined this scenario for myself because with mental illness, I didn't think I could ever make it to a woman I loved.

Part of the counter-stereotype I supplied to the generally accepted stereotype about people with mental illness—that they are unstable, untrustworthy, and potentially dangerous—is that, more than anything else, I was desperate to prove myself at least as "normal," if not more normal, than the average person, so, in my fantasy, having a wife offered me the appearance of normality, having two kids offered me an even greater appearance of normality. If my wife was not the woman I really loved and her children not children I really wanted, I could accept that. This fantasy kept coming up in my mind like something I needed to accept to get on with my life. I would be in an ugly situation, but I would be safe. It was much better than being locked up.

My means of transport was by motorcycle and I drove a 1984 Kawasaki Ltd. It was black with light green and yellow stripes around its gas tank. I went down on it the first time I drove it. Since that time I had driven it without incident.

When I got the license, my doctor simply said, "I don't recommend that you ride a motorcycle." But she didn't object.

This particular Sunday I was at the Gallaudet University Chapel, attending Catholic mass. The chapel was an ancient, gothic structure. As a wing of Chapel Hall, whose steeple rose above it, it towered up like a modified barn, the entire edifice of which it was a part being the frontispiece to a campus that well into the 20th century had included a farm which produced fresh eggs and milk for both the school and local residents. Gallaudet was in no way a Catholic institution, but I was a good Catholic, or had gone back to being one, after cataclysmic pain I had suffered, brought on by unorthodox views so foolishly proclaimed thirteen years before. Under the airy loft of the chapel, I remembered the three nuns and one priest in my family. The priest was dead, but the nuns were still alive, and they loved me, even if I had had views which had gotten me into trouble. I didn't have such views now.

The love of my brother, Delbert, who was deaf, drew me to Gallaudet. I came to the deaf world for understanding. Just such precious understanding was the theme of the heavy, green statue on the road just outside the chapel: the little deaf girl Alice Cogswell, who moved Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to undertake the education of deaf children in America, leaned across the lap of her seated, saintly mentor, receiving from his extended hand such divine revelation of the letter A that she, as if stricken mortally with the desire to communicate, clasped one hand over her heart—soul transfixed, face transfigured—and with her arm outstretched, looking up at him, closed the fingers of her little hand into a letter A like his, the simple shape crying out across geometrically different worlds.

As I sat in the chapel, encouraged by the busts of famous men from deaf history around the perimeter, comforted by the presence of deaf people, the air was grey as smoke, except for a light that seemed to burn around an Asian girl across the room from me—she, resplendent as an army with banners, was solitary as the Virgin Mother heeding the announcements of an angel, and I could not tell if she could hear a voice or only read the signs of celestial hands.

Father Mat, the handsome Italian from New Jersey who had come to Gallaudet some twenty years before, simultaneously signed while speaking. Deaf people commonly praised him as being a very good signer for a hearing person: "This mass is ended. Let us go forth in peace to serve God and each other."

Many of the forty-or-so people gathered for mass, all of whom, except myself and only one or two other people, were deaf, murmured, "Thanks be to God."

"Thanks for comin'," Father Mat said. "We have a few announcements." As I listened to Father's reassuring voice, I watched a young, deaf student with long beautiful hair in the front row interpret his signing into the hands of a deaf and blind man. The man seemed to cling to her hands like a baby at its mother's breast, hungry to receive the communication which now cascaded over him as if from an ever renewing fountain of virginal motherhood.

And I turned myself to behold wisdom, I thought, and listened to Father Mat as he sang out through the murky grey air and the busts of famous figures from deaf history gawked from around the room, "We are going to have a class for those of you who are thinking of becoming Catholic or who just want to find out more about what it means to be Catholic. Please sign up if you are interested. And we have juice and donuts to share. See you in a few moments." With a sweep of his robes, he turned and was gone.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, I thought, and carefully made my way for the juice and donuts. I was timid about such social gatherings, even when they were so informal. The beautiful Asian woman like the Virgin Mary—the woman like an army with banners—was a presence I could feel on my back as if that side of my body burned from a beam of bright light focused on it through a window. She radiated toward me like a sun; I did not turn to look at her.

When I did turn, I had half a paper cup of orange juice in one hand and a messy donut in the other, the donut showering me with powdered sugar each time I took a bite. Her back was to me and I watched her thick, luxurious hair bob to the rhythms of her signing like a Mongolian pony's tail in the forefront of a vista that flashed from her swift, jerky, fluid motions like a charge into battle under a stormy sky across a hard, grassy, rolling plain. I averted my glance and strolled forward a little, glancing awkwardly, as if for reassurance, at one of the busts of the august personages who rimmed the room. The polished formality of sculpted, white, marble clothes seemed to soften into textures of warmth which encouraged me to be social.

Jeff, a friendly, hard-of-hearing man whose head looked like a mischievous leprechaun's, strode toward me with his deaf wife. She also had cerebral palsy.

We knew each other by name, and the way he announced mine indicated he was open to conversation. It would be easy to understand him because he talked while signing, but that kind of communication from a deaf person was also a little annoying, since it was a little like being talked down to.

"What did you think about the police outside?" I asked him, just remembering that I had seen four police cars parked across the street from the chapel on Florida Avenue on my way in.

"Could be someone was murdered," he said, speaking out loud as he signed. Brushing aside my annoyance from his use of voice, I welcomed the chance to talk with someone, anyone, at a social gathering of this kind, so I cherished Jeff at the moment. His wife looked on skeptically, almost scowling with an expression that said she didn't like or trust me. To her, there was something funny about my interest in deaf culture.

"My great uncle was murdered in 1924," I confessed, feeling strangely proud of it.

"Really?" Jeff swept his forefinger down in front of his chest from his lips.

"Yeah, by Irish gangsters. They hit him in the head and ran over him with a car." This was more information to be strangely proud of. Talking about tragedy like this gave me an opportunity to express myself about the kind of suffering I myself had experienced but couldn't talk about. It was OK to talk about murder, but not about mental illness.

I suddenly realized that I had talked to at least one person, my rule for socializing after mass. That meant I was free to go, and so I excused myself and headed for the door.

**3.** The bright sunlight was like the sunlight encountered after going out of a motel room where the curtains had been drawn all night. Blinking, I tottered down the few steps to the walkway which led over to more steps that led down to the campus street. On the walkway, between the chapel and the street, I took a few more steps forward and then stopped. My eyes still adjusting to the light, I felt the warm summer air wash over my body like a liquid at the bottom of a sea.

Still across the street, I observed, looking at the police cars just beyond the wrought iron fence that ran along the campus as if around a cemetery. Most of my family—my mother's side—was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, the old Catholic cemetery of Washington, just a few blocks away, but it could have been in an alternate reality, since Gallaudet was like an island set in a sea of black faces which inhabited the ghetto-like houses all around. Up until fifty years ago, those houses had been the precious abodes of middle-class whites, but had fallen into disrepair, the lawns unkempt, trash on the streets.

The Chapel door swung open behind me and someone came out. Out on the campus street a few of the deaf churchgoers paused before getting into their car, having a look like me at what was going on across Florida Avenue. I paid no attention to the footsteps that sounded on the walkway behind me, but when they came to a stop beside me, I looked up out of politeness to see whose they were. Beside me stood the beautiful woman who inside the Chapel had appeared to me like the Virgin Mary, in the sunlight looking like a caryatid from some Buddhist temple high upon a cliff overlooking the sea, the entablature she had braced on her head having long since crumbled into ruins.

"What happened?" she signed. Her presence was like the presence of something holy, with an aroma sweet as incense, and I glanced back at the house across the street as if to make sure of what I was looking at before I answered her. A door opened, and a man began to guide out the front part of a stretcher.

"I don't know," I said. "Jesus," I muttered to myself: "It looks like someone was really hurt," I said, twisting my index fingers toward each other.

"I think he's dead," the woman said. She was right. A sheet covered the entire body.

Once again I muttered "Jesus" to myself, then signed, "My name is M-O-O-D-Y what's your name?"

"N-O-R-M-A," she responded, fingerspelling it to me, and I understood the first time. Fingerspelling was when a deaf person spelled out a word letter by letter. Usually there were no signs for a name, unless your name happened to be something like King, so names had to be spelled out. The word mood, which was close to my name, had to be spelled out, so it was no help.

It would usually take me two or three repetitions of a name being spelled out to understand it, while a word spelled out in a conversation would usually be easier to understand because of the context.

"Norma—like 'normal,'" I responded with a smile. "I'll remember that. You a teacher?"

"I work in the Computer Services Department at Gallaudet."

I made a mental note to remember that.

Across Florida Avenue, several men came out of the house behind the stretcher. Just as the sudden awareness in a dream that you are naked in public comes over you all at once and with a kind of disbelief and amazement, so I realized that the man I was looking at in the procession behind the stretcher was my own uncle.

"That man looks like my uncle," I said, trying to make sure whether it was actually him or not. Tall like me, grey on top, with the unmistakable pot belly that seemed for some reason not actually to be his, but rather a burden he had to carry, he radiated a benevolence that would end all war, all poverty, all injustice. "Jesus," I muttered.

Saying no goodbyes, I ran to the 8th Street entrance to Gallaudet, stopping to wait for the light to change in order to cross. When the light changed, I ran across the street and up the sidewalk toward the ambulance that was waiting to depart, the body having already been stowed away carefully in back. My uncle talked with a carefully-barbered, portly man in his late fifties.

"Uncle Henry! Hey! What's goin' on? I was in church. What's goin' on?" I huffed up in front of him. He looked no different than he always looked—like the man I loved who had gotten fired from NASA after over 20 years service and then became a public defender for the DC court system: "I'm afraid I've got some very bad news for you."

"What?"

"Delbert has been murdered."

**4.** It was 2:30, too late to be up.

I crossed to my bookcase and grabbed hold of my dad's book. It was his paperback novel. Dad, I thought, you sure were hard to get along with . . . I couldn't finish the thought, but carried the book back to bed with me, and then finished: But I love you, Dad. His book was thick, like an old worn novel by Thomas Wolfe, his favorite author.

The cover drew me to stare: a black-and-white photo of a beautiful Teutonic woman in a bathing suit hung over another black-and-white photo, this one of a stormy landscape, with the lone commander of an M10 tank destroyer surveying the battlefield before him with binoculars from his turret. The montage of woman and landscape lay over a third picture of an azure background of ocean which framed the top and bottom of the montage so that with the tips of her toes on water at the bottom, and the crown of her head on water at the top, the woman's body stretched across a battlefield as if from sea to shining sea.

I laid the book down, my head heavy with sleep. I love you, Dad. I love you, Uncle Henry. I love you, Delbert. You mean so much to me. I'll always love you. I reached over and placed the treasured book on my lamp table, turning off the light.

**5.** "And I will make thee unto this people a fenced brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord." These words, from the story of Jeremiah, rumbled through me, stirring me until my hands trembled with the resolve and motivation to find my brother's murderer. What I knew about Jeremiah was that he was the prophet who had the unfortunate task of telling the people of Judah that they would lose their homeland because of their sins and would go into exile in Babylon. I thought about him on my motorcycle on the way to Georgetown from my uncle's office near Judiciary Square.

Passing the Washington Monument, I wondered what had happened to Jeremiah, since his prophecy had come true. I drove south of the White House over to the George Washington University area, then picked up M Street. I had read in a Jewish encyclopedia that when the people of Judah went into exile, Jeremiah may either have been stoned to death or may have escaped back to Egypt. I chose to believe he escaped.

As I drove, I was paranoid that a blue car was following me. When I turned off M Street, back into the neighborhood where this lady lived—Ms. Szabo—someone my brother knew from work, I was relieved that the blue car went on by.

On the 3600 block of N Street, I started looking for a parking place. The bumper-to-bumper parking along both sides of the street offered me only one possible space at the end of the block after the last parked car and I took it, backing my bike to the curb. I walked slowly along the red brick sidewalk. I could do this kind of work, but however motivated I might have been to do it, I was still nervous enough to be nauseous. There were three pill bottles on my dresser top at home, pills I had not been taking. Lithium was one of them.

4301 N Street, NW: I rang the bell. There wasn't much traffic on N Street. A lady with curly grey hair and glasses answered the door. She had blue eyes and a heavy accent.

"I'm Delbert Santo's brother. You knew Delbert, right—from the National Library of Medicine?" I had called ahead to let her know I was coming, but I still found myself repeating things that didn't need to be said.

"Yes, please come in." Vampires were from Transylvania, which was once a part of Hungary, I thought, from the sound of that accent.

"Delbert was murdered. He's dead," I said.

"I talked with the police. I'm sorry," she answered.

In her living room, she took a seat on a Victorian couch that looked out on some bright, impressive oil paintings, the color and expansiveness of which, together with the room's wood floor and high ceiling, reminded me of the interior of a Magritte painting—or did I mean Matisse?

She said: "They told me Delbert was murdered and asked if I knew anything that could help them find out who did it."

I felt right at home with this woman. She had been in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. That much I knew about her. As she talked, I spaced out to the single most important event in my life, the event that for me was my exile, like a crucifixion—the night I was involuntarily committed to a mental ward. It had been a spring night. Nothing in my life prior to this event, nothing significant, nothing major, could have ever been said to lead up to it or to have any comparison to it. I wanted to tell someone, but there was no one to tell, and I was not in the habit of talking about myself, not even to psychiatrists.

Ms. Szabo had just told me that the police had asked her if she knew anything that could help them solve the murder. "Do you know anything?" I asked her, but in a flash, I had seen myself back in my little room next to the laundry room back at my parents' house and heard the garage door opening and the clump of footsteps down the steps.

A stern voice called out my name, "Moody?" When they led me out of my room, I passed my father at the door. He gave me a Judas look as I went by. He had betrayed me. The police led me out, up the stairs, out the open garage, into the back seat of the police car.

Ms. Szabo didn't know anything about the murder and said so: "No, but that is terrible! I am very sad to hear about this."

"Yes, it's terrible, you are right about that—a man named Cho, you know who he is?"

"No."

I went on about Cho: "He gave the police your name and address, and the police asked my uncle about it." I was very eager to get something out of her solid to go on, but if I squeezed, something might go pop: "My uncle said your name and address were on the back of a note that Delbert had written to Cho about renting a room in his house across from Gallaudet. Delbert passed it under Cho's door before he was killed. What do you think?"

She gave a look with her blue Ashkenazi eyes like she was seeing something significant far off, the kind of information she knew I wanted and wanted to give me but couldn't: "I don't think anything. I don't know him, I don't know what to think."

I was at a dead end, so I started to recapitulate what I knew, as if it made me feel better to say it, and I said it in a hurry, like a trial lawyer hurrying a case: "There was no sign of forced entry or robbery in the house. Delbert must have found the door open and walked right in. He wanted to rent the room he must have seen advertised on a bulletin board at the student center at Gallaudet, but no one was home, so he left a note." I had said all I wanted to say, adding, "Can you tell me anything at all about Delbert that you think could help me with this?"

I may have asked the question as if I expected to get nothing of any value in reply, or, just the opposite, as if I expected to get at least some answer, like a person who shakes a branch to get an apple out of a tree. I could almost see the inside of the police car I was in on that cool night so many years ago. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know how or who had the right to arrest me like that in America, for fasting, and having a few crazy, but harmless delusions.

Ms. Szabo's voice cut through my reverie like the sword of an angel upon ramparts of heaven: "Delbert, he was involved in some strange thing."

As she spoke, I had another mental flash: being dragged from the police car into the hospital, literally dragged, both shoes coming off, because I refused to walk.

"I could not believe it—a man he did not like," she continued, "But why? I don't know: Delbert did not like him." It was information, hard information, I could use: somebody who didn't like Delbert, a possible suspect.

"Who was this man?" I asked.

A cloud was on me, the memory of that fateful night, when I walked to a white door in a white hallway, fully expecting that I could walk right out that door to freedom. I pushed on it. I pushed several times, looking out on more white hallway beyond the crisscrossed wires inside the glass of the small window in the door—why wouldn't the door open?

"I can't believe it," Ms Szabo said, "but he said Dick Gilman, the famous TV documentary reporter."

"Really? How did Delbert know him?"

I was seated in a chair, not moving. Patients milled all around me. Nurses talked on the phone and with each other at a nurses' station right in front of me. I heard a choir begin to sing. The voices were too good to be real, but I did not want to believe they were a hallucination.

"His girlfriend worked for Gilman as a maid, I think. I don't know. That's all I know."

"Where?" I asked.

"I don't know where . . . in Bethesda."

"Delbert told me you were in a concentration camp." A black attendant grasped my wrists and pinned them down—another put his weight on me, pressing down on my shoulders. A wild nurse bent down wildly with an upraised needle, her face like a witch's—she grabbed my left biceps with one hand and, as I strove halfway to rise against the overwhelming display of force, she plunged the needle into my arm.

"Yes," she said.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"All of my family was killed."

I remembered the tower of pain which overtook me within minutes of being injected with that shot. It swept over me like the upward spiral of a mushroom cloud, like a gigantic spindle that whirled out of control. I had to explain it—it was my concentration camp: exasperation beyond the reach of language, blared within me like some hideous alarm that could not be turned off and for the next two years, I thought daily of cutting my throat to get it to stop. I went into exile with the stigmatized armies of the mentally ill, the dispossessed and disinherited, the persecuted and betrayed.

"I'm very sorry," I said.

"There was a Deaf friend of Delbert's at the library," she said. "Her name is Dana." She wrote the name down for me on an index card which she fetched from a desk.

I had a wake to go to.

**6.** Now on my motorbike, I drifted on up Wisconsin Avenue. The air seemed heavy, and the heat seemed to waffle up off the street surface in waves. At Gawler's, the heavy sweet smell of flowers permeated the air. I saw my mother first. She stood in the center of the room like a rickety old house with a burnt-out sign out front which read "Motel," and underneath that, in red, "No Vacancy."

Aunt Mary, a Catholic nun, my mother's sister, stood next to my mother. I hugged and kissed them both. Not far off was my Uncle Henry. Deaf friends of Delbert's signed near him, one woman slightly heavyset with the look of a person who is still alert when a television station goes off the air at night. Delbert's friend from work, Dana, whom I had recently heard about, was there, though I didn't know her yet, nor recognize her.

The throng of mourners half-circled by big bouquets around the casket was like rain clouds before a storm. A shower of light from her blond hair burst in golden flames over a snow white complexion that swirled around bright blue eyes like a China doll's, spangling on lips smudged with red lipstick as red as the blood of Adonis: Missy wended her way through the throng like a golden maiden with a torch on the way through a dark castle to an appointment with her lover, her exotic bosom dancing over playful legs and feet. She threw her arms around my neck and, drawing herself up on her toes, kissed me on the cheek, touching off sweet explosions in my brain from her perfumed body, which so lightly pressed up against mine.

"I was Delbert's friend. My name is M - I - S \- S - Y," she fingerspelled, "last name, J - U - S - T - U - S." She looked up at me sadly: "I'm very sorry for you and your family."

"Thank you," was all I could think to sign. She remained standing next to me for an awkward moment, till I reached down and picked up the soft fleshy palm of one of her hands, pressing it in my two much larger hands like a boy cuddling a kitten. Then I went to kneel by Delbert's casket.

It was a polished brown wooden casket. A grey metal cross rested against the open lid near Delbert's head. Delbert's face had sunken in death like the earth over a new grave. His olive complexion looked darker than normal, as if it had started to dry out like a mummy's. Dabs of brown makeup marred his cheeks. His lips were not placid, rouged as they were, but severe, as if it had taken some stretching to change them from what might have been the horror of his last expression before death. He had lain in the hallway of that rooming house for a night before he was discovered—a hot night. I prayed the Our Father and Hail Mary in Italian to myself, something I did when I prayed extra fervently, concluding, "Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell'ora della nostra morte," which meant: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

We had loved each other as boys; we had grown apart as men. Now we were reunited in a way by this tragedy. If life was like a battle, Delbert was out of the battle. He had got a million dollar wound and gone home, home to God. I was still very much in the battle. I meant to find out who killed Delbert, just as sure as I meant to find the woman I loved: her face shone like a lion's, her skin was dark as a pool in Hebron, her hair hung like tresses of dyed wool, her lips were like a warrior's, ruthless in battle, her bosom like twin fauns of a gazelle: her feet were like messengers. I wanted to be with her in the place where her mother conceived her, if that is what she wanted.

### II

**1.** The lamplight in my efficiency apartment gave it a warm and homey glow. My books in the two brown bookcases made by my father when he was a young man held an old blue and black set of World Books, a few big medical books— _Textbook of Medicine_ , _Textbook of Surgery_ , and _Clinical Radiology I & II_—that I had taken from home after my dad died; and countless novels, collections of poetry, and volumes of religion and philosophy, including some books in Italian (Dante's _Commedia_ ) and French ( _Le Chanson de Roland_ ).

My dad had been memorialized in bronze on a bronze plaque as the founder of the new Radiology Department at General Hospital. My mother had his medals, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart from World War II. I talked on the phone with Unc.

"No . . . no . . . I've never heard of such a thing. I don't need medicine," I told him. I had not been taking my medicine—lithium—a common salt I was supposed to take for my mental illness.

"How do you spell it?" I said to Unc. He spelled a word back to me that I had never heard before. "OK, thanks, Unc—no, I don't know anything about that. Thanks for calling. I appreciate it."

I hung up the phone. I went and lay down on my bed with all my clothes on. There was only my bed and desk chair to sit on in the apartment. There were no other chairs in the room. My bed was the same bed I had slept in all while growing up. It had a wooden headboard and footboard that could fit into the headboard and footboard of another bed like it to make bunk beds. Delbert and I had had them rigged up that way—Delbert had had the top bunk. I hung my feet still in shoes just off the end of the bed to protect the bedspread and fell asleep.

An hour or so later, I woke up. It was 11:30. I got undressed, folding my clothes neatly and putting them away in drawers, then went back to bed.

I woke that night to a signal, an unearthly signal from a ceiling corner of my room, as if from some part of heaven descended to my level of perception: two hands, invisible, yet still perceptible, motioned toward me—signaled. The simplest gesture seems difficult to explain now: the hands clenched and unclenched twice in rapid succession. After a pause, they repeated the signal. The person signaling—an angel—was my brother. I signaled back to him, clenching and unclenching my own fists with both arms extended toward the upper right corner of my room.

"Delbert, is that you?" I asked by telepathy. I could feel that we were mentally connected.

He gave no reply. Instead, the signal came again, then he spoke, also by telepathy: "They-are-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you-with-nah-nah." His answer sounded in my mind almost like the drone of an insect that was actually a very much higher being than humanity, so much higher as to be on a completely different level of reality and relating altogether.

"What?" I asked in my mind.

"They-are-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you-with-nah-nah." The voice had a rhythm to it as if it pulsed, syllable by syllable, to the beat of the human heart. A note of panic struck me.

"Do I have to leave here?" I asked. It was about three o'clock in the morning. His signal answered through the silence. OK, I thought, jumping out of bed. Normally I was very slow to get up after being asleep. But now I was scared. Somebody meant to do me harm. I paused. I was unsure what to put on.

"That-is-your-fa-mily-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you," Delbert counseled. I looked toward the closet. "They- are-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you-with-nah-nah." I took a step forward and stopped. I had a mental vision of a crowd in the street outside my apartment, clear as the action of a play upon a stage. Together the crowd prayed the Our Father—I heard their voices, but not as if they were in the room with me—as if they were communicating with me across mental space. Their voices did not have actual sound, but they were still as distinct as if they did. They were not whispers, but vocal thoughts. "They-are-trying-to-con-fuse-you." I reached up and grabbed a shirt out of the closet and then some pants, moving in slow motion. I had slowed way up in dressing myself to pay as close attention to my vision as possible. Watching it was like trying to watch a beautiful young girl's sleek brown body as she dove down toward the bottom of a pool.

Time stood still for me. I was a prophet, with a crowd outside calling for my imprisonment. Delbert said, "You-are-nah-nah . . . That-is-nah-nah . . . They-are-nah-nah."

In the front of the crowd outside my apartment, a man revealed a wax effigy of me about eight inches high and commenced to burn it. As the wax dripped from the effigy and my face crumpled and melted, I heard a tortured scream as of the soul of some demon. So you want to exorcize me? I exclaimed inside. Now I was afraid to get dressed and leave my apartment, too afraid to even have a look out my window. I went to the window and looked out. There was nothing but the yellow lamplight of the street lamps over an all-but-deserted Massachusetts Avenue.

Delbert signaled. I signaled back.

"Should I take my motorcycle?" I asked.

"They-are-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you-with-nah-nah," he replied.

"Should I walk?"

He signaled. I went out the front door of the apartment. It was if a murky cloud of sulfurous blackness had descended over everything. As I started to walk toward Dupont Circle, red laser beams about six inches long started coming out of the sky like rain. They were like pencils of light, and when they hit me, which they did every so often, they burned. "Ow! What are you trying to do, burn me?" I uttered aloud under my breath as one hit me.

Suddenly, a voice boomed from the rooftop of a building across the street: "We will kill you!"

That voice was like the voice of a judge to a condemned man, saying, "You shall be hanged by the neck until dead." I hesitated as if someone had struck me.

"You're not gonna kill me," I said in my own mind. "Why would you want to kill me?"

As I crossed in front of the next building, the same condemnation came down from both sides of the street, "We will kill you!"

I prayed to God to help me. "Please God, don't let them kill me!"

Majestically, a whirling cloud like a small tornado rose up to a height of about ten feet on the sidewalk about 150 feet ahead of me. The red lasers began to veer to the right and left of me as if the cloud were somehow now protecting me.

"Oh, thank you, God! Thank you! Thank you!"

I gratefully responded to this sign from heaven while on up the street, I braved the repeated cannon shot of the same booming condemnation: "We will kill you!"

"You won't let them kill me, will you, Delbert?" My thoughts poured out: "You believed in me—and I believed in you. We were brothers. I learned sign language because of you, but even with everything we went through together, growing up—don't tell me something's right when I know it's wrong—who murdered you, who?"

I looked toward heaven. Visions of Jesus Christ flitted through my mind. A light like a beam of light breaking through tremendous cloud formations on a summer evening came down from the sky only several shades lighter than the darkness, subtle as a shadow falling from a sudden shift of clouds, but still dimly perceptible. With the light came women's angelic voices, singing in unity: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

"Please don't let them kill me, Delbert, please don't," I beseeched the sky.

"We will see what we can do to help you!" the voices of many angels sang—I thought of them as Elohim. "We will see what we can do to help you!"

**2.** Now as I understand it, Lane Building is now closed at Lakeland Hospital. They have a new building called Solomon building for what's called intake. But I was put in Lane Building at that time. Lane Building was a small, Spartan facility with poor lighting, dingy hallways, tiny double bedrooms, two day rooms, a musty gym, bathrooms and showers, a small cafeteria, doctors' offices, medicine rooms, and a candy and coke machine room—every room in the entire place being behind or only accessible through locked doors. A locked door is a brute force, solid as a head-on tackle in football, firm as an inescapable hold in wrestling. But a locked door is a bully, not a sportsman, and being on a locked ward is like giving up in a fight with a bully and submitting to his will. Pacing, as it was called, was how I coped with locked doors.

I walked up a hall to the locked door which led to another hall, took a moment to look through the pane of glass with wires inside crisscrossing the glass, seeing nothing but the same white linoleum floor and silver metal cabinet on wheels on the other side, then turned and walked back from where I'd come, taking a left at the Day Room and walking down that hall to the locked entrance.

Or I walked right at the Day Room and went down that hall to the barrier between the two sides of Lane Building, on the other side of which were more patients and another Day Room, patients who were segregated from us except for certain times during the day when the doors would be flung open and the two sides allowed to mingle. I walked up and down the halls for hours, talking to no one, stopping for nothing.

Others like me did the same. One of them looked like the famous actor Jackie Cooper—I could have sworn it was him. He wore a flannel shirt and looked to be about 60. I asked him if he was Jackie Cooper. He shook his head no and kept walking. We walked until they stopped us for a meal or for a meeting, back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."

Now I have never experienced chemotherapy, which I understand to be pretty bad, but the side effects of the medicines I was taking were intolerable. I called the pain an allergic reaction to the medicine. The doctors called it a side effect of the medicine. I told the nurse at the medicine room that I was in terrible pain and needed to see the doctor. This was on a Friday night. She told me I could see the doctor on Monday. On Monday, I went to see the doctor. Her name was Doctor Sugar.

"All right, Mr. Santo, I believe you've been having some trouble with your medication. Do you want to tell me about it?" A little smile played around her lips. I was 40 and unmarried. She was about 28, with white skin and black hair, up in tight curls. She was probably single—no wedding ring. Her smile was stingy.

"I feel pain from it in my head—it won't stop. The pain is terrible, and I have to keep moving. It's like something's telling me to keep moving, keep moving, forcing me forward, and I have to keep moving forward—I can't stop! I keep walking—it's terrible!"

"Well, here are some of the other medicines you could try," she offered, giving me a choice. "Halidol, prolixin, stelazine, thorazine, navane. Any of these?"

"What were they again?" I couldn't really pay attention on the first go-round, since I was getting a mixed message from her: she seemed to be half playing with me, half being professional, and I was amused myself, even though I was in pain. She went through the list again.

"I'll try navane," I said.

"OK, we'll try you on navane and see how you do on it. Thank you. That's all." With a wave of her hand, she dismissed me.

"Thank you," I said into the space created by her dismissal.

I had only been at Lane Building a few days before I decided one night that it was time to leave. It was around 1:00 in the morning. My roommate was asleep in his bed a few feet away in the tiny cinder block cubicle we had for a room. I got up in the darkness, getting dressed quietly, then opened the door to the cubicle and slipped out.

A soft light fell in the hall at the nursing station outside the Day Room. I hovered up to the lighted area and navigated past it, noting the ghostly white uniform of a nurse in the shadows. I headed straight for the door at the end of the hall. It was locked. I turned and headed back for the nurse. When I arrived in front of her, I said, "I want to leave. You can't hold me here against my will."

"I think you should go back to bed," she said, with the taboo look about her of someone who should rarely, if ever, be seen by a patient.

"I want to call a lawyer. I haven't committed any crime. I want to leave here."

"OK, wait a minute," she said: "Have a seat over there."

I sat on a metal folding chair in the hall. The nurse got on the phone and talked quietly. A few minutes later—maybe ten or fifteen minutes—it was like waiting in a doctor's office—and I sat quietly, fully expecting to be let out in view of my rights as soon as I had a chance to talk with the right people—four men showed up, one of them for sure wearing a white jacket, another of them carrying a walkie-talkie, which sprayed static over the halls in spurts. They grabbed me by both arms on either side, with the rigidity and resoluteness of robots, and I heard from one, disembodied voice, "Come with us."

They led me into an isolation room, strapping me down to a bed with leather straps. Then one of the men, a black man, whose face I couldn't see, took a seat next to me, but somewhat behind me, and that is how I remained for the remainder of the night until some time the next day.

Counting out the prayers to the rosary on my fingers, I prayed fervently, dreaming about Norma and resolving somehow, however impossibly, to find my brother's murderer. As long as I didn't panic, my thoughts were free. And if I kept my mind busy, I could survive not being able to move. I pictured Norma, her placid face and sweet expressions.

**3.** Released from bondage, I resumed my walks up and down the halls. Soon I was transferred to B-Cottage. I got a job at the Greenhouse. I was in a positive, almost-free environment. I lived on a partially locked ward, open all day, locked at night, and had the run of the entire gigantic campus. I could work and earn money for a few easy hours each day—I had plenty of people to talk to and I made friends easily.

No one at the hospital tried to convince me that I could not communicate with my deceased brother as I had said I had. I had recounted the entire experience to a roomful of psychiatrists and psychologists, whose only response was to conclude I was bipolar, and that was it. But there seemed to me to be something more true about my experience than illness, though I couldn't say what it was—something like dreams that could be interpreted and that were important to the dreamer, however little they might matter to others.

The psychologist I was sent to see one afternoon was a pleasant-looking man with a beard. He wore a checked short sleeve shirt without a tie and khaki slacks; a gentle smile flickered over his face.

His office was like an empty classroom with a few empty desks in it for a small class. The building was ancient and poorly lit. I sat in one of the empty desks. The psychologist sat behind an old battered desk at the front of the room.

"I just wanted to check with you to see how you were getting along," he said, and I wanted to be friends with him. He seemed like more than just a nice guy, but someone who understood something of what I'd been through and cared.

"I'm fine."

"You're working in the greenhouse: how do you like it?"

"I like it."

"Are you still communicating with your brother?"

This kind of question spelled danger for me and I knew the right answer: "No. That's stopped."

"And how do you feel about it?"

"I don't know if what happened is true or not."

"You told me what you think. I wanted to know how you felt."

"Fine." He talked like he wanted to hear more so I added, "I don't feel bad. I mean, I'm not ashamed." I had almost forgot what all this had to do with my brother's death. I wanted to keep the mourning to myself where it would be kept holy. But I also wanted to be released from the hospital, so I sought within myself for what I believed would be something healthy to say: "I'm still very sad about my brother."

This went over big. "I understand you would be." The psychologist's response was genuine. Most of what the people in his business had to say was words. They wanted to know how I felt and felt nothing themselves.

I shifted in my chair. The wood was hard, and the chair itself was too small for me. "'Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,'" I said, feeling friendly. I was quoting the Beatles.

"What's that?"

"Death is not what we believe." I felt more confident and continued reciting, this time poetry from T.S. Eliot's _Four Quartets_ : "'Down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened.'"

"What's that from?" the psychologist asked.

I told him, then: "I think Eliot once had a nervous breakdown, didn't he?"

"Writers, artists, tend to have a hard time in our society. Do you think about death much?"

I had been friendly enough. Once again, I was on dangerous ground, looking for healthy answers to his question like a person picking his way over freezing water on slabs of ice.

"No. I'm ready to go home. I don't think about anything that will keep me from my freedom." This was a stock response and signaled an end to our conversation.

"What do you plan to do when you get out?" It was clear that I would be getting out soon and this made me happy. But I would tell him nothing more of any importance, certainly not about my resolve to find my brother's murderer. I turned once again to the recitation of poetry, of which I had a considerable store.

"I give you the end of a golden string, only wind it into a ball." I paused, looking into his eyes. They were blue and glittered. With his beard, he reminded me of the man who wrote the poem, a man many thought to be mad. "It will lead you in at Heaven's gate, built in Jerusalem's wall."

"That's very nice. What is it?"

"It's a positive point of view," I said.

**4.** Shirt off, wearing jeans, as was my customary dress at the greenhouse, one day I had just filled my watering can from a hose and had stopped and cupped my hand around a beautiful flower when a seductively clad girl in shorts and sandals and a tank top gleamed into my view like some golden artifact revealed upon an altar almost overgrown by surrounding leaves. I saw almost immediately that she was deaf and had a woman interpreter with her.

"Are you ready for work?" the interpreter signed to the deaf girl.

"Yes, how?" the girl asked.

The deaf girl was only around 26 years old, at most. I set down my watering can and caught her attention: "Deaf?"

"Yes, deaf?" she asked me.

"Hearing." I told her my name, then, "Nice to meet you. What's your name?"

"C - A - R - R - I - E." She made the letter C, then placed it over her heart to show her name sign. The heart was bigger than any kind of language. We exchanged a look that went between us like the peace shared by desert tribesmen at a well. It was a look that traveled through locked doors and experiences beyond understanding.

"Where you live, where?" she asked me, waving her index finger in the air.

"B C-O-T-T-A-G-E," I fingerspelled, uttering the name aloud with a hushed voice: "And you?"

"Deaf W-A-R-D," she answered. It sounded like a place I had always known. Delbert had been there once before.

The Epileptic Colony was a group of five great red brick buildings arranged in a circle on the Lakeland campus that looked like Southern plantation houses in ruin. The name, "Epileptic Colony," was emblazoned over the lead building in big block letters. All five buildings were boarded up. Grass and weeds grew up around them and in the spacious yard they shared with a number of big old leafy trees which threw the whole area in shade.

Elaborate old-fashioned fire escapes, once possibly an innovative safety feature, rusted slowly in the summer heat as the buildings crumbled, brick by brick. To me those buildings were a symbol of hope. The epileptics all were gone, no longer locked away like lepers in a colony and perhaps one day people like me would also be freed. The ruins of those old buildings were like a place I knew. I looked at them affectionately. They inspired poetry in me, a yearning to say deep and passionate things.

There was a hut just inside the circle of buildings—was it a brick gazebo? Enclosed on three sides, the fourth side open, it had a concrete floor, up a few steps, like a loading platform, but it was not connected to the surrounding buildings. Carrie met me at the front of the colony and together we wandered to the gazebo. We didn't talk much. What we wanted from each other was something like motherly affection, so we just comforted each other by holding hands. Up on the gazebo platform, she leaned back on the gazebo wall, and I leaned toward her, her cool arms coming up around my neck, her fragrant breath coming and going on my mouth: I kissed her and kept kissing her.

**5.** In the van, going past horses in corrals on farms, I thought about how fragile life was. I never lost my fear of being locked up. If a mental hospital was supposed to be an asylum, that is, a sanctuary of inviolable protection, it was never that to me. That was all right, though. It was all right.

The driver let me off in Wheaton, at the Metro. I took the train to Dupont Circle, then walked to my apartment. When I got there, I reached for the phone to call my mother, then changed my mind and went to my desk and got out the deaf _Red Book_ , a book with all the numbers of deaf people in the Washington, DC, area. My copy was a few years out of date, but it had the numbers for all the different departments at Gallaudet University.

I went to my TTY, which stands for teletype, a keyboard with a lighted screen which can send and receive typed messages across the phone lines, and began to dial the Computer Department, where Norma worked. Too nervous to continue I hung up before connecting.

I meant to change my life. I dialed my uncle's office. The phone rang five times. I knew he wasn't there because he always picked up after one or two rings. Then I called the Lawyer's Lounge over at Superior Court. When my uncle came on the phone, I greeted him in my usual manner, "Hey, Unc, what's up?"

"Heyyyyyyyyy!" he growled into the phone.

"I just got home to my apartment."

"Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it, old buddy!"

Unc was a positive force who never looked on the negative side of things, even though his own life had flipped upside down twice—when he was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital as a young man and then when he was fired from NASA as a middle-aged man.

"Well, what's goin' on with the investigation?" I was eager to hear of any new developments. The police were in close touch with Unc.

"The police have got it all under control, I guess," he said, not encouraging me to pursue the subject any further.

"Oh, I see: nothin new, huh?" I was in no mood to push any boundaries, being quick to sense any possible misstep, since I valued my new freedom and wanted to stay on the best side of everyone to keep it.

"Nah!" he said.

"They said I was bipolar at the hospital."

"Really?" was all Unc said, as if he didn't particularly want to hear more.

"Yeah, I felt good about it. I guess I'm like Dad—up and down. I gotta talk to somebody and take medicine for life. Can you imagine that? I gotta talk to somebody, a psychiatrist or psychologist, like every week, for life!"

After we hung up, I went to my TTY and called Gallaudet. I had never lost hold of the pieces of information I had gathered from Norma in the precious few minutes we had talked outside the Chapel: her name and where she worked.

I waited for someone to get her. Calling a deaf woman was different than calling a hearing woman because the deaf woman was likely to be more understanding. If the deaf woman happened to be beautiful, her beauty did not make her necessarily more elusive, as it might a hearing woman. The deaf woman was still likely to be accessible, at least to any hearing man who knew sign language.

"Hello. This is Norma. GA"—"GA" was TTY etiquette for "Go ahead," meaning one had sent one's message and one could now expect a reply—like saying "Over" in radio communication. The tinted TTY screen gave me the feeling of looking into the tinted windshield of a space capsule. The letters she typed seemed to roll up on the screen as if oiled. What did the Song of Solomon say? My loved one drips with myrrh?

I fumbled up a greeting and asked if she remembered me.

She typed up her answer in the affirmative: "Yes, how are you? GA"

"My brother was murdered. That was my brother we saw being carried out of that house across the street from Gallaudet. GA"

"Yes, I heard. I am very sorry. GA"

"Listen, will you be in church this Sunday?" I asked her: "I'd like to see you. GA"

"Yes, I will see you there. GA" she typed.

"Great! SKSK," I typed. "SK" was etiquette for "Stop Keying," meaning, the conversation was over and it was usually repeated twice by each person, so I watched for Norma's sign-off. Hers was subtly intimate. She typed simply, "Bye S" when she signed off, leaving it to me to type in the "K" that would complete it, a bit of teamwork that was a certain sign she wanted to be friends.

I loved the Gallaudet Chapel. I didn't know its exact history. That it was poorly lit inside made it seem older even than its years, and it was old, dating back to 1870. Marriages for deaf people were held in its great barnlike hall. Baptisms of babies to deaf couples took place on its altar. No doubt funerals were held there also. The place was a part of what was known as deaf culture. Hearing people could enter, but they could never be a part of that culture. Hearing people could be members of the deaf community, as I was, but never a part of deaf culture. To be a part of deaf culture, one had to be deaf. That was the basis for the definition. That was how deaf people defined their culture.

I had trouble with that definition for a long time, but the reality of my experience with deaf people caused me to accept it. One couldn't really share the experience of deaf people without being deaf. I remembered a line from a poem I once read, "How does it feel to hear a hand? / You have to be deaf to understand." No matter if you were raised by deaf parents and spoke sign language as well as any deaf person, if you were not deaf, you were not a part of deaf culture.

Why should that matter? Well, if you were close to a deaf person, as I was with my brother, you would want to be fully accepted in his or her world. Being excluded from deaf culture was like being excluded from a private club. It didn't feel good.

When I came into the Chapel, I felt like I had turned a key in a door that admitted onto the threshold of an antechamber to heaven. Even the air seemed scented and cloudy as with a mist on a mountain top. I took a seat in the back on the right as I usually did, finding Norma over on the left around the middle at about the same place as I had seen her last time. I knew her now. But she was still a stranger.

With her luxurious hair pinned back as if like a princess from some antique Asiatic land, she appeared to descend to this world from some higher world of peace and simplicity, truth and knowledge, honesty and understanding. Her lips sweetly curved to form an intense, motherly expression that breathed with virginal purity. Her lofty brow, fragile as an egg, swept over the graceful pleasures of her serene and accepting face. Her clothes being as simple as the uniform of a child in Catholic school, at first sight, she looked unremarkably plain. But she was not plain.

People not willing to look long enough or with enough interest might have seen nothing like the beauty I saw, but the smooth and flawless complexion, the curves her clothes could not obscure, extolled pleasures that the deepest part of me sought with a resolve far greater than any fear, and my fear was great. If man was made in God's image, she was God. No man could look on God and live, or so I had read. My mind revolted with the intensity of such perceptions; the grandiose dwindled to the matter of fact: somehow she seemed a symbol for how I felt as an individual, since I believed I was a far greater person than I at first appeared. She was like an angel carved in crystal, wrapped in a plain brown wrapper.

"Let us go forth to serve God and each other," Father Mat said, revolving one upturned and one downturned thumb around the other.

"Thanks be to God," we signed and some also murmured.

After making a few announcements, Father Mat swept from the room. It was fall, still warm, but the school year had started. I felt like a student, like I had never graduated with a degree in English so many years before or like a person in a dream scheduled to take an exam I had not studied for. I was still a boy with greying hair, a boy in awe of a beautiful woman younger than myself in actual years, but seeming so much older in wisdom and experience and the peculiar authority that accompanies beauty.

I waved, catching her attention. She recognized me right away.

She greeted me with her low and heavy deaf voice, innocent as a child's. It had the timbre in it of the kind of perpetual innocence every deaf person seems to start with.

"I'm glad to see you," I announced, patting my chest to show happiness.

"How are you?" she asked. I could tell she was genuinely pleased to see me.

I did not beat around the bush, but got right to my point, as was done in the deaf world. With deaf people, the punch line comes first: "I want revenge."

"I understand you." The index finger of her right hand went up into the air.

"You know, I'm an investigator. I can find out who did it myself." I was referring to my brother's murder and she knew without any extra explanation.

"Really?" she said.

"Yes, I work with my uncle at Superior Court. He's a public defender and I do investigations for him." In the midst of talking, I realized she might not have any idea of what I was talking about, and so in a rush to break all barriers, I suddenly asked, "I'm wondering: do you have a boyfriend?" I had asked the same question of countless women. The answer had always been, Yes. It seemed that every woman I ever approached had a boyfriend or was married and Norma was no different.

"Yes," she answered. She had a boyfriend.

"I'd like to be friends," was my response. I wanted to be more than friends, but I had read that women wanted to be friends first, anyway, so I convinced myself at the moment that I really wanted to be just friends.

"Sure, good idea," she said. Our spirits commingled in a smile that passed between us like the understanding shared by two parents handling an infant. I threw my hands into the air, making the sign for "great" as if to play patty-cake.

**6.** The Community Mental Health Clinic was where I went for treatment of my mental illness, or therapy, as it was called. I talked to a psychiatrist and got prescriptions for medicine. The psychiatrist was Dr. Trudy Gluckstern. The medicine was currently lithium, risperdal, and propranalol.

As I understood it, lithium had originally been a salt for seasoning foods, which was discovered to have medicinal properties. Risperdal was a new drug, an antipsychotic, which I took at a very low dosage. Propranalol was a blood pressure medicine. I didn't have high blood pressure, but it had been discovered that propranalol worked to lessen anxiety in some people who were in high stress situations, like violinists in orchestras, and this appealed to me greatly because I had suffered greatly from anxiety. Dr. Gluckstern had not introduced me to lithium, but she had put me on risperdal and propranalol, both of which had helped me.

"I'm telling yah, this is different," I said in the small office used for our meeting, a few children's toys lying around a red plastic crate on the floor between us. "If Norma's livin' with a guy, that means they're havin' sex." I had assumed she was living with her boyfriend. A girl that attractive had to be. "That's disturbing me," I went on, feeling, I guess, that I could get strength from voicing such disagreeable facts. "It's none o' my business, I know, but I don't feel good about it, I don't like it." I was on the verge of some great discovery about myself and women. Talking would give me control over it: "Ever since I was a kid, Jeez—Jesus!—the same thing always happened. Every time I met a woman, I always felt the woman knew so much more than me"—I paused—"about sex! Like they had this special knowledge. It didn't matter how old I got: old or young, the women, they always knew more."

Dr. Gluckstern looked on me with the deadpan, expressionless face of someone being paid to listen to information she did not like to hear. No, it was no projection of my own dislike of her to say she didn't like me. She didn't like me. If not helping a person who is injured is abuse, then not contributing to the revelations of a person who has suffered is also an abuse. It was Dr. Gluckstern's way to be that kind of abusive.

I went on talking, no matter. Talking in a social situation that had been designed for deviants like myself was another form of bondage that also might lead to freedom. "And then I couldn't get into it. Every time . . . every time I was at some stupid party or whatever—where people were 'going in the bushes' at age 13, I just couldn't do it. Instead of getting turned on, I got frightened. Under better conditions, I'd start to laugh! I couldn't get serious! The whole thing was such a joke to me."

Maybe I just talked to see if I could get some response from the doctor. In some cultures it was effeminate to talk; to talk felt masculine to me. I was being like my father—he talked: "When I got older, when I got older, the only thing I ever wanted to do was meet a woman in a strange place—a public place, like a city street, a park, a museum. I felt that only if a woman could trust me that much could she be right for me." I had reached a scenic vista where I could see out over my life.

"Well, I'm afraid time's up!" Dr. Gluckstern said.

**7.** It was 6:00 a.m. Michael woke right away to the alarm and shut it off. The alarm was a device placed under the pillow that made the bed vibrate, common among deaf people. Norma got up too. Her bed was in the same room as Michael's. In the half light, she moved like Aphrodite, a goddess.

She and Michael were not married, but Michael didn't seem to notice. He was intent on one thing only, getting ready for work. He stumbled to the kitchen to get some coffee, making it in the microwave; then, after a few sips, he charged into the bathroom, setting the coffee mug on the sink, turning on a warm shower, and jumping in. Taking a shower in the morning with a cup of coffee was the best way he knew to wake up. He had an eight o'clock class to teach. He was a deaf professor at a place that was like Harvard for deaf people.

He was certainly not the only deaf professor, but he knew he was a member of an exclusive caste. The people who taught at Gallaudet, or even just worked at Gallaudet, were members of an elite, and he knew it. At Gallaudet, he moved in an entirely deaf world, where sign language was the first language, and deafness was so much the norm it was not even considered a handicap.

Michael crossed the bedroom, dressed in a robe, and went to get some clothes from the walk-in closet. Norma headed for the bathroom.

"Heard anything from that guy whose brother was murdered?" Michael signed in the fluid, sometimes jerky, but confident language of ASL (American Sign Language).

"No," Norma responded without interest.

Though they both worked at Gallaudet, they went to work separately, since Michael's schedule was different than Norma's. Michael went out the door, swinging his briefcase.

She and Michael lived in an apartment in Silver Spring, near the Metro. It was a great location, just five stops from Union Station and a short bus ride to Gallaudet, where she and Michael had met. His position on the faculty in Business had been quite impressive to her. In a secret way, deep down in herself, in a way she could hardly admit to consciousness, however, Norma was dissatisfied.

She finished getting ready for work. The clothes she had picked out to wear were clean but simple (some people would say plain): a white blouse, a skirt that might have been turquoise, a narrow brown belt, and brown shoes.

She wore a ring on her wedding finger and a Timex watch with a brown band on her left wrist. Around her neck, she wore a teardrop pendant on a chain. It was not hard to believe that the woman in clothes was the same woman who had just been so modestly dressed in a full length nightgown for bed. Her hair she had pinned up in that antique, Asiatic way that completed her look—an innocence like a seven-year-old's asking a serious question in class. She took her time—she didn't have to be in until nine o'clock. Like Michael she knew she was one of the chosen—one of the few—of the many deaf people who tried—to get a job at Gallaudet. She knew she should be happy, but she wasn't.

At lunch, she ate with Elaine at one of the tables in Ely Center. A middle-aged woman who worked in the library, Elaine was deaf and thought nothing of expressing herself fully on any subject, so when the subject of Moody came up and Norma mentioned that Moody rode a motorcycle, Elaine spoke right up, emphatically, signing, "Motorcycles are dangerous!"

"You're right," Norma agreed.

"King became deaf from an accident, did you know that?" She was referring to the deaf president of Gallaudet, I. King Jordan, referred to as simply King by deaf people.

"Yes, I know."

"Weird! His brother was murdered—he should be careful!"

"He goes to church at Gallaudet. I like him."

**8.** At work, Norma drifted into a troubled reverie, as if she were rehearsing an attempt to explain her past to an ideal lover—Moody?

My name in Korean was Young Mi. It meant "Beautiful Spirit." I was deaf and, for that reason, a shame and embarrassment to my family and a mark for ridicule and scorn in public, destined for a life of ostracism and poverty.

I had family secrets to conceal. My father had a girlfriend, with whom he had sired a child a few years younger than I, but he did not divorce my mother. We still lived together above his clinic. He came and went from either house as he pleased. My mother used to make our house shake with her complaining and I had seen my father beat her so badly once with a metal rod that she had to be put in the hospital.

"We all live in the gutter," Oscar Wilde said, "but some of us are looking at the stars."

I went to the Seoul School for the Deaf. It was a small school near the American Embassy containing all twelve grades, from first through high school. I remember one time—it was the spring of my senior year. The bitterly cold Korean winter was over. What would become of me? Deaf school was all I had known.

I had no boyfriend, no prospects of marriage, or employment, or higher education. There was only the quiet but elaborate dream of a girl: I wanted to marry a hearing man—not just any hearing man—a white man—from America! While the realistic world piled me high with gloom, I tended quietly and persistently to my dream:

A hearing man would interpret for me. A hearing man would stand up for me. He would take away my shame, the shame of being shooed away by ignorant shopkeepers who threw salt on deaf people to rid their store of evil spirits, the shame of being exiled to my room because a deaf child was an embarrassment, not to be seen when guests came to visit and I would spend long solitary hours shut up in my room like a leper.

I had heard that in America deaf people had their own university. America loomed up like a modern form of Eden, the entrance to which, guarded over by angels, was not forever barred by some transgression. In my room, in my Korean bed rolled out on the floor at night within the unadorned confines of my room, I prayed to God to make my dream come true.

One night at school, where we would sometimes stay till late at night, hiding to avoid notice of the custodian when he locked up for the night, I shared my dream with my friend, Jin Ju. She was a priceless friend, slight and pretty, with an ability to listen to others in so thoughtful and profound a way as to make her seem almost transparent to every barrier of communication.

"You don't want to marry a white American." The sign for white American was peculiar, the first two fingers—extended, not bent—of one hand being drummed on the cheek. "Think of your mother and father," she told me.

Then, she placed the top of a fist on the bridge of her nose—"good"; next, she waved her right hand in the air at a perpendicular angle to her left hand like a gear that had become disconnected on some machine: that meant "family." Then she drew her right hand out and up from the side of the head at about the level of the eye to imitate the edge of a traditional Korean roof in the sign for "Korean," and followed that up by making a fist in one hand—"man"—and then extending a pinky in the other hand—"woman"— bringing the two hands together in the sign for "marry." She ended with a light beating of the bottom or but of her right fist on her left forearm—"do": altogether that meant, "Marry a Korean from a good family."

No," I told her. "I want to marry a white American."

It was an impossible dream. She could only answer with a puzzled expression that struggled into a smile.

With my dream, I could face any reality. I could think beyond the confines of my little, deaf, Korean world.

One day in the spring of my senior year, the boys were getting ready to go outside and play sports during break time. I motioned Jin Ju to come with me and said to Jung Ku, a stocky, stubborn boy, whose name sign was like the American sign for red, but in Korean meant only that he had a big lower lip, "We want to play sports!"

Jung Ku turned haughtily toward me and with a scowl emphatically clapped his fists together in the sign for "Men," continuing, "only go out to play"—palms rubbed together, one hand on top of the other. "Women"—the Korean sign for women, extended pinkies being clicked together like a pair of high heels, was in contrast to the strength of the fist in the Korean sign for men, "can't play sports with boys. You stay inside." We stood beside our desks.

"We can play sports with you!"

I had known Jung Ku since 10th grade and there had been no animosity between us. He was an outstanding artist who could draw a likeness of anything you asked him to, without even a model to look at. I admired him very much for that. He was expert in math, and I admired him for that, too. While he was athletic, I was famous at the school for being a champion athlete among the girls.

"Girls don't play sports with boys—you stay inside!" He was right up close to me so that if he had been hearing, I would have felt his spittle on my face.

I grabbed the papers off the top of his desk and threw them to the floor.

He struck me—he struck me with his fist, directly in the face, the blow landing on my right cheek, and I staggered back, the cheek flaring and swelling up blue almost instantaneously, my eyes running with tears. I grabbed a rake that happened to be leaning up against the wall and swung it at him and missed. He struck me again, this time in the chest, a solid blow that momentarily winded me.

Another boy, a big boy, wading into the fight, broke it up, wrestling the rake away from me, and pushing Jung Ku away.

Jin Ju threw her arms around me, crying out. The other girls crowded around us, forming a protective circle.

After I graduated, I entered upon a vast wasteland. My mother conceived that the only solution was to arrange a marriage for me.

She fixed me up with a hearing boy, a Korean, who knew no sign language but had gone to a very good high school—not a college, mind you. I was of good family by all outward appearance—my father was a doctor with his own clinic—but as polite as this very nice-looking boy and I were with each other, the situation was impossible. It wasn't just that I struggled without success to read his lips and he struggled through suppressed anger and frustration to make himself understood, it was all of that and more: my dream—to marry a tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed American—overclouded all my perceptions and the hearing Korean became to me no more than an impostor.

When the night was over, we never saw each other again. I went home to my parents.

My mother refused to send me to college. "Where's the money?" she asked me, shaking her head.

My father being a rich doctor, with only myself and my deaf sister left to care for, my older, hearing sister having become a doctor, I could not understand what my mother meant by this. It was because I was deaf. I was not worth the money.

Jin Ju and I conceived the idea of going to seminary school. It was much less expensive than college and deaf people could be accepted without the large bribe necessary to get a deaf person into a major university.

Classes were from six to nine in the evening, so that when I was going to school, the other girls were coming home from classes at Seoul University, dressed smartly, carrying their books on the bus, laughing, wearing the pin of the university—the style then—the way a person in the United States places the name of his university across the back window of his car.

I wore the pin of the seminary, carrying my books proudly, but my heart was not in sitting for hours at religion classes given in Korean without an interpreter.

"Love is patient and love is kind," I read in my Bible: "Love is not jealous, it does not boast, and it is not proud." The path to love led through a mythical place, both in the consciousness of the world and in my secret dreams: it was called America.

One night several years after I had received my degree from seminary school, while the maid was cleaning up after dinner and my mother and I were seated with my older sister, the doctor, at the kitchen table, I said to my mother, using voice, "Owm ma" (that meant "Mother"), "I want to go to U.S." I used a home sign for "U.S." to aid my speech, drawing a loop by laying the side of my index finger across the bridge of my nose then bringing it up over my nose and then under it like a person stifling a sneeze. As often as I had repeated this wish to my mother, she had shaken her head resolutely, "No."

Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, like some enchanted spirit breaking long-held bonds of silence, my older sister said: "I will send you to the U.S."

A storm blew through me and I shivered like a rose of Sharon in the rain. I would tell my children one day that all our suffering passes away as a dream: I was still a virgin; my life stretched out before me like a vast horizon. I had prayed, I had believed, I was deaf and God had answered my prayer.

### III

**1.** It was fall. At Mt. Olivet Cemetery, leaves began to collect on Delbert's grave. Back at work with my uncle, I was a little unsteady at first, trembly, shaky, like a person walking a tightrope in a dream.

Let's face it, though: what really troubled me? I believed Norma was having sex.

This sex thing hurt me bad. I didn't know what to do about it. I didn't know what to do about my brother's murder. What was really troubling—I didn't know which was worse. It seemed to me that the first thing I ought to do was to talk to Dana, the name Ms. Szabo had given me of a coworker of Delbert's at the National Library of Medicine. I knew her, that is, I knew of her. I had heard about her from Delbert.

On a Saturday morning I went to see her. Delbert used to refer to her as his "friend," as if he had no other. She lived in a little yellow house in Forest Glen, right near Wheaton, about a block from the Forest Glen Metro station. The house was near an old, rustic church which had been built around the turn of the 19th-to-20th centuries. On the grounds was the site of the Carroll Chapel, where in 1774 the first Catholic Bishop of the United States, John Carroll, had started a mission for the area. I knew because I stopped by the church before visiting at Dana's house, and walked through the old cemetery, picking up a flyer at the replica of the old chapel.

I wasn't sure what it meant to be Catholic. For me it meant church every Sunday and occasional visits to my aunt's various convents in Northwest Washington: the holy aura that surrounded everything in the convent—the chapel set aside for prayer—the crucifixes on the walls and paintings and statues of Mary and Jesus—the absolute sanctity of everything and everyone in the house, set apart to God, the flowing habit of my aunt with its white peak around her face—black flowing robes with the thick brown beads of a rosary trailing from her hips—her face pale white, set off by the habit, her hands white from constant prayer in darkened rooms.

I putted around the corner and parked my motorcycle in front of Dana's house, took off my fingerless gloves and stuffed them in my jacket, then took off my helmet, fastening it to the helmet hook. This was a nice neighborhood. It would be all right to leave my helmet outside on my bike. It was fall but plenty warm outside—I had my yellow jacket—it was still too hot for the leather one. I walked up to the door and rang the bell. I assumed she had a flashing light rigged up to it to alert her someone was there. It would probably be useless to knock.

A long few moments later, I was in luck. The door opened and a smart woman in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt stood before me with short hair like a boy's.

She recognized who I was at once and asked me to come in. Inside, her house looked like a college student's. It had that spare, stylish but inexpensive, thrown-together look of a place that roommates share for a few months or a few semesters. I took a seat on her living room couch. Dana's voice was almost like a hearing person's. She really didn't need to sign when she talked. She was that understandable, but I needed to sign to her. She was deaf.

"Ms. S - Z - A - B - O"—I fingerspelled the name out—gave me your name and told me you were friends with Delbert. I'm trying to find out who killed him. Can you help me?"

"I don't know what to tell you," she answered. Her mood had changed. She was serious as at a funeral. I had missed Delbert's funeral. Maybe she had gone to it and missed me there. I worked from the assumption that she didn't know I had mental illness. If she did know, my credibility would be ruined.

"I don't know who killed him." It was an answer so complete and final, it was like encountering a dead-end street. I knew there must be another way around.

"How did you get to know Delbert? I remember hearing him talk about you."

"I worked with him at the National Library of Medicine," came her response, which ended by her jiggling the middle finger of one hand in the center of the upturned palm of the other, like rubbing a teeny bit of lotion into the center of her palm. Her deaf accent was not quite as pronounced as Kermit the Frog's: "I was his tutor in English at Gallaudet. We became friends. That is how he heard about the job at the library—through me."

"I remember," I said, bringing one thumb from my brow down to touch the back of my other thumb near my waist, then continuing: "You wrote for _Deaf Life_ magazine."

"Right," she affirmed.

"I remember you. Delbert was so happy to have you as a tutor." I remembered Delbert telling me that she spoke and wrote like a hearing person.

Delbert was a good student—he tried very hard," she said sympathetically. That was Delbert. He threw himself into everything. I was like that, too.

"Do you live here alone?" I asked. I was just curious. Her personality was so gracious and welcoming, I felt right at home with her.

"I'm looking for a roommate. My old roommate moved out recently."

Her answer opened up a possibility—my becoming her roommate—that seemed far-fetched for the moment. I ignored it and asked another question, "Did Delbert tell you anything that sounded strange about his life. You know that Delbert had emotional illness, right?"

Saying emotional illness was another way of saying mental illness that made it seem less bad. If Dana only had a hazy idea Delbert was sick, she would say yes but not realize exactly how; if she didn't know what emotional illness was, she would come away knowing he was somehow sick but not being able to remember exactly how. It was better that way all around, like telling people you were bipolar. They would have no idea what you were talking about.

"Yes, I knew. He told me." Maybe she knew that I had it also. I had a piece of humble pie with a dash of embarrassment as she proceeded, but her turn in thought brought me out of it. Maybe she didn't know about me, or, better yet, knew and didn't care. That would make her an ideal person. "He told me he was afraid of a man named Dick Gilman."

The name was like an abrasive on me. I wanted to scour a pan with it, "Really. Why?" I inquired, pulling my fingers back into the letter, Y, off the right top of my head like I was trying to pull a string out of it with my middle finger.

"He said this man"—and here she made a name sign for him which surprised me: it was a sign for a snake—"did not like him and wanted his girlfriend, M - I - S - S - Y. She worked as a maid in Bethesda for friends of Gilman"—snake sign for Gilman as she voiced his name.

"Did you tell the police about this?" was my immediate response, as this sounded like a substantial lead.

"Yes," she answered.

After my experiences with police—being arrested in my room at night like a political prisoner in Russia, and then locked up on a mental ward like a criminal—I had less than zero interest in working with the police. It was of interest to me, however, to find evidence of their incompetence.

"What did they say?" I inquired.

"Nothing" was her response.

I had heard nothing from my uncle either. That did it. Dana's simple and direct responses to me were friendly and sympathetic, I wanted to be her roommate. I spoke right up, sure she would say yes: "Listen, my rent is too high in D.C., and I'd be interested in being your roommate. What do you think?"

Dana gave a cherubic smile with a shrug of assent. I almost hoped she was a lesbian because as a lesbian she would most likely be able to understand a person like myself a lot better than the average person. She would know about discrimination—she would know about being an outcast who survived along the outskirts of acceptable society. She would know about the quiet suffering that went with not being able to reveal the most important part of herself to other people. These were all aspects of what it was like to be seriously handicapped with mental illness.

You encountered discrimination in the workplace and in social life, making you a complete outcast, unable to make friends because you could not safely talk about yourself—could not share your hospitalizations, struggles with anxiety or bouts of depression or history of failures, lost jobs and unemployment, list of medications or schedule of weekly therapy visits that made you the person you were—could not share the life-altering aspects of yourself that instead had to be hidden from all—could not share the most crucial information about yourself—information that might describe twenty years of your life, without which you were a total puzzle: what was wrong with you? Why were you forty years old, unmarried, and working the job of a twenty-two-year-old? Try making a friend, having to conceal the most important aspects of your life, such as that you were married, divorced, or single, or had held a job for over twenty years, or that you had fought in Vietnam or World War II?

"How much would you charge for rent per month?" I asked.

"Do you have furniture?" she replied.

"Yeah," I said.

Her price was low and her offer expansive, offering me the run of the house. It remained to be seen how our relationship would progress. I was good at the introductory formalities—could not get past the barriers set up by my past. I almost forgot about Delbert in my enthusiasm for the move to a new place.

"When could I move in?" I asked her.

"As soon as you're ready," she said with a cheerful smile.

**2.** I read in my Bible: "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away."

I put the Bible down and took up my father's book and began to read, searching in his words for the key to the mystery of my own life

I closed the book and set it on my night stand. I had heard and read that mental illness was at least in part hereditary. My father had suffered from battle fatigue, having had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the midst of battle. And of course there was Uncle Henry, who had actually once been committed.

I got up and took out my pill bottles, one by one, taking out the correct number of pills from each bottle. I took them all at once because psychologically, I felt like I was taking less medicine that way: I'm talking about washing down maybe four or five big pills all at once, in one big gulp! I went down to the kitchen to get some water. Dana was sitting up at a desk in the living room. As I went by her, I smiled and waved: it was Sunday night—we both had to work the next day. I took my pills in one gulp then came back in the living room, still holding a glass of water in my hand.

"Do?" I asked, making a D with my free hand and tapping the tip of my index finger against the tip of my thumb to form an O, so that I spelled D - O repeatedly.

"B-I-L-L-S," she fingerspelled, with a smile.

I made the sign for "Oh" or "Uh huh," then I started toward a question: "Can you tell me anything more about D-E-L-B-E-R-T?"

She put down her pen and slumped back in her chair. "Yes," she replied, flexing her clenched fist up and down as if a person were nodding. "Have a seat!" I took up a nearby chair.

"Delbert's girlfriend was the same thing as a prostitute. She took money for sex. But Delbert never told me that—I don't think he ever knew. His girlfriend was Deaf, 17-years-old."

"Really?" I responded. That was young. Delbert had been in his thirties.

"Her name is M - I - S - S - Y," Dana went on: "Her father is a very rich doctor in Bethesda. M-I-S-S-Y is very beautiful."

I immediately recognized her: "You mean, the beautiful blond girl I met at Delbert's wake? That was her?" I asked excitedly.

"Yes, that's her. She worked as a maid after school part time, for some rich hearing men from New York, but they paid her for sex."

"Really?" I said again, throwing an index finger out in front of me from near my chin. "Who was in charge? Who paid her?" I thought I could get to the bottom of it with a few simple questions.

"Dirty men—I don't know," was all I got from Dana. The details I needed would have to come from somewhere else. "Are you OK?" she asked me.

"Fine," I answered. My thoughts were clear: "Who told you about Missy?"

"Missy told me."

**3.** I was nervous. I had to go up to the Community Psychiatric Clinic for my appointment with my psychiatrist, Trudy Gluckstern. The clinic was located a block from Wheaton Plaza. I paid for the clinic with a Maryland Medical Assistance card, which was part of public assistance, or Welfare, as I was brought up to call it. In all the years I had had mental illness, there had not been a single talk therapist or psychiatrist that I had liked personally. Trudy Gluckstern was no different. She came out to the waiting room to meet me. "Hi," I said when she didn't. Every time I talked to these people, for me it was a put-on.

"Hi," she answered and smiled with that ready-made, proper smile that seemed manufactured in New York and inserted in the lining of her gums by the American Psychiatric Association. We walked back to her office. On the way, I made my usual inane comments about the weather. This was another part of my "being normal." Inside myself, I knew it was against my nature to talk that way, like the kind of dumb ass I despised: "It sure was nice out today, huh?—Wow!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, it was nice," she responded.

I saw an opportunity to fill in more time with chatter: "Fall is here, though." She sighed in agreement. "It'll be gettin' much cooler," I added. (Playing dumb-ass required the frequent use of cliches—why couldn't I just be silent!) In Trudy's office were a bunch of children's toys clumped together on the floor around an upside-down red milk crate.

"Well, how are you? How've you been this week?" she asked.

We would now talk for an hour. I was a good talker. I could fill the hour up, no problem. That had not always been the case with all these talk therapists, though. I once had one I simply refused to talk to. We sat for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes staring at each other.

"They had no right to arrest me like they did!" I exclaimed.

"I think you are referring to your involuntary commitment, am I right?" She said this without sympathy, like the involuntary commitment had been something I deserved.

"They gave me no warning—that should be unconstitutional. A person should at least be given a chance to change his behavior before that happens. They came and arrested me at night like a political prisoner in Russia. I'm never gonna forget it as long as I live!"

My anger got in the way of plans she must have had for a more quiet session, especially since she may have had appointments all day. She was tired, so she let go of her earlier authoritarian tone and asked, "What's brought this up?"

"Because I'm frustrated. For two years I was a vegetable, in a raging pain like a fire that could not be extinguished, sunup to sundown, and I could not communicate the pain I was in—I was in agony. But you can't understand that because no one can—no one could believe that a person could endure so much pain. I would never have believed it up till then myself. Now I've got to do things and I can't explain myself, but I can't be worried about that now. I have to forget it and go on."

She picked up on the subtle allusions I had made to doing things I couldn't explain and having to go on and said, "You don't want to give up the idea of working on your brother's case." She felt that case was none of my business, and that I was certainly not qualified to work on it.

"It shall be eye for eye, tooth for tooth," I said.

Her earlier authoritarian tone returned with new energy: "Just so long as you are not a danger to yourself or others."

**4.** When Norma returned home from work, it was 6:30. She couldn't help it, she was thinking of Moody. She smiled and leaned up against her refrigerator. Michael was in the living room watching closed-caption TV. It was ridiculous and impossible to think of Moody. She poured herself a drink of diet soda. She watched the bubbles in her glass as the bubbles fizzed to the top. She wanted to linger on the thought of Moody. She wanted to go back to the thought, as it had been, just a few seconds ago. It had been so good! As she walked into the living room, Michael pointed out that he was watching, "N-E-W-S."

Norma acknowledged this with, "Oh." She sat down and picked up the newspaper, kicking off her shoes and curling her feet up under her, taking a sip of her drink and then setting it down on a little table next to her chair.

She waved toward Michael with that way of waving the open hand up and down from the wrist which seems so much like the natural way a child will try to get its mother's attention. Michael looked up toward her.

"Hey, you read this? Strange!" It was an article about Gallaudet. In it, mention was made of Delbert's murder.

"What?" The way Michael looked indicated he was in a different mood altogether from Norma's. His brown beard, normally cut close to his face, now clung just a little loosely, making him probably more handsome now than when he had it just right. Big frame glasses hung down just slightly on his nose. He wore a brown-and-tan checked short sleeve shirt which bulged at the waist around a pot belly. He was a husky man but not a powerhouse. Brown penny loafers and thick wool socks completed the picture of a very scholarly, very collegiate-looking guy. His "What?" signed in an off-handed manner was the gesture of a busy and important man. It was at moments like that—when perhaps Michael looked best and felt best about himself—that Norma felt most estranged from him.

"Never mind," she exploded, drawing the shape of lightning with her hand to indicate "never" and pointing to her temple to indicate "mind." She flung the paper on the footrest near her chair and stood up. Michael stood up, too. As she went to walk by him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him.

"I have to go out to Giant," she said, frightened by his anger.

He released her arm and pushed her roughly away from him. "You don't have to be rude about it!" he exclaimed, then: "I'm going with you—you never buy the right things."

"Fine," she said.

Throwing on a sweater, she headed out the door, in jeans and a sweater looking like a rumpled graduate student. She and Michael came out the front of the apartment building together but with a distance in between them that was as if they were walking apart from each other—they crossed the parking lot over to Giant, Norma's mind revolving with the desire to end the relationship, and that hurt her, because she had never really failed at anything.

Outside Giant, she grabbed a shopping cart and commandeered it into the store, heading for the vegetable section. She had had enough! Michael went off to shop on his own—good riddance—she almost shuddered to be free of him.

Ahead of her, picking up a head of lettuce, a familiar form suddenly appeared before her in a bright yellow jacket which shone at that moment brighter than the beams of Apollo, god of the sun, irradiating her and him both within an aura—her a woodland nymph who lived far from Olympus within her shady glen among the harvest fruits—him a wandering deity at home among the clouds. She felt naked as a goddess surprised while bathing by a rural stream, not even a fig leaf to cover her, shy as a school girl, and brave as any immortal with superior knowledge and skills who watched over and guided the foibles and follies of men. Timidly, she tapped Moody on the shoulder.

**5.** I turned toward the tap on my shoulder with reflex indifference. I had been a vegetable for two years. Now among the vegetables, I looked out as if from the tower of a healthy mind and body on a smile like a resurrection. Norma's face beamed as if transfigured, her teeth gleaming like white garments on a spring morning, her eyes shifting in their expression like sands of a desert at sunset or clouds over mountains in the afternoon. I forgot about my two years of pain and all that had followed from them—the halfway house, the rented rooms, the unemployment, the welfare and supplemental social security income, the shame, the isolation, the therapy appointments, the murder of my brother, the loss of everything I was or could have been.

"I didn't know you lived here!" She signed without voice, only mouthing some words like some Delphic oracle resurrected to lead me to some new world across the dim gulf that separated me from her.

"Yes, I moved here a few months ago," I responded. Telling her about it made it seem like one of the greatest things I had ever done.

"Where do you live?" she asked me. She didn't talk when she signed, but her signing was clear and easy to understand. It was like I had never seen her before and known her for a thousand years.

"Near Forest Glen Metro," I replied.

"Oh!" She was surprised.

"And you—where do you live?" I asked her, trying to hide my anxieties about her having a boyfriend.

She indicated the building across from Giant, then spelled it out for me, "B-l-a-i-r P-l-a-z-a."

"You and your boyfriend, right?" By mentioning her boyfriend, I felt I could get some control over my ill feelings for him.

"Yes," she replied stoically.

Her lack of enthusiasm motivated me to smile—she looked up at me, beautiful as a deer transfixed by oncoming headlights, and I spoke into her fair gaze, myself transfixed, signing, "We can be friends, right?"

"Yes," she answered, shaking the clenched, plump fingers of one beautiful hand while uttering the word simultaneously aloud with her low, soft voice.

Michael appeared and dropped something into her cart. Norma did not move to introduce him. He stood uneasily by, looking on.

I ignored him, feeling like a fruit picker under the scowl of a critical boss. "Maybe I could come down to Gallaudet one day and see you for lunch," I said, ending with the letter L against my chin and raising my eyebrows in expectation of her reply.

"Great! Call me!"

Norma and I warmed in each other's smiles like children lost in the sparkle of sea shells in the chilly sweep of receding waves on a beach far beyond lettuce, cucumbers, and celery arranged on refrigerated shelves.

### IV

**1.** I sat back at my uncle's desk. Unc was busy going through some files in the top drawer of an old beaten filing cabinet.

I said: "I saw you name inna paper—Santo, then I look em up inna Yellow Page." I shrugged: "I call'a you up, how about dat, huh?" I smiled. "Hey! What you call'em'a'dat?" I scrunched up my face, "Prostitution Ring!" I leaned forward—"At's'a no Mafia, hun huh, I can tell'a you dat—hey! I live'em'a here a turty year inna Washington—you wanna Mafia, hey, you have em'a'dat inna New York, sure! Somonabitch! But Washington is'a clean."

I seemed to be finished. But I had made a point so important, making it had left me without energy. I concluded: "I tell'a you, my boy Johnny is a good'a boy!"

"Is that right?" Unc said, amused.

"Unc, you should see this guy, man, the one you sent me out to see today?" I was referring to a black man who was being charged with half-a-dozen very serious crimes for trying to run over an off-duty policeman with his car.

"What's that?" Unc played along absent-mindedly—his way—but I knew he was very interested in the case.

"Man, he had these big open cuts on his head—man! From where the policeman hit him . . . he was hitting him with his gun. The guy jumped in his car and tried to run over the cop: can you believe it?" I was for the guy who jumped in his car—that was our defendant, but I almost seemed like I was supporting the cop, so I added, "The cop shot at him, broke his windshield, and the guy crashed. He never knew the guy who shot at him was a cop. He just thought it was a bully abusing him. So they're accusin' this poor guy of doin' all these things to a policeman—he never knew it was a policeman! The policeman was wrong! He had no business doin' what he did!" I didn't like police, plain and simple—not after what they had done to me.

"Hey, Unc, when you were young . . ." I halted. I had never before tried to mention the deep, dark family secret of his youth, when he spent almost a year in St. Elizabeth's, his family not even being notified that he was there until several months after he had been committed.

Unc stared down at the files in front of him. "Look on my desk. I wrote down the kind of gun and bullet used to kill Delbert."

"Really? Let me see . . ." I had ignored the various papers scattered across his desktop, but now I sorted through them, coming on the information I wanted on a reporter's notepad over by his phone. I jotted down the information on another sheet of paper from the pad, pulled out the sheet, folded it, and stuffed it in my pocket.

"Where did you get this?"

The door opened and a middle-aged man walked in. He had on a blond sports jacket like someone who had just come from Congressional Country Club and his face was red like an alcoholic's.

"You got a visitor," Unc remarked. The visitor must have called and Unc not told me about it. He told me about it now, like bestowing a little gift on me.

"Mr. Moody Santo?" the man stammered.

"Right," I answered.

"Can I talk to you in private . . . or?" He hesitated, not exactly eager to discuss his business in front of Unc, but willing to. He fiddled with one of the flaps of his coat pocket.

"Sure, we can go in Mr. Lang's office." I suddenly realized Mr. Lang might be in his office. Mr. Lang was a public defender at or beyond retirement age who looked like a country preacher. He always wore a dark suit and a white shirt with a dark tie, the grey hair of his balding head neatly swept back on what was left on the top and sides. He carried a briefcase. He always looked crisp and professional. "Is Mr. Lang in his office?" I asked Unc. "Mr. Lang?" I called out.

It was just the next room, but Mr. Lang could be so quiet, you would never know he was in there. I realized at about the same time that I had not shaken hands with my visitor.

"Yeah!" came the reply.

"Can we use your office?" I asked him.

"Sure, I was just leaving. I heard the snaps of his briefcase going shut and then he appeared in the room, going by briskly, saying, "Go ahead in."

I closed the door behind us. The man took a seat across from Mr. Lang's desk. I sat down in Mr. Lang's chair behind his desk. "What can I do for you?" I still didn't know who the man was.

"I'm Walter Justus, Missy's father. You know that Missy was a friend of your brother." His conversation style was like a society person's relating gossip. "I'm sorry about Delbert. I'm very sorry about Delbert," he added, and I could tell he meant it. This man might drink a lot, but he had integrity. He was honest.

"I did not know your daughter," I told him flat out. He regarded me quizzically when I mentioned her, perking up a little. He was a delicate man, sensitive to every nuance. "I met her at my brother's wake."

He plowed on. I felt like taking notes, but I just sat politely and listened, "My daughter is Deaf, so there is a barrier in communication between us. But Missy told me she saw you at the wake and told me you were an investigator. When I called your uncle—I couldn't find you in the phone book—he told me about you and your investigations for Superior Court. Your work is very highly praised by the lawyers you work for."

"I try to do my best."

"Missy said you might be able to help us."

This really was out of the ordinary. Suddenly, I was no longer the black sheep who had given up the possibility of becoming a doctor so many years ago, but the smart boy in a white lab coat with a name tag that said my name and under that, "Orderly," who had gone in to help my father on Saturdays at work, the obedient son, the devoted brother.

"Well, what seems to be the trouble? What can I do for you?" I asked as if I had just washed my face and hands in his cleansing words.

"Let me run through this for you. I'm willing to try anything," and I knew that this was true if he was willing to try me because I had a private detective license, but that was it—I wasn't even listed in the phone book. He went on: "Now as I say, Missy is deaf. Now you know sign language, am I right?"

"Yes, I am fluent in sign language."

"That is great. I never learned it—that is why I came to you. Well, I . . . what I do know, is that Missy took a job after school as a maid in a house in Bethesda in a very nice area." I knew Bethesda inside and out and had a mental image of the community that had been called Cohasset when we moved into it, an Indian name like the names of all the streets. I could picture the houses at Cayuga and Pawtucket on a quiet summer afternoon. Mr. Justus said: "I thought this was a great idea, a chance to work and be independent, earn some extra money and learn the value of things. Plus, Bethesda is a very nice area—we had no reason to suspect that she would encounter any trouble at all from the people she worked for."

"I would agree with that. I'm from Bethesda," I told him. He was obviously getting more and more worked up from telling his story. He was on the edge of his seat, using wild gestures like an Italian.

"Now I'm just shattered, I tell you. We were just shocked to find out that the people at that house—two men—who were renting that house—got Missy to sell her virginity to an old man—why, the man must be 70 years old!" He threw a white hand with freckles out in front of him palm up. "Now I'm just shattered!" he went on, "But that's not the end of it—there's worse. They got Missy, without her knowing it, to make a videotape of sex between her and this 70-year-old." His voice trailed off.

"That's terrible," I said.

"And the old man is no one who you would suspect—he is a very eminent man who you'd never believe could ever be involved for a minute in such a thing."

"Who was the man?"

"Dick Gilman, the man who did that big Vietnam thing on television—you may not have heard of him because he's sort of behind the scenes." He paused to check my response. Seeing perhaps that I had never heard of him, which I hadn't, he continued, "It was too late by the time Missy told us about this to get any evidence to prosecute him, and a trial with the little evidence we had would have been too much to put Missy through."

"I understand," I said. I had heard arguments like that made on television. It seemed like a fancy way of saying he had no case. "Where is the tape?" I asked. If Missy was involved with my brother and Missy was also involved in blackmail of a man I had heard from at least two people that my brother was afraid of, then there might be some connection between this man and my brother's murder. The police had never considered Gilman a suspect. I knew that. But that didn't phase me. You could be sure the police would tiptoe around a suspect in the news business.

"Those men have it," he stammered, like a kid tattling on a bully at school.

"I'm not sure what I can do for you, Doctor." I was terrible at names and had already forgot his, but I remembered he was a doctor from my previous conversation with Dana. "But I'd like to get in touch with Missy."

"Anything you could find out about that tape would be helpful."

"How does this sound?" I said, "If I turn anything up worth knowing, I'll get back in touch with you. If not, we'll just forget about it."

"Well what do you charge? How would you like to arrange about money?" He was eager to pay me. But I knew who I was. I was just a nobody who knew sign language, shunned by deaf people and hearing people alike.

"Forget about it," I shrugged cavalierly, then: "We can work something out. Missy was a friend of Delbert's. I'm not worried about money." I wasn't going to take the man's money with so little to go on. Besides, I had no idea what to charge. It was easier to brush off the idea of payment. If he had offered me money—let's say, some specific amount, now that might have been different. I said: "How can I get in touch with Missy?"

"You can call her. She has a TTY." His face shone. He and I had shared something so private and guarded we had been taken up in a cloud together on a mountaintop.

"Where does she hang out?"

"Gallaudet," he said, nonchalantly. "She happened to tell me this morning that tonight she'll be at a party at a place on campus called the loading dock."

"Really? I know it," I said. "Tell her I'll meet her there."

I was confident he would tell her, she would show up, I would find her when I got there, and she would talk to me. Missy was certainly beautiful, and a glimmer of an erotic attraction played around her like the halo that circled the head of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

**2.** When I got home to my room, I found Dana home.

"Delbert had a rough time as a boy. He was mainstreamed."

"I was mainstreamed," Dana replied. The sign for it was something like two streams coming together at chest height as one pushed the flat of each hand facing down from about shoulder width together then out.

That meant they went to hearing school like me along with all the hearing kids, not to a school for deaf kids known as an "institution" in sign language.

"When did you learn sign language," I asked her.

"In college."

"Same as Delbert."

We didn't think anything of it at the time. My parents wanted Delbert to learn to lip read so that he would be able to fit into the hearing world when he got older. Since he was born deaf, this was very hard for him—almost impossible. But Delbert was a very positive, optimistic little boy. If he suffered greatly from the hours and hours he sat in classes where the teacher's words rushed by him in an uncomprehending torrent, he would end up making a joke of it:

"If you want me to read your lips, I have to be able to see them!"

That night at the loading dock, in the dusky, fluorescent light of an underground garage, I sipped a coke and watched about nine or twelve kids line dance. The kids, all deaf, danced in perfect rhythm to the music, so well they almost seemed to be rehearsed professionals. Blaring from two towers of black amplifiers on either side of the platform, the music was loud, so the kids could easily pick up the beat.

Dressed in dark layers of clothes like a tomboy, a mystical deaf girl, who must have been hard-of-hearing, danced lithely on the platform that extended like an L along the back and one side of the garage. She sang the words to the music, signing it as she danced, a foreign, erotic beauty who looked to me like an urchin Queen of the great depression, not the actual Great Depression, a half century removed, but my great depression, the one that had started with my involuntary commitment and lasted almost a decade-and-a-half, the great depression of the underworld in which I lived, a world of concealment and poverty, nonidentity and shame, where I was a nobody and less than nobody to everyone I met, a forty-year-old doing a college student's job, unmarried, living alone in a rented room, friendless, taking medicine like an invalid, talking to shrinks like a juvenile delinquent, unable to support myself without the help of my mother because I didn't make enough money on my own.

The beat of the music throbbed through me, pulsing through my heart like a mixture of rocket fuel and psychedelic drugs, convolutions of chords churning through me with the beat, uniting me with the crowd of deaf people dressed in jackets and sweaters against the autumn chill, all signing all around me in one animated mass, and cramming every corner of the garage except for the opening where the dancers stepped, bent, shook, and turned as in some ancient rite.

I dove down deep into myself, I dove down into waters that broke like waters of a birth, and, for just one shimmering moment, I knew what it meant to be deaf, to live in a world of alienation and nonrecognition so profound you formed your own world, one in which you had no handicap, where life was natural and free, cherished as the right of every newborn baby to grow up and flourish in that freedom, exploring the boundaries of his or her potential. No life of bondage under any tyranny, would issue forth the kingdom of God in a future world because the kingdom of God was within you, or, as might also be translated from the few words of Greek that I knew, entos hymon, among you.

I wove this way and that through the crowd to join the dancers at the bottom corner of the loading dock at the far end of the garage. Going into their space reminded me of running out onto a football field. And the movement of the dancers seemed confusing at first, like the sudden start of a play. I bounced along with them to pick up the rhythm, then, taking the cue to jump in from the person next to me—a type of athletic black girl with big, opaque, light blue glasses, just balanced on the end of her nose—I merged my body with the fluid, concentrated movement of the group—one, step, two, step, turn, step, step, step. The room swirled and towered up around me like the walls of an ancient city under siege—one, step, two, step, turn, step, step, step . . .

A flash of gold through an opening in the crowd as through a crevice in rocks of a cave along a seashore gave onto a view of Missy's bright blond hair like a lost, buried mask of Pharaoh uncovered by shifts of the Earth and no longer marred by the sin and toil that once went into making such a mask. I watched her bob before me as I swam within the tide of dancers that flowed around me. Her eyes flashed, meeting mine, as I stepped out of rhythm, and wended my way toward her.

She had the knowing look on her lips like the expression of a Sphinx that could destroy me. Her beauty was a riddle, the answer to which I knew was woman. That was the answer: woman—the dream of a lost paradise at a birth which was like a sleep and forgetting till such sweet charms awaken us and we find ourselves in the midst of a world more wonderful than the womb.

She signed expressively with a group of handsome youths in jeans, flannel shirts, jackets, and sweatshirts, one crew cut boy signing to a smaller boy, "That guy chases all the girls." He was referring to another boy who smiled broadly, avoiding a mock punch from the smaller boy.

"You flirt!" the smaller boy said.

"You're like a dog—follow women! Ewwwww!" sang the crew cut boy, pinching his nose.

"Finished," the teased boy said, shaking his hands in front of him. "You chase _her_!" He pointed toward Missy.

Missy blinked in response to my salute. That was all the response I got out of her. Her friends looked at me as at a parent who had come to pick up a wayward child. I signed into the respectful pause they created: "Want to take a walk?"

It was a long hike across campus to the coffin door across the street from where Delbert was murdered, but that is where we headed. The coffin door was a door in the shape of a coffin on the Florida Avenue side of the Chapel. The story about the door was that someone had died and the body was put in a coffin but they couldn't get the coffin out the door, so they had to cut the door in the shape of a coffin to get it out. It was supposed to be bad luck to leave the Chapel by that door. Delbert had told me the story, and I recapitulated it for Missy.

It was dark outside, but the campus was well lit. We had to walk all the way across an underground parking lot, past Hall Memorial Building, where English classes were taught, past the library on our right, past Ely Center and the old Kendall School Building, on our left, then around to the Chapel.

We took up seats outside the coffin door on the steps leading down from it, our mood having changed as we walked around the Chapel. The house where my poor brother was murdered was across the street. "It's terrible what happened in that house," she signed in ASL in a way I could almost not understand. I had to piece together the signs like a puzzle, making use of common sense and answering in a way that would be appropriate to any of a number of different things she might have said. She might have said, "Finally we're here at that terrible house." I got the basic meaning, which is all I could get a lot of the time with sign language, especially with someone who couldn't talk, like Missy. I knew that deaf people had little patience with hearing people who couldn't understand them, so I didn't want to risk losing Missy's attention on the basis of stopping to clear up something I could recognize with relative certainty to be minor.

"I did not know you were Delbert's girlfriend," I confessed to her. I had to be careful what I admitted. Working with unknowns in conversation was something I had learned to do well, since I was not free to talk about the things most important to me normally. It was important that I not seem estranged from Delbert.

"We were friends," she replied, adding, "not boyfriend-girlfriend."

That made their relationship more understandable, given the age difference. It also meant they were not having sex—hard, but not impossible to believe of my brother with a girl that fine—no, I didn't believe it: "How did he meet you?" I asked.

It took some effort for her to answer, as if she were lifting a weight: had she told a thousand people or was it somehow too complicated to explain? "He was working for a pizza delivery, and he came to the house where I worked as a maid."

He brought the pizza, she answered the door, they talked—she gave him her number: "Tell me about this house where you worked—what kind of house was it?" (In my mind, I thought whorehouse.)

"Just a house, a very rich house."

As I signed I carefully mouthed the English words that went with the signs, but without voicing them. "Who were the people you worked for?" I was taking my time with getting to the point, which was not entirely her father's point. I was interested in my brother's murder.

"Two rich men," she signed. The signs were simple and clear, there was no chance of misunderstanding them.

"They shared the house?" And I voiced the word house with my sign for it.

"Yes," she answered like a student reacting to a teacher's praise.

"You were a maid, that was all?" I asked—I had heard she was paid to have sex. I wanted to hear it from her. She launched into a story that was lurid as the kind of true confessions that once teased the magazine racks of drugstores: "One day I was dusting. D-I-C-K G-I-L-M-A-N was visiting. He was a very rich man who worked for the newspapers and television. He kept looking at me and smiling and talking. I didn't understand. Then he left. Later, T-U-R-I gave me a note. T-U-R-I lived at the house with B-E-A-M-E-R. The note said, 'G-I-L-M-A-N,'" snake sign for Gilman, "'likes you.' Gilman kept after me. I was a virgin and didn't like boys my own age. I went ahead and had sex with him. I felt very strange and awkward. He gave me money. The money was OK. I was deaf—I was a maid." The story aroused me. Hearing about the cheapened life of a girl that beautiful inspired awe, like seeing something precious destroyed.

"I understand. Then what happened?" I whispered, signing. Her loss enabled me to see her as a true companion to my own life of misery. I paid attention with mouth agape as she went on with her story:

"I was cleaning in the master bedroom and found a video tape on the floor by the VCR. Since I was bored, and there was no one around, I put it on." I pictured the sumptuous bedroom, the regal furnishings, and plush carpeting as the beautiful girl entered, dusting the nightstands, straightening the pillows on the bed, a rag dancing from one hip pocket, a feather duster in one upraised hand. Not bothering to rewind the tape, she put it on, flipping it into the middle of her most private moments: there in black bra and panties, she undulated astride the nearly naked Gilman, who was in his boxer shorts, socks and undershirt, with his wrists handcuffed around her tiny gorgeous waist. "I was shocked!" she signed throwing pretty hands out, palms facing her, fingers spread.

"What did you do?" I inquired. I was caught up in the story. It was like a story I had heard when I was fourteen, whispered in the corridors at school one morning, about a boy who had balled a girl on a couch in front of another boy.

"I took the tape to Turi and asked him about it," she said.

"What did he say?" I asked, pointing away from myself, then tapping a finger on my chin.

"He told me that he would get a lot of money from Gilman for that tape or he would sell it to the newspapers." She paused, widening her eyes: "Then he gave me money and told me there would be more money when he got paid by Gilman." I was having trouble deciphering who was paying whom, but common sense prevailed—I got her meaning. "The money made me feel special—I didn't feel like a whore," she said.

A girl as innocent and beautiful as she was didn't come even close to being a whore in my opinion. "Then what did you do?" I asked. She looked tremulous and frail, no longer confident as before.

"I had sex with Gilman a few more times and that was it."

"Did Delbert come to the house?" I asked. I wondered what part my brother played in all of this. He wouldn't have cared about the money—but he wouldn't have liked the sex.

"He came sometimes to pick me up. I told him I was a maid. I did not tell him about the sex with Gilman."

"Really?" So much for the saying that there were no secrets in deaf culture. Apparently there were secrets. Another saying was that a person's reputation precedes him in deaf culture. I wondered if she knew anything about my mental illness.

"That's right, but Gilman hated Delbert—he was jealous of him," she went on.

Missy reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a pair of handcuffs, handing them over to me like a carnival prize. "Handcuffs," I muttered. Missy pulled a key out of a front pocket.

"These were Gilman's," she said, handing the key to me. "He liked to be locked up in them during sex. They're real—they work."

They were heavy, like the handcuffs I had worn. I stared at them a second, then signed: "Did you have sex with other men at the house? I talked aloud, but barely audibly as I signed.

"No," she replied.

"Why not?"

"I was afraid of disease," she answered.

"Where was this house where you had sex?" My voice accompaniment to my signing overflowed with excitement.

"Bethesda." She just jiggled a "B" and I understood.

"Where in Bethesda?" I asked her: "The address."

She opened her pocketbook and dug into it. The scent of some perfume rose from it like a bouquet of flowers disturbed in front of my nose, then she pulled an address book out, rifling through it. She found what she wanted, and pointed out the address to me. I pulled out my own pen and paper from my pocket and carefully wrote down the address.

"Burning Tree Road," I said aloud as I wrote.

Then I signed: "Is there anyone at the house now?"

"Yes, T-U-R-I is there alone on weekends."

"Is there anything else you would like to tell me about him?"

"He speaks Italian. He and B-E-A-M-E-R speak Italian together."

**3.** Missy got on the back of my motorcycle. I warned her it might be cold. She had on a light jacket with a sweatshirt, jeans, white socks and white running shoes. The helmet I gave her to wear completed the outfit. It had a visor, so her face would be warm. I had brought it for her, in case she rode with me. I instructed her on how to ride as passenger on a motorcycle. Then we got started. Riding across Gallaudet from the underground parking lot over by Hall Memorial Building with Missy hugging my waist, we headed across town to the Whitehurst Freeway and Canal Road. Her warm thighs snug against my hips, the throaty roar of the engine trembling up around us, we mounted the supple road that united Washington to Bethesda, thrusting into its sweet enfolding embrace with the cone of our headlight spreading out over pavement like hot milk.

We plummeted through the darkness under an archway created by trees into the hope that hung above us like the Moon.

Missy didn't live in Potomac on a horse farm off River Road, no, those horse farms from my childhood were gone. The people who had owned horses in Potomac had mostly migrated elsewhere. All that was left were flashy sports cars and multimillion dollar homes—Missy lived in one of the more humble, upper-middle-class abodes over on Whittier Boulevard near Walt Whitman High School. When we got to her house, we found the front lights on. Missy jumped off the back of my motorcycle.

She thanked me, sweeping the back of her hand from near her chin. Her bright eyes gleamed, then went dark as we passed in front of my motorcycle, which I left running, and I walked her to the door.

**4.** The next thing I knew, the door was closed. I wondered if she had flashing lights for the front doorbell in her father's house. I jumped on my bike and headed down Whittier Boulevard. I took a left at Wilson, past Pyle Junior High School, and went up to Maryknoll, turned right, and went into Cohasset, the area where I had grown up, going all the way down Maryknoll to Burning Tree Elementary School, the school I had attended as a boy. I took a right there. I was on Beech Tree now, heading downhill toward Booze Creek—Delbert and I had played in Booze Creek, hunting for crayfish and catching tadpoles and minnows in summer, walking adventurously over ice and snow in winter.

When Beech Tree became Burning Tree at the foot of the hill, I started getting nervous. Was I actually going to try and talk with someone at this house tonight? My hand gripped on the throttle. A little while later, I saw on the left the house where Missy had become if not exactly, at least something like, a whore. The lights were on in several rooms—the porch light was on. It burst through the autumn leaves of leafy trees about a hundred feet to the road and scattered through the woods which overwhelmed the area. I was not mistaken. This had been the house of a boyhood friend of mine. His name was Sam Shapiro, a Jewish boy. Small world. There was the rapid glint of a reflection off chrome from a car in the driveway like the kind of car one would see parked in Little Italy in New York.

At the next intersection, I turned around. I wanted to make another pass by the house. This time I decided to have a look on foot. I left my bike by the side of the road and started walking. Suddenly, I changed my mind. I was angry at myself. I went back to my bike, started it up, and then drove back up the street to the house. I turned in at the entrance and parked in front of the big black car. I shut off my bike, took off my gloves, and then hung my helmet on the hook next to the seat. Stuffing the gloves inside an inner pocket of my jacket—a leather jacket with padded shoulders, elbows, and waist—I went to the front door and rang the bell.

It was late. The man who opened the door was Italian. I knew from what Missy had told me and because he looked Italian, and because the delicious sound of a woman's voice singing some jazzy, contemporary tune in Italian flooded up around him. The man had black hair, dark eyes, and a ribbon of shadow around an oval face. He wore a white button-down shirt with a bow tie undone hanging down both sides of his collar. He had on a dark suit jacket. He looked like he worked in the restaurant business. He nodded toward me, his way of asking the question, what did I want, without saying anything. He was about 30 years old, but looked 40.

"I'm a private Investigator for Missy Justus." I handed him a copy of my license, which I normally never carried. "I just want to ask a few questions."

"Do you know what time it is?" he asked me like a bouncer with an unruly customer.

"OK, I'll come back some other time," I said. "What time would be good for you?"

Maybe it was my motorcycle jacket and jeans, but he just said, "I want you outta here now—don't come back, you hear me?"

I turned away from him. He had raised his voice with me and my nerves were ruffled. I didn't like that. I went to my bike, unlocked my helmet and put it on. I put my gloves on but didn't tighten the chin strap to my helmet. I pushed on the starter button. The engine turned over but wouldn't start. I tried a few more times. I remembered now with some certainty that Turi was the man alone at the house on weekends. I was dealing almost certainly with Turi. He watched me from the door. I could feel his eyes on me. I took my helmet off and set it on the ground, thinking what to do next—I didn't want to run down the battery.

Turi came out of the house.

"Hey! I thought I told you to get the hell outta here!" he shouted. A drop of his spittle hit me on the lips and under one eye.

"You know, I used to know a kid who lived here," I said.

"Listen, buddy, you push that bike outta here. I want that bike outta here now!" he screamed at me.

"Listen, buddy, you push it!" I screamed back at him.

He immediately went to hit me—I was too quick for him, though—I had been sizing him up. I grabbed him around the neck and chest with such fierceness that when I wrenched him to the ground, I didn't even feel the cement when we hit. I was a good wrestler. He was bigger than me in weight, shorter in height. I got my arms around his neck and head and started to twist: he cried out.

"You say one more word, and I'll break your fucking neck!" I rasped. We both panted together on the concrete. I had felt something inside his jacket as we wrestled, so I reached in and pulled out a handgun from a shoulder holster. I held it to his head, standing up slowly. I pulled the handcuffs out of my hip pocket that Missy had given me and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. I went to my bike and took two bungee cords off the back of the seat.

"Awright, let's go in the house," I told him.

The house was empty inside. I hadn't noticed before because he had stood in the door, blocking my view. Now it was obvious. Everything was gone. I took the two bungee cords and tied up his ankles securely with them, then I went to reconnoiter the house. I could remember the general layout of the house, but it had been thirty years since I'd been in it. Sam had been a great friend of mine. We went to see movies together on Saturday mornings at Burning Tree Elementary, were in the same class together, and in the same Cub Scout troop. I spent the night over at his house a few times.

In one room, I found an office with the only furnishings left in the place—I wondered where the Italian was sleeping—there was a scarred desk with a phone on it and two chairs in front of it, a boom box on the floor next to it, a can of coke opened on the desk with a bag of potato chips opened also on it.

I bent down and turned off the Italian music. It was getting on my nerves. The phone was interesting. It had a console on it like a little switchboard. I pushed a button and saw a blinking light. I left the office and navigated my way to the stairs, bounding up them to the bedrooms upstairs. Sam's room had been at the top of the stairs. I glanced in. I could hear a phone ringing down the hall.

I flicked on an overhead light from a wall switch. An unmade, queen-sized bed with a red cover tangled in black sheets jutted out from against the far wall, a playboy's bed. On the floor near the bed was an open suitcase with a tangle of rumpled clothes next to a walk-in closet, which was empty but for a few salient hangers with a shirt or two on them. I was about to stop the phone from ringing by picking up the handset and hanging it up when my attention suddenly went to the incongruous mirror over the bed.

I crossed to it. Carefully examining it to see how it was hung, I lifted it off the wall, finding it necessary to stand on the bed, something I didn't feel comfortable doing, especially in my shoes. The mirror was heavy, about as wide as my arms' breadth and almost as high. Then I set it down ponderously against the wall beside the bed, having like an archeologist unearthed a major find, revealing behind the mirror a dark and gaping shelf. It was a legitimate shelf that had been built into the wall, almost the size of the mirror that covered it. On it was a tripod, a small tripod, looking like an accessory to a lunar escape module that had long since departed for some other civilization.

Wild, frantic with my discovery, I retraced my steps to the mirror, picking it up laboriously and positioning myself now behind its reverse side, crouching down behind it. The reverse side was transparent. I looked through to the lighted hallway just as surely and easily as a grocer who glances through the two-way mirror over the refrigerated display cases of his meat section.

Leaning the mirror against the wall, exultant with my discovery, I went and picked up the telephone handset. The phone had been ringing all this time and I had hardly noticed it. This must have been the master bedroom.

"Hey! Hey!" Turi shouted from downstairs.

I hung up the phone. I hurried downstairs.

Seated on the wood floor of the living room, his face pinched, Turi was red with exasperation.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Hey, man, can you loosen these handcuffs and this cord? They've cut off my circulation."

"In a couple a minutes, I'm gonna turn you loose, OK?" I answered. I meant it. I meant to be out of that house in a few minutes.

As if I had found out nothing more of interest than that he and his roommate were moving out and I didn't know where to, I stuffed the gun inside my jacket and reached down and pulled a little on his handcuffs, seeing his hands were swollen and beet red. I readjusted the cuffs to loosen them up.

"Awright . . . " I took the bungee cords off his ankles and got him to stand up. "Awright, now c'mon back to the office. I wanna talk to you."

**5.** In the office, I said, "Have a seat." He took a seat next to the desk, I took a seat behind the desk. There were only two chairs in the room, and we were in them. The half-eaten bag of potato chips next to an opened can of coke perched on the desk top like a pigeon on a park bench. "What's goin' on here?" I asked him. He just stared back at me, and I returned the stare. When he didn't speak, I asked "Che cosa fa qui?" In Italian that meant what are you doing here, or what's going on here? I wasn't sure. My Italian was from schoolbooks. But it didn't matter—he didn't reply to any meaning, although Missy had said he spoke Italian.

He turned down the corners of his mouth like a dog slicking back his ears.

"Qualcuno ha ucciso il fratello . . . il fratello sordo. Tu lo sai?" I used the familiar form of address, not the formal, as if he were my friend, because I couldn't remember how to say it the correct way. Someone killed my brother, did you know that? was the translation for what I said.

His lack of a reply slapped me like a baccala (a kind of fish). I had learned that much Italian at home. To get a baccala was to get a spanking. "Una ragazza é venuta qui a lavorare nella questa casa. Che cosa fa con questa ragazza?" All that meant was, a girl came here to work at this house. What did you do with this girl? I gave up the schoolbook Italian and blurted out in English, "Do you know a girl who worked here named Missy Justus?"

"No," he lied, one of those asshole managers making concessions to a hotheaded patron, but he actually answered me.

"Are you Turi?" I asked. I liked the name Turi. It was the name of someone you believed to be good who you found to have done something very wrong.

"No," he replied, the same dogged, hangdog look: the cagey manager planned to get rid of me with that look just as quickly and effortlessly as possible. I knew he was Turi.

"Where is Turi?" I asked.

That shut him down.

"That's a nice camera setup you got up there in your bedroom. Wanna tell me about it? You a movie buff?"

I had confirmation of Missy's story. I had all the confirmation I could want.

"C'mon with me to the front door," I said sternly. When I made my mind up, I moved quickly, sometimes too quickly, but not this time. At the front door, I said, "I'm going to leave the key to your handcuffs in here on the floor. After I leave, you can come in and get it. Awright, let's go. Outside."

I motioned with the gun for him to move ahead and we went out the front door together. I left the key on the floor as I promised. I had been locked up with handcuffs before and, if you're at all claustrophobic, the closed-in feeling can bring on a panic. I didn't wish that on anyone.

He slowed up on the flagstone path out to the driveway. I stopped and ordered, "Keep walking. I'll tell you when to stop."

My own voice had become imperious and serene, like I was listening to someone else talk from an echo chamber on a sound stage, the cosmic voice of a world weary god. "I want you to walk out in the driveway and have a seat on the ground," I said. He seemed to falter a little on the driveway, as if uncertain to go further. "That's it, stop. Sit down. Just stay right there. Don't move."

He turned to face me and sat down, Indian fashion, with legs crossed, waiting for me to disappear. I kept my gun on him, fumbling for my helmet and gloves. I didn't want to run the battery down on the bike any further with the starter button, so I decided to run with the bike to jump-start it. If I couldn't get it started, I would be sunk. I had no one to call to come and help me. I couldn't call Unc. If I stayed at the house any longer, somebody else might show up. Then what would I do? I couldn't leave the bike there. I ran with the bike with all my might down the driveway, praying, and jumped on, kicking it into gear. It started up with a throaty roar.

I could feel Turi's eyes on me as I sped out. At the end of the driveway, a white-haired woman in a heavy, button sweater looked up at me as I went right at the corner. She was walking a white poodle, which sniffed daintily at the grass and leaves. I watched in my rear view mirror as she noticed Turi and began to walk toward him.

From his point of view, I had attacked him bodily, threatened to kill him with his own gun, and broken-and-entered into his house. He could call the police. The woman walking her dog had seen me and could be a witness against me.

The next day I was so upset, I drove. The weather was beautiful, cool and fresh. On the south side of the Capitol, I came up a hill like I was driving right into the giant, brightly lit-up dome. "Get Together" by the Youngbloods, a popular song from the 60s, played in my head almost as clearly as if I had it on a radio. The voices of a thousand high school kids, not like actual voices that could be heard in actual space, but like voices in mental space, in perfect time with the music, flooded over me: "From DC!" And then, "Go!"

From an upper right-hand corner of the sky, I heard the forlorn plaintive voice of a ten-year-old black girl, saying "Come to God." As I headed down Independence Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial, I heard this eerie voice call to me three times. It was like a voice from a wake or funeral. I felt I should obey it—it had a peculiar authority—but I didn't know how. It was the voice of death, reminding me of the night I had driven to Baltimore, prompted by hidden forces, and then found myself in a park at one a.m., on the far end of which was a house with wreathes in the front window and on the front door, the flowers looking wilted and frightening, festooned with ribbons, old and faded.

A voice told me to open the door. I would know death. All I had to do was open the door. The streets were empty; the park was empty. The fuzzy yellow light of street lamps flared out along the house fronts. I walked up to the door and quietly tried to open it. It was like the door of a funeral home. I tried several times. The door was locked. Fearing to be picked up by the police, I hastily retreated to the dark and dangerous park, heading back to my car for the long trek through unknown streets back to Washington.

**6.** I burned down River Road toward Dick Gilman's house. It was Sunday afternoon. I had gone to church at the National Shrine, prayed at my favorite chapels, looked around the gift shop, and then headed up North Capitol Street to Missouri Avenue and Military Road.

Gilman: the name struck me. It sounded like kill man. There were so many such bizarre resemblances between fact and fiction in my reality, I had given up trying to make any sense of them. Was each individual's thought and speech strained through some sort of atomic filter, which even censored actual speech at the moment of pronunciation, so that man's evolution, down to the level of daily life, could be carefully monitored and controlled by some higher race, a race that somehow fed off man? Through the dualistic view permitted us, we perceived this race sometimes as devils, other times as angels. Our world was either a clear path or a mighty maze, but not without a plan, one that conscientiously segregated peoples into classes of rich and poor and subclasses of victims.

What did all this have to do with Gilman? It was possible that at any moment, our separate bodies shared the same space. Our symbol for this concept was God. In public, ten people might walk down 10 different streets in 10 different cities, yet all be walking together, individuals superimposed on each other, so that any one of them might be visible to multiform variations of others, each in a different reality. The man jogging down a street in Hollywood, might be seen in place of the actual man jogging in Bethesda. Because of the confluence of realities, a crime could be committed by as unlikely a suspect as Gilman and completely escape notice.

Because of the voices I had heard the night before, I had taken a double dose of my antipsychotic medication. It seemed to help, and my head was clear, almost. When I got to Gilman's house, I heard the same plaintive black girl's voice from somewhere in the sky, saying, "Come to God!"

Gilman himself answered the door. Cocky, ugly, disdainful: these were the qualities that immediately jumped off from him before he even said a word. He stood before me in a V-necked undershirt and baggy khaki pants—was the zipper undone?—no—he had on dirty tennis shoes, staring at me over his proud, beaked, hook of a nose.

"Mr. Gilman?"

All he said was, "Yeah," but there was a heavy, New York slur in it.

I introduced myself as a private investigator for Missy Justus's father, Dr. Walter Justus. I was confident Gilman would talk with me. "I'd like to ask you some questions."

"No, I'm sorry—what kind of questions?" he said. His eyes were blue, and he gave a kind of scared, boy's look through them.

"Did anyone try to blackmail you?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"I think I can help you avoid a lot of trouble, Mr. Gilman, if you just sit down and talk with me." This was a line of sheer baloney. Talking to me would only get him into deep trouble, if I could help it. I went on: "Missy Justus is the deaf girl who you knew from over in Bethesda. She was a maid, remember?" I saw that he remembered. Having a license impressed people, so I dug mine out: it was a real private detective's license, but it was really a little too big to be carried. "I have a license if you'd like to take a look at it. Why don't we sit down and talk for a few minutes." I handed him my license. He glanced at it, handed it back to me, and glanced over at my motorcycle.

"What's she got to do with me?" he asked, then: "Awright. . . but just . . . c'mon in . . . just a few minutes." He shouted, "Gladys!"

I would describe his house as being upper middle class inside. The paintings on the walls were not all original oil paintings. The furniture was nice, but not elaborate. There were no marble sculptures or fountains off in a corner to indicate great wealth. I didn't know much about such matters. I had grown up in Bethesda. This was a house that would have fit in with the houses I knew there, but not what I would have expected of a house in Potomac.

As Gilman led me through the house, my eye fell on a wall of photos in one room. Near the door was a plaque which I read rapidly in passing, "The Bollinger Award for Excellence in Journalism - 1979." Next to it was a picture of Gilman firing a handgun, presumably in Vietnam. Gilman reached in and closed the door to the room. He had to cross back in front of me to do this, extending a long, hairy arm in front of me.

In a sunroom at the back of the house, plants cascading from shelves, Mrs. Gilman rose from a wicker chair to greet us against the pale flicker of a small TV that cast a ghostly glimmer in the grey light of a cloudy day.

"Gladys, this is Moody Santo. He's a private investigator for that girl who worked over at Horowitz's place," Gilman said.

Mrs. Gilman looked like a woman who had already suffered her share of insults for that day. I wondered if she would leave the room.

"How do you do," she said and made to leave, but Gilman reached out and snagged her arms and she turned toward him like a woman toward some churl who had made an inappropriate gesture, giving him a look that seemed to plead with him to stop and scold him from going any further, as if a trail of betrayals and infidelities which must have disrupted their marriage from very early on had been fully and suddenly revealed.

I spoke into their silence after we all took seats: "Mr. Gilman, what can you tell me about Missy Justus?" If I were innocent and someone came around in front of my wife asking me about an affair I was supposed to have had, I don't think I would have wanted my wife in the room, since an accusation is often as good as a conviction in such matters. I don't think I would have discussed it in front of her. But here Gilman forced his wife to stay.

"She's a girl I met, why? Look, I don't have much time for this; you've got a few minutes, then you have to leave." He was irritable probably by nature. People in his business had to be, what with having to meet deadlines.

"It seems she was somehow involved in trying to blackmail you. I am looking into the matter for her father." I checked on Mrs. Gilman. She was smoldering. If I fanned her a little, she would burst into flame.

"Listen, my wife knows all about this—I've got nothing to hide. Missy Justus was a little slut who worked at a friend's house in Bethesda—she was a housecleaner."

"Why do you call her a slut?"

"I'm a reporter—I call things as they are." He crossed his legs in the masculine fashion, one ankle laid across the other knee, his right hand resting on his right knee and his left hand on his left thigh, hands halfway between making a fist and pointing. He looked very young and healthy for his age, virile: "My friend rented his house out to a couple of businessmen and left me to look after it. So what?" He was talking to me. I listened carefully. If he didn't kill Delbert, he must have had an airtight alibi. He went on: "I soon learned that these guys at least pretended to mob connections; I'm from New York, so I thought they were phonies, but I was interested: I sort of hung out with them a little, thinking I might learn something new—I'm always interested in a new story, a new angle." He checked to see if he had impressed me and continued, "That girl cleaned the house for them, and had sex with anything that moved—deaf, you know—couldn't hear a thing."

I could not spare Mrs. Gilman. Her husband was saying things I knew to be untrue. "What about the videotape you and your friends made of you having sex with her?" I asked.

"Aw, c'mon! What a bunch of baloney! Ha ha!" he replied. I had not seen the tape, but in the presence of such denial, its reality became momentarily doubtful.

"Missy—that's the deaf girl you were talking about—she says there was a tape. Your businessman friends had it. She said they were blackmailing you with it: is that true?" I couldn't imagine how they could have made such a tape. Their equipment must have been very high tech.

"I told you, no!" Gilman exploded, then to his wife, "I'm sorry, dear."

Mrs. Gilman had had enough, sweeping from the room like a cold draft. Gilman ignored her.

"Look, I think you've asked about enough questions. What do you think?"

"I guess you know that whoever was in your friend's house appears to have moved out of it: did you know that?"

The change in subject had saved me some time. Gilman forgot about his wife and went on talking, "Yeah, and good riddance!"

"Who were they?"

Gilman seemed pleased to talk now. It was almost like he was bragging, the good reporter showing off his knowledge: "I don't know much about them, but I should have known better—I didn't know what they did for a living. One of them used to send cars back to the Middle East. He was also a high-priced security guard of some kind—had a gun in a shoulder holster—was very impressive." That must have been Turi, and it explained his gun. "Another was in real estate—I didn't ask the details—they were rolling in money. We had some drinks and some laughs. They were good tenants."

"And Missy Justus?"

"She was a very pretty girl, but I never slept with her."

"She says you did."

"She's a liar!" he shouted with sudden vehemence, animated by forces of self-preservation that made him seem like a cornered animal.

I didn't know what could motivate a man like this: money? Sex? Fame? To speak into his front of stolid opposition required some bravery. I tremulously asked my next question about my brother, offering it up like a prayer. Gilman's beaked nose, beady eyes, and reddened face seemed poised to strike at me. "Did you ever meet her boyfriend, the deaf guy who used to pick her up sometimes from your friend's house," I asked, tremulously. "His name was Delbert. Did you know him?"

"I might have met him. I don't know," he began, almost slobbering like a drunk as he talked, "I might have seen him—I didn't know him. Listen, I won an award for _Vietnam: The Inside Story_ , and I've been covering politics in Washington ever since the end of the Vietnam War, and nobody's gonna blackmail me!"

All I knew was how much Gilman was the kind of big shot who could have killed my brother and gotten away with it. He had impeccable credentials—an educational TV series on Vietnam, years as a successful reporter for a major newspaper, a wife and a million dollar house in Potomac. Add to that that he was from Brooklyn, which in itself meant nothing, but combine that with the kind of rise he had achieved in the social world as a journalist, and the combination led to even more nothing. I was beginning to feel like I was in a place where a lot of nothing begins to mean something—in a vacuum.

### V

**1.** On Monday when I got back to work with Unc, he was already there in his shirtsleeves, papers spread out in front of him on his desk, the light coming in from the window behind him.

Greeting him, I wondered whether I should talk to him about my interview with Dick Gilman. Gilman had denied everything. I didn't see how I could get around that. Obviously, the police had found nothing on Gilman. With all Missy had told me, I didn't see how that was possible.

"The police were here with a warrant for your arrest," Unc said.

"What?"

"I said the police were here to arrest you. I told them you were out."

"Jesus Christ! What for? Oh my god!" I thought out loud, "That Italian. I don't believe it!"

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

I attempted a full, if abbreviated, confession. "I went into this crazy Italian's house. He attacked me. The guy is guilty as sin. I can't explain it—remember that man who came here..."

"Moody—put yourself in the hospital," Unc said. He didn't want to hear it.

I attempted to justify myself: "Jesus, Unc! Do you know what that guy did? He made a videotape, for god's sake, a videotape of a girl Delbert knew, having sex with an old man, a man who could have murdered Delbert."

"Put yourself in the hospital."

I fought with him a little more, but not much more.

I checked myself into Suborgo Hospital. I had been born in Suborgo Hospital. Now it no longer had a maternity ward. I had also worked as a messenger for my father's radiology firm which staffed its radiology department, carrying X-rays, checks, and other mail to doctors who knew my father well. What had happened to the happy boy who had been born in that hospital? As a man, a cripple, in and out of trouble with the law—a mental patient—father dead—brother murdered: "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" I had come back to Wordsworth's poem. But I didn't think of it from the point of view of wanting to return home to a true home with God, wanting to die. Life was a kick in the pants, but I wanted to live.

The carpeting on the floors gave Suborgo a homey feel, missing in a place like Lincoln, which had linoleum floors. Except for the locked doors, being committed at Suborgo was a little like staying in a hotel. Time passed without pain. My medication stayed as it was. There were no changes. Maybe Gluckstern increased the dosage of my lithium to get me through what appeared to her to be a manic stage in my illness, but I didn't pay much attention to that. I was still on lithium. Gluckstern was still my doctor, and she had privileges at Suborgo, so she visited me once a day, with her usual sternly impassive demeanor. I actually put myself voluntarily on a psychiatric ward, that is, I was willing to have myself locked up until I was told I was ready to leave. I had come a long way to agree to that. There was a piano in one room and I sat down alone on the hard bench and started to play. I had taken lessons as a boy but had never learned to read music. I played by ear. There was a song I had taught myself, the theme song to the movie, _Young Winston_ , about Winston Churchill. He rode in the last cavalry charge of the British army. He was everything I wanted to be, a hero, with a bright destiny, not a life of squalor of the kind I'd lived. I played the music in the place where I'd been born, not thinking, just feeling, that I was someone special too, that I was important, that I mattered, wondering who heard me as I played, and what they felt and what they thought. As my music went out into the hall, I realized I wanted to live—I didn't want to die. For me there would be no million dollar wound. I would stay in the battle to the end.

Standing pensively by a table in the Day Room, I was half-watching TV when my mother and Unc arrived during visiting hours. My mother had rheumatoid arthritis, so she just barely hobbled in. Her hands were all crooked and swollen around the joints. We took seats at an empty table and after a few pleasantries, I asked Unc, "Will I have to go to jail?"

Unc reassured me that I wouldn't have to go to jail, but I would have to go to court "in a few months."

"A few months?" I protested. "I'm gonna have this hanging over my head a few months?"

"These things always take time," he explained to me.

"Oh, Lord! Look, I'm an investigator. I may have roughed that guy up . . ."

I was trying to justify myself when Unc uncharacteristically interrupted, "You were in his house!"

"That's breaking and entering!" my mother said. She could jump in for a kill in an argument better than any other person I knew.

"Ha, ha . . . I can't believe this!"

"Look, Moody, drop it, all right, just drop it. You're not an investigator. I helped you get that license, and it says investigator, but that's not what you are, all right?"

I knew when I was beat, and I quickly threw in the towel: "All right, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I got out of hand. I don't want to be here forever. I'll change."

"Have you been taking your medicine?" my mother asked.

"Yes, Mom," I said.

A few days later, the police came to get me, handcuffing me, and escorting me in a paddy wagon down to Bethesda station, where I was fingerprinted. They released me from the hospital the next day. My mother picked me up and took me out for lunch, then we went to the grocery store and I bought some groceries, including kidney beans to make chili according to my mother's recipe. As soon as I got back to Dana's, I called Norma. Her presence seemed to waft around me like a perfume. Now that I did not want to die, she represented a chance for new life for me. I hoped it was not too late, just to be her friend.

"I wanted to get together with you GA" I typed on TTY to her.

"What about tomorrow afternoon? GA" Her words came up readily on the screen. She was not coy.

"Great! Where? GA"

"My apartment. GA"

Yes, I knew where it was. I was in love with those apartments. They held something so precious for me. "Yes, what's your apartment number? GA" She told me, and I immediately scribbled it down on a scrap of paper. I was actually going to see her. My room, which had seemed cold and claustrophobic, expanded, becoming spacious, while still delightfully cozy, graced with her delicate fragrance, which seemed to travel over the telephone line. Light danced in from the windows and dappled over my desk and bedspread.

It was cool for November, and I was dressed for it. I had on a scarf and leather gloves with wool liners, a sweater, a flannel shirt, and my leather jacket with jeans and long underwear. Riding a motorcycle in the cold was bracing and I enjoyed it, as long as my hands kept warm. In December it would be too cold to ride, just because of my hands. They would become like ice. But it was still fall now.

**2.** When I got to Norma's apartment building, I went right in as somebody was coming out, thus getting around the hassle of the security system. Going through the long dark hallways was like going into the underworld to rescue her from an ogre. I expected to see a pile of human bones just inside her door, and I reached down to try the lock—she might have left it open for me—but finding it locked, pressed the doorbell. Maybe she didn't have a light on her door, or maybe she wouldn't see it. I might have to go back down to the lobby and call up, I thought, but my misgivings dispelled when the door opened and Norma in a red-checked flannel shirt with the tails hanging out over her shapely hips in jeans stood before me barefoot as a country girl at the door of her family's farm.

Her smile put me in a valley by a bright stream that sparkled up at me under bright blue skies with the promise that I could be whoever I dreamed myself to be. She reached to take my jacket and I peeled myself out of it, undressing even this much with slight embarrassment in front of her, first handing her my helmet, which I did not chance to leave on my bike—she set the helmet down on the floor—and then handing her my gloves and scarf. I was suddenly warm, and feeling encouraged, I peeled myself out of my sweater and handed it to her, one more thing to add to her collection. She took everything back to her bedroom and laid it on her bed.

"Where is your boyfriend?" I signed when she came back.

"Philadelphia," she answered. I did not understand her.

"Where?"

She started to spell it out, "P - H - I - L - A..."

I interrupted her midway, "Oh."

The awareness that we were alone together glimmered like a light between us in a darkened room.

"Have a seat," she signed.

I took a seat on the couch and to my surprise, she took a seat casually and seductively beside me. I was almost short of breath from her nearness. I didn't know whether to ignore it or show I was pleased. She interrupted my confusion with a smile.

"I missed you—I haven't seen you in a long time." The whole woman got into her communication with an energy that seemed so sensuous, to me it was erotic.

"I've been busy. Work and investigating my brother's murder."

"Really? What did you find about your brother?" Her head tilted quizzically and her beautiful hair danced off one sturdy shoulder.

"I think I know who did it," I said with resolve, speaking aloud while signing.

"Really? Who?"

I signed that it was a secret or that I was keeping it to myself, then, "I can't tell you," and I made the sign for "secret" again. "Understand?"

She looked at me a moment, not quite comprehending, not quite knowing, as I would guess, whether she should feel bad that I didn't tell her. "Do you want something to drink? Coke, coffee, milk?" she asked as if way ahead of me, knowing I was thirsty. "Coffee."

She fixed the coffee and brought it in to me in a cup on a saucer. Her beautiful hand withdrew gracefully from my pensive stare as I took the saucer from her, steadying the jiggling cup with my other hand. "Thank you," I said as if I were thanking her for a lot more than a cup of coffee, but with the kind of politeness reserved for behavior in church. She was more kind to me—her whole bearing was more kind—than I could express thankfulness for. "I want to tell you something about myself, but I'm embarrassed," I began as if speaking to someone I thought I knew, but suddenly realized I didn't know at all.

"What?" she signed. Norma took her seat once again casually but seductively next to me on the couch.

"Did you know Delbert had mental illness?" I was a boy throwing a rock into a pond.

"No, I didn't know."

"Well, he did . . . There's a prayer I know that goes something like this: May the Lord bless and keep thee. May he turn his face toward thee and smile on thee and give thee peace."

"That's very beautiful." The smooth, creamy skin of her jaw turned toward me like the pearl handle of a dueling pistol.

"I have it—I have it also: I have mental illness." I had not touched her, but I had pulled the trigger, and the gun had gone off.

"Really?"

"I take medicine. I'm normal, but I still have some problems now and then," I signed rapidly now like a person treading water who had just gone overboard.

"Like what?"

"Different things." I couldn't go into details. At that moment my mind had become a blank anyway, and I knew I had symptoms but couldn't remember myself what they were. "I am O.K. I'm safe—I'm not a danger to you in any way. You are safe with me."

"I feel safe with you."

Seeing her accept what I had told her without a qualm gave me confidence, and I spoke up to say more, "The worst part is being locked up like a criminal. Then when you get out, you're ostracized—set apart from everyone—no friends, no job. The illness destroyed my life—I'll never get it back."

"Yes, you can!" she said.

"I had been out a few years, supporting myself with social security money because there was no other way to support myself, when suddenly the government ordered me to pay back $18,000. I couldn't believe it! It said I received social security payments without being in a training program for the mentally ill. I was in a program—I was in several programs—but it took me two years to get out of that mess. I had to get a lawyer, and I had no money."

"Did you have to pay any money?" She had listened sympathetically to something I had been able to share with no one.

"I didn't have to pay any money, no, I paid with anxiety and worry that they would take away what little money I had and then garnish the wages of my job indefinitely. That kind of injustice is all part of mental illness, but it is nothing: nothing compared to the pain—painnnnnnn"— I grimaced for emphasis—I was trying to tell her everything at once, feeling like a fool while being absolutely sure that no one could possibly understand how much pain I really meant, no matter how I communicated it—"I suffered six years before that. For two years I looked like an idiot, but I still felt." I stood—I needed more room—the clear image of my father's hideous smile flashed before me, when he came home from work to find me standing in the kitchen, seared by invisible flames, my mother cooking, me crying out inside like a building on fire, sirens blaring like one continuous scream of burning rage through which I stretched my face into a smile. "I screamed inside with pain, but I still smiled. I was in constant terror of being locked up for being me, so I smiled—plenty. That was my introduction to mental illness—pain—pain that lasted every waking moment for two years."

I stared hard at her. I had told this to no one. No one would believe it. "It was from a shot of P - R - O - L \- I - X - I - N." I spelled it out slowly and deliberately for her the way she had spelled her name to me when we first met. "When I was put in the hospital the first time, the hospital attendants and nurses ganged up on me." My mind was there as I talked—I could see the horrid screwed-up face of the white-haired nurse as she brought the needle down to my arm, and I rose up against the weight of the black attendants holding me down. "They gave me a shot of a drug called P - R - O - L - I - X - I - N." I almost wept to be saying it after so long to someone who clearly understood, and I sat down again on the couch beside her. "Within a minute," I paused, "I went up like a mushroom cloud." The pain I experienced was beyond conceivable by a healthy mind. I remembered standing in the day room, blinded by pain, seeing absolutely none of the many people present in the room all around me.

"I could feel the pain spiral up in me. Even then I could not believe it was possible to bear so much pain . . . but it went on." I saw myself in a semi-darkened room in my parents' house during those two years of walking room to room, down the hall, into bed, out of bed. "Morning till night for two years, and there was no escape from it." It was like I had turned on a light in a room: "Toward the end of those two years, I went to buy a gun to kill myself. I looked at the guns." I had held a few in my hands at a gun store in Rockville, snub-nosed, black revolvers: "But when the man asked me did I want to buy one, I said, 'No.' I was afraid I might shoot myself and live."

"Spring was in the air: something, someone, wanted me to live." I could see Norma was paying attention, but I had given up hope of being understood. "I found I could read. The pain was letting up. It lifted a little at a time, then almost imperceptibly went away."

"I believe you," she said.

We stretched out our hands toward each other, and I took her hand in mine. "Do you think I am weird?" I asked her. Deaf people commonly referred to people with mental illness as being weird.

"You are you and you alone—you are not weird!"

We kissed, her beautiful hair tumbling around her shoulders, her tremulous lips like sweet grapes pressed against mine in a swoon as dark as blood. Velvety flames flicked at our loins, enfolding us in the gentle arc of our embrace as we hung upon the Moon. Outside the open shutters of the windows, the lights of Giant Food gleamed into the twinkling chrome and glass of cars parked in orderly rows.

We were laughing like two children at play when I left and we hugged goodbye at the door and waved, then I headed down the dark hall. I turned to look back at her where the hall turned and she waved. I waved back, again, and turned longingly around the corner out of sight.

**3.** Sitting up in bed, I crossed myself, holding a black rosary in my left hand. I reached over to my nightstand and grabbed my father's book. I opened it about halfway through and started to read.

I looked up from the book. I had been wounded in life, not killed. I had lived. Others, young men, had died.

I went back to reading.

I stared into space. Could I have faced death the way these men did? I stared into space, holding the rosary and the book. The book could not diminish the pain I had experienced. It represented a different order of experience in a different world.

I read more. I closed the book, turned off the light, and lay down to sleep, the rosary still in my hand.

I dreamed I saw an office building in downtown Washington: was it the National Press Building? It was night. Some lights were on throughout the building: were people working at night? The building looked like one of the glass and concrete structures that lit up the Virginia side of the Potomac River just across Key Bridge. I entered, finding myself in a sumptuous corridor like the one that reached all the way from 17th Street to Connecticut Avenue in the Mayflower Hotel, with great, plush squares of oriental rugs on the floors and enormous oil paintings in great gilt frames upon the walls. Tall mirrors on both sides of the great hall encased it like the interior of a watch within the pocket of a king and chandeliers high above stretched down like jewel-encrusted pendants between the breasts of beautiful women.

I found myself in an elevator with four or five businessmen in suits with briefcases. Their faces, like the faces of corpses in a funeral parlor, sagged like hardened clay around rouged cheeks, reddened lips, and chins smudged with makeup over bodies through which no breath seemed to move. Missy in a ballet outfit, with black mesh stockings over sexy legs, stood in front in the elevator. She turned and looked toward me with a wounded expression of hurt.

I opened the door to an expansive suite of offices as of a large and wealthy corporation. At a desk in a plushly carpeted room, a swanky secretary in her early 30s turned from typing on an electric typewriter and faced me, folding her beautiful hands on her desk and looking up at me with a smile, saying, "He will see you now. Go on in."

I went in to Gilman's office. It was like the book-lined, leather-upholstered office of a judge's chambers. I took a seat in front of his large, heavy desk. It had a glass figurine on it like a child's bauble in a toy store.

"How did you kill Delbert?" I asked him.

"I followed him. I followed him to the house on Florida Avenue," he croaked: "then I walked in and shot him."

The dream offered me a theory. The theory that Gilman could have followed Delbert was one I had not considered before. It seemed unlikely for a man as important as Gilman to be off following a lonely deaf man like my brother, and it seemed just as impossible to prove. Yet I latched onto it. That it had come to me in a dream gave it the authority almost of divine inspiration, of coming to me from a higher world, if not from God, then from powers much greater than myself. I was not sure that dreams were simply revelations of one's own unconscious mind. It was possible that communication occurred in dreams.

**4.** "I had a dream last night that's bothered me, but I don't see what that has to do with me and Norma," I said to Gluckstern at the Community Clinic. Turning the focus to Norma perked up Gluckstern's interest.

"You seem to choose relationships that have little chance of succeeding long term."

"I don't go into a relationship with that in mind," I said, fully intending to refute this idea with an argument that would fully change her point of view, "I've been in a revolution," I said thoughtfully. "I never realized that until recently." I paused, exasperated. "For years I tried to meet women in public and never could. I would go up to a woman in public as a nice person, a person who can be trusted. I would be the same person at that moment in public that they would meet if introduced in private. Yet 100% of women rejected me in that situation!"

"That's right!" she said.

"And I say that's wrong!" Like an orator making a stand in British Parliament, I continued: "In social situations, I did the same to women in private that they did to me in public. I rejected them out of hand. When everything was just so and proper, when everything was perfect and just right, I rejected them. Norma is a compromise," I almost hated myself for using that word. It had been very popular at one time, but I was just trying to score points with Gluckstern, since what I had had to say looked like it had hit her pretty hard and that was bad. It was bad to have opinions if you were a mental patient, especially if they were in disagreement with the therapist's.

Gluckstern bought it and went back to her textbook-learned mode of questioning: "And how do you feel about that?" You could almost feel the full weight of her formal education in every unimaginative and coercive syllable.

"Fine," I said, uncomfortably.

"You thought I would commit you," she smiled.

"I didn't say that. I've been committed, but I don't know how it's done." It was true. I had been involuntarily committed, an act that had completely altered my life forever, and I had little idea how it had occurred. What is more, no one would respond to any curiosity I showed about it, nor volunteer any information. I myself was too afraid to ask outright. What had happened to me had been unspeakable. What had happened to me had completely unbalanced my world, turned my trust in others inside out, and left me in an America that was a democracy in name only, not a democracy for a person like myself, but a place with a veneer of democratic institutions and a rock bottom tyranny of money over imagination, conformity over freedom, with just enough money to go around to satisfy, not creativity, but greed.

"I'm trying hard to be a good person," I stammered. I paused for a moment, a long moment, like I was in a dark corridor, pacing halls behind locked doors. Faced with that kind of isolation, there was only one way out for a person like myself: "I believe in God," I said deliberately, "and I believe God loves me."

**5.** "Try to see it my way—only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong," the Beatles sang on my tape player. I was a Beatles fan from childhood and certain songs at certain moments moved me like a call from seraphim along ramparts of heaven.

"Go!" I heard in my head, the wildly enthusiastic scream of two thousand teenage voices.

". . . the slaying today of former agent Jim Thurman had all the appearance of a Mafia hit, and law enforcement officials have indicated that they are presently engaged in a massive search for possible suspects among members of organized crime." A news broadcaster, who looked like a teacher's pet in some school where all the other students were being thrown out of class, dutifully read the news on television.

"We can work it out," the Beatles sang.

"Go!" The voices of the high school students reverberated in time to the music like the distant reverberation of a rocket in an auditory hallucination so powerful it almost moved me to tears.

I was having microwaved trout, instant mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli—Menu #1 in my three-meal repertoire. For Menu #1, the fish might be trout, catfish, or perch; spaghetti without sauce could stand in place of potatoes, and a salad of lettuce and tomatoes might alternate with the broccoli: it was protein, starch, and something green: I even kept some cheese to eat while making dinner or I might drink some milk. I did not want to be a danger to myself. Menu #2 was spaghetti with meat sauce and a salad of lettuce and tomatoes. Menu #3 was a hamburger on two pieces of bread with lettuce either in the sandwich or on the side. Menu #1, Menu #2, and Menu #3—I wasn't doing badly for a 40-year-old single man!

Dana walked in the door.

"Awwwwww!" the high school students swooned in my head to the music.

"I've got to pay a visit to Dick Gilman's office—I've got to see it!" I told her.

"GO!"

She put her jacket and backpack carefully in the closet.

"Why? Be careful, Moody—you think Gilman"—snake sign for Gilman—"killed your brother?"

I followed her into the kitchen, putting my plate on the counter, then followed her back into the living room. "I'm not sure. I checked the phone book. His office is in the National Press Building."

"Where is that?" Dana asked.

It seemed to me that everyone would know where the National Press Building was. "Downtown . . . I know I can figure this out—I know I can!"

A look of support flashed from Dana's eyes, "You can do it, Moody, but be careful. If Gilman"—snake sign for Gilman—"killed your brother, he can kill you—be careful!"

The voices had stopped; the music had stopped, I had finished my dinner, and the conversation with Dana had risen to a climax. The television droned on like a television in the room of a sick child after a day home from school. Dana and I hugged—we held the hug, standing within the center of the living room. Table lights beside the couch glowed warm and vibrant against the walls, as if we stood within the center of a stage before a final dimming of the lights.

### VI

**1.** The coaching of Gallaudet football was in sign language, but the start of each play was by the beat of a very loud drum. Deaf players could "hear" the drum by the vibrations. I could hear it from memory as I nervously left my motorcycle on F Street in a lucky parking space I had found right next to the National Press Building and, taking my helmet with me, started like a halfback down a sidewalk of would-be tacklers. I left my gloves on. It was a cold fall day and I wanted to look like a busy messenger in order to help me get by any security personnel there might be in the lobby.

In the lobby, I went right by the one man watching things, who was distracted from even noticing me by a steady stream of visitors and guests. Reporters had little need of security, I figured, as they were unafraid of intrusions and more concerned about civil liberties, which might have been lost by a too severe surveillance of their space. Now I was in an elevator, going up to the 10th Floor of their building, thinking just how easy it would be for one of their number to do wrong under the cover of an immaculate image. The doors to the elevator opened. The air was still, the light fuzzy, as if it smoldered in a process of combustion just below visibility to human eyes, reminding me of the processes of deterioration at work in the human body after death. I turned right, noticed the men's room, then started to check the numbers on the doors. I was heading the wrong way for 1023. Of course. So I turned and walked back in the other direction. There was no noise, no movement, like a hospital room with a patient swathed in bandages. I went down around a corner and found the pebble glass window in the door to Gilman's office. His name was stenciled on it. I could see there was a light on. I stuck my head in the office and called out, "Mr. Gilman? Mr. Gilman?" The silence of a news conference that had never been held reverberated through the empty rooms. I stepped inside the rooms.

There were three rooms. They had the shabby look of a Brooklyn tenement. Just inside the door was a room for an old, scarred, secretary's desk with a few tall filing cabinets next to it like apartment buildings overlooking a vacant lot in New York.

In front of the desk, along the wall were low shelves with reference books and black loose-leaf binders. The light was off in this room. Grey light from the window behind the desk filtered in like dust off the floor of a warehouse where cement powder was being moved.

The room to the left was dark too, except for the grey light that came in through the window in that room. A pantry with a small refrigerator opened to my left, just next to the door. A light was on in the room to the right, like a light on in an empty school at night. A cheap plastic couch jutted out from the wall that ran to the left of the door. To the immediate right was an ugly folding table stacked high with newspaper clippings; a safety razor and can of shaving cream were almost reachable from where I stood. Crowning the mess was a computer on a cluttered brown desk. This was Gilman's office.

He had stepped out for a moment. I stepped back to the door from the hall, opened it and had a look both ways. It was empty. I didn't have much time.

All I could think about was how easily Gilman could have gotten an untraceable gun from Vietnam. Now I wondered if I could find it. I set my helmet on his desk and opened the top drawer. Seeing nothing of interest, I pulled open the bottom left-hand drawer. My hand fell on a brown cloth. I brushed it aside. In the drawer lay a steel black revolver. I took it—I still had my gloves on, but I took the cloth, too. I wrapped the gun in the cloth and was about to stick it in my jacket when suddenly the door to Gilman's office opened.

I froze. Gilman came in through the door. He did not come into his office proper where I was standing red-handed with the gun behind his desk. He went into the secretarial office area just inside the front door. He crossed to the filing cabinets by the secretary's desk. I could hear the drawers opening, then he slapped a few files on the desk. I had no idea what I would say to him if he came into his office. I didn't dare move. I could hear myself breathing—I tried to breathe more quietly. Gilman picked up the phone. He had an old-fashioned rotary phone, and I could hear the dial clicking as he dialed a number.

Gilman said: "Hello, it's me . . . yeah, I'm getting the 9:00 shuttle tonight. I can meet with you . . . Yeah, tonight . . . Where? . . . Same place, yeah, what time? . . . I'll be there . . . All right, Beamer, all right . . . Yeah, thanks, Beamer. I'll make it, don't worry—I gotta go to the bathroom, ha ha . . . Yeah, I'll see you, bye."

He hung up. I prayed to God. It was all I could think to do. If he was going to come in the room, he was going to come in now, but I was still iced with resolve to hold my silence and my ground. He crossed the next room—I could hear him moving, his clothes rustling. He went to the door and went out. I put the gun back in the drawer as I had found it and closed the drawer.

I waited a second for him to get around the hall to the bathroom, then I went out myself, taking the stairs in bounds eight or nine floors down to the shops on the lower levels. Excitedly, I realized that Gilman could have thrown the gun away. In keeping it near him, he had behaved like any primitive savage, since leaving clues out in a place where almost anyone could find them was Gilman's way of asking pardon from the victim of his crime. As much as I knew of primitive psychology, this was called propitiating the spirit (or ghost) of a murdered enemy, as can be seen in the elaborate rituals of atonement in the tribes of head-hunters in New Guinea. I was now sure that I had found the gun that killed my brother. It was possible that the police would be able to examine markings on bullets fired from it and compare these to markings on the bullets that killed Delbert. If the markings matched, that was pretty conclusive evidence that this particular gun was the actual murder weapon.

I was full of myself, pumped with adrenaline and high, high as the Washington Monument. My consciousness, lit up like a lantern in the lighthouse of my head, expanded to a view of distant perimeters. I got on my motorcycle and drove back to Dana's, up 16th Street, to Silver Spring. Dana wasn't home. I felt like a student who had just scored a hundred on a computer programming exam and now would be going home for Christmas break. I walked to my bookcase and pulled out my King James Bible. I opened it to Revelation and read, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." I felt I knew these lines, or would come to know them, in a way I couldn't account for. I had wanted to die. Did that mean to return to a state I had known before birth? I left my motorcycle at Dana's and walked to the Metro a few blocks away. It would be winter soon. It was almost winter now. There was a chill in the air, cold for a November.

At the Departures and Arrivals Monitor on the bridge from the parking garage and Metro to B and C Terminals, I checked out the departures for New York. There were two flights due to leave for New York's La Guardia Airport—one from U.S. Air at 9:00 and the other from Delta at 9:30. One flight was listed right on top of the other as if to confuse me. I read across the U.S. Air listing. It was leaving from Gate 35. I quit the monitor and hurried to get there. It was only around 7:30. B and C Terminals were lit up like the office building I had seen in my recent dream. There was a gaiety to the lights that spoke of coming holidays, a festive atmosphere.

When I reached the security checkpoint for the departure and arrival gates which included Gate 35, I was at a loss of what to do. I had not been to an airport in years and did not know how the system worked. There had been no such security checkpoints in the years I had gone to the airport to pick up my grandmother with my father or mother. I went to a newsstand in front of the checkpoint and bought a paper. There were two or three blacks at the checkpoint ushering people through. I wondered if you needed a ticket to get through, and so I walked up to the electronic gate, pausing just in front of it, and raised one arm with an uplifted index finger to catch the attention of one of the guards. A woman, who looked like an Ethiopian, waved me through.

**2.** Gate 35 was not far from the security gates. It was on the left. Now on the right was Gate 36. There was no one at Gate 36 and it had a clear view across the expansive room at a diagonal to Gate 35. I decided very quickly to have a seat over at Gate 36 behind and to the side of an unmanned ticket desk. This way I would be concealed from anyone coming down the hall from the security checkpoint, but I would still have a clear, unimpeded view of everyone who might gather at Gate 35. I watched the people coming past me down the hall from the security checkpoint. Without exception they walked by me without turning their head.

I turned to my newspaper, not comprehending a word. Something was happening in the Middle East. Congress had appropriated money. I turned to the sports page. The Redskins were rebuilding their offense. My eyes glazed over the newspaper and refocused on Gate 35. There were a few people in the seats around the gate. A blond showed up to man the gate along with a man in a red jacket. There wasn't much other activity. I kept looking down at my newspaper in order to appear friendly to anyone who chanced to look my way. I didn't hold it up much as if to hide behind it. I just left it in my lap. At 8:35, I heard an announcement over the public address system by a female announcer whose voice was almost like a mother's calling to a neighbor across a lawn in suburbia, "Thank you for riding the U.S. Air Shuttle. Have your ticket ready for boarding through Gate 35."

A line of passengers immediately formed to board the plane. I had already scanned each one of them with precision to match the highest standards of science and technology, extracting all but their DNA from each quadrant of my view. Gilman was not among them: a thirtyish woman with a carry-on bag, an older man in a light jacket—most of the passengers didn't look like business people. I had expected men and women in suits with briefcases. Instead, I found a collection of people who might have recently come from a shopping mall. My eyes went over and over them, continually reassuring me that Gilman was not there, no, Gilman was not there.

It was now ten minutes to nine. All the passengers had boarded. As the public address announcer began her final call for Gate 35, I watched, stunned to see the object of my vigil come down the hall past me. Dressed in a tweedy sports jacket with no tie, grey pants, and brown loafers, he was carrying no luggage, a _Time_ magazine rolled in one hand.

" . . . for the 9:00 U.S. Airways Shuttle to New York's La Guardia Airport leaving through Gate 35. Final call," I heard, like I had missed the most important information of the announcement. The facts were before me: Gilman boarded the plane. I was frantic. I rushed to the ticket counter, producing a credit card, then hurried with my ticket to board the plane.

I could not explain what I was doing. I was an investigator, following a lead. As I hunkered past the first-class cabin, the worry that Gilman would see me seared my face like heat from an oven and I took the first open seat I could find in coach, a middle seat toward the front between a man and a woman who at a glance I quickly decided to be a businessman and a librarian, respectively. I scrunched down in between them with the nervousness of a performer just coming off stage. The woman smiled, just a distinguished older woman with glasses. The businessman next to me had a _U.S. News and World Report_ open on his lap. He looked like he had three or four grown kids and a big house in suburbia. Presumably Gilman was busy reading his _Time_ magazine further back on the plane. He probably rode in the back because he thought it was safer. I pictured him in a window seat with an empty seat between him and some scrawny girl who would be of absolutely no interest to a playboy like him.

"Would you care for something to drink?" a pretty stewardess asked me, a voice calling to me out of my reverie.

"I'll take a coke," I answered.

"O.K," she said and set one down in front of me.

I sipped the coke as if being just about to speak to either the librarian or the businessman for the duration of the flight. But I said nothing. The light came on, "Fasten your safety belt," and the pilot announced we were landing in New York. I was so nervous, my arms felt weak and my head unbalanced. When the plane taxied to a stop, I edged into the crowded aisle, not daring to look back.

Inside the airport, I ducked behind the Hudson News Stand, watching the train of passengers continue past me down the long hall that formed the only exit. Suddenly Gilman came into view. It almost paralyzed me to see him go by so close. I couldn't let him get too far ahead. I fell in with the crowd behind him, but not right behind him. If he turned around to ask someone a question, he wouldn't see me because I used other passengers as a blockade. He was so unconcerned about himself, I gained confidence. He had no idea he was being followed.

Gilman was among the first to reach the taxi stand, and there were plenty of taxis waiting, so he got one right away. I came up right behind his taxi as he got in the back seat. If he had turned his head, he would have looked right at me.

I moved quickly to get into the next cab. I pulled $20 out of my wallet and gave it to the driver as I got in, asking him to follow Gilman's cab. Gilman's cab was still within view, and my driver, a heroic Asian who might have been from Vietnam, followed his cab to a dark, old house not far from the airport. I got out at the next block. It was dark and cold. Tree branches forked like lightning into the bare, autumn sky.

There were no lights on in the front, so I decided to have a look around the back. There was a tall wooden gate around an alley in the back. I pushed through it and saw that there were lights on in the back rooms. I stopped in front of some wooden steps up to a back porch. Something hard pressed against my ribs. A voice said, "Let's go inside, huh? Wanna go inside? Let's go inside—let's go!" It was Turi's voice.

Four doors opened onto a back room with a dusty, uneven brown-and-tan linoleum floor. A white porcelain light fixture over the center of the room with a 40-watt bulb in it threw a tinge of faint, yellowish light over scarred white walls which receded into musty cobwebs. The four doors were the door in and the bathroom door, both in the rear, and then two doors on either side of the front of the room that led into the inner house. One of them had a piece of cardboard taped over a large hole in it at about the level of a man's mid section. The place had the look and feel of the 1940s. It was old, and smelled old—old paint, old tiles, old pipes—water, rust, and mildew.

Beamer was there with another man, whose name, as I overheard, was Biggie. Biggie looked at me through impassive eyes, a reptilian coldness coming from him that spoke of bodies buried in vacant fields. I had never met an Italian like this before. Nobody had to say he was Italian: I knew. He was portly, perspicacious, and wary, about 50 years old, a made member of the Queens or Brooklyn mob.

"Hey, where's Mr. Gilman? He here?" I asked him, sitting upright in a straight-backed chair they had set out for me to sit on.

"Sure, wanna talk to im?" Biggie said.

"Yes, please."

At a gesture from Biggie, Beamer retreated into the house and came back a second later with Gilman.

"I know you killed my brother!" I said.

"You're certifiably insane!" Gilman said.

"I don't have all the evidence I need to convict you in court, but I will—soon. I found the gun, your gun, in your office, with bullets that match the ones that killed Delbert." I was stretching it. I had not found any bullets.

"That was a souvenir from Vietnam. There must be a thousand of them in Washington alone. If the bullets match, it's a coincidence." Gilman sounded convincing. He was now a professional journalist with a few friends and I was a stalker, intruding on his private life.

"I don't think so," I said.

"So you come around and trespass on other people's property. Is that what you do?" This remark from Biggie was chilling in its shift of subject. I was like a murder suspect caught on trial with a major contradiction. Fear motivated me to talk.

To Biggie, I said: "You may be blackmailing Gilman, but that's not why he killed my brother. He killed Delbert because he wanted Missy. Unfortunately, she was deaf. She was not the perfect lady for a poor boy from Brooklyn who made it big." I was on solid ground here with the motive for the murder and it looked like I had gotten somewhat to Gilman himself by the slightest nuance of his expression.

I turned and spoke directly to him: "Oh, I see, you're touched—she didn't want you—imagine: the great Dick Gilman rejected by a deaf girl: oh, but this was a safe and easy game, wasn't it—these deaf people—I mean, compared to the world of socialites and ambassadors you knew." I had plenty of steam, but I had never fully developed a theory about Delbert's murder. The message of the one dream I'd had now poured forth from me: "You followed Delbert—he was just a deaf nobody who stood in your way, but Missy wanted him and that made all the difference—you were angry—so you took the chance: you followed him—down to Gallaudet—just the way I followed you here"—suddenly it all made perfect sense to me—I had developed a theory for the first time in the worst possible circumstances—if it was wrong it wouldn't matter—I knew Gilman was guilty—I would get him one way or another—"You followed him down to a house on Florida Avenue, a strange house. You must have been right out on the sidewalk, but he never looked. He waited—you saw him wait; he pushed the door open: you had not planned it, but this was your chance! All that compromise—all that politeness—all that servile ass-kissing of the high and mighty in the hearing world—you see, you and Missy . . ."

Turi strode forward and struck me across the face, knocking me over backward in my chair: "Shut the fuck up!" he shouted.

I crawled up off the floor and dodged toward him, grabbing him around the chest. He went for his gun and in the instant he attempted to point it toward me, I twisted it and as our fingers gripped for the trigger, it went off, firing directly into his chest. He dropped, and I had his gun in my hand. Beamer and Gilman looked on, paralyzed. As if in slow motion, as if he had rarely had to handle it, Biggie fumbled up a gun from under his jacket and was raising it awkwardly toward me when I shot him directly in the forehead. I could see Beamer's leg disappear behind the door with the cardboard over it into the inner house. Gilman stood with his arms raised from the elbows, a boy who had been screamed at by his father.

"Gilman, get over there and kneel down in front of that door!" I said.

Gilman obeyed, falling to his knees, his head now approximately level with the cardboard over the hole in the door. I took up a position next to him, to the side of the door, my gun leveled at his head.

"You and Missy were good together, weren't you, from the sex you had—that made you feel right. But when Delbert entered the picture, and Missy told you about it, that spoiled everything . . ." I was still huffing from my encounter with Turi. "I found the gun, the gun in your office—it's a perfect match for the gun that killed Delbert. Why did you do it? . . . All I want is the truth . . . Tell me why? Tell me? If you don't tell me . . ."

There was an explosion and a flash. I saw the upper part of Gilman's head sheer off as if sliced like a grapefruit. Beamer had fired a shotgun from the other side of the door, presumably to kill me. He fired it a second time. Gilman lay still in a pool of blood that collected in a swirl across the dusty floor. I heard footsteps, the front door opened and shut, a car engine coughed to a start then screeched off. I leaned back against the wall and lowered my gun.

Being careful not to leave any bloody footprints on the floor, I went through the shotgunned door into a kitchen with tub sinks and bulky, white cabinets, everything looking like it came from another era, dating back at least to the 1930s. The floor was a two-color tile of faded green and black. Beyond the dingy kitchen was a dark bedroom with an antique bed, its dark, walnut frame and taut, white knit bedspread hovering up as if to invite a visitor. A big picture of Jesus with his exposed heart wrapped in thorns and lit up as if in flame loomed down from one wall. More antique furniture crowded the living room. On a dark, wooden desk, an antique sailing ship raced inside a greenish bottle.

I went out the front door into the New York night and began to run back in the direction of La Guardia Airport.

**3.** Back at Dana's house, a few days later, I read aloud from a newspaper article to Dana and Norma, jumping around in the article as I read. The article's title read, "Disappearance of Vietnam Journalist Still Unsolved."

". . . Former Vietnam news correspondent, Dick Gilman, has still not been found . . . Police say they have no clues as to his disappearance . . . The former newspaper and television correspondent who covered Vietnam during the Vietnam War had been last seen with his wife at their house in Potomac . . . Gilman left the house that evening on a visit to his mother in Brooklyn, New York . . . Any information as to his whereabouts can be brought to the attention of police investigators. . ."

As I read, I got a clear picture in my mind of Beamer and another man, lean, strong, and determined, driving up to the old house with plastic bags and a chain saw to dismember the bodies. Outside the house, the chain saw would just barely be heard, lost in the cushion of air space between houses. Seemed like it would be a lot of noise, but I had read that this kind of thing was very effectively done to dispose of bodies. Beamer was still alive. He knew what I had done. Someone now might come looking for me.

**4.** Father Mat handed my manuscript back to me across his desk up in his office in Chapel Hall. He looked me full in the eyes as if to reassure me, then over toward Norma, who had accompanied me.

"Moody, I have read your story."

Talking and signing suddenly seemed almost impossible for me. I despaired of making myself understood, but a look from Norma hushed my anxiety. "I killed two men. That was wrong. I should not have done it, but it was in self-defense."

"Moody, the Church's teaching in this matter is very clear. God's most precious gift to us is the gift of life." He paused for effect, or perhaps because he had prepared what he was going to say ahead of time and wanted to space out his words so as not to seem too bookish. "Because this gift is so precious from God"—of course, he signed simultaneously for Norma's benefit while talking—"we have a responsibility to preserve our own life out of respect for this gift, even if it means taking another's life in self-defense."

Even though he was talking while signing, I paid attention mostly to his sign language as if I were deaf. With his hands formed into "D's" and crossed in front of his chest at the wrists, index fingers pointing up, to sign "defense," he evoked a time when men crossed swords and lived in a relatively lawless world.

"When—how should I say this—an unjust aggressor"—he winced a little when he said this—"attempts to remove this gift, you have the right to defend yourself. So if your concern is that you have committed murder, please remove that idea from your mind, because God does not see it that way."

It felt good to hear him say that, but I knew what was coming next, and I wasn't looking forward to it: "Considering the circumstances of this case, it seems to me that the next step you must take to protect the gift of life God's given you is to go to the police and tell them your story, just as you have told it to me."

"I have mental illness. They'll never believe me."

Father Mat looked me in the eyes, then down as if at my grave, then back into my eyes. My own gravestone reflected back at me from his eyes, which were black as marble, with light coming off them as if from names etched across a shiny surface: "If you would feel more comfortable, I'll be happy to go with you to the police as both moral support and to verify that I believe the truth of your story."

I looked at Norma. She turned her thoughtful face toward me, as if in assent to his suggestion. Her eyes remained impassive, though, and her lips motionless—no trace of a smile. I said: "Father, let me think about it."

**5.** I came out of my confessional at the National Shrine and walked slowly out of the Confessional Chapel into the Crypt Church where Norma knelt in one of the back pews, waiting for me. A few tourists walked around the perimeters of the room, admiring the beautiful artworks; a few people prayed in pews here and there throughout the church, huddled forms mantled in darkness. I took Norma by the hand and led her to the Our Lady of Lourdes Chapel to say my penance. It was my favorite chapel and I needed to say my penance right away. What I had heard and said within the confessional remained locked and sealed within my heart, never to be discussed, not even with Norma. Confession was about as close as one could come to direct communication with God, I believed. It was private, not for any other human ears than my own and the priest's.

I finished my penance, crossing myself, and sat back in my pew with Norma. The Our Lady of Lourdes Chapel was in imitation of the grotto in which a girl had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in France. An iron fence with iron thorns and roses closed off its altar from the few pews that opened in front of it, lighted candles flickering in a vestibule on the right, the small room warm from them, two old, wooden, unused confessionals with a place for the priest to sit in between them on the left. Someone had set a candle and a white rose between the bars of the fence in front of the altar. Two older women dressed in black prayed the rosary silently on our right, one in front of us, one behind us. Every so often, tourists would come and stand in the back of the chapel, pausing a moment to admire its dark, simple beauty.

I turned to Norma, arrested by the beauty of her skin, which was luminous in the pale light, and signed without voice, "He almost caught me in his office. Do you understand? I don't want to be locked up. I don't want to be put back in a mental illness hospital . . . I can't do it—I can't do it. I know Gilman killed Delbert—I can't prove it."

"Do you cry?" She had noticed my eyes welling up with emotion, "Don't cry, take time."

The advice to "take time" was deaf advice. Deaf people needed time to unravel the mysteries of the hearing world. I was surely a dead man if I didn't find a way to start a new life, and I didn't have much time to do it.

"I will. I will," I assured her. "I give myself up to God!"

Norma struggled to sign back to me the prayer I had once told her: "May God bless you . . . and smile . . . and give you peace."

I put my hand on her shoulder and patted her and we embraced, her thick hair falling over my mouth and nostrils, the smooth skin of her cheek sliding against my cheek as her lips came up to mine like the most delicate rose petals gathered from within the sandalwood bowl of her face.

Upstairs in the basilica, high mass was in progress. We walked to a narrow, stone, spiral staircase and then ascended to join the lines forming to take communion. I walked down the aisle with Norma, chills going up and down my back and arms from the music: "O blessed Savior, now behold . . ."

IV. Book of Afterlife

### I

It snowed the next day. I took the Metro down to Metro Center, then walked over to the National Press Building. It was about two-thirty. I walked to the 14th Street entrance and went in. I was very nervous. I took the elevator up to the 8th Floor, riding up with several journalists in beige or black raincoats, white shirts, bright or somber ties, dark suits and dark shoes. They reminded me, in some unaccountable way, of 19th century funeral directors. On the 8th Floor, I walked down to the Washington Bureau of a major newspaper. I couldn't go in. I went back down to the lobby in a crowded elevator of journalists, and we all swept out the doors together.

Outside, I couldn't go back to Dana's house—I just couldn't—don't ask me why. The snowflakes coming down seemed to promise a new life, a different life, so I went to the Washington Lee Hotel on the border of the George Washington University campus and took a room. George Washington? Yes, the snow came down like the snow that must have come down at Valley Forge. If I could make it through the winter, I might make it through a Valley Forge of my own. It's curious how I knew this, but some part of me knew I could not make it, and that was scary. I had no good reason to suspect I might die. There had been rheumatic heart disease on my mother's side of the family, but I did not have it. I was sure I had enough money for at least one night at a hotel. I checked though my wallet. Yes. I called no one, no one knew where I was. By midnight, the last time I checked the clock, I was seated at the small desk in the room, staring into space. Some time soon afterward, I passed on from this life. The date was March 2nd in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand.

I rose from my remains as I imagine the phrase, "rising from the dead," suggests. The reality of Earth dissolved like a dream. I found myself on a plain, on a primeval landscape. The rosy light of dawn played over rocket ships that blew jets of smoke off their base and sides, about three hundred yards off. Lines of people, robed in greyish white, like myself, led to the rockets. All of the people appeared to be young, and very attractive. It was immediately apparent that just as humans came into Earth reality as infants, everyone came into this reality as uniformly beautiful young women and men—the women about 24, the men about 28, none younger and none older. I saw others dissolve into the reality as I had, like bodies emerging from a curtain that hung down from the sky like a wall. We joined the lines, all of us, as the only natural thing to do. I felt no sadness about my death, but I was not without desire. I longed to be with one woman, and the longing was so strong, it could almost be tasted. I had a picture of her in my mind, she lying placidly asleep, in a deep sleep, as if in a trance. There were roses around her body. She was dressed in a red gown, and her face and body were the face, with cheeks rouged to a blush and lips stained with lipstick—the face and body of Norma.

I could still feel what it was like to be in the remains I left in the hotel room. It was the feeling of flesh slowly burning like coal. In contrast to the cold feeling of a dead body to the living, the feeling inside the body of a dead person was one of warmth, but it was not an agreeable warmth. It was like the warmth which might accompany freezing to death. There was an acid edge to it. There was a sense of danger of being in the body, but not of urgency to escape from it. One could be calm and regard others from above the body or from inside it or around it. There was no sense of time. Time passed, but it was of no concern. Thoughts, observations, the body's slightly disturbing warmth placed one inside an experience of suspension from all activities in a state of rest. All of my Earthly concerns were finished, except for one: the hope for Norma's love. This hope, along with my belief in God, stayed with me.

I began to get glimpses of the plain and its rocket ships and lines of people while still in my remains. I can remember Norma, my family members, and Dana viewing my casket at my wake. Norma wept piteously beside my casket for a long time. My mother held her hand, my sister standing near, talking quietly about my failure to succeed in life as being the cause of all the stress that resulted in my death. Like a powerful fortress, Unc bowed his head and prayed. I watched without emotion. It was of no concern to me whether what they said was true or not. However, I still cared for them. But I cared for the real people, not the Earthly people who had a stake in matters like these.

Unc said: "Well, it's a terrible thing, but, you know, it might be better that he died, who knows?"

My mother answered, "He had a terrible hard time of it."

Norma and my mother embraced.

"But we mustn't let it get the better of us," my mother said, patting Norma's hand.

"Moody's at rest," Unc said, putting an arm around Norma's shoulder to comfort her.

The dark clothes and quiet tones of the mourners, the flowers around my casket and somber lighting of the room: none of these effects was lost on me. The closing of the coffin produced no sensation of anxiety. Darkness was no worse than light, each was equally comfortable. I had feelings, but they were emotional not tactile. The only tactile feeling I had was of the warmth of the remains, a feeling like a warning that a process was underway with a limit to it, like a length of stay in a womb, and the burning body was like a fuse that burned. It was scarcely believable to me at that time that a dead body could ever be perceived as cold.

When I rose from the remains, I rose with much of my memory from my former life intact. How much, I cannot say, but this much I felt was remarkable. I was sure that reincarnation of some kind might be possible. But I was not sure what part it had played in my experience. Around my neck and that of others, a blue pouch hung down by a strap. A bearded man in a greyish white robe, looking something like a prophet, came down the line ahead of me asking for, "Identity papers."

Like the others, I reached into my pouch and pulled out a rigid card which stated my name and next to it, "Deceased: 3/2/00." Then below that read, "Other World."

### II

I did not know if I could ever get back to the Earth as I had known it. The unknown stretched before me. Physical beauty of the human form surrounded me, wrapped in grey robes like ancient Roman slaves on a grey plain in the grey light of a grey dawn. There was no laughter, there was no talk.

It was not the loss of my former life that assailed me, but the loss of the woman whose beauty equaled or surpassed that of everyone's around me as I advanced toward the waiting ships.

The shapelessness of the grey robes almost but not quite completely obscured the curves of the female form, revealing the legs from mid-thigh, each tiny waist being cinched by a simple belt. With sandals on their feet, these women looked like Rebecca about to fetch water from a well: "I will get water for you and for your camels," they might have said. I was like Isaac. It was as if I had been saved from a sacrifice: I had died, but I still lived. I had not been annihilated.

I had no desire to discuss this or anything else with anyone around me. Silence was a comfort to me.

Perhaps I had been lost in thought, but it almost appeared to me that another grey-bearded man examining identity cards, these older men being anomalies among the younger people, appeared suddenly by my side, as if materializing next to me out of thin air. I looked ahead to locate the man I had been watching before, seeing in some perplexity that he was still ahead of me.

"Identity?"

I pulled out my card and handed it over.

"3 2 0 0," the man said. "You are going to Other World." I remained silent; he looked at me through crinkled eyes. "Galaxy of Ghod, under the blue star, Sin." He spoke with no notes or papers, clipping my identity card into a small, handheld communicator with a small screen.

A white beam flashed from his naked head and momentarily embraced me like a warm affectionate hug, so that I hardly heard him talking through a mist of pleasurable feelings, "It is a mining community. You will be working for Kraist." He paused, entering something into his communicator, then said. "Your job is Rolling Data."

Distracted by a beep and flashing light on his communicator, apparently an incoming call of some kind, he handed me back my card and absent mindedly moved on to the person behind me in line.

"Identity?" I heard him say. "5 9 7 2..."

The distance to Other World appeared to be considerable, and when the transparent casing of my compartment was closed over me by one of the grey-beards, I determined to remain calm. The air hissed around my head, mixed with a scent like incense, awakening in me a euphoria that made the confines of my little cell expand to very comfortable dimensions, and a hologram appeared on the capsule surface before me as other passengers locked into their compartments.

The hologram presented the soothing view of a red sea crashing in brilliant waves on the rainbow sparkling sand of a violet jungle under a mystical sun that, although blue in color, actually gave off rays of mixed blue and gold within a brilliantly green sky. Enchanted by this view and the beat of the ocean it offered me, as realistically as if I were there, I then listened to the mellifluous voice of what sounded like an exceedingly compassionate woman as she began, "The story of Trinyon Halaka teaches us how to develop the beam. Only through the tremendous frustration brought on by autoerotic activity in adolescence can Trinyon's crucifixion be understood."

I was out.

When I woke up, I was alone in a room with a door out onto a balcony. The light was pale blue. The room was sumptuous by any standard, like something out of a magazine which featured homes for the very rich on Earth. It was a king's bedroom, with a king-sized bed, an off-white bedspread with colorful throw-pillows clumped around the head, a couch to the right and a comfortable chair to the left, a low table at the foot of the bed, and a large screen that hung down from the opposite wall across from the bed, being as if tilted down at an angle for better viewing from the bed. There was a black globe above the bed. No light came from it. It seemed to be mere decoration.

I threw off the luxurious covers and headed for the regal bathroom. After a visit there, which included a long drink of pinkish water from a glass set out on a shelf, I hurried to the balcony. Outside, the air was warm, tropical. A great violet jungle stretched before me, and at a distance, a curve of red stretched across the green horizon with the distant sound of waves. I was on a promontory overlooking a sea. I could just barely make out the gleam of a white building nestled on a crag afar off to my right.

The balcony of my room extended over a sheer drop of at least 30 feet to the roof of the jungle below. I turned to look for a door out of the room, finding what looked like one in the wall to the right of the bed. I tried every way I could to open it, searching for sensors, pacing in front of it, knocking, and calling out.

But I soon tired of this, turning back to my room. It was then that I noticed for the first time a book on the table at the foot of the bed. Could it have been there before? I picked it up and examined it. It had a long slender cover, smooth and iridescent as the inner texture of seashells. The title, in red, was _Trinyon Halaka_. There were no publisher's markings on it, nor any other markings of any kind. As I opened it, the room darkened and a hologram came on the screen of a beautiful white temple on the craggy bluffs above a seashore. A woman's erotic voice narrated the text as the screen gave view to the text's dramatization. Light behind the pages enabled me to glance at them as I watched:

Trinyon Halaka

Zein Nima stood on the balcony of her summer home and watched the swelling waves of blood-red ocean curl to crash upon the sparkling gem-bright shore. The sand was a rainbow of tiny micro-gems crushed to pieces over a billion years and now soft as a woman's skin—red, gold, purple, and green—all sparkling in the morning light. The sky was clear and green as far as one could see—deep and fresh and green—so green it seemed orgasmic in its color—warm and full as love's embrace.

I shut the book. The hologram faded, the light came back in the room. The beauty of the woman in the hologram had overwhelmed me. I noticed the black globe above the bed had turned pinkish in color.

I noticed because a patter of feet above the ceiling, which was textured like the cerebral cortex of a brain, drew my attention to the ceiling. As the patter stopped, somewhat alarmed, I watched as the pink color got sucked up out of the globe like a vapor. The globe then returned to its former ebony color. Once again there was a patter of footsteps and then a return to silence.

"Hello!" I shouted.

I was almost afraid I would get an answer. This must be Other World, I thought. I tried to remember what I'd been told before on the grey plain: my job was Rolling Data. I remembered that. A solemn phrase struggled to come up into my mind, with a cadence that gave it distinctive authority, "Our Father, who art in . . ." That was all I could remember. I didn't know what it meant. My memory was intact, but there were hazy areas. This was one of them.

I sat down on the bed, then lay down, curling up in the fetal position. My clothing still consisted of a grey robe like a tunic. I was barefoot. After a few moments, I stood up and tried to take a closer look at the black globe above the bed. The ceiling of the room was rather high. I was tall, at 6'-3". The bed was at least three-feet high, as measured by my foot, which was almost a size 12, so the ceiling must have been a good 15 or 16 feet in height, but the globe, which was about two feet in diameter, hung down so that I could almost touch it from my tiptoes.

It was not glass but a membrane, like a mucous membrane, sheer and apparently translucent, as I believed, from having seen its interior color change, and covered over with a clear, most probably, sticky fluid, which just coated its surface, giving it a shiny cast. It did not drip on the bed. It did not seem to move.

The ceiling was odd. It had the appearance of a cerebral cortex, as I said, being made up of folds and fissures of a grey substance that on as close an inspection as I could manage appeared not to be living tissue, except that it was all of one piece, like an organism's, not pieced together as one might expect of a fabrication.

I was not much hungry, but I wondered how and when I would eat. I considered watching more of the erotic hologram. Maybe I had left off it too early. Maybe there was a message on it for me. I sat on the end of the bed and opened the iridescent book. The room darkened and the picture resumed where I had left off and like a traveler going out to sea and losing sight of land, I forgot where I was or how I had got there and hung on every word, every image, searching for some message, some clue!

...and pulled them closer closer till they entered sliding filling full her streaming womb. The universe she would transform into a rose whose velvet petals pulsed and held upon the edge of bloom until they shattered throbbing pulsing, roaring, waves on waves of crystal light that showered through the dark transformed to rain.

The Editor to the Reader:

Although the author included the complete text of _Trinyon Halaka_ here in his original manuscript, it has been cut down to these few paragraphs to vastly diminish its intrusion into the narrative. The complete text of _Trinyon Halaka_ may be found in the appendix.

Billowing milky flower, holy rush of ecstasy, streaming sweetness, atom halo round the dragon by the sea, fading, fading, slowly on thy husk of timeless light, yet fade, they seed has scattered to new shores, where fade thy lovers will not from the night, but gleam as constellations fixed among eternal stars.

It was almost as if the ceiling of the room by some innate intelligence had caressed me into sympathy with the sexual images on both screen and page, soothingly encouraging me to respond, and I positively beamed with a glow of orgasmic feelings. As I closed the book, the light coming back in the room from the balcony, I glanced up toward the globe. It was red, a dull red. Once again I heard the patter of feet, then watched as the red vapor swirled and then vanished from the globe, then again the patter of feet.

"You will eat and then you will work." The voice of a woman accosted me as she appeared in a door that opened in the wall. Her face shone out at me from under a shock of blond wavy hair.

It hardly mattered to me that she was a replica for Trudy Gluckstern. That I was able to remember Trudy Gluckstern at all seemed just as unimportant.

### III

"Come here to me," she said, with an authority that compelled me to rise instantly and go to her.

She had a wafer in the shape of a woman's compact for make-up in one hand, which she handed me, and then three or four colorful pills in the other hand, which she spilled into my hand, just slightly brushing her hand delicately against mine.

"Eat this," she said, referring to the wafer, "and take these with water."

I hesitated, then at a look of insistence from her, took a bite of the wafer. She crossed the room to get me some water and I would have regarded the lithe alluring flare of her buttocks with some desire had the situation not been so strange. I almost shuddered. She brought me some water and I took the pills, finishing the wafer. Outside the door to my room was a vestibule in which she changed clothes into a drab tunic like my own, and sandals, leading me down a tunnel that I thought remarkable for having no other rooms adjoining to it.

At the bottom of a gradual incline, we came to a glass-enclosed room with the flickering lights of computers in banks against three of four walls, the fourth wall, fronting on the tunnel, being made of glass.

"You are Data Maintenance. You will roll data," the woman said.

She sat down at a console in a comfortable chair in the center of the room. There was an eight-inch gold prong about two inches in diameter rising up from the center of the console like a phallus. Next to it, on either side, were two purple disks, also metal. She put her hand around the phallus and moved her hand up and down on it, up and down, rhythmically. As she did so, the computers jumped to a start, awakening with a hum. Continuing to move her hand up and down, changing hands when she got tired, she kept up a steady beat on the prong, stopping briefly only to rub the purple disks on either side of it.

It seemed like this went on an awfully long time. There was an indicator light in the center of the console that, going up and down, gradually rose at the same time like a thermometer. When it reached a certain height, the room suddenly darkened and a hologram appeared across the glass partition around the console— _Trinyon Halaka_ , the same hologram I had seen in my room.

Zein Nima stood and looked out upon the sea, her golden hair tumbling in waves blown back like a fiery comet's trial, her fragile chin tipped up and sensuous lips half formed as if to smile, her sheer lilac robe wrapped round her in the wind, clinging to reveal her shapely perfect form.

She felt the tingling in her naked breasts . . .

The woman continued to work, tirelessly changing hands, beating up and down on the golden phallus, alternately rubbing the purple disks.

"Do you see what I'm doing?" she asked me.

"Yes," I replied.

"Now don't stop, but jump in here with me," she said, half rising from her chair. I put my hand over hers and started to take over where she left off, slipping into her chair as she rose from it.

. . . until they shattered throbbing pulsing, roaring, waves on waves of crystal light that showered through the dark transformed to rain.

As I rolled the data, the beautiful hologram unfolded before me and I felt intimately connected with Zein Nima. Her beauty inspired me. It was majestic, awesome, unreachable, unobtainable. I couldn't help it: I felt pleasurable sensations watching her. I knew this woman. She was a dream come true, yet I had never seen her before.

Once when I paused an instant longer than I should have to gape in wonder at Zein Nima's beauty, I heard the Gluckstern woman shouting at my shoulder, "Roll the data! Roll the data, 3 2 0 0! You've got to roll the data!" And she put her hand over top of mine and rudely pumped to get me started again.

When the hologram came to an end, she bade me stop. I experienced the same orgasmic sensations as I had before in my room, and looking up, noticed the globe that hung above me in the cerebral ceiling was a dull red. Once again I heard the patter of feet.

Evidently annoyed at the attention I was paying to the inscrutable scene above, the boss diverted my attention with a critique of my work: "Your strokes were not full," she complained, "and your cadence irregular." She paused, then went on. "If you want to have a rhythm, that's all right. But not this starting and stopping like you were doing."

"It's hard to keep up that beat and watch the hologram at the same time," I said.

"Why are you being so defensive?" she said. "You learn from your mistakes and go on."

I was hurt. My strokes had been fine. I had just lost my concentration for that moment. You make one mistake and everything you do becomes suspect. I let the matter drop. It wasn't worth arguing.

"Every interval, you roll data," she explained.

I looked at her, still hurt.

"When this indicator falls to here," she said, pointing to a light on the console like a column of mercury in a thermometer, "you roll the data."

"OK," I said. "Why do you have to roll data?"

Her face screwed up with agitation: "Just do what you're told."

That kind of answer did not feel good. I suddenly almost remembered: "Hail Mary . . . the Lord is full of grace . . . blessed is thy womb." It almost made sense. I couldn't remember precisely, something I had learned on Earth.

So it went. The intervals passed—there was no other measurement of time here. The sun rose and set, the seasons did not change. I rose each day and went to the work room, spending the intervals at my console, rolling data, watching the hologram, never ceasing to be stimulated by Zein Nima's beauty. It was almost as if I could feel a vapor ascend off my body at moments of sexual excitement. That was my theory, any way—a vapor that collected in the globe and that was somehow used by as yet unseen beings. I could hear them only. They seemed not to be human, or so I imagined. They were not rats. Their feet were not that small. They were not children, I didn't think, for their steps were too resolute.

I saw no one but the one woman. Her name was 1 0 3 1 2 6. After we started having sex, my each ejaculation would turn the globe a brilliant red. I could not speak for her part in the process, how much her own excitement contributed to whatever happened from the release of sexual energy.

One day, when I had finished rolling data and begun to make the long walk down the tunnel back to my room with Two-six, as I called her, I conceived the idea of finding out something more about the white building I could see at a distance from my balcony. There seemed to be no way out from the balcony—no way down. But it did not look impossible to climb up, perhaps onto a roof from which there might be some easier way to the jungle.

I spent what must have been months looking up at the handholds I might use to climb up, and as I did so, I became more and more confident that they might work for me. I had to watch out for Two-six. She visited me regularly for sex, and I did not ever want to be caught furtively looking for any possible means of escape when she appeared, as she always did, quite unexpectedly: she had a little switch she carried with her to accomplish her ingress and egress from my space—there was only my one room, the tunnel to the work room, the work room itself, and some space of an undetermined nature above both my room and the work room. Two recesses in the tunnel looked like elevator shafts, but their doors were always closed, and I never saw Two-six or anyone else ever come and go from them.

I would go to the balcony and stare at the handholds, especially after she had just left my room. It was then that I felt safest. The balcony had a stepped entablature up to the roof. If not for the exceedingly dangerous height, the climb would be easy.

But what of the patter of feet I had heard at each successive collection of vapors in the globe? Something, someone, was above my room. I did not know what or whom. Whatever it was, it could not be human. It was too attentive to the globe, unless it were somehow possible that an entire group of humans huddled around it, tending to it as carefully as cavemen would a fire.

The intervals took up only one part of the day—morning till around noon. Which means I spent the remaining part of the day as a prisoner in my room. Two-six would sometimes stay with me for sex after she had accompanied me back to my room. I counted the days. At least six or seven days would pass between visits. I had to roll data, as there was no way to shut off the computers and they were like an organism that had to be fed. At least I did not yet know how to shut them off. If I left the day after a visit from Two-six, right after rolling data, I could make the trip to the white building and be back by dawn the next day, at the very latest. I could certainly be back by then. The trip, as I judged, should actually take no more than a few hours.

The evening before my planned departure, I stood on my balcony and watched what I could of the sunset. My balcony faced east and the sun set in the west, just as on Earth. When a Moon became visible—there was more than one Moon on Other World—I remembered Earth's Moon, and with a longing I could not explain. I thought of Norma. Norma! How I ached for her! Her beauty would be at home here, or would it? At last I admitted it to myself. I didn't like it here. The beautiful images of Zein Nima, the erotic pictures and words with their uncanny power to arouse me, were but scanty compensation for the wasteland realities of rolling data and sex with a strange woman and the unimaginable loneliness and isolation I felt under the ever hungry globe that fed off my sexuality, providing sustenance, as it would seem, to some being either so primitive as to be like a drone in a hive, or so intelligent as to be like a scientist refining an element precious as uranium: would these organisms miss me while I was gone? They had gotten used to a steady diet of vapors from the repeated viewings of _Trinyon Halaka_.

All rational objections to my plan fled before the Moon. I took up a writing instrument and on paper fine as parchment wrote a poem under the moonlight. In view of my situation, it made little sense, but it captured a welling up of emotion that I had not felt before, or at least, had not permitted myself to feel since I had arrived on this planet. It went like this:

Let my love be darkness, let it be dark

Dark as a midnight sea. I feel—I feel

The frantic waves rise upward in their arc

But to fall back to Earth again, and wheel

Back into dark. O tumultuous One

Of Mysteries who made this sea of blood,

So take away all light from me, no sun

Controls my heart, nor makes it ebb or flood—

Not like the Moon, whose love I seek, whose face

I cannot touch, nor body kiss or hold,

Whose beauty all my yearning to embrace

Is not to reach, and soon I'll be too old.

Such waves of darkness rise within my heart,

I weep such tears past finding out by art.

### IV

What did the sea say, the many voices of the sea? Perhaps in the roll and toss of the waves she would hear the answer to its mystery, if she could only listen well. Perhaps she would hear the voice of her lover calling to her from the sea. Had he drowned there ages and ages ago, the wreck of some dim vision of future ecstasy?

I shut the book, the lights came back up in the room, I looked at the globe and saw it was a dull red. With the patter of feet, my awareness flared like an eruption on the sun.

I was tired, I was exhausted.

I opened the book again. The lights lowered, the hologram, fresh and vibrant as ever, picked up where it had left off:

Had he glimpsed her beauty by the light of some strange time warp in the waves and dived perhaps to meet her, but to find oblivion where he thought her love might be? Or had he descended living, or perhaps transformed, to find another world, lost golden city, at the bottom of the sea, where even now he reigned and called for her to join him, there to share his sceptered realm?

It was a curious mythology, yet totally fascinating: a beautiful woman—beautiful beyond the genetic measure of entire generations of women—alone and in various stages of excruciatingly tantalizing undress, down to total, ravishing nudity—presented alone in an overpoweringly ornate and sumptuous setting, then with a fantasy lover, then finally alone, as if she had been alone all along—eternally waiting with eternal beauty for the natural, perfectly uncomplicated lover to come along—no, materialize: that was it! That was the secret! There was no other way into her world, a world of impossibly unrealizable desires, except by a complete transformation of the body, of the self—not metaphorical but actual—like the kind of transformation from body to spirit imagined to occur in death.

Something like that had indeed occurred in my own life. I had died but still lived, in another form of body, on another plane of reality.

I was a prisoner and a slave. Nothing I had done in my former life could have caused me to merit such a fate. Maybe the key was in the way I thought, as if I had dived into a world of my own unconscious. Was the world a separate reality from humanity or was it the manifestation of a divine reality that was actually a part of humanity? And if it was a part, then it was largely an unconscious part. If humanity were more like an aggregate than an individual, how much of reality was a matter of social consensus, a social consensus, largely unconscious, that was nowhere better symbolized than in myth?

What I meant to say was that the green sky, the violet vegetation, the blue sun, and red sea might have been somehow willed into being. Was it possible? I did not believe in _Trinyon Halaka_ , but that kind of belief was not necessary in this world. All that was necessary was a shared view of the story's pleasing symbolic construction and overall aesthetic value.

A civilization was held together by a mythology, and when the mythology waned, the civilization went into eclipse. Temples became ruins. But a new mythology always took the place of the old and physical reality remained unaltered. But metaphysical speculation brought on real changes in thinking about the fundamental form and composition of matter—the structure of the atom and the genetic make-up of humanity—which brought about alterations in the actual appearance of physical reality.

Movement through space and time depended largely on a three-dimensional view of reality. But the myth of _Trinyon Halaka_ restricted movement to a psychic flow of images, almost entirely sexual, through the mind of a single person. She could alter the composition of her space through fantasy, and you could participate and share in the alteration with her. If thought was an associative structure which supported the reality that swam before our eyes, and myth was a model for the central concerns we shared within that structure, then the way we understood the model could bring about changes in the way we moved through the reality.

I shut the book, determined now to have a try at climbing up to the next level from my balcony. The globe was red. I heard the patter of footsteps to and away from the globe. As I was looking up, watching the swirling disappearance of the vapor, I was startled by the sudden, unexpected appearance of Two-six. She seemed preoccupied and in a hurry. After sex, she left. But curiously enough, she left something behind her, which I found when my hand brushed up against it as I lay back on the pillows of my bed, looking up at the still-running hologram of _Trinyon Halaka_. What was it? I seized hold of it and held it up for examination. It was a curious egg-shaped switch of some kind, red in color on a field of blue. I wondered what it did. Two-six must have dropped it. Jumping up excitedly, I pointed it toward the space that Two-six always managed to open for me when we came and went from my room and pressed it. The space opened. I glanced back in my room for a moment as if to search for some reassurance there, but then turning away from the mellifluous tones and flickering shadows of Zein Nima, the most beautiful woman I had ever beheld, whose beauty always managed to charm me with its sweet enchantment, the globe red overhead, but the goddess-like feet not yet sounding to retrieve their booty of red vapor, I marveled at my good fortune, walking quietly to the door—almost afraid my footsteps would be overheard—and went out.

The tunnel, a long, dark, musty and twisting corridor with sconces of light set periodically along its length, had as if been hewn out of grey sandstone like a mine shaft, then reinforced with an arched steel ribbing. Fantastic mineral growths of red and green crystals, like rubies and emeralds, glittered here and there in the faint light against the stone.

There were one or two indentations in the rock as if for elevator shafts and I stopped before one and pressed my switch. I pressed it repeatedly, listening intently for any sound. Impatient and nervous, I was just about to leave and seek out another shaft when the doors opened, which is to say, a space appeared before me as if the dark recess, which was the only indication of a door, had dissolved from a solid that prohibited my entrance, to a gas that let me through.

Once again the door solidified and I started upward on a slow ascent which seemed to be both lateral and upward, going up the interior slope of a mountain.

When the doors dissolved, a tempest of rhythmic guitars and throbbing drums whirled around me as I advanced into a great white, crowded amphitheater rimmed by massive Doric columns and crammed with a teeming multitude of people in grey tunics, such as I had not seen gathered together in one place since my appearance on the grey plain.

In the center of the expansive room and raised up on several circular, white, marble steps was a throbbing black space like a slab of anthracite, about ten feet in height, five feet in width. Joining the audience—no one was seated, but all stood with excitement—I watched with curious fascination as the ceremony unfolded before me.

The band, which played from a pit somewhere to the side of the altar—that is the only way I could describe it—suddenly stopped playing and a procession of grey-beards, somewhat violently, carried a writhing, screaming woman—was she Asian?—from the back of the room, down an aisle, then up the shallow steps, to deposit her on the smooth, cold, marble floor before the pulsing slab. It was Norma! Her cries were like the screams of a strangled cat, so piteous I could hardly restrain myself from rushing right away to help her, but my disbelief that Norma could actually be here in this strange place with me momentarily paralyzed me. The others merely smiled, with a murmur of quiet laughter rippling round the room. She wept so sorrowfully, collapsed upon beauteous, yellow knees, that I almost wept myself. It was like my mother crying, I remembered, from my former life.

"You are nothing!" an old woman, Ms. Szabo, said, joining her on the altar. "You have nothing! You will be nothing!" She paused, then wisely motioning toward the pulsing slab, said: "Ascend to a new life beyond the limits of your humanity!"

The wild Dionysiacal rhythms of the band recommenced from the pit, the crowd murmuring with laughter. As I strode resolutely down the aisle, the words to a prayer from my former life pounded through the confused synapses of my confused brain: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!"

I rose upon the altar, unhindered, unheeded, threw my arms around the sobbing Norma and raised her up from her kneeling position, taking her by the hand and leading her out from under the mortified glare of the haggard old Ms. Szabo and astonished grey beards, a beam of bright white energy flashing from my brow like a puff of wind at every threatening move or step made toward us by the grey beards. I had a power that others in this place were very respectful of, but which I as yet knew very little of myself. As we proceeded up the aisle from where I'd come, the crowd gasped with astonishment, exploding into excited chatter. At the back of the room, I hit my switch, meaning to bring Norma into the elevator with me, but she refused, shaking her head—evidently she still could not talk, even after death—and vehemently motioned me to go on without her.

"Will you be all right?" I said, not remembering to sign to her.

She smiled through grateful tears, but it was plain: she did not recognize me.

No one moved to pursue her. Even Ms.Szabo, looking shriveled and gaunt, ignored my intrusion, leading the crowd in a prayer that went, "We will obey and become one with Trinyon Halaka. We will enter the Door of Darkness . . ."

My elevator door closed.

When I reached my tunnel I explored every inch of it as quickly and as thoroughly as I could. I did not know whether others would now come to arrest me for what I'd done. There was only the work room, my room, and the two elevators. My switch only worked for one of the two elevators. I returned to my room. I could either go back to the amphitheater or try my hand at climbing up to the next level. Of course, if they came for me while I was gone, I would be in even more trouble. Possibly! But what had I to lose? The grey beards had attempted to use force against Norma: the beam had stopped them from using it against me. Would they let her go? She had not seemed afraid.

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners: I could remember no more of the prayer, however hard I tried to remember, and I tried without success, going over and over the same words as if the momentum gained from their repetition would catapult me into the next-remembered phrase.

What was sin? It was the name of a sun. Galaxies away, a place so hard to envision now, where skies were incredibly blue and the water incredibly clear and blue, and the clouds so white, and the trees and grass such different shades of green under a warm bright yellow sun, Earth seemed as far away and obscure as fantasy.

I resolved to go back, but how? The ships that had carried me from the grey plain—where were they? How could I get to them? I had to get to them. It was still early in the afternoon.

### V

My fingers twitched with the strain and I heaved myself up on the ledge, first pulling myself up to get my elbows on it and then pushing and balancing myself forward. There was just enough room so that I could do that, since there was nothing to hold onto but flat surface. Once I got up on the first ledge, I climbed the cornice easily to the next one, as the cornice stepped back as in an ancient Babylonian ziggurat, not forward as in Greek architecture.

I climbed up several levels, none as hard as the first, and at the top of the climb, appeared to me to be indeed a temple, eerily similar to the one I had seen over and over again in _Trinyon Halaka_ —open to the air, yet protected from the elements, with roseate crystal casements thrown open to the breeze and a bronze door that stood slightly ajar, open to a tiny balcony like a widow's walk in a New Bedford home.

I carefully approached the door, just barely and breathlessly tipping my head forward to have a look inside. I had to control my breathing, for I was still slightly winded from my climb. It was with utter amazement that I beheld the beautiful Asian woman I had saved before from the pulsing slab. I had to assume it was Norma, but I regarded her as if she were a stranger. With luxuriant brown hair, a silky complexion like polished jade oiled with jasmine—some subtle sweet fragrance perfumed the air—sleek, voluptuous leg's like a showgirl's, and trim, delicate feet in sandals, she reclined, one arm folded under her precious head, on a couch like a small bed that stood to one side of the cerebral ceiling that hung over my room. In the center was a bell jar and an apparatus like a vacuum pump. Certainly: for getting the vapor out of the globe. The patter of feet must have been the sound of this woman's feet when she collected the vapor. But what kind of life could that mean? She was a hierodule, a slave like me.

The room was circular and made entirely of marble, as I could judge, with columns all the way around and shallow steps from a spacious surface in the back, down to the level of the bed just above the cerebral ceiling, which looked brittle, like plastic. No wonder I could hear her feet through it. I could never have heard them through the marble.

At the back of the temple were two bronze doors. Others might be waiting just outside those doors—others might come in to discover me if I revealed myself. Yet I felt an intimate connection with this woman. I did not feel afraid of her.

"Please do not be afraid, "I said coming in at the door and raising one hand out in front of me as if to reach out to her.

She rose up into a sitting position like a deer startled at the approach of hunters. I was astonished when a flash of energy like light, almost invisible, sped from my brow into her body with the effect of calming her just as effectively as if a friend of hers had introduced me.

"I am 3 2 0 0. I live in the room below here." My words had no effect. Another flash beamed from my brow.

She shook her pretty head, smiling gratefully toward me and bowing, and pointed to one ear, looking up at me with unblinking eyes.

It took me a moment: "Can you hear?" I asked futilely. She made no reply but shook her head again more insistently, still smiling, and pointed to one ear. "Can you read lips?" She shook her head again.

I crossed the room, not daring to walk on the cerebral ceiling but rather on the shallow steps which circled it. She stood to meet me. I felt suddenly sleepy, lethargic, heavy, as if drugged. My mind clouded. I began to forget why I was there, what I had intended to do. Wide-eyed with a view of something beyond my level of perception, she reached out and took my hand, drawing me close to her and taking my arms in her arms. A golden light like a halo, an aura, flared up around our bodies and I was terrified to see in its light long thick black snakes like eels with suction mouths like leeches coiling round my head and body, invisible and imperceptible to me in ordinary light, and I cried out involuntarily several times as they dropped off one by one, twisting and writhing away on the floor.

As the snakes writhed away, presumably back to the roof where I had picked them up, she kneeled down and threw her arms around my ankles and hugged me. It was gratifying to me in ways that I cannot express, except to say that I was inwardly exultant with the knowledge that I had truly saved her from that pulsing slab, or Door of Darkness, in the Great Hall and she was actually all right after all that had happened, or at least appeared so. Raising her up, I shuddered with the thought that I might have to go back to my room across that roof, and if that kind of danger lurked just outside my room, what could I expect from the jungle below?

I pressed the woman's arms and thanked her as best I could. Who was she? How had she been able to see those eels? Call them snakes. How had she created that aura? Was she human, another species, or a higher being? Why was she chosen for sacrifice to that strange, pulsing door? With a shudder, I pointed toward the windows and indicated my fear of the snakes. She shook her head. The danger had passed. I sat down on her bed. She sat down beside me. Something had happened between us, some kind of transfer of energy. I couldn't explain it. I felt euphoric.

In my other life on Earth, I had certainly known some sign language, but how? If I could only remember! Under the spell of the temporary delusion that my mother had been deaf, I peered down into the well of my memories, dropping down a bucket till I heard it splash. If my mother wasn't deaf, still somehow the knowledge of sign language began to glimmer in me like a light in the water I drew up to me. Energy seemed to hum back and forth between the deaf woman and me.

I pointed to myself and then raising my right hand up as if to give a benediction, amazingly formed the number "3" in the deaf manner, holding up the thumb and first two fingers of the one hand, and then, moving it back then forward to indicate the expression of a new number, bringing up my first two fingers for "2." Then like an exceedingly old person with decrepit hands, I slowly curved all of my fingers into an "0," the tip of my first finger just touching the tip of my thumb, bringing the number back and then forward again to indicate a second "0."

With serene peacefulness, like a lily pond in a secluded city park, she tapped two fingers of one hand across two fingers of the other: "Name: 4 1 5 5." She formed the numbers ever so slowly and considerately, so that I understood each one. She must have died on April 1st, 2055. My mind raced through the math: she was 32 in 2000. 32 plus 55 made 87—she must have been 87 when she died.

I was like a man about to let a moment go by when some demonstration of affection needs to be made in spite of the timidity most people feel in such situations.

"Do you remember me?" This was said by my touching the tip of my thumb to the tip of my middle finger, all my awkward fingers forming an O shape, except for the index finger, which pointed up. I snapped it down to touch the thumb, pointed at her, and then brought the thumb of my closed right hand from my forehead down to the back of the thumb on my closed left hand at my waist.

Her wide, slanted eyes looked up at me and she shook her delicate head, "No."

I could not accept this, but asked her once again if she remembered me, repeating my question more insistently.

I began toward another sign in an attempt to bridge the distance between us, not knowing exactly what I would say, bringing my two hands slowly up in front of me, forefingers extended and like an electrician wrapping two wires together, I interchangeably wrapped them together, back and forth: "Friend."

She smiled and signed back: "Friend."

I could not get through to her and could not be sure now if she was the same person I had known in my former life. I looked at her a moment: she smiled up at me, her bright, round eyes hooded by the slant of heavy eyelids, her full mouth drawn up at the corners under the smooth wide nose which joined the laugh lines on her cheeks. I smiled back at her, helpless how to proceed. As I could take the matter no further, I pointed with exasperation to the bell jar and made the sign for "What?" moving my two hands palm up from side to side as if panning for gold.

She brought her fingers to her mouth in the sign for "eat," then pointed toward the two bronze doors at the back of the room, sweeping the pointing finger to indicate "they."

So much seemed to pass between us at that point, so much more than what she had said, that I suddenly found myself like a stroke victim struggling to speak. My right forefinger came up and I waved it at her almost like a mother saying no to her child, not knowing where the sign came from or how I would proceed: "Where?" Then I put my two hands up as if I was shielding my face with them, the two hands being each like a door with hinges on the left and right, and I swiveled the right one on its hinge: "door." Exasperated but still determined, I grasped the fingers of my right hand with my left and pulled the right hand forward, out in front of me: "lead?"

She spelled the answer slowly for me, forming each letter with pretty hands as if overcome by a spell, in a trance of the most primal creation between me and her, meaning being formed like a human being out of dust by God: "T - U - N - N \- E - L."

I made fists with my hands out in front of me and bent them downward at the wrists, then slid my right hand into a crack between the index and second fingers of my left hand: "Can go through?"

"No!" she said, throwing her right hand out in front of her, snapping the tip of the thumb to the tips of her first two fingers. She brought her hands together in the shape of a closed door. She made two fists, circling one over the other, then bringing them together at the wrists: "Locked!"

Anxiety mounted in me. The brutality of her message meant that I could not advance any further than her room and would probably have to go back out with the snakes. I rose and went to the bronze doors, feeling over their surface, trying to wedge my fingers in their cracks. It was no use. My switch was useless, and I had no tool with which to try and pry the doors open. It was doubtful I could do that even if I had.

As she had followed close behind me to the doors, I turned to her and making the shape of a gun with my right hand raised the thumb up to touch my chin, "Who?" I asked, then like a traffic cop motioning for cars to proceed forward, said, "Comes?" She understood what I meant, I could see, but I wanted to finish my sentence, even though I could see she was eager to reply—and I added, "here," moving my hands, palm up, from side to side.

She bowed her head and her sweet face darkened as with a shadow over the sea. Raising up one honey hand like Aphrodite with a boon for a supplicant, she formed the plastic, malleable flesh of her nubile fingers into the word, "E - L - D - E - R - S."

"Who?" I asked, the thumb of my gun-shaped hand wavering up to my chin as if it made me unsteady on my feet to do so.

She flicked the thumb of an open fist under her chin: that was the sign for, "Not." In that much time, I admired her proud womanly shape, graced by a grey tunic, as her hands, each formed into the letter "h," fell, touching either side of her subtle breast, and then her slender waist, "human." The message meant much more than what she had said. Her fresh skin shone on bare arms and neck and beamed from her face, radiating up from her feet in sandals like a wind around her legs, which were like great marble pillars of a temple where her hands would flutter like sacred doves to nests upon her hips.

The difficulties in communication moved me to desist in my efforts. I turned and motioned for her to follow me, crossing the room out to the balcony. The afternoon was yet young, and I had still to accomplish my mission. As we stood together in the brilliant blue-tinged, golden light beneath the thrilling green sky, I pointed toward the distant white structure that had aroused my curiosity, shaking my hands, palm up and apart, in the sign for, "What is that?"

I was not of a mind to ask her about the globe, what, if anything, she knew about me, or about the vapor. Did she even know I lived in the room below her? She knew nothing about the structure I pointed to, shaking her head and bringing her right hand up as if in salute and then flipping it back off her brow: "I don't know." Her expression, like a clear stream before, became clouded, muddied, as if someone were harassing her.

I looked at her. I looked into her eyes. They were brown, almost black. The breeze stirred a wisp of hair over her brow and she brought a gentle hand up to brush it back, but she did not look pleased.

"How long," I said, shakily inverting my hands back to back and bringing them toward myself and up like a child saying, This is the church, now see all the people, with all the awkwardness of a man who is all thumbs, then slowly running a finger down the length of my other arm, running it all the more slowly because it was such an easy sign to make, I wanted to linger on it as if to rest—I reached out as if to grasp something in the air and pull it toward me, twisting my chin slightly toward her with suppressed eagerness, then tapped the first two fingers of each hand repeatedly one on top of the other while raising them: "to reach that building".

Her first three fingers snapped together like a slap in the face, "No!"

"Why?" I asked as if drawing a string out of the top of my head with the middle finger of my right hand. The abruptness of her reaction disquieted me in such a way as to make me feel like a child who had been reprimanded. The intimacy of her concern for me was gratifying, but the irrationality of her command hurt. I wanted to please her: looking at her as if to repeat my question without signing it.

"No!" she said again, this time to my expression. I was either to acquiesce or risk her displeasure. As she was my friend, I chose to trust her.

Stabbing a finger toward me, she made a hook with the same finger like a pianist hitting a final note, then swung the straightened finger in an arc forward with the same downward motion: "You must go." Her lips were turbid, almost trembling. She looked at me sternly, critically, running her eyes over me with such intensity I could almost feel their heat. She took my arms in hers and drew me to her. Her magic aura flared around us, burning brightly in the midday sun. Two or three of the foul, hideous snakes slithered off me, uncupping their suction mouths from my chest, shoulders, and back.

Drawing back from her, taking hold of her hands, then releasing them—but not looking in her eyes, out of bashfulness—I awkwardly crisscrossed the index fingers of each of my nervous hands: "Friend."

Her supple fingers intertwined threads from each of us, interlocking them in the golden white knot of her hands: "Friend."

Muscles that had gone rigid in her face relaxed and her stern brow, which had furrowed, became smooth. I looked into her eyes and smiled, motioning a jet fighter to move forward on an aircraft carrier, drawing my two fists together like a fighter touching his gloves together, and pointing my right index finger toward myself: "Come with me!"

"No!"

I swung over the balustrade, and hastened down the stepped entablature back to the ledge that dropped back down to my own balcony.

Looking up one last time before I went completely out of sight, I saw that she had gone. Sadly lowering my feet into the abyss, I kicked them out to find the railing—if I somehow missed the railing or got my feet tangled and found myself unable to pull myself back up to the ledge, I would fall and fall and fall.

### VI

That night it was as if a tractor beam fell across me from my ceiling and I had walked from under a hot sun into heavy shadow, so that, although I was completely conscious, I completely lost control of my will. The beam held me in a grip as strong as a surgeon's hands, an awareness within my awareness, examining my every thought, my most minute emotion, the subtle and delicate nuances of my being, my inner self laid bare as surely as if I were standing naked in front of a large audience. The awareness examined each of my emotions in turn, studying each one, identifying each one, marveling at each one, resonating in me like an instrument that could grasp hold of an emotion as precisely as a scalpel could cut through tissue, with all the attentiveness of a doctor tapping each rib along one's back with his fingers, listening closely and feeling for any possible abnormality, censoring nothing. It was excruciating.

My emotions were the object of study, as I painfully became aware, for it was embarrassing to have each one held up to view, and then placed as if under a microscope for examination. The examiner was an alien. I knew that. I could feel it, and the alien was an individual, and not a team of aliens. When he concluded his examination, and it was exhausting—I lay motionless on my bed, an unprotesting and completely disabled captive through the whole of it—I saw him. He was looking in at me from the balcony, just barely visible in the moonlight. I rose from the bed and slowly walked toward him. He seemed to be as curious and frightened to see me as I him and we each cocked our heads quizzically at each other, both the better to see through the transparent surface between us as to see whether the slightest movement could motivate a reaction. I stood my ground, staring intently, transfixed.

He had a very large brain, the high brow expanding above a long, narrow jaw. Dark green in color, he had a small body, with a sunken chest and spindly arms and legs, simian in appearance, with very long fingers that hung down almost to his feet. He was no more than three feet in height. He wanted me to become like him. I didn't know how: the Door of Darkness. It seemed impossible, but I knew it. I felt it. There was a flare of bright light off to the right. It was his vehicle come to pick him up, but he was as if on a different plane of reality than I, as if we stood in the same place, but at different times, in different eras, in different realities: one of us (I) stood on a mountain, the other (he) on level ground. Moving off, he became invisible.

I fell into a troubled sleep and woke early. I ate the wafer and took the pills that were my only source of sustenance. There seemed no place to hide the switch I had found the day before. I climbed up on the railing of my balcony and reaching up, set it on the ledge above it, carefully climbing back down in a tremble from nervousness and apprehension. If that alien was, if not completely, at least partially, in another dimension, it was possible he would never see it. Two-six would never see it. It wouldn't be visible from 5 5's room above.

At work I pulled and pulled on the golden phallus, rolling the data, watching the hologram:

And all her beauty, all her blue golden beauty under the halo of long golden curly waves of flaxen hair that streamed from off her lofty brow and gathered midway down her back seemed poured as if to a pool of perfect placid stillness and calm, poured and flowing as if from the fountainhead of God.

The globe went red, the patter of feet sounded above. They were 5 5's feet, the feet of wise, grey-eyed Athena—I knew them now. Two-six and I walked down the glittering tunnel in silence and she left me at my room. There would be no sex. I had started into sex with her because I was alone and in need of comfort, continually being whipped up into a sexual frenzy by my repeated viewings of _Trinyon Halaka_ and with no possible other outlet for the expression of such feelings except, as it seemed, through her.

Left alone in my room, I lay down in my bed and looked up at the ceiling. What did the elders want with that red vapor? What was that red vapor? And who were the elders? If the vapor was a gas, it could be breathed. Or it could be changed from a gas into a solid and eaten or into a liquid and drunk or injected. The elders wanted it and they wanted it badly.

I rose from the bed, went to the balcony, and made the climb to 5 5's temple, finding her seated on her couch bed.

I drew a jet toward me on an aircraft carrier, then put my two fists together and made a circle with them, finally pointing with my right index finger toward my chest: "Come with me." I dropped my hands apart, pointing toward her, and then brought one index finger down against the tip of the other: "I can't make it without you."

Her wise, patient, oval face, with its limp, wide Asian eyes looked up at me in cool peace and she brought one fist up, the sallow knuckles clenched prettily, and flexed it up and down like a person nodding her head: "Yes."

We climbed up a series of stepped levels to reach a slanted roof. I lent her my hand and we edged out across it, our feet precarious on its smooth, slanted surface, till it leveled out, running into the side of the mountain. We stepped onto land with a sigh, but when we inhaled, it was with a feeling of exhilaration and triumph. We smiled at each other. We had so far to go, but we congratulated ourselves on a great beginning, then I took the lead, with 5 5 following behind me, and we wound our way through a tropical forest, which, though darkened by a thick, overhanging canopy of trees, was surprisingly free of undergrowth. The ascent to the ridge was steep and our breath came hard as we rose on it.

My idea was to follow the ridge to the white building. Every few minutes, 5 5 called out to me with her guttural cry, then drew me to her. Her aura enveloped me, and the snakes slid off. I knew when it was time. I could feel myself becoming weary, but I persevered. It was the least I could do—I had no choice, as I saw it. The care 5 5 showed toward me touched me deeply.

I thought I saw movement in the shadows as we walked along, keeping up a good and steady pace. It was as if something moved on one side of us or another at a distance of maybe twenty or thirty yards or more—it was difficult to judge—because the line of visibility altered with the undergrowth. We were on the ridge, which was rounded. If there were snakes, there might also be worse—animals—predatory animals. I kept an eye out for them, but each time I caught the vaguest hint of something moving along with us, I looked, and it was too late. I had missed it.

We saw the temple at some distance through the trees, for it was a temple, as we discovered, or rather, not a temple, but a church, a church in ruins. When we got up close, we saw written, engraved in bold letters over the entrance:

And, behold, I come quickly: and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

Vines and creepers stained the marble brown, trailing over the letters. We entered the building. Light came in where stained-glass windows, long since smashed and demolished, had once no doubt welcomed the blue-gold tropical sun. The altar, still remarkably preserved, but nearly hidden by ferns, defiantly upheld a golden crucifix from which Christ hung down in tragic majesty. I knelt before it. 5 5 came up beside me and I reached up and took her hand and with her hand folded in mine, prayed these words: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." I recited the prayer in its entirety, and when I had finished, I bowed my head.

Then I stood and 5 5 looked up at me questioningly, but pressed me to her. With a shudder, I watched, under the golden halo of her aura, the gaping mouths of the snakes disengage from my body and fall off to the ground.

"I want you to burn!"

I heard her voice distinctly in my head. It was 5 5's voice. But it was not the voice of a woman handicapped by deafness. It was the mature, superior voice of a being comparable only to an angel of God.

"I want you to burn!"

I looked into her face and she did not smile. I turned and looked toward the entrance to the ruins. Standing with his feet agape, his long arms dangling and fingers almost touching the ground, stood a dark green alien like the one I had seen the night before. He took two long strides, then practically flew through the air toward me like a lion pouncing on its prey. I threw my arm up, falling backward. He fell on top of me, his long hands gripping toward my throat.

"I want you to burn!"

I stared directly into the ghoulish face—the lobes of the brain pulsing faintly, and bending toward me, spread apart, exfoliate folds rippling horribly back with grotesque precision to reveal a horrible beak, all while 5 5 frantically beat on the being's back, pulling at it and whimpering with strangled cries.

"I want you to burn!"

I couldn't move—I was paralyzed—he had entered my mind, his alien awareness vibrating within my awareness, as the beak came slowly toward my face. I wanted to live. I realized that at this point I didn't know what that meant, but I saw another of the creatures fly through the air onto 5 5's back, and I saw her go down. The giant of my fear aroused a shepherd on the battlefield of myself and a savior strode between two armies, swinging nothing but a simple sling. I concentrated the entire fury of my will to save 5 5 and myself onto the head of the creature: "I want you to burn!" I didn't know what the words meant, but in absolute exasperation with their meaning and enkindled with a rage that burned within me like a flame stolen from the gods, I summoned up a power like a shift of atomic particles within myself and released a flash onto the being's head, followed by a single beam of concentrated energy in a bolt from my brow, like a freight train onrushing with a scream past the silent graves of my ancestors, from the forgotten land and country of my birth. Some invisible flame rushed out of me as out of the burning core of a dying star, and it burned through the glistening folds of retracted muscle in the alien's skull, leaving only a headless torso marked by a wisp of smoking ash.

"I want you to burn!"

Throwing aside the limp body, which amazingly still clung to me, I leaped to my feet and directed my gaze to the creature on 5 5. The beam scorched from my brow, searing into him like a puff of smoke, and he was vaporized like an insect by a blow torch.

I reached down and helped 5 5 up. We were both plenty shook.

"They are trying to pursue you," I heard her voice say in my head. Our communication had passed from sign language to telepathy.

"Who?"

"The elders."

I looked warily around for more of the creatures, neither of us showing much surprise at the new mode of communication. I had thought I had seen something following us, one on each side. There were only two, there were certainly only two. But would there be more? I looked into 5 5's face, its serene Asian beauty shining with life. The lips were maternal with triumph, humble as if with child, but the eyes were wary as a warrior's, a Hebrew warrior's, faced with the mysteries of an angry, but merciful God.

She hugged me to her. The snakes slid off, the aura glowed. I shuddered involuntarily. I did not know what she saw or how she saw. I did not know if she was from Earth or another planet. It did not matter. I did not know what to do next. Go back? I was shaken.

I took her hand. We looked into each other's eyes. That was all. I let go of her hand.

"Where do we go now?" I asked.

"To the grey plain. There is no other place for us."

"How do we get there?"

"I don't know."

I looked down at the charred remains of the headless alien. The grey plain. I remembered it clearly, but where? It was on another planet, an impossible journey away, reached only by spacecraft. We would have to get past the grey beards to get on one, then somehow manage whatever was necessary to prepare, regulate and control our traveling compartments for the journey.

### VII

"Let's rest awhile."

She shrugged.

"We can't go back," I said.

Her mood had changed. She wasn't listening to me. She was angry, angry at me, angry at the elders: why should she be angry at me? She grabbed the branch of a fern, pulled at it, then threw the leaves she had pulled off violently to the ground: "You don't know what to do?" Her words were harsh now that they came spoken whole in my mind, especially after all I'd done.

"I'll think of something."

"We were nearly killed because you wouldn't fight." She faced me, her hands clenched by her hips.

I didn't answer.

She went on: "You were afraid to fight." She threw a hand up with exasperation. She was bitter. "If you want to live, you have to fight."

She wasn't the person that I thought I knew, but I remembered her when I first saw her, how she screamed and fought as they carried her up to that altar and set her before that mysterious pulsing slab.

Not looking at her, but looking down, still seeing her: "I fought for you." I looked up.

Her expression softened.

"We can make it," I said.

She looked up at me. "Where?" Then: "I want you to be big," she said, "not because I am small." She reached out a hand to me and drew me to her, her aura flaring up around us, the horrid snakes sliding off. "But because I care for you."

"I care for you, too." I hugged her delicately, then released her from my embrace as she released me from hers.

We circled the church, finding what appeared to be an animal trail behind it that led up through the forest and over the ridge. Following it up to the top, we looked out across an expanse of trees to the top of the nearest ridge, and that was as far as we could see. The horizon looked almost artificial to me. There was something about it that looked unreal.

We were thirsty. We hadn't had a drink since early morning and we had exerted ourselves considerably, and so it was none too soon that we came upon a stream that bubbled down across our trail, and we threw ourselves down and drank.

The mountain range had come to an abrupt end, leveling off into a vast expanse of forest. We had no food. There were no animals, no birds, not even insects. Nothing but the vast canopy of trees and the abundant blue-gold rays of sun that fell like yards of finest cloth to the forest floor.

Now that we were in the valley, the horizon, or what we had seen of it in glimpses through the trees, was completely lost to view. It was getting dark. We would have to spend the night in the forest.

"Let's get some sticks—we'll get a big stick and lean it up against this tree," I said. "Then we'll get some smaller sticks and lean them up against this big stick. Then we'll cover everything with branches." She kicked at a fern with one foot as my thought unraveled in her head. "We'll have a little shelter. One of us can sleep in it while the other keeps watch."

The facts that we had no food for the morning nor knew where we could get any, nor had any idea where we were going, nor for that matter seemed to be heading into anything more than a completely uninhabited wilderness, depressed me. I was sure they depressed her, and she said so, then:

"Where are we going?" I heard the doubt in her voice as I laid my hands on a large stick that would serve well as the backbone for the lean-to and dragged it up out of a tangle of leaves and branches.

"There may be other peoples on this planet," I said doubtfully. "It's worth a try to find out. Somebody made this path." I dragged the large stick to the tree and leaned it up against the trunk. "It wasn't animals."

She seemed mystified about what we were doing, so, looking about me, I found a smaller stick and leaned it up against the big stick. "See, you put these sticks like this, then you cover them with leafy branches, like ferns. It'll be great!" I smiled.

She acknowledged the smile with a nod but remained pensive, bending down to pick up a stick. Soon we had a complete skeleton for the lean-to. It was fast getting dark. I broke off a few branches of leafy ferns that grew nearby and laid them on the sticks. "You better get the ferns. I'm gonna start a fire."

I gathered together some dry wood and leaves and made them into a pile to one side of the lean-to. Not too close, for safety's sake, but close enough that some warmth might reach to it. Then I got some larger sticks. I had to go further from our little camp to find fuel for the fire and I found some larger logs that would burn a long time, though they were a little longer than I would have liked and were heavy.

Feeling much more weary than I should have, I went to 5 5 for relief from the snakes and she burned them off me. It was almost completely dark now and her aura flared up in the darkness like lightning off an angel's wings.

We had enough wood for the night and the lean-to was finished. 5 5 had even put down a layer of leaves and ferns for bedding. I crawled into it, completely satisfied with the work we had done. It was big enough for the two of us, if we lay side by side, close together. The pain I felt at the thought of those aliens stabbed at me. I crawled out.

I started the fire with my beam. I fed the flame with larger sticks and it leaped and jumped like the hope we kept alive between us.

"The snakes will not bother you near the fire," she said.

"They won't?" This was cause for celebration. "Great!" I forgot myself and said suddenly, "We can go back," realizing I had spoken differently earlier: "We've already died. We can't die again."

"There may be worse."

"I'll sleep first." I threw a twig into the fire. "It'll be better that way." I peered around me in the dark. We could have been in a cave the dark enveloped us so completely, the sky being almost completely hidden by the trees. No stars were visible. "Wake me if you see anything." I realized I was taking some big chances: she couldn't hear. But we were both exhausted. We had to get some sleep. I crawled into the lean-to.

Although it was cold I was very tired and soon fell asleep. The awareness of being cold seemed to never leave me and then there was something soft and warm laying on top of me like a blanket. I woke to the white flare of 5 5's aura as black shapes twisted and flipped from off of me. She had crawled into the lean-to and was laying on top of me, embracing me, to rid me of the snakes, and I hugged her to me, bending my lips toward hers to kiss at first tentatively, like trying to grasp hold of something that couldn't quite be reached, then more deeply, searching for reassurance, warmth, comfort, safety, finding in her person a shape that conformed to my touch and touched me in return, a spirit out of eternity that sought to commingle her fate with mine.

A whirring sound alarmed us. We jumped to our knees and shimmied out of the lean-to, trembling. The whirring sound got nearer. A light like a searchlight stabbed rapidly around on the treetops as the vehicle swept overhead.

Our fire! They must have seen it! I wanted to kick it out, but it was too big, it was no use. I listened, straining to hear. The machine did not come back, but continued on its way, skimming the treetops. Of course, I remembered, still listening apprehensively as the whirring sound faded off: "Those beings are in a different reality. They can't get into this one easily." I remembered the one I had seen on the balcony. He had been standing on level ground, not on a mountainside as I had been. God knows what he was looking at. "But we better put out the fire."

We worked quickly, digging up dirt with sticks to smother the embers. Without the fire, we couldn't see each other. "It's cold, isn't it?"

"Yes," her voice answered in my head. "We should have camped near water, so we could drink."

"This path must lead to water." I realized the mistake we'd made myself and wanted to kick myself for it. "There's gotta be water on this path. We'll find water, don't worry. Now you get some sleep."

"All right. Good night, moody." The shock of hearing my name in her thoughts streaked across my consciousness, and I took her arm in the darkness with a force and suddenness that pulsed between us like waves between continents.

"Do you know me?"

"You are moody, aren't you?"

"Do you know me? How did you know my name?"

"What do you mean? I was just making a joke." She hesitated. "I'm sorry if I upset you."

"Try to remember. Do you remember Earth? Do you remember who you were?"

"I don't remember anything."

I just stood there, holding her arm. If the process that was so much more advanced in me had started now in her, tomorrow she would remember more.

"Norma, like normal."

She made no reply. We kissed, her fragile arms around my neck and full lips against mine, so fresh that sweet reality peeled away from them like the petals of a lotus and I beheld beauty and love commingled in our union like a spark whose fire might recreate the universe. In a swoon, trembling, with my hands on her sturdy shoulders, I guided her into the lean-to and then down into it, covering up the entranceway with ferns.

She must have been exhausted, for soon I heard her breath coming and going heavily in sleep. Except for her breathing, there was total silence in total darkness. I was tired. I was very tired. The lean-to had turned out to be a good idea. Why build a lean-to if you have a fire? Because you might not have the fire. I was cold and scrunched my knees up under my tunic and tucked my arms inside of it also, taking them out of the sleeves, hugging my knees for warmth and huddling up against the trunk of the tree.

"I want you to burn!"

My eyes were open but I had been asleep. It was dawn.

"I want you to burn!" 5 5 thrashed up out of the lean-to.

The creatures hurled themselves upon us as if through a hole in the fabric of reality and I incinerated two of them in midair as they leapt toward 5 5, then turned to mind one hurling itself at me. In the instant I dispatched it, two more came at me and I lost sight of 5 5 in a swarm of them as they overtook her. I groaned, hearing her last strangled cries, straining to hold an alien off my head. With a will, I fried it, fending off and frying another. A beak stabbed into my thigh and the blood gushed out in a purple stream. Pain stabbed at me. I beamed the dark green shape into oblivion, now firing my beam wildly in a frenzy of self-preservation. I saw that a fire had started in the highly combustible vegetation. It spread rapidly and thrashing backward through the brush, fending off the last of my assailants, at first I welcomed it. But the flames, towering up above the trees, heat flaring out like an inferno, although making any path between the creatures and myself impassable, had overtaken and consumed the body of 5 5.

Freight trains rushed through me: the sky darkened as if in sympathy like the darkness before a storm and a great bundle of clouds and light opened above the towering flames, showering rays of a revelation down upon me. A choir of angels sang a single note in unison as if to announce the coming of God and I saw two immensely beautiful forms dressed in flowing white robes, recognizing almost in disbelief, that the forms were my murdered brother and on his right, Norma.

Arms extended toward me, they clenched and unclenched their fists twice toward me, the movements seeming to be connected up to me through almost palpable space, as if I could feel their movements through an awareness that transcended the normal limitations of the senses and without hesitation I answered them with the same movements, raising my arms toward them like a child first learning to speak.

"They-are-try-ing-to-trans-form-you-like-them," Delbert said in that monotone cadence that mimicked the throb of the human pulse.

My mind flashed to the Door of Darkness and the strange ritual I had witnessed, intervening to save Norma, but the greater miracle, that Norma now stood before me, displaced this memory.

"Norma, you're alive!"

"You-have-saved-her-from-the-trans-for-ma-tion."

"You mean, to become an elder?"

Delbert flexed his fists twice in answer.

"Are you still human?"

"They-are-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you-with-nah-nah."

"Who killed you?"

"That-is-nah-nah."

I turned to Norma, now signing as I talked.

"Norma, did you suffer?"

She flexed her hands twice, but there was no regret in her communication, only acceptance, as if all had already been forgotten.

"Are you all right now?"

"Moo-dy-I-can-hear-you-I-can-talk-and-hear."

Joy thrilled through me and I looked up at her in even greater awe: "God has saved you! Have you seen God?"

"That-is-the-el-ders-try-ing-to-con-fuse-you," she replied.

A volcano erupted in me and I cried out, shouting words I hardly knew, yet knew so well, the words of a new people in a strange land, "I-love-you-Nor-ma-and-I'll-al-ways-love-you-for-as-long-as-love-will-live-u-pon-the-Earth."

She flexed her hands twice to me and more of the same unconscious stream of uncontrolled communication flowed out, "And-we-shall-make-each-oth-er-feel-as-we-should-feel-and-we-shall-make-each-oth-er-ver-y-ver-y-ver-y-ver-y-hap-py."

A beatific smile swept across her face like ripples over water when the wind dances over it and she looked toward Delbert and smiled, then folded her arms in the sign for love. Delbert did the same. And as the heavenly choir returned, the sky, lightening, closed over them and they were gone.

I turned from the flames and began to run. Pain stabbed in my leg. I had not gone far, and I huffed and puffed to the point of nausea before I slowed my pace, when the trees began to thin and I entered upon a savannah that stretched ahead of me to a structure which appeared to be either a hallucination or a mirage. It was a canopy, a gigantic, crystalline canopy that hovered over the forest, indistinguishable from true sky as it arched upward, becoming lost above and as far as one could see across the far horizon. It seemed to float, tethered by steel cables, and drawing under it a steady current of air that must have maintained the homeostasis of rain forest on the one side, while excluding any encroachment of the arid plain on the other.

I limped and ran, throwing off my sandals after crossing over an elaborate trench in which were panels like solar panels meant, as far as I could understand, to throw up a disturbance in the atmosphere that would camouflage the canopy from view of the ships. I could now see the ships about a mile ahead of me. Trucks passed steadily away from them, over a dusty road, under the canopy, becoming lost to view.

Beyond the ships, the wall hovered on the horizon, a solid black curtain that fell from a grey sky onto a grey stage of perpetual twilight. I prayed, "Hail Mary, full of grace," and tears filled my eyes, streaming down one cheek, "the Lord is with thee . . . Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners." I sobbed and ran, limped and lurched forward, propelled by some force beyond me, so much greater than myself. I passed the ships, the lines of bewildered dead, the grey beards taking identity cards. No one moved to stop me, nor heeded me at all.

"Hail Mary, full of grace," I prayed, driving myself beyond all endurance, all capacity to persevere. The wall rose up before me, the dead stepping out of it from a reality beyond my capacity to understand, as out of a tidal wave that threatened to overwhelm a tiny island.

March 2nd, Two Thousand: I held the thought as firmly as if I clenched it in my fist, then leapt into the wall.

I seemed to fall as in a dream through a darkness like a tunnel, at the end of which streamed light, and I floated toward the light, floating closer and closer until the light became so bright and intense, it awakened me, and I found myself back in the hotel room I had left, as it seemed, more than a century ago. It was still snowing. I was in two bodies: my former body lay on the bed in a deep sleep. I in my present body stood over it, looking down with infinite compassion on my former self. I spoke to it, at first softly, then with impatience. The clock on the desk by the door said 12:15 a.m. The last time I had looked at my clock before passing away was at midnight. Without hesitation, I called 911 and reported that I was having a heart attack and in immediate need of assistance, knowing that I was in close proximity to a hospital and that an ambulance could be expected at any moment. I stripped the clothes off the body—it was quite an effort, for I was big and heavy, especially in sleep, such a sleep as I had never seen before. Then, throwing off my tunic, I dressed myself in my former clothes, but as I could not stand the sight of my former body naked on the bed, I quickly drew the tunic over it. I had no time for indecisiveness. If the ambulance arrived too late, I might be found guilty of murder. If it arrived on time, I would be thought mad. I planned to start a new life. More than one contradiction threatened to paralyze me. I would go out into the night as one who had died but had risen from the dead, given one more chance by the blessed Lord to do his work within the Earthly paradise man attempts to make his own, by his own toil, by his own hand, within the ever glimmering hope that by God's grace I would remain, though vulnerable to all Earth's dangers, still deserving of all its infinite blessings.

A Closing Note from Norma

Although both the housekeeping staff and the police claimed to have searched Moody's room thoroughly after his death, this remarkable manuscript for _Other World_ was found there three months later. Suspicions of foul play aroused by the discovery, were immediately put to rest, the cause of his death, cardiac arrest, having been determined beyond a doubt.

That Moody took shelter from the snowstorm he described in his story by taking a room in the Washington Lee Hotel where he was found, and for similar reasons as he described, is certainly a credible explanation for how he ended up there. I never doubted anything Moody ever told me, especially of the circumstances leading up to Dick Gilman's death and disappearance.

The mystery, which to many presently seems unsolvable, that when Moody was found, he was dressed in a grey tunic like the characters he presents in his story, is no mystery to me. Moody fully explains it in his manuscript, and I believe that what he says is true—I have never had any reason to doubt him.

Together with the manuscript, the fiber analysis of the clothing provides conclusive evidence that his story, although beyond the reach of our present understanding, is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but documented fact, beginning with the mystery of his brother's death and ending with the mystery of his own.

By whatever strange explanation, by whatever strange fate, Moody lives, however unable he may be to communicate with us, and I will carry that hope with me to my grave, with the firm resolution that our love, though brief, will prove itself immortal.

V. Fabula

### I

**1.** The publication of _Other World_ brought Norma and me a comparatively small sum of money in view of the much larger rewards we had hoped to gain from at least some degree of social recognition for my continued existence on the planet. I helped write the Closing Note for the publication. The appendices [included in the back of this book] were filler, especially the excerpts from my father's novel. I was really stretching it to get a book long enough to satisfy the demands of the market.

But I also thought that authentic World War II material would help me sell my book. As the son of a war hero, I might gain greater credibility for the fantastic story I had to tell. My father never talked about his war experiences. Everything he had to say, he said in his book. But as a record of my father's heroism, the book presented me with a constant challenge to equal such heroism in my own life and at the same time, since the demands of my own time were completely different from those of his era, the search for analogies between my own and his existence could only turn my landscape into a battlefield that led to handcuffs. The book was an inspiration and a stumbling block: even paying homage to it as I did with the inclusion of some excerpts seemed to do me damage among readers who thought the excerpts completely out of place. Yet I still found myself including them, like a Hindu god who creates with one hand and destroys with the other.

Getting the copy of the manuscript into the room where I had died had not proved too difficult after all. I had done that, too, by the accident of being able to translate myself through space with some modicum of self-control, simply by envisioning a space and then willing myself into it. The physics of how I did this are beyond me, and it required some energy, but the bilocation of saints assured me that I was not the first to move through such strange configurations of reality. Suffice it to say, I got the book where we wanted it and got myself out without detection, the desired response occurring within days.

Such hyperspatial travel is not idiosyncratic to solely me, but exists on a much more limited and unconscious scale in the average movements of any individual. Instead of traveling across a city, the momentarily distracted individual might accelerate himself or herself ahead the distance of a few steps, or even as much as 20 or 50 feet in some cases, while walking absent mindedly down a city street, any notice of the event being concealed by what I can only describe as the vastly overwhelming associative structure of thought which unites all human and nonhuman reality.

Enough said. The fiber analysis and manuscript, we thought, would provide a means for me to safely reveal myself to the world. Not so. Within weeks, _Other World_ sank from bookstore shelves—a disappointment, to be sure, but we took it in stride. I had settled a score.

This involved the parts of a puzzle that finally fell into place. The beam I had been involuntarily committed, at least in part, for saying I perceived—in part, meaning, the physical part of unorthodox views I said I had so foolishly proclaimed thirteen, now fourteen, years before—that beam had turned out to be real. The massive rejection I had received for ever making any claim to the truth of its existence had caused me to question and even dismiss its reality as a delusion. What I had perceived at the time was so undeveloped a form of this power that, what with my knowledge of science, particularly electromagnetism being so inadequate, I had no way of proving the truth of my perceptions to the many vehement and powerful detractors I had encountered. Like Jesus who said he was God to a people who did not believe God could ever be a man, I went to a crucifixion for my own views, a crucifixion that, as I will keep repeating, lasted two years, not of metaphorical pain, but actual physical pain brought on by the administration of a forced shot of prolixin on the first day of the involuntary commitment which propelled me helplessly into the ranks of banishment and exile among the population of the mentally ill for the remainder of my Earthly life and, afterward, into the eternal memory traces of all those I left behind after death.

It took the consent of two doctors to do this. The man who had come to the door of my room, he was one. He was the one. The other might have been my father—or might even have been the doctor at Suborgo Hospital who examined me before I was officially condemned to my fate, or, no, couldn't have been him.

Norma helped me locate the one. She had access to a database at work that could locate almost any person, from public figures to just about any private individual. It was not hard for me to identify the address that came up under the name. It made perfect sense for a Chief of Psychiatry to live so near the hospital where he worked. He had committed me. Now, although it was an eternity later, I even had his age: he was 75.

I was not too late. I went to his house one night. I had to use public transportation—I had no driver's license, no identification whatsoever—and I certainly didn't want Norma along, not for what I had to do.

**2.** It was a May night, warm, but ominous, portending of autumn in the lush resurgence of growth promised by spring. It was dark. I was not aware of the time. I am sure I had checked my watch and rechecked it, each time without registering the position of the luminous hands upon the dial. I had actually walked up the street a ways when his car pulled up—I had had a presentiment that he would so arrive, as I lingered upon his suburban street, wealthy homes arranged neatly along well-manicured lawns. He got out of his car as if it took him some effort. I picked up my pace—I didn't want to embarrass myself by an unseemly rush to meet him—and so I actually jumped forward a space to the front of his lawn. He was at his doorstep, fumbling with his keys when I called out to him.

"Mr. Devel."

He looked toward me as if somewhat perturbed I had omitted to say "Dr." He didn't answer me, just looked at me, befuddled, guardedly angry.

"Remember me?" I said it with enough force to get him to pay attention. And I had his attention now because he did recognize me.

"What can I do for you?" He was confused. Perhaps he had heard I'd died, perhaps he hadn't. I couldn't be bothered with that now.

"Burn in hell!" I cut loose a bolt from my brow that enveloped him in a momentary aura, for I had modulated the intensity of my beam way down to a level that would cause a slow burn. I wanted him to feel at least a fraction of the pain I had felt for those two years. Then he vanished. I could withhold the force of my feelings no further and they all poured out of me in one opalescent flash of transparent consciousness.

There were no witnesses. I was sure of that. A person could be murdered in broad daylight on a suburban street and no one would know the difference until a child stumbled over the body on the way home from school.

I had grown up in suburbia. I knew. But I also knew not to take any chances, and I made sure to atomize and scatter every particle of evidence that could remain of the body before I advanced myself out of his neighborhood with a single step. In no time I was on a Metro train headed for Silver Spring and Norma's.

**3.** I grew a beard and went to work among the undocumented Hispanic laborers who congregated on a corner, waiting in the early morning to be picked up for a day or few days' work. I was dark complected and half-Italian, so I could pass for an Hispanic in a pinch. Norma had got me some old baggy clothes at a Value Village, and so I fit right in, immediately making friends with a young man who was standing a little apart from the others. His name was Rudolpho. He was a Nicaraguan, his bold Indian features hovering up behind the red glow of a cigarette which he waved from between his lips like a benediction in the predawn early darkness.

He spoke little English, but he communicated a wealth of character in the few moments I shared with him that made me appreciate the opportunity to spend even that little time with him. For I was soon singled out by a man in a beat-up Ford pick-up truck.

"Worky?" he asked, leaning across his seat to speak over a half-opened window on the other side of his cab.

I did not know the etiquette of who went first in such situations and since Rudolpho had been there before me, I looked toward him for some guidance. He was apparently waiting for another possible boss and motioned me to go ahead: "Oh, no," he said with soothing empathy, "Go, go!"

I got in the cab. Grey dawn sifted through the air like dust. I stole a look at my new companion, but without anything like the nervousness I used to feel in such situations.

He said nothing. He had a moustache and his fair skin shone even in that much light like the weathered marble of a graveyard statue—an Irishman, no doubt, or a German. He had on white painter's pants that showed plenty of wear. We drove out 16th Street then down East-West Highway toward Bethesda. He had the radio tuned to a talk station in the middle of a discussion of divorce, a woman with a slightly agitated voice saying, "The divorce rate of 50 percent does not seem to be putting much of a brake on the number of marriages."

"No, I think that's true," a man answered. "But did you know that the rate is even higher for second marriages?"

Divorce was certainly a tragedy to be endured, especially when children were involved, I thought.

My driver and would-be boss stopped at McDonald's, stepping out of his truck without a word to me. I got out and followed him in.

"You want some coffee?"

"Yeah, thanks."

He acknowledged my ability to speak English with a twinkle in his eye, paying for the coffees and then taking a seat with me at one of the booths on the side facing Our Lady of Lourdes across East-West Highway.

"You speak English?" He half-smiled as he said this, unashamed, even pleased, to have been made the butt of my little joke, though I had intended none.

"Yeah."

"Great. Can you paint?"

"I can try."

We used water-based paint, an off-white color, to paint the inside of an empty condominium near Wisconsin and Bradley. When the day was done, Dave—that was my boss's name—counted out payment in cash for my eight hours of work.

"This job is gonna take us a couple days," Dave explained. "If you wanna work, I have work for you."

"That's good to hear," I said, because painting had turned out to be relatively easy at the pace we worked at it.

We were standing by his truck. "I'll see you here tomorrow around 9:00-9:30," he said. His truck was scarred and dirty. Dry paint smeared the seat and crumpled drop cloths cascaded onto the floor.

"I'll be here," I said with a smile, pocketing my cash. Norma wouldn't be home till later. I felt very good because she would be home later and I would be with her and now I had some money. I wouldn't be so beholden to her.

**4.** When I first got back with Norma, I had been frightened, more than I can say—I mean, after my fantastic return from Other World. It was almost too fantastic for even me to accept, let alone understand, and although I had new powers from this Other World experience, I knew instinctively that revealing myself would be dangerous, if not impossible.

After a night spent trying to sleep on the floor beneath empty waiting area seats at National Airport, I had decided early in the morning not to use any of my former credit cards to take a plane to another city and there attempt to start another life, safe from all discovery. No, this was my home. I had died with $27.13 on my person, as I discovered after rifling through my pockets. The wallet and all its identification I had taken care to destroy with my beam, except for a few pictures of my family—one of my mother when she was 16—that would positively identify me when they were found. I had left them near the body.

Almost immediately, my thoughts had turned to Norma. She still had her apartment. By a trick of luck, it had been in her name, her boyfriend thinking to do her irreparable harm by moving out. With that on my mind, I went to Union Station and splurged on a breakfast of scrambled eggs, a sweet roll, sausage and coffee, making use of the bathroom like a veteran cohort of the homeless. Food seemed strange to me after my previous diet of wafer and pills.

One would think I'd buy a newspaper and I did, but I quickly found I couldn't read it. My mind was too distracted. I spent the day in a daze, involved in a long soliloquy with myself over just what exactly I could possibly say to Norma when I met her, as I planned to do, when she got off work. I could not meet her at Gallaudet. People knew me there, if only by my face.

The solution was rather simple, as is often the case with especially complex matters. Tell her the truth.

But how to get to the point where I could tell her anything was a whole other problem. She had a door light, so once she got home, if I could get into her building, I could go directly to her.

I waited till it got dark. I saw the light on in her apartment when I arrived in the parking lot outside her building and just like a thief in the night I got past the security system by helping an older woman with her groceries, two big bags, and I went through the doors as if through the gates of a lesser Eden guarded by no angel's sword.

I rang the bell. I rang it twice in two short bursts, waited an interminable few seconds, then rang it again—once again, with two short bursts, thinking I would get her attention better if I alternated the play of light and dark.

She opened the door like a jailer opening the cell to a dungeon that had been shut for 13 years. My eyes sought hers with all the desperation of the falsely accused. She could not have known yet about my death. I had a chance to explain!

I hugged her, and held the hug, not wanting to let go, the soaps and perfumes of her hair and body stirring me with the warmth that glowed like an exchange of current between us, and she responded with the malleable sweet pressure of her body against mine, her arms around my neck, conforming her sweet touch to every exploration of my movements upon the undiscovered country of her flesh, which, covered only by a robe, came nearly naked to my hands.

I had so much to tell her and so little time. The identification of my body could not have yet occurred. Indeed, by a look at her I could see it had not.

Taking her hands in mine, I led her from the door, closing it behind me.

"What's up?" she signed to me happily, overcome by my intense display of affection, taking a seat on the couch beside me and drawing her knees up under her like the queen of a royal harem. Indeed, she was so beautiful, so desirable, at that moment, I felt like a child about to confess some great wrong to a totally unsuspecting parent figure in the form of a beautiful teenage girl.

"I missed you," I said, searching in the roll of her limp, liquid eyes for some explanation to the mysteries I had uncovered.

She smiled and said, "I miss you, too." I could tell she was a little embarrassed to admit it. I was desperate, my eyes clouding up in a mist of desperation and sentimentality, confusion and desire.

I took her two hands in mine and shook them, holding them, not letting them go, weighing them in mine like precious gold, then bent my face down and kissed them, first playfully, then long, dramatically, and now it was her turn to be like a child, for she looked in wonder toward me through her own haze of confused emotions with a turbid smile.

"You will never believe me, but in a day or two you will know the truth," I began. "I told you I was mentally ill—I told you that, right?" I held my hands in the sign for "right" as if they had become a street sign on a dark road only momentarily visible through a fog.

"Yes," she signed dutifully.

"I'm going to need your help."

"How?"

"In a day or two they will find a body at the W-A-S-H-I-N-G-T-O-N L-E-E hotel." I paused to check her response. "The body will be mine."

"What do you mean?"

"Just listen to me. Don't try to understand." I was a surgeon making an incision, but she would still be conscious: "I died last night."

"What do you mean?"

I had her attention. She was not laughing. What I had to tell her was too fantastic to believe, but she had willingly suspended her judgment. The facts could speak for themselves.

"When they find my body, they will find it in strange clothes, a grey tunic."

She looked doubtful, so I sought immediately to reassure her: "I died, but I am alive. You will see the body. You will go to the funeral."

She turned her head in disbelief. I was losing her: "You must not tell anyone you have seen me."

"You want to kill yourself!"

"No!" I shouted. "The dead body was me before I died. I am a new person, different from that body, because I live again."

"Crazy!" she signed.

"You will believe me when you see the body. You will believe me when you see me alive after you've seen the dead body."

"Are you O-K?"

"Promise me you will not judge me until you have seen with your own eyes that what I say is true."

The look on her face of a wizened cat, she half-smiled, the smile playing over her lips like the knowing expression of a teenage girl when a boy comes to visit for the first time and her mother leaves her alone with him.

"Promise!" I had all my greater knowledge behind my sign, which I voiced as well, as if to propel the word beyond every barrier of communication. Indeed, I realized I had been talking out loud all the while I signed because the silence suddenly became deafening.

"You must tell no one you have seen me." I said this like a hypnotist implanting the deepest and most powerful of commands into her unconscious, holding her eyes to mine like a chalice.

**5.** After several days in a homeless shelter, during which time I watched the papers carefully for notice of my death, I returned to Norma's apartment, this time calling her from a pay phone through the Relay to get her to come down and open the door for me. I had wanted to make absolutely sure that she was alone.

She had been to the funeral; she had wept piteously by my casket, as I had seen, it seemed, so long ago.

Now at the door to her apartments in the early evening of the first warm and beauteous day of spring, soothing breezes fragrant with the fresh scent of soil, bark, and the tender buds of new leaves, she regarded me quizzically, as an animal might a higher being, just as surely as if I were an alien several million years more advanced in my evolution than she.

I put my hand on hers as she held the door for me and as I reached to hug her, she melted into quiet tears, rubbing their wet blessing against my cheek.

**6.** I went into her bathroom to take a shower, stepping out of my clothes and handing them out a crack in the door to her to be washed. It's hard to describe the mood we both shared—a mixture of thankfulness and astonishment. The blue tiles of her bathroom reminded me of the flaming blue sun I had escaped. As the warm water poured over my back, I felt the excitement of being naked so near to her. This first night back to safety would be the best, like the first night of a long vacation. Everything was ahead of me. We could figure a way to make things right.

I dried myself, then wrapped a towel around me. Looking in the mirror to comb my hair with a big red comb I had found on a shelf beside the sink, I was shocked to find a reflection looking back at me that was not my own. I made eye contact with the reflection. Certainly, it was my reflection, there was no doubt of that. But that's where the identity ended. The appearance I made was of a dark-complected man similar to myself only thinner, with more angular features. It might be said that he looked even more Italian than I did. His eyes were deeper and more piercing than mine.

I'm not sure when I first noticed him. It is not my habit to look in a mirror. At the homeless shelter I'm sure I must have seen him—I couldn't remember.

When I came out of the bathroom, Norma gave me a blanket in exchange for my towel. It was an Indian blanket, probably handmade, red and black in a geometrical pattern, and I had a vision of cowboys upon a prairie that stretched to distant mountains.

"I am a virgin," she said. I very modestly wrapped myself in the blanket first, then dropped my towel under it.

"What about your boyfriend?" I signed, holding the blanket up with one hand.

"Never sex," she said.

"You mean, you slept in the same bed and never had sex?"

"No, I had my own bed. In my country you must be a virgin till married."

The subject of virginity had come up seldom if ever in my life, and almost always in connection with the Virgin Mother. I myself was not a virgin. I had never had a girlfriend before Norma, but I had been to bed with several women as a result of college beer binges that culminated in one-night stands.

"I'll sleep on the couch," I said.

"No, you sleep with me." Her eyes met mine in that helpless, but knowing way that suggests a spiritual awareness way above anything capable of the human being seen simply as an animal.

"Just sleep," I reassured her, "no sex."

Her former boyfriend must not have been too bad a guy to have lived with her so long and never had any sex. I had a new respect for him.

"How could you and your boyfriend live together so long without sex?" I asked.

"I was not ready to marry." Her answer was final, but that didn't make it any easier to understand.

As we took seats next to each other on the couch, I hesitated to broach the next subject: "Do I look any different?"

Her hyper-receptive deaf eyes regarded me quizzically. "You're handsome." She smiled.

"But do I look any different?"

Somewhat amused she answered flatly, "No, you look the same."

"Come with me." I took her hand and led her to the bathroom, still holding up the blanket with the other hand. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I saw the stranger that was my own reflection looking back at me. But then with a start, suddenly, I noticed Norma's reflection was different also.

"Look," I signed and said at the same time, raising my voice, without sign, to myself, "Jesus Christ!" The woman who looked back at me from the mirror was an unattractive, slightly fat woman of Asian descent.

"You look fat!"

"I am fat," she said. "I've always been fat."

"You're not fat, you're beautiful!"

"That's what you think."

"See? I look different." The Indian blanket, the room itself behind us: everything reflected back exactly as it was, everything except for my own image and Norma's.

"I look different." It was hard to make the sign for different with one hand, so I scrunched my hands together where I was holding the blanket.

She smiled and shook her head: "You look the same."

She turned off the bathroom light to signal the subject was at a close and headed back for the living room. I took one final glance in the mirror.

In the shadowy light, a sinister thought assailed me: was I somehow inhabited by a devil? I had killed the psychiatrist. He had recognized me. I knew he had. No, he deserved to die. There was something, something I was sure that science could explain.

I went and took a seat next to Norma on the couch. Being fully naked underneath the blanket in such close proximity to her sweet exciting femininity, I had little concern for how I might reveal myself when I brought my arms around her and we kissed in a thrill of comfort and familiarity that annihilated my every fear, reassuring me that I lived once again within the orbits of God's love and influence. As we groped and kissed and embraced, I came out of the blanket and she came out of her clothes.

She had decided it was time.

### II

**1.** Unc sometimes called or came by, and Norma's sister would call. It didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that I had to leave the DC area. That might have been an easy decision for me, but I was also dependent on Norma and her job at Gallaudet. I wanted her to come with me. If we went to another city, as I planned, she might not be able to find another job, or certainly not one as good as she had at Gallaudet.

On an off-day when there was no work with Dave, I did some research on farm workers. The pay was horrible, but no identification was required. I had no identification. What if a policeman stopped me on the street for any reason?

"We can go to Colorado," I told Norma that evening, when she came home from work. "We could learn to farm."

"You want to work so hard?"

"It's beautiful out there. I've been reading about it on the computer."

She shrugged.

"There's a town called B-O-O-N-E. It's near P-U-E-B-L-O. We could go there."

I expected her to rebel against this idea and she did: "Where would I work? Do they hire deaf people there?"

They probably didn't, but it was a place to hide, a tiny corner of the globe, and I wanted her with me.

"I found a place called Fell Brothers Ranch and Farm. I'm going to call and see what I can find out."

She stopped arguing and paid attention.

"There's a two-hour difference in time between there and here. I can probably talk to someone right now."

I picked up the phone and dialed the number I had printed out earlier. After the normal exchange of greetings, a woman with a tired, humble voice turned me over to the boss.

"We could use you to feed calves and bale hay," he said. His voice was simple, plain, and boyish. "You could stay on the farm and eat with us or cook for yourselves."

"Wow! How big is your place?"

"Four-thousand acres."

After we hung up, Norma asked me how much I would be making.

"I didn't ask him that."

She frowned.

"If I had identification, we could marry."

"Marry?" Her mood changed and she positively beamed. "Did you say marry?"

"Yes, marry. Will you marry me?"

"Yes, I do."

**2.** I did some more research on the Internet. There was no way I was going to get a social security number or a passport or even a driver's license. "The only I.D. I have is the body buried at Mt. Olivet cemetery," I told Norma, "and this."

I pointed to a candle across the room.

"Watch."

A flash of white energy shot from my brow and lit the candle.

"How did you do that?"

"Now watch this." This time I flashed the beam toward her, stimulating the sensations of a warm hug.

"Wow!" she giggled.

I went to the kitchen and, quickly searching this way and that, decided on an almost empty box of cereal, which I placed on the dining room table.

"See that cereal?"

She nodded yes in reply.

A flash and I had incinerated it to finest ash.

"How did you do that!" she said, tracing her fingers over the film of powdery ash, sweeping it off the table into one hand.

"I don't know," I said. "It happened in Other World. I don't know how I got the power. But I have it. Did you quit your job?"

"Tomorrow."

"This beam is worth millions, do you understand me? But I could be killed like Christ for having higher powers. That's why . . ."

The phone rang. Norma went to answer it on her TTY, and when there was no answer, we both knew it was someone at the door waiting to be buzzed up. A look from her to me was the only signal I needed to head for the walk-in closet in her bedroom.

Inside the closet, surrounded by her perfumed clothes on hangars, winter coats and summer dresses, shirts, blouses, and sweaters, some folded and neatly stacked on the shelves above the hangers, I felt like a boy hiding from a bully.

I listened. She opened the door. It was Unc. There was no danger he would come back to her bedroom as her sister might.

"Norma! You look great! I just dropped by to see how you were doing. Do you have some paper?"

He wanted to write notes back and forth to her.

"Thank you."

There was silence for a minute. Then, "No, no," he said. More silence. This time the silence went on for awhile. She was explaining to him that she was about to quit her job and move out west and I knew he wouldn't like it.

This seemed to take forever. I was tired of standing but didn't dare move for fear of making any noise.

Finally, "All right, all right, well, now if you need me for anything, call me. Please, Norma. Think about it. All right, bye. Bye."

The door closed with the finality of a judge's gavel.

**3.** I came out of the closet like a deep sea diver reconnoitering a wreck. Norma related to me what Unc had said with a single word, "Nothing."

"He said nothing?"

"He just wanted to see how I was, if I was all right. That was all."

I sat down and read the paper for a little while, my eyes glazed over with an emptiness that went back and forth from the newspaper to the TV. When I had had enough of this, I went into the kitchen and tapped Norma on the shoulder.

"I can't hide." She was busy getting dinner together. Rice simmered in a covered pot. Chicken legs sizzled in a cast iron frying pan.

"What about Gallaudet? Do you still want me to quit?"

"No," I said.

She checked the rice. The pan still had a little water in it, big white bubbles coming up. She turned down the heat."

"I have to tell Unc."

"I'm going to see him soon."

"When?"

"This weekend."

"Why?"

"Your mother wants to see me. I'm going to her house. He will be there."

"I will go with you." Then: "I can't! My mother is crazy. I can't tell her."

I started getting out the silverware to set the table, opening a drawer by Norma's hip. She was making a salad, the iceberg lettuce making rubbery sounds as she snapped off leaves and washed them in running water to make a salad.

I reached in a drawer by her hip and got out the silverware, then got some napkins and set the table, setting the plates out on the counter and filling a glass of milk for her and water for me.

When I came back to the kitchen, she was spooning the sticky white Korean rice onto our plates.

"I'll go with you. I'll tell both of them."

"Good," she said. She smiled a big smile: "Do you feel better?"

"Yes," I said.

**4.** I worked at a house in Silver Spring the next few days. We painted the entire interior. There was nobody in the house, no furniture, and the carpeting was all going to be removed, so it didn't matter if we spilled any paint.

Friday afternoon I got paid. Dave counted out the cash into my hand.

"Monday we've got something in Chevy Chase," he said.

"What's that?" I asked

"An old lady needs some work done."

"What kind of work?"

"Just some touch-up. I'll pick you up at 9:00 or 9:30, OK?"

He dropped me off at Silver Spring Metro. I never let him know exactly where I lived.

It was around 3:30 when I got home. Norma didn't get home till 5:30 or 6:00. I took a shower and put on a nice shirt and pants from Value Village. When Norma came in the door, I was seated on the couch in front of the television, watching the evening news.

Saturday Morning I was up at 5:00 A.M., watching the dawn come up while Norma slept. I had traveled to another world and back. I had even passed beyond the barrier of death, but I still had completely irrational fears of the personified figure of evil known as the Devil.

The concept might be childish, but the fear attached to it was not. It was real fear. And the images I saw reflected back to me in a mirror did nothing to allay that fear. They rather provoked and intensified it.

When afternoon came, around 1:00, after lunch, Norma and I piled into her Honda Civic for the trip over to Bethesda and my mother's house. I felt like a Marine in a troop carrier about to land on a heavily fortified enemy beach.

The grass on my mother's lawn needed to be mowed. It was high. When we pulled into the driveway, we could see that Unc had not yet arrived.

I wanted to just disappear. But I pressed the doorbell and waited. Mom cracked the door, as much as she could do with her arthritis, then awkwardly moving out of the way, threw it open.

The smile on her face at seeing Norma contorted into a half-frown at seeing me. Puzzlement, pain, even anger looked out at me through eyes like those that had once committed me.

"Mom, it's me, your son."

"What?"

She did not move to hug me, for she was still shocked. I stepped forward and hugged her.

"Mom, it's me, I'm still alive."

"Well, what do you mean, you're still alive?"

Hugging her went a long way toward restoring me to life in her eyes. "Well, who was it that we buried? That wasn't you? Where were you? We thought you died. Where have you been?"

We all went into the house. I led the way, an arm around my mother.

"I don't know how to explain it, Mom. But I'm not dead."

I went to her refrigerator and opened it. "What have we got to drink in here? Lemonade? Norma, want some lemonade?" I spoke while signing.

Just then Unc came in the door. He had a key to the house. When I heard the lock turn, I started, for it reminded me of my father coming into the house. I was afraid. No one had ever warned me about involuntary commitment. I was like a person who had been kidnapped, held hostage, and tortured. Violent recollections of the experience would be with me for life.

There was a fantasy in the form of a joke that went around when I was a kid that went, "They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho, hoo hoo." In the fantasy, somebody who was plainly nuts would be taken in a straitjacket to a mental asylum. But this nursery rhyme-like fantasy never even remotely suggested that the same drama could be enacted in dead earnestness on anyone who had the least amount of sense, could carry on a rational conversation, and could offer an explanation, however fantastic, for his or her ideas.

It was suddenly clear to me. No one would believe my story of death and resurrection. No one would believe I had gone to Other World and back.

"Katharine?"

"We're in here," Mom called out.

Unc came through the living room into the sun room where we were all seated around a table.

"Unc."

"Moody, my god, Moody?"

"It's me, Unc."

I rose from the table and, crossing to him, threw my arms around his neck and hugged him.

"I'm alive, Unc, I'm alive."

"Well, my word, Moody, my god, this is a surprise."

"Unc, I did die. But I've come back from death."

"How is that possible? What do you mean?"

"I will explain it to you, Unc. You can dig up the body. It's my body. The fingerprints and dental records will match, however they identify a body. But I'm not dead, I'm alive."

"Well, my word, my word."

Suddenly Unc appeared distant, cold. In that quiet way of his, he demonstrated to my mother by his demeanor that even he had doubts about my sanity.

"What was your birthday?"

I told him.

"Who is President?"

I told him.

"What was your father's name?"

"Domenic."

"What was your brother's name?"

"Delbert."

"What is my name?"

"Uncle Henry."

He looked at my mother, the two exchanging a look of satisfaction mixed with complete bewilderment. I turned to Norma and interpreted the questions he had asked me.

Unc took a seat at the table, still unable to regard me as his nephew.

"Now Moody, when you say you died, what do you mean by that?"

I saw immediately that this line of questioning would lead to no good, so I gently steered him in a new direction.

"Unc, believe me, you wouldn't understand what I've been through. But if you have any doubts, dig up the body and examine it."

I reached over and took Norma's hand, not bothering to interpret for her what I had just said.

"Well, who should we call?" my mother said. "I guess we should call the police."

"Yes, we should call the police," Unc said.

"Go ahead and call."

"Moody, where have you been? Where were you when we buried the body we thought was you?"

"Unc, I was with Norma."

"You mean, you knew we were going ahead with a funeral for someone who was not you and you were with Norma the whole time?"

"No, Unc, that is not true." I saw I was being backed into a corner. "Look, I'll write the whole thing out for you. I can't hope to explain it in a few words."

I turned to Norma and said, without voice, "He's asking me questions that show he doesn't believe me. Tell him you saw me before the funeral and then right afterward and that I explained the whole thing to you."

Mom had placed a writing pad and pen out on the table for Norma. I motioned for her to write her statement out. It would make more of an impact from her own hand than from signs followed by my interpretation.

"Norma's going to write something for you to tell you what I was doing during the funeral."

That shut Unc down and me down, too. We all fell into a bottomless silence while Norma wrote. When she finished, she pushed the pages she had written across the table to Unc.

He read them in silence. Then I read them. They told exactly what had happened from her point of view: I had warned her ahead of time that I would die and live again, then I had showed up immediately following the funeral. There was no doubt in her mind that what I said about my own death and resurrection was true.

Unc got on the phone: "Hello, Montgomery County Police? I'm afraid I have to report that my nephew, who we thought was deceased, has turned up very much alive."

**5.** Neither Mom nor Unc believed my tale of having traveled to and from another planet, but I was insistent that the body they buried be exhumed. When the coffin was opened, my former self, perfectly preserved, satisfied every test and, an exact identity having been established, no doubt remained that the unbelievable had occurred.

More tests followed, memory tests, to see whether I might somehow be an imposter. But my memory was now intact. The gaps which had opened up on Other World, making me unable to remember such simple things as a common prayer, now closed. I was my former self, but I was my former self with new knowledge.

Norma and I went ahead with our plans to get married.

"Let's get married at Gallaudet," I told her one afternoon. We were at her apartment and light dappled over the window blinds onto the back of her couch. We sat comfortably together, sharing a peace between us that was like a commingling of two sympathetic fields of humming force.

"Are you sure?" she said.

I wanted to get married in the Chapel.

"We can have Father Mat."

"OK," she said. "Where do you want to have the reception?"

"I don't know." Wow, a reception! Who would we invite? I guess Dave could come, my mother, Unc, Norma's sister in Bowie—what about her sister in Korea?

"We could have the reception at the Old Gym."

"What's that?"

"It's an old room in a very old building. It's really neat."

I loved the old buildings at Gallaudet. They were so steeped in the unwritten history of quiet suffering and profound joy.

"OK, we'll have it there."

"Let me see. We might have to pay, or it might be free. Let me see," she said.

The delight Norma took with each detail was not lost on me. I delighted also.

We went to see Father Mat at the Catholic Deaf Center in Landover Hills, Maryland, but not by showing up for mass. That the brother of Delbert Santo had passed away was already a well-known fact in the deaf community. And Norma and I were wary of creating a stir.

Norma called Father Mat.

"Moody is alive! GA"

"You mean, he is alive in heaven? GA"

"No, he is alive now. GA"

"What do you mean? GA"

She told him she would bring me to see him and he was plainly baffled. He had been to the wake and the funeral. There was nothing in science to suggest that a human being could return from the dead and there was certainly nothing in Christian doctrine except for the apocalypse, the end of time and the second coming of Christ, which, unlike certain of his contemporaries, Father Mat saw no signs of occurring now.

He wondered about Norma's health. Had the stress of the whole experience of Moody's death been too great on her?

"I will bring him to you. When you see him, you will believe me. GA"

It was late summer. And the scene was like a pastoral portrait of white, fluffy clouds, imperial blue sky, emerald leaves on overarching trees, and fresh, recently mowed grass that flowed around the stolid dark outlines of the Deaf Center like a stream of consciousness around some timeless, enchanted memory.

When Father Mat opened the door for us, his expression shifted from simple curiosity to shock.

"Father."

I stepped forward and embraced him in the doorway, the half-opened door leaning up against us.

"Moody, how can this be?"

"I am alive."

He ushered us into his living room.

"Have a seat, and please tell me, Moody? What has happened? How can you be alive?"

The living room, as I would call it, had a TV and several comfortable, cushion chairs, some bookshelves and a table. It was spare but not Spartan.

"Father, I can't explain to you what I've been through. I certainly can't explain it in terms of what I know about Christianity."

"Yes, Moody."

"But I am alive. That is as much as I want to tell people."

"I was at the wake. I saw your body."

"Yes, that was me. I can't explain it, but I continued to live in another world."

"And somehow you managed to come back. Well, that is certainly unbelievable."

"My mother and uncle had the body exhumed. The FBI did a DNA analysis, took fingerprints, and examined dental records of the cadaver: all evidence came back positive. It was my body."

The intensity of our communication hovered over us like a cloud upon a mountaintop.

"He came to me before he died and told me everything would happen as it did," Norma said.

Chills went up my spine and up the backs of my arms and shoulders.

I told him an abbreviated version of my story. He listened patiently, hardly saying a word. When I had finished, he said these words to me.

"Moody, I would keep that to myself. It's all right to tell me. But I must admit to you: I am baffled."

"Father, I'll just tell people that some mistake was made with the identification of the body that was thought to be mine. That's not a lie, is it?"

When he hesitated to reply, I added, "The body they buried . . . oh, I don't know."

"Don't say anything." Father raised his eyes toward me. "People thought you were dead, but you were alive. Neither you nor anyone else understands who was buried."

I wanted to ask him more about just exactly how I could pull this off.

"If they question you and want to know more about just exactly where you were when all this was going on, the wake, the funeral, and everything else, I would just tell them, that's a personal matter and leave it at that."

Like a person who finishes praying beside a grave, I felt resolved to meet my fate, whatever it might be.

"Father," my tone signaled a change in subject. "There's something Norma and I want to talk to you about."

"And what is that, Moody?"

"Norma and I want to get married."

I looked toward Norma. She looked toward Father and smiled.

"Well, we can certainly arrange to do that. When did you have in mind?"

**6.** One troublesome matter remained. In these pages I have confessed to the murder of Mr. Devel. However, the police investigation into his death revealed only that he disappeared without a single clue. To save myself from prosecution, I chose not to reveal to anyone other than Norma the strange power of the beam I had somehow obtained or developed in my life-and-death experience. And it remains a fiction in the eyes of the scientific world to this day. Whatever I might admit, absolutely no link, except for my own admission, could be established between me and the murder.

However, I wanted to confess what I had done before I got married. So I went to the National Shrine.

With that taken care of, I now felt free to receive the holy sacrament of matrimony and when the day came, a fall day, the weather was as warm and beautiful as the most happy blessing from heaven.

I was not to see Norma on our wedding day until she entered the church. That was a ritual she very strictly observed and so she slept at her sister's the night before the wedding.

She had made her own dress, all in white, a long train flowing behind her, a veil over her angelic face.

From where I stood at the altar, she looked like a member of royalty being escorted into the Chapel by a knight. Her brother-in-law, the deaf husband of her deaf sister, gave her away.

Dave stood beside me. I had chosen him as my best man. A small crowd of friends and relatives looked on.

Father Mat signed and talked, vows and rings were exchanged, a kiss and applause followed like a burst of red and gold leaves into cool sunny air.

We were married. And so it is said, a man will leave his mother and cling to his wife. I felt like we had always been married. The ritual only commemorated a fact already as real as biology.

**7.** After a honeymoon at Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, Norma and I returned to a new life together in her Silver Spring apartment. I became a subject of study at the National Institutes of Health in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.

I didn't believe I had mental illness. I believed my mind had been in the stages of developing new powers and what were called symptoms were actually elements of growth. Of course, I kept that opinion to myself.

I did not have to go back to Trudy Gluckstern. The NIH researchers got in touch with her and obtained my records.

"Do you think we can have a normal baby?" I asked Norma one afternoon.

"Of course we can," she said.

"Something happened to my body. I'm different."

I blew a hug her way with my beam. She had told me it left her with a pleasant tingly feeling all over. "But you're still a man."

"But am I a different species?"

That was the question being examined at NIH: what kind of child could Norma and I have? They checked my sperm count. It came up normal. Norma and I kept trying, and by November her period stopped.

We got one of the pregnancy test kits from the drug store and brought it home. There was a plastic stick like a thermometer with two windows in it. One window had a blue line down the middle. The other window was blank.

To do the test, Norma had to pee on one end of the plastic stick, then wait to see the results. If another blue line appeared in the blank window, she was pregnant and, sure enough, to our great joy we saw the telltale line.

"Congratulations!" I said, shaking my hands together to make the sign.

"I knew I was pregnant," she said.

"You've got to take care of yourself," I told her. "You've got to eat and rest and take care of yourself. There are two of you to think about now."

"That's right!" She positively beamed. "I'll have to get new clothes."

"Yes, we can get them. Anything you want."

What kind of baby would be born? If Norma and I were still of the same species, the baby itself would have to be able to reproduce. That is one of the rules for determining members of the same species, that they produce viable offspring.

The NIH program I was in paid me a small stipend that was actually better than the amount of money I had been making with Dave, so I no longer had to work. This stipend apparently came as part of the grant NIH got to make me a part of one of their studies. I didn't know all the details, but accepted the money gratefully.

Now the NIH campus is quite large and beautiful, its many buildings seeming to float like little islands upon a rolling sea of green grass and green leafy trees. I imagined labs with cages of monkeys and rats in ongoing experiments. From my school days, I remembered seeing one experiment where an electrode had been inserted inside a cat's brain. That kind of experiment seemed diabolical and I shuddered to think I might become the subject of a similar one.

Dr. Sophie Henchman was in charge of my case. The name was some kind of Americanization of a Russian Jewish name, whether a shortening of a Russian name that could be spelled as Henchman in English or an attempt at a translation of a Russian name that could be translated as henchman into English. I never understood clearly what the exact derivation of the name might have been. She might have simply chosen the name. But humorous as the name may have seemed, there was nothing laughable about the person. She was matter-of-fact serious, acknowledging no congruence between her name and any larger meaning.

To compound things, Dr. Henchman looked like Trudy Gluckstern. I mean, she was the same identifiable type of East European, fair-skinned Ashkenazi Jew, just as identifiable as a pretty American blond or a dark, Italian beauty. She was short, but she carried herself with such a sense of dignity that the shortness went unnoticed. The white lab coat she wore was a gentle reminder of her calling as a scientist, but also as a healer, for she carried not only a PhD but also an MD degree, formidable credentials for a woman who was no more than 50 years of age.

An intense, somewhat supercilious, graduate assistant, Denise, took notes during our meetings and generally followed Dr. Henchman around, attending to her every need.

Our first meeting was on a rainy, cold November day. Arriving on the campus by bus, I walked to Building 10 in the rain, quite a hike—I didn't know how to use the Campus Shuttle yet.

I wore a coat and tie with a beige raincoat my mother had bought me as a coming home present or staying alive present, or however you might like to call it. The blue blazer I wore had been my father's. I was still wearing old clothes of his that had come down to me after his death.

Dr. Henchman's office was like a professor's office at a university, only a little larger—like a Chairman's office at a university. She had a big desk cluttered with papers. A human skull rested on one corner of the desk. The desk was gun grey metal, not wood.

She had a few white view boxes for X-rays on one wall. Narrow window blinds opened to the drizzly scene just visible outside, a black iron staircase across a small lot rising to the back of an adjoining building.

"How do you do, Moody," Dr. Henchman said, taking my hand. "Have a seat."

I pulled a padded wooden chair back from just in front of her desk, glancing at Dr. Henchman's assistant, Denise, who was making herself comfortable in a similar chair.

"I've been going over the FBI data on your incredible case, Moody." She started to turn some pages in a folder in front of her. "Now by every indication the body identified as Moody Santo, date of death, March 2, 2000, was yours, and yet you are still alive." She smiled and looked at me, almost with admiration. "How can that be?"

"I can explain it, but I don't think you would believe my explanation."

"Try me."

Denise looked up at me through her quizzical glasses.

"Well, when I died, I entered a different dimension. By traveling from one dimension to another, or one set of dimensions to another, I traveled through space and time in ways that would be impossible to our present modes of transportation."

"Why do you think that?"

"You know, I don't think that. Listen, I don't have the slightest idea how what happened to me happened." Seeing that my audience had appreciated my use of irony in leading them on, I continued: "If anyone has an explanation, I'd be the first one to want to hear it."

They smiled and that motivated me to go on.

"I saw some pretty scary things, though."

"Really? Like what?" the doctor said.

"Like human beings controlled by aliens." This remark met with stolid silence, but it was more like the silence of an audience waiting to see some action on a stage than to counter or interrupt me, and I played into it, confident that I had things to say that would blow their minds.

"There was even some suggestion that one might have the choice in this other world of becoming an alien or staying human."

"What kind of alien are we talking about?"

"An alien that looks remarkably like many of the popular depictions in present movies—small, green, with long arms, a sunken chest and a huge brain. The way these aliens—they're called elders in Other World—are able to move through space, I don't doubt that people have seen them—I mean, in this reality—which is where our popular depictions come from–glimpses of these aliens for as fleeting a moment as a subliminal message planted in a reel of movie film. You know how that's done?" Both the doctor and her assistant nodded their heads along with me. "You take a few frames of movie film and put something on them that had nothing to do with the actual movie, but would not be seen for long enough to register on the conscious human mind . . ."

It seemed like the more I tried to explain this concept the more I was losing my audience. But maybe that was because I only half-believed what I was saying myself.

"Oh, forget it."

"No, I'm interested in hearing everything you have to say. As you were saying?"

"The more I say, the more you might think I'm nuts."

"The data I have suggest you are not delusional."

"I appreciate that," I said.

After we talked awhile, Dr. Henchman took my blood pressure and examined me. Denise took a sample of my blood.

"You've got good veins," Denise said.

I was slender but muscular and the blue veins inside my elbows stood out as in a phlebotomist's dreams.

"I want to schedule you for a CT scan," Dr. Henchman said. "Next week."

"Sure," I said. "Want to see if my brain exhibits the hyperactivity of a schizophrenic?"

The doctor all but ignored this question, attempting to answer it with a good-natured smile.

### III

**1.** The baby. It was all coming down to the baby. How would it turn out? Would it even be born? Norma's pregnancy proceeded normally.

She gained weight. But like most women with a first pregnancy, her stomach didn't bulge much. The muscles were too strong and tight.

She too was under observation at NIH, though not by my doctor. It was after the third month, I think, that her doctor assisted me in listening to the baby's heart. It beat with such strength, rapidity, and force I felt as if it were almost commanding me to prepare its rightful place in the world. Immensely powerful, a gift from God, the baby still needed me, just as even the greatest human being still has the simplest human needs.

The next milestone was when the baby kicked inside the womb. It is all a blur to me now. Was that during the fourth month? It is hard to remember. I read _The Little Engine That Could_ as loud and expressively as I could into the bare mound of Norma's belly with the hope of providing some education and entertainment to my future son or daughter.

After five months, we had an amniocentesis. Although her chances of giving birth to a defective baby were increasing, at 33 Norma was still at a relatively safe age for giving birth to a healthy baby. That was not the main reason for the test.

The doctors wanted to see what kind of being would be born: I knew. So they crowded into the room to observe the ultrasound.

I watched the sinewy skeletal form leap within the murky depths of Norma's abdomen.

"It's a boy," the technician said. "See the penis."

I saw and just as quickly signed the news to Norma. The long thin needle was inserted into Norma's belly, a small amount of fluid being extracted from the fluid filled sac around the fetus.

Norma made not a sound, nor even flinched. The fluid would be tested for genetic and chromosomal abnormalities and some DNA testing would be done.

But I was still worried about the two things Norma and I had been warned about: possible injury to the fetus and possible miscarriage.

"Did it hurt?" I asked Norma, as soon as I got a chance.

"Not bad," she answered. In stress situations of this kind, she became very weary and extremely passive.

"It's a boy. What do you think?"

"Great," she said. She appeared to be exhausted.

"You can tell her that we will let you know the results in about a week. It takes about a week for the tests to be done," the technician said.

Because of the pervasive shadows of the darkened room, the technician in her uniform was no more than a blur of white to me, her face a blur, even her voice nothing but a blur.

"Congratulations," Dr. Henchman said as the doctors filtered out of the room like a receding wave around some object left upon the shore.

"Thank you," I said. "Why all the doctors?"

"They're interested in your case."

"OK, you can get dressed," the technician said to Norma.

"I'll see you later," the doctor said. "Congratulations." She leaned toward Norma, mouthing the words with exaggeration.

Norma smiled and nodded her head.

**2.** That first day I had gone to see Dr. Henchman, she had put me back on medication.

"Let's see, you were taking lithium, sinequan, and risperdal, right?" she said, looking down at my records on her cluttered desk.

"That's correct," I said, crestfallen. I believed that I was now another person, a new person, and that whatever need I may have had for such medicines was now a part of my past.

"What were you taking the sinequan for?" she asked.

"Anxiety," I said.

"Do you have a lot of anxiety?"

As Denise looked on, I realized the right answer was, "No, not anymore."

"Let's see if we can stop the sinequan. As many medicines as you don't need, we can stop."

"I've been off medicines for some time now," I said, "and I've been fine."

In spite of the sympathetic audience they had shown for my claims to have been to Other World and back, both listened impassively to this assertion.

"You were really on a low dose of lithium. Three pills a day. What did you do, take two in the evening, one in the morning?"

"Yes."

"We'll try you on that.

"You're on a low dose of risperdal, one milligram, twice a day. I want you to keep taking that, one in the morning, one at night."

"That's for psychosis," I said, "and I believe I'm fine."

"Once in the morning, once at night," she replied impassively. It was no use arguing. "How am I going to pay for these medicines? They cost a lot of money."

"We will provide them to you, free of charge," she said, "as part of the program you are in."

Taking medicine was bondage. It meant your brain, of all things, was not right, and that was very hard to accept, since the brain was the very seat of a person's whole identity.

Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy, I thought, remembering a line from Wordsworth's poem. In certain ways I was like a child in a new world. If only I hadn't killed the psychiatrist, I could demonstrate my beam. Then I could dispense with these medicines like Jesus upturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. The analogy made no sense, but neither did having to take medicine when I was perfectly all right.

Even if I revealed the beam, I would have to take medicine. I was sure of it. No, revealing the beam was no easy way out. It was a sure ticket for the kind of persecution Jesus endured. Some people would exalt me for having it; others would want to destroy me.

Each of us is Jesus, I thought to myself. I had died and been reborn. I had been resurrected. I had risen from the dead. The fate of Jesus seemed to be inescapable. The doctrine that he had died for our sins only made sense as an example that we too would live to die for the sins of others.

Such were my thoughts. When I shared them with Norma, she said simply, "Tell them."

"What do you mean?"

"Tell them about your beam."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I did something. I can't tell them about it."

"What?"

We both sat on the sofa, folding laundry. The television flickered across the room.

I found the mate to a white sock of hers. The socks had greyish stains on the bottoms: she really needed new socks.

"You know, when I came back from Other World. Remember that?"

"Yes," she said, folding a pair of my underwear. I wore boxers. It often sounded like she said, "Deh," for yes, which would be yes in Korean.

"Remember I asked you to help me find an address with your computer program from work? Remember that?"

"Yes," she said.

The shadows in the apartment seemed to gather around me, light falling into the room only from the kitchen, where the light was on, and from the TV across the room. It was late.

"That man committed me," I said. "He was the one." I checked her response like a doctor checking her pulse. "He was the one."

"He was the man who threw you into a mental illness hospital."

"Yes," I said. "I killed him with my beam."

That seemed not to get too much of a response. She went on folding clothes, so I repeated what I had said, even more forcefully, "I killed him," I said, making the sign for kill like shoving a knife into his imaginary body. "I destroyed him. I destroyed every part of him so that there was nothing left. There is nothing left of him. He's dead."

"The way you destroyed that cereal box?"

"Yes," I said, "the same way, the same way."

Looking up at me with a mixture of admiration, awe, and foreboding, she said, "He was a bad man. He was E-V-I-L." Then, "What will you do?"

"I can't reveal the beam," I said. "If I do, the police will make the connection between the E-V-I-L man's death and my power."

"Did you have to kill him?"

"I had to. He had to die for what he did to me. He had to die."

"I thought you said he was old. He would die anyway."

I said nothing more. No one would ever know or understand what he had done to me and no one would ever know or understand what I had done to him.

**3.** Norma and I busied ourselves with the application for her green card. It was merely a matter of filling out the right forms. Since I was a U.S. citizen, her marriage to me guaranteed her the right to become a lawful permanent resident, which meant she could stay here as long as she wanted, and work, and enjoy all the rights of living in America, except the right to vote.

"I hate Korea," she had said, many times. "They discriminate against deaf people. In America deaf people have everything."

If she wanted to expound upon the good of coming to America, I would let her. But after what had happened to me in this country, I was not impressed. Still, I did not argue with her.

"Foreigners come to this country and do things," she said proudly. "Big fat Americans sit back in front of their TVs and eat potato chips."

She was actually disdainful of Americans in a way I found amusing, but the portrait she painted of what appeared to her as exceedingly bright, ambitious "foreigners" taking the utmost advantage of every available opportunity looked to me like a nightmare of greedy, self-aggrandizing parasites feeding off the polluted blood of a worried beast.

Mainly, she hated Korea: "They don't have TTYs in Korea. They don't have closed-captions on television."

There was nothing I needed to say in reply to her anger.

"The men come home from work and sit back like a king and read the paper." She mimicked the lordly homeowner in his castle after work, regally turning the pages of a newspaper.

"My father did the same thing," I said.

"The women serve them. They start cooking in the afternoon and cook all day to prepare Korean food. It's not like here where you have simple things. Over there, they have many different dishes. It takes hours to prepare a meal."

"Wow," I said, a Korean meal sounded good to me. I liked Korean food. But it was over for me. I mean, America. I believed I could be just as happy if I lived in Korea. I had lost my honor. The rest of my life I would live as an outcast in dishonor and disgrace. But there was no use telling Norma this.

"I like Korea," I said. "The women are beautiful. The food is great."

To my mind, we lived in an Age of Betrayal. There was the betrayal of the Vietnam War, the betrayal of Nixon and Watergate, the betrayal of marriage—a 50 percent divorce rate—the betrayal of religion by myth criticism and of Catholicism by the sexual scandals in the Church. There was the betrayal of my involuntary commitment and the destruction of everything I ever knew or believed in, the betrayal of being stigmatized for life as mentally ill: no matter how much medicine I took, no matter how many hours of talk therapy I endured, no matter how much I may have loved Norma or become excited over the prospect of having a son, nothing could take away this sense of betrayal.

"In Korea, deaf people are the same as retarded people. They are thought to have no mind," Norma said.

"Really," I said. "Yeah, you told me that. That's terrible."

I couldn't help but be fascinated by the paradox that she loved the place I hated, and yet we still loved each other.

"You are way behind." She meant I was way behind my peers. "You made some big mistakes," she went on.

"You mean, leaving Landon School?" I had dropped out after fourth form (tenth grade). Landon was an exclusive boys' prep school I had gone to in Bethesda. I had been an honor student, excelling in athletics, even in my final year there. But I had dropped out in order to go to school with blacks. I was fascinated by blacks—I was in love with blacks—and so I enrolled in a Catholic School with a 50 percent black student body. The school had nothing of Landon's reputation or prestige.

"You were crazy."

She was picking on me, but no less severely than my own conscience.

"Yes, I was crazy."

We were getting around to the subject of Landon School because a large part of both of us wanted our unborn son to go there.

"Our son will never go there," I said.

"Why?"

"It costs around $30,000 a year. We can't afford it."

"A scholarship." Norma tilted her face up toward me by the refrigerator and smiled, wiggling a fist out from her jaw in the sign for scholarship.

"If they found out I have mental illness, they would never accept us." This remark seemed to cast her in shadow and her playful expression changed to one of dismay. "Oh, sure, they would say that wasn't the reason, but that would be it. They would never accept us."

It wasn't just the child who was accepted at a place like that, the parents had to be accepted too. I remembered the interview I had gone to with my mother almost thirty years before. It was an interview between the director of admissions and my mother and me. Yes, I had taken an entrance exam by myself, but my father later told me that the reason I got into the school was that a very powerful Landon benefactor, who happened to be a colleague and friend of my father's and who himself had two sons at the school, arranged for me to get in.

"You should have never left there," Norma said.

"If I'd have never left there, I wouldn't have become mentally ill and I never would have met you."

"You might have met me through your brother." She looked a little hurt and angry by what I'd said.

"I hung around Gallaudet because of mental illness." It was true. Had I been conventionally successful in the hearing world, I would probably have had much less to do with Delbert than I even did. "Had I been successful in the hearing world, you would have never seen me." I was angry that this was so but I went on anyway: "I would have been married to a hearing woman and had five kids by now. I'd be a doctor. I'd be a member of a country club, the whole thing, just like my father."

"You should have done it."

"You mean, you don't love me?"

"I love you. I just don't like to see you suffer."

### IV

**1.** Norma was getting big. She was about in her seventh month and the folks at NIH decided to hold a baby shower for her. I was hard put to find some reason to distrust them for it.

Dr. Henchman and Denise came, then, on Norma's side, her doctor—Dr. Ortiz—came, my mother came, Unc came, even Dave came. There were balloons, plenty of food laid out on a big table, and gifts, which Norma opened one at a time in front of everyone. Lab technicians, nurses, and file clerks who knew us also stopped by and joined in the celebration. There was a good crowd.

"Congratulations!" Dr. Henchman said to Norma. "I wish I knew how to sign."

Norma smiled, shaking the doctor's hand, as I interpreted what she had said.

"That's all right," said Norma. "No need, no need."

"But I wish I had learned." Dr. Henchman shook her head. Norma seemed to bring out the best in people, as if to make a deaf person smile were good luck. "Everybody should know sign language. It's really a universal language."

To make the concept of universal understandable to Norma, whose native language was neither English nor American Sign Language, I interpreted it as "It's a language for everyone."

Norma simply nodded her head, continuing to smile with all the graciousness of the Virgin Mother answering a prayer. She raised her hand up to flex her fist up and down in the sign for "Yes."

"Now is sign language the same all around the world?"

I was now in the difficult position of knowing the answer to this question as I interpreted it.

"No, different," Norma said.

"Different: how about that? You mean Korean Sign Language is different from American Sign Language?" Dr. Henchman's fascination with the subject pleased me. Deaf people were really "in," at least in certain circles, even if they couldn't find a decent job. Still, they had come a very long way in the last two hundred years.

"Yes, it is different," Norma signed and I interpreted, adding excitedly: "Norma knows English, American Sign Language, Korean, and Korean Sign Language, all those languages. She is very smart."

I was proud of her. I was proud to be married to her. I was proud we were having a son. The colorful decorations, smiles, and animated chatter around the room, all for Norma, me and our future child, reinforced my pride and I positively beamed with it.

"I should say she's smart," Dr. Henchman said.

Dr. Henchman wanted me to stay on medicine, considered me mentally ill, and, despite all evidence to the contrary—the fiber analysis, the FBI lab reports—continued to regard me and my story with skepticism, but I felt, more and more, that I could trust her.

What was plainly different about her from other psychiatrists and psychologists I had known was that she liked me. This came through to me in all her communication.

"Congratulations," Denise said to Norma, shaking Norma's hand. The presents had been opened and people stood around, ate, drank soda or coffee, and talked.

Denise was from Wisconsin and talked with the nasal accent distinctive of that part of the country.

"Thank you," said Norma, smiling.

"This is D-E-N-I-S-E," I said, almost not remembering her name. "She works with Dr. Henchman." The sign Norma and I had agreed on for Henchman was an H waved in the air.

"Nice to meet you," said Norma.

"D-E-N-I-S-E gave us those clothes for the baby. You know the ones I mean?"

Norma knew. She knew immediately from the card that had come with the gift and she thanked Denise several times over.

"Hope they fit. They're so little, like a little toy."

It was amazing to me that this totally studious and scientific woman could suddenly become so personable.

What I had done to Devel was not a sin. I had no regrets, only that I had not got to him sooner. He deserved to die. What he had done to me, he had no doubt done to others. And like me they had had no way—there was no system in place—to redress such wrongs. That was all right, though. That was all right.

One night I told Norma, as we were lying in bed, before we turned out the light to go to sleep, "I told you about D-E-V-E-L. You're the only one on Earth besides me who knows."

"Did you have to kill him?"

The slightest pause was all I gave by way of answer to her remark: "You can tell our son I killed a man. He's the only one you can tell."

"You can tell him."

"If I live long enough, I will," I said.

"Too much stress makes a short life," she said.

A patchwork quilt covered our queen-sized bed as in some cozy country cottage. Hanging down beside my side was a tulip-shaped light on a chain, with blue, white, and pink glass shades in a Tiffany, metal frame. It was a light I had preserved from my boyhood, and it showered down a mist-like flame of radiance around us.

"Don't talk about death."

"Why?"

"I should know something about it, but I don't."

"You said you died. What did you learn?"

"I learned that there are surprises ahead for us."

I realized at that moment that I was happier in the present life, with all its ills, than I was in Other World, with all its beauty, mystery, or whatever else one might say could distinguish or define it.

"We can choose to be human," I said. "That is what I learned."

"Sounds scary."

The soft white mist of light created a chiaroscuro portrait of Norma in her nightgown as if she were painted before my adoring view by the hand of a Flemish master.

"There is nothing more beautiful than a man, a woman, and a child," I said. "That is the direction humanity must go. Toward that beauty."

I reached out and took her hand.

**2.** They were taking regular blood samples from me. Whenever I asked for an explanation, I got a run of medical jargon that went by me like a rush of traffic at a busy intersection.

The emotional content of the message would make sense. Whether Dr. Henchman, Denise, or some other assistant or doctor spoke, she or he delivered the message with an energy and enthusiasm that could not be doubted.

Norma was nearing the completion of her seventh month. Now all our thoughts were on avoiding a premature birth. Norma had put on too much weight, the bulk of it water. Her legs and ankles were swollen.

"So tell me," I said to Dr. Henchman one day in her cluttered office, looking momentarily toward the skull upon her desk, "what do you think? You've listened to my story; you've tested me physically and psychologically. You've observed and tested Norma. Do you think the baby will be normal?"

"The baby should be fine," Dr. Henchman said.

She didn't sound so sure.

I had never revealed the power of my beam to anyone but Norma. The revelation of a power of that kind, with all its mythical implications, could turn me into a hunted beast.

However, I knew that science had uncovered absolutely no hint of the beam's existence, even with all the most sophisticated tests. I did continue to emit the beam at very low-energy levels, for it involuntarily flowed from me in moments of excitement, and a lot more frequently than occasional rushes of static electricity, but these emissions escaped notice.

I tried to read up on electromagnetism in order to try and understand something of the physical basis for the power I had.

"Do you understand E-L-E-C-T-R-O M-A-G-N-E-T-I-S-M?" I asked Norma one day.

She asked me to spell it again. When I had finished, she answered, "No."

Her answer didn't surprise me.

"A man named L-U-I-G-I G-A-L-V-A-N-I once did experiments to study the relationship between animals and electricity."

Norma listened, waiting for me to go on.

"I don't think this beam of mine is electrical." It was easier to make the sign for electrical than spell out electromagnetism again.

Norma went back to making dinner at the sink. I tapped her on the shoulder.

"My theory is: a burst of energy from the front of the brain reflects off the back wall of the skull and propels forward through the eye sockets. Or a signal from the front of the brain sends a message back to the C-E-R-E-B-E-L-L-U-M which causes a burst of energy from the back of the brain that simply passes through the frontal part of the skull."

Norma lifted a strainer of green beans from under a tap of running water and shook it lightly, then set it on the counter.

"Everyone should have this beam at weak levels," I said. "It's just in an undeveloped form." Norma went to the stove and stirred a pan simmering with pasta. I crossed behind her and opened the oven, using a mitten to pull out the top rack. I carefully turned two broiling trout, then pushed the rack back in and closed the oven door.

"But if it is present in all people, someone would have found evidence for it in one of those E-L-E-C-T-R-O-E-N-C-E-P-H-A-L-O-G-R-A-P-H (E-E-G) machines, if not on purpose then by accident."

"Maybe they have," she said.

"True, I haven't read enough. I wish I knew more. But this makes me think the beam may not be E-L-E-C-T-R-O-M-A-G-N-E-T-I-C."

I led Norma to the table and got her seated, then prepared all the dishes and carried everything in. With a flash of my beam, I lit a candle on the table. It was one of those cheap candles from the grocery store I had bought on a whim, a long narrow glass painted with a colorful image of Jesus.

"How do you feel?" I said.

She made the sign that she was tired, bringing her hands up to touch the inside of her shoulders and then pivoting them on her fingers like she was loosening the straps of a burden.

"How's the baby?"

"Feels good," she said. "He kicks a lot in the morning. Right now he's quiet."

"What should we name him?"

"I don't know."

"Are you hungry?"

We had started to eat. Eating and signing was awkward. In order to eat and still pay attention, I often found it necessary to pick up food from my plate with only the quickest look down to see what I was picking up.

"Let's name him M-A-X-W-E-L-L after J-A-M-E-S C-L-E-R-K M-A-X-W-E-L-L. He discovered E-L-E-C-T-R-O-M-A-G-N-E-T-I-C radiation."

"M-A-X-W-E-L-L S-A-N-T-O," she spelled out with her fingers.

"We can name him M-A-X-W-E-L-L D-A-N-T-E S-A-N-T-O," I fingerspelled back to her. "D-A-N-T-E traveled through H-E-L-L, P-U-R-G-A-T-O-R-Y, and heaven. I only went through what seems to have been P-U-R-G-A-T-O-R-Y."

Norma looked up at me with the interest of an inquisitive empress who, poking her nose out of an exquisite palanquin, so fancied my sketchy projection of our son's greater chances for achievement, she smiled with the placid beauty of grey-green celadon.

"M-A-X-W-E-L-L D-A-N-T-E S-A-N-T-O. Yes, I like that."

She reached across the table and took my hand.

**3.** Now we had all the baby's gifts in our apartment. We had a little bath; we had a swing (Unc gave us that); we had tiny little clothes—little one-piece, jumper outfits of beige and blue; we had diapers—we planned to use disposable diapers, in spite of our being told that they were ecologically unfriendly; we had a few little toys—a rattle or two; Mom gave us a car seat; and, best of all, we had a papoose for carrying the baby on our chest when we went out. I had seen others out and about with a papoose. In Korea, the custom was for the mother to wrap the baby to her back with a simple cloth, nothing so elaborate as one of these manufactured American items. Norma assured me that the baby wouldn't fall out or feel neglected on the mother's back. American Indians and Koreans both carried their babies on their back and were both tough peoples. I wondered if that had anything to do with it.

I told Dr. Henchman about this theory.

"The Indians may have migrated from Asia," she said. "Maybe that's where the Indians got their custom."

I was staring at the skull on her desk: "What will it take for you to believe that my experience in Other World was real and not a fantasy?"

"Oh, I don't know. I haven't made up my mind."

"You mean, you think what I've experienced might be real?"

"Your experience was real. Experience is always real for the perceiver, isn't it?"

She was evading my questions, and it was clear she didn't believe I had gone to Other World and returned. To her the whole experience was an elaborate hallucination, a dream, including the remains that had been dug up in corroboration of my story. The whole thing could be explained with some simple scientific explanation which all came down to one incontrovertible fact: I was mentally ill.

The pressure of Maxwell's coming birth was on me. I was going to become a father. To my way of thinking, I was no longer mentally ill. That may have been a part of my identity, but if it was at all true, it was no more an adequate classification of me than to say I was a carpenter or a democrat. I was a person and, all the professed acknowledgment and salubrious lip service paid to that fact by the hypocrites of Dr. Henchman's profession never seduced me from the knowledge that I would never be a person in the eyes of anyone who ever knew I had had the least association with mental illness. I had been tarred and feathered and carried out on a rail. My word was as good as dirt.

"What I said seems to have shut you down."

My silence had become noticeable. I was angry. What about the beam? What if I showed her the beam? To hell with Devel!

"Do you see that skull on your desk?"

"Yes."

"Is that precious to you?"

"Actually, it was here before I came to this office. I don't know whose it was. It was simply left here. So I adopted it." She smiled.

"Now what if I told you that I can project a beam of energy from my brain that could disintegrate that skull? I mean, destroy it, completely destroy it? And what if I told you I got that beam from Other World. Would you believe me if I showed you that beam?"

"Well, I . . . I don't know."

"You mean, even that wouldn't prove to you that what I've been telling you is true?"

"Look, Moody, I never said that what you're saying it not true for you. I'm saying that what is true for you might not be true for me. There might be some other explanation for me than the one that works for you."

"You've seen the body that was dug up. It was me. You've seen the fiber analysis of the tunic taken from the corpse and the fibers could not be identified. What is more, they were not even formed by carbon atoms and not all the elements that made up the fibers were known. But that is not enough for you."

"Look, Moody, you're upset. What upset you?"

"I'm upset because I'm going to become a father and I'm tired of living with the shame of being considered mentally ill."

"There's nothing shameful about it."

"That's what you say."

"I don't want my son growing up to think his father was crazy."

Was I going to reveal the beam? A moment ago I had almost done it. Now that the moment had passed, I felt like I had escaped making a revelation I might have forever regretted. But suddenly I remembered my son. It had taken millions of years, even billions of years, of evolution to get to me and my son over the course of the incredible journey my ancestors had made through all the fantastic trials of their suffering and endurance, loss and triumph—from a beginning where even God seems to have been unconscious, suspended in a timeless zone of uncaring oblivion, to now, when the whole of my own precious life would be blotted out with the stigma of being mentally ill. But my life was far from over. I was a living man—I was not yet a ghost.

"In Other World, I developed a power," I said, feeling a rage build inside of me like a fighter's when climbing into the ring for a championship bout.

"What kind of power?"

"A power you will not believe to be real, but which I can assure you is real."

"Can you show me the power?"

"What if that skull disappeared? Would you be upset?"

"You mean, if somebody stole it?"

"No, I mean, if it disappeared. Could you get another one?"

"Oh, I suppose I could. Look, Moody, what are you talking about?"

A flash hurtled from my brain to the skull and dissolved it from her desk just as thoroughly as if it had never been there. Only the finest particles, indistinguishable from dust, remained as evidence that the skull had ever had an existence.

**4.** So far, nothing about Devel had come up. I had dissolved one object after another in front of the most skeptical witnesses. Eventually, the story reached the public through an article in the _Bethesda Gazette_.

I was wary of revealing too much about myself. The reporter was about 28-years-old, blond, the kind of woman who would be attractive only if you were the focus of her interest, but otherwise who would go unnoticed if passed on a city street.

She interviewed me in Dr. Henchman's office at NIH.

"Do you mind telling me how old you are?" She asked this question with a smile, as if it might somehow be illegal to ask me, or as if I didn't really have to answer.

"I don't tell my age."

I looked at least fifteen years younger than my real age, so I was fed up with being considered naive. If she wanted to think I was 25, that was all right with me.

"How long have you lived in Washington?"

"Actually, I was born in Bethesda, but my family lived in Northwest Washington at the time. I lived up until the age of four in Northwest, then we moved to the suburbs. I have lived in the Washington area all my life."

"Where do you work?"

"I thought you were here to ask me about my beam?"

"Well, I am. I just wanted to get some background information about you. Our readers would be very interested."

"I'm a very private person. If you have any questions about the beam, I'd be glad to answer them."

"I understand from Dr. Henchman that you have a power of sending a beam of energy from your brain that can dissolve objects."

"That is correct."

She inhaled, almost with a sigh, as if about to go over the first hill of a roller coaster.

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know."

"Have you always had this power?"

"No, I developed it recently."

"How recently?"

"About the past year or so."

"Was there any reason, I mean, what caused the beam to develop in you?"

"I have no idea."

"Dr. Henchman informed me that you have a history of mental illness."

My opinion was that the newspapers had no right to publish a person's medical history without that person's permission, and I told her so: "You say history of mental illness like I was a criminal."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean that."

"Not even criminals want to be considered mentally ill," I said.

"Yes, there is a stigma to it, isn't there?" She had become serious. The smile was gone, the giddy attitude of riding the roller coaster seemed gone also, but this was just a swerve where she could collect herself.

"Dr. Henchman says the beam seems not to be electromagnetic and there is some question whether it might be some kind of hoax. Are you pulling the wool over people's eyes?"

I laughed. "I can assure you the beam is not a hoax. Would you like to see me demonstrate it for you?"

"Sure."

She had been taking notes on a spiral pad, so I said, "Why don't you tear a page out of your notebook and hold it up in the air in front of you. I won't touch it. You can get as near or far from me as you please."

"This is fine," she said.

Now she seemed as intense as a student taking an exam. She opened up her notebook, tore out a page, and held it up. "Is this good," she asked.

"Whatever you like."

We were seated in the two wooden chairs in front of Dr. Henchman's desk, facing each other. A bolt flickered from my brow. The page she had been holding disappeared.

"How did you do that!" she exclaimed, turning over the piece that remained within her fingers.

"My God, I've never seen anything like this! You are unbelievable!"

"Thank you."

The article showed up somewhere toward the back of the paper as a curiosity for the city of Bethesda, but when I got a call on my answering machine from _The Tonight Show_ , I realized I had interested a national audience and that felt deeply flattering. There was still the Devel business to think about. I needed to talk with Norma.

It was spring. The leaves burst out of their buds like successive stages of a rocket bound for another solar system. The air was as cool as the inside of a refrigerator held open on a warm summer's day.

Our apartment was as fresh and new as the crystalline air that seemed to stream in like fragrant water down golden rays of glittering sun as over the eaves of an Oriental palace, the Palace of Shining Happiness, in Seoul.

When Norma came in with a few plastic bags of groceries, I quickly jumped up from the couch, where I had been watching TV, and went to take them from her, while shaking my head with a half-smile, half-awestruck look of amazement. Norma headed for the bathroom.

I set the groceries on the kitchen floor. She had bought some milk, so I immediately put that away; some cereal for breakfast—I liked that—it had almonds in it; some bread: I crumpled up the plastic, grocery bags, stuffed them in a shopping bag under the counter, and then came out to reveal my news. I could hardly contain myself.

"We got a call!"

She was seated, going through the paper, but she understood my excitement meant the revelation of something big. I could see that because she dropped the paper and gave me her full attention.

"What?"

" _The Tonight Show_ called. You know _The Tonight Show_? That show with the Italian man who has grey hair, the funny man?"

"Yes, I know it."

"They want me to go on TV—national TV!"

"Will you go?"

"Yes! I can't believe it. Yes, I will go."

"What about the psychiatrist, the one you killed? What if people find out?"

"Jesus." I slumped down in a chair. "I can't get away from that." Looking at the way the light streamed into the room through the windows, I remembered some lines from a poem I had written: The glass sweeps the light at the window panes as the bow the strings of a violin . . .

When I called _The Tonight Show_ , I got a woman on the phone who seemed to recognize me right away; her tone had a levity about it I wanted to share.

"Yes, Mr. Santo," she said, "someone sent us a headline from a little article in a Bethesda paper that read, 'H.G. Wells' Martian Lives Again in Bethesda Man.'"

I confessed that the article was about me. The article alluded to my power as something like that of the Martian heat-ray in _The War of the Worlds_.

"How would you like to come on the show and talk about it?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I normally don't give interviews or make public appearances."

She could not persuade me to change my mind.

The next day I told Dr. Henchman that I did not give her permission to talk about my case—I had given her permission before. A mistake.

But nothing happened. Reporters continued to call for interviews. I ignored their calls. The answering machine was full of them: _The St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ , the _Chicago Sun Times_ , the _Miami Herald_ , the _L.A. Times_ , the _Washington Post_.

**5.** I had to see Father Mat. He had told me to make a confession, and I had meant to. I had known what had happened to Gilman, Turi, and Biggie: Father Mat had absolved me of any guilt in their deaths. But Devel was a different matter.

And so it was that Norma and I once again made the trip out to the Catholic Deaf Center in Landover Hills to meet with Father Mat, the only priest I ever knew, beside my great uncle, who could connect me through his own goodness and decency to a holiness that goes beyond any one religion and is part of all religions. Yes, through knowing him I could say I was a Catholic and not feel as if I were excluding over half the world's population but rather including it.

As we took our now accustomed chairs inside the living room, I started talking before even taking a seat, "Father, remember, you told me to confess what I knew about the death of D-I-C-K G-I-L-M-A-N and the others in New York?" I knew he did remember and he simply looked at me in a way that said, yes. I went on: "I meant to, but I never got to it." I looked down at the carpet. It was a dull, institutional grey. "Father, when I got back from Other World, I was angry." I had all my attention focused on Father Mat but I still signed for Norma's benefit, just as he would and did. "I had a power I didn't tell you about. I got it from Other World. I don't know how I got it. But I got it." I almost thought I might have offended him with the roughness of my communication style, but if I did, he showed no sign of having taken offense. His face simply shone at me like a saint's: "I could dissolve things with a beam of energy from my brain." But that was not my point, and so I hurried on: "I killed the psychiatrist who involuntarily committed me to a mental ward. I killed him with this beam."

He raised no objection to what I had said, such as that it takes two doctors to commit a person and that one person could not possibly have committed me.

"I went to his house. N-O-R-M-A gave me his address. I mean, I used a computer program of hers to get his address. I know you won't believe me."

I got up, crossed the room, and, taking a brochure from a table, crossed back across the room and handed the brochure to him. "I don't expect you to believe me. But I can prove to you that I have this beam."

I crossed back to my seat and stood behind it. "OK now Father, hold up that brochure."

"You mean, just hold it up? Like this?"

He had it right out in front of him, to the side of his head.

"I'm going to make that brochure disappear."

"OK."

I did what I always did to shoot the beam. It was a half conscious, half unconscious process, but this time nothing happened.

"Just a minute." I wiggled a little like an athlete trying to loosen up and tried again. Nothing.

"I don't know what's wrong. This has never happened before." I tried again. I tried several times.

"Well, Father, I don't know what's happened." To Norma, I said, "You've seen it. Tell him."

"I saw him dissolve a box of cereal."

"She saw me many times."

"He could light a candle with his beam."

"All right, all right, I believe you," Father said.

So he, Norma, and I all agreed that we would go to the police together for me to inform them what had happened in New York and to confess what had happened to Devel.

The next day, we all went together to Bethesda Station. Inside a room with scarred green walls and a brown tile floor, a corpulent policeman with a mouth shaped like a large mouth bass, took a seat behind a battered brown desk and said, "Now, what have you got to tell me?"

Father Mat, Norma, and I all sat in brown, straight-backed chairs in front of his desk.

I said: "I know who killed Dick Gilman."

"No, you don't." He unfolded his hands in front of him and made as if to sweep a spec of dust off the top of the battered desk with the back of a pudgy hand.

"What do you mean?"

"The case is closed. Now what else have you got to tell me?"

"I want to make a confession."

"OK, what's your confession?"

"I killed Dr. Emmanuel Devel."

"Oh yeah? How?"

"I shot a beam of energy at him from my brain and dissolved him."

He looked at me wide-eyed.

"I had this beam up until recently. Now I no longer have it. But I can assure you I killed him with it."

"Is this what you came here to tell me?" He turned his attention to Father Mat. "Father, with all respect, what do you make of this?"

"He told me exactly what he told you."

"Are you a witness?"

"No, sir, I am not. I can only go by what he's told me."

"And what about her? Is she a witness?"

"Are you a witness?" I interpreted for Norma.

"No," I said, interpreting her sign.

The policeman recommended I get psychiatric help. I told him I was in a program at NIH and I reminded him that I was in such a program because my own body had been buried, and yet I continued to live.

"Stay with your program at NIH," he said.

"You mean, you're not going to arrest me?"

"Stay with your program at NIH."

### V

**1.** "I'm all wet."

"Your water broke."

I had turned on the light so we could see what we were saying. It was 4:00 in the morning.

"I'll call the hospital," I said.

When we got to the hospital, Norma changed into a hospital gown and then climbed into a bed that looked like an instrument of torture. A husky, jovial nurse strapped her down into it.

Norma looked like she was about to face torture. She was scared. I had never seen her so scared.

"Don't be afraid," I told her, standing by the side of her bed. "You will be fine."

She made no reply: her eyes were wild as a frightened mare's on a carousel.

When the interpreter arrived, I was loathe to give up interpreting and sorry we had arranged to have the interpreter come.

"She's scared," the husky nurse said to the interpreter.

So I relinquished my role and had a seat on the sidelines across the room by the window. Hours passed. Lunchtime came and went. Dinner came. I had eaten nothing all day. I finally broke down and went down to the cafeteria to get something to eat.

Midnight came. Around two a.m., her doctor, the tall, affable Dr. Ortiz, ordered her to be moved to a birthing room near the surgical ward in case a Caesarean needed to be performed.

Once they got her set up in the new room, with her feet up in the stirrups, the nurses exhorted her to push.

"One, two, three, push!"

They were just as loud, emotional, and carried away as for any hearing mother, but of course, Norma couldn't hear a thing. Still, she could see the expression on their faces.

"One, two, three, push!"

As I watched like a student who had been up all night studying for an exam, the doctor came up by my side and addressed me in the most serious but confidential tone.

"Each time she pushes, the baby's heart beat goes down. If she has the baby that way, we may lose him. I advise you to go with a Caesarean."

"Yes, of course," I said. "Whatever you think is best. If you think a Caesarean would be safer, do it."

"It's late and she's been in labor all day . . ." I didn't hear the rest. I was too tired. If he wanted to do a Caesarean, that was fine with me.

A team of attendants wheeled her down a hall and I followed, now wearing a blue-green paper outfit with a hat like a baggy beret and booties over my shoes, the whole outfit crinkling as I walked like the sound of someone setting up crepe streamers for a birthday party.

There was no question that a human would be born. I had no doubt of that. But what kind of human? As I took a seat beside Norma and held her outstretched hand, which was strapped down with leather straps upon an extended wing of an operating table like some archetype of consciousness displaced from the medieval world, my only thoughts were helpless, like a knight before the magic of a sorcerer.

I calmly watched as the incision was made, a rivulet of blood being stanched by an assistant as the doctor cut straight across her belly. I looked away.

When I looked back, the doctor, swathed in operating gear like a mummy, hands covered by latex gloves, as bloodless as the desert, had his arms, it seemed, up to the very elbows in her abdomen. Prayers cascaded through my mind in a torrent of Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee and I held Norma's hand with all the sweaty, gross detachment of a first date as the mummy rummaged around inside of her as in a rucksack. Norma felt no pain. She told the anesthesiologist so when asked through the interpreter, her eyes wide as a frightened mare's on a carousel.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name: I looked toward the doctor and a light flashed up out of the rucksack like the flare of a light that turns within the tower of a lighthouse and as he lifted a rubbery, red, plainly human baby in a glowing aureole of powdery light, angelic voices that must have been audible to each and every witness in the room, sang "Ahhhhhhhh!" I thrilled with a joy that knew no bounds: Lord, God, heavenly king, have mercy on us!

**2.** Like any baby, Maxwell demanded round-the-clock care. Norma breast fed him every two hours, going without sleep.

We had sensors rigged up to the baby's crib that would cause lights in our apartment to flicker when the baby cried. It is amazing how efficacious a flickering light is as an alarm. If I were asleep, it would wake even me. And of course, if the baby were asleep in the bedroom, where we had the crib, and Norma were alone in the living room, taking a break, the flicker of lights would alert her to check on the baby.

Dr. Henchman had assured us that at least for the present, or until other arrangements could be made, NIH would be for us like home. We were not to worry about money.

As Norma sat on our couch and peacefully nursed Maxwell, the tender intensity of their union radiated a glow in me of fellowship, compassion, and love beyond my every struggle to surpass the limits of human speech and knowledge, and I entered such a state of peace, confidence, and calm as to look upon the humble surroundings of our apartment as upon the boundless immensities of the sublime.

"I love you so much," I said to Norma.

Norma quietly looked up at me with eyes as I'm sure had once looked upon the death and resurrection of Christ. In the space of two thousand years, nothing much had changed. Nothing but the birth of our son.

In conquest of death, we embraced a new life, entering upon the vast frontiers of eternity.

### Coda

I had not eaten in two weeks. My father had brought a plate of food down to me: a chicken leg with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.

"Moody, eat your dinner," he had said.

I refused to speak. The dinner looked good. I was drinking water. I had actually started my fast without taking food or drinking any water, but the pain of going completely without water had been too much for me. I thought I might die.

Since I would not take the plate of food from him, my father set it down on the floor inside my room.

"Eat this, eat this for me, Moody. You've got to eat. C'mon, this is a good dinner."

He backed away and closed the door to my room. It was a little room. There was barely enough space in it for my bed, a single bed, and my desk and two bookshelves. I opened my door and slid the plate of food out along the floor.

My father's silhouette hovered in the chiaroscuro light of the dark basement. A hall light illuminated him at the foot of the stairs that went up to the garage and then another flight up to the hall outside the kitchen.

My father turned. He had been walking away from my room. Should I eat? I wanted to eat. Clearly, I was taking this too far. But what if I did eat? The whole thing, the whole mess, would continue: the unemployment, the nonpublication, the lousy jobs. I was 28. This initiation, or whatever you could call it, had been going on too long.

My father brought the plate back to me, "Eat this, Moody. C'mon, you have to eat. Eat this for me."

There was something about the way my father spoke, as if any disobedience now would break the most sacred bond between father and son. It was almost impossible for me to resist, but I wouldn't take the plate from him. So he set it down once again on the floor of my room, then closed the door.

I waited a second considering whether I might actually break my fast and eat, and then anger overcame me. This time I opened my door and slid the plate all the way down the hall toward the stairs and closed my door and locked it.

Was I an animal? I would not eat. There was silence. My father would not come back.

I felt sorry I had disrespected a full plate of food and my father as well. What did I want? I wanted my life to change. I wanted to prove the beam. I wanted people to listen to me and my ideas. I was not crazy. I had really discovered something, something that could be scientifically proved.

Until they listened—they being my family first, with others to follow—I would not eat.

I was a prisoner in my room, just as surely as if I had been locked in a cell. I had no job, no friends, no money. I had no prospect of getting a job that matched my education and abilities, just more of the same clerical, secretarial work for temporary agencies that devoured like a trash truck the murdered bodies of my energy. And the women? One would have thought I'd meet a woman. I had had a woman, another man's wife. I had dishonored myself by having her and for what? For sex? The Bible was full of injunctions to avoid such a woman. Her words were sweet but her pathway led to death. It was true. I had chosen her and here I was, cut off from my people. God had turned his face against me.

I was lying on a blanket over in the corner of my tiny room. I felt if I lay still enough, I would not be the one to cause the movement of others. Somehow we were all interlocked in force fields and moved almost as predictably as the puppets of a German clock. I noticed this with the certainty of a scientist faced with the results of an experiment. If my brother were coming down the hall from his room, I would not hear him, but, inevitably, if I were lying still, one of my arms would lift and flap across my chest. Only then would I hear his steps upon the stairs. It was his invisible, almost imperceptible force field that made me move.

If I moved, he would move: chain reactions of movement. Now I wanted to make sure I didn't move so that I would not be responsible for setting off the chain reaction. I lay perfectly still. I heard my brother in the kitchen above my room. I imagined the sun room was directly above my room and that every time a person entered it, that person stomped upon the floor. I believed this was unconscious anger being expressed. But, in fact, the sun room was not above my room as I then imagined it. The dining room was. Still, I heard a knock on the floor, a loud knock each time a person passed above my room.

Someone was upstairs now: my mother. She was seated on the wicker couch by the sliding glass door out to the sun deck. I was determined not to move and create a connection between my movement and hers. I was as still as death. I hardly breathed. This time no one would move because I moved. I would not be the cause of my shabby existence.

I must have held this stillness for thirty minutes, like a person whose body was cooled into suspended animation. And then it happened. I heard my mother groan and get up from the couch. I had done it!

I had turned reality. She had not moved because I moved. I had taken myself out of the chain and could not be held responsible for the chain of events that was to occur.

I was jubilant. I got up from the floor. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon of a Thursday. I celebrated by having some water. I had a little metal teapot Alona had given me once as a present. It was filled with water. I poured myself a cup and added some sugar. The water and sugar tasted like real nourishment.

I had no shirt on and my belly sank to hip bones that jutted out like the shoulder pads of a child's football uniform. Already thin, I had lost a noticeable amount of weight. My white jeans were loose around my waist and hung down on my hips, revealing the top of my underwear. I was barefoot.

I had fasted several days (was it a week?) before the two weeks, but that fast had been without both food and water. The pain of going completely without water had been too great for me. I was not that ready to die, so I had broken the fast by adding water to it, water with a little sugar mixed in. I had read or heard you could go a long way on water and sugar.

The week before I had chastised our Guatemalan maid. A sullen, ferocious woman, she felt no compunction in openly showing disdain for me. Each week she would bang her vacuum cleaner against my door with a rattle and bang that shattered the bounds of all decency and last week I was alone in the house with her and fasting. I threw open the door to my room and grabbed the vacuum cleaner out of her hands, carried it past her out into the hall and then threw it with all my might down the hall. She was safe behind me, completely out of harm's way. I meant to do her no physical harm. The vacuum cleaner sailed cleanly through the air, then crashed to the floor.

Miraculously, it didn't break. But the hose whipped around and the metal fixture in the end punctured the wall, leaving a dark incriminating hole. I turned toward the infuriating woman and screamed at her, "Now you get the hell out of this house!"

With deadly calm, she looked up at me and said, "I go."

I went back to my room and slammed the door. I was shaking. I had gone too far. I had put a hole in the wall, but it sure felt good to tell off that maid.

Nothing had been said when my parents returned. Not only did I refuse to eat, I refused to speak. That maid had been giving me the evil eye for over a year. After she left, I felt tremendous guilt and remorse. I had a mental image of taking her a great bouquet of roses and apologizing. I still had time to go out and buy the roses. The roses were my last chance to save myself before my parents found out what happened. One day I had driven the maid home. She rented a room in a single woman's house near the neighborhood where I had grown up, which was only about a mile away. She was a live-in maid for the single woman. The maid worked at our house on her day off. But she was evil, and there were undertones of a sexual nature between us. She was middle-aged and ugly, ugly in intention, ugly in temperament, a dirty, ugly woman, who disrespected me with her whole being. In my journal, I called her a witch.

I had picked up the vacuum cleaner after she left and carefully put it away in the upstairs closet by the front door where it belonged. We had had the vacuum cleaner since I was a child. It was very old and had worked faithfully these many years. It had been uninjured by its flight and fall. It was an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner, not an upright. It had a central unit like a cannon and four small plastic wheels and a fabric hose that plugged into the central unit on one end, with an electric cord that stretched from the other end. Different fixtures could be fastened to the metal end of the fabric hose, and it had been a short metal fixture that had been banging unmercifully against my door and that had whipped around and punctured the wall, a fixture like a mouth about four or five inches wide. I had used the vacuum cleaner plenty while growing up, to help clean the house, to vacuum the inside of a car. I was thankful it didn't break.

But the hole in the wall bothered me. I came out of my room and walked down the hall to study it. I picked up pieces of broken plaster from the floor. The hole was about an inch and half in diameter. That was all. Why had I become so angry? It was unlike me. But the woman had banged against my door as if there was no one in there. I wasn't dead. No, I wasn't dead, yet.

Something was going on. Some plan was afoot today. The other night someone had come to the house. I mean, a psychologist or psychiatrist. I heard the front door open in a silence that was heavy and ominous. There were heavy footsteps, my father's, followed by a long meeting in the living room. After a long while, someone came to my door and knocked. I didn't answer. Then an inhuman voice, the strangled voice of a man who did not seem to want an answer, said, "You need some help, you know."

Who was it? I had no idea and did not want to know. The voice threatened, it offered no help. Whoever the voice belonged to went away without further ado.

I had a bag packed. As far as I knew, you couldn't be arrested for fasting. Hadn't scores of political figures fasted to make one point or another? Hadn't Gandhi fasted? No, I had no worries in that area.

I did conceive the possibility that my father would have me evicted from his house. I imagined him calling the police to come down and tell me I had to leave. In the America I knew, this was the only other possibility to my continuing to languish on my fast in silence until some negotiation broke on the subject of my beam.

If only I could prove the existence of the beam. I could perceive the beam flicker from my head. It was invisible, yet I could perceive what I can only describe as a slight perturbation of the air, almost imperceptible, when it flickered from my head, almost always excited by the tensions that arose in communication with another person. It would flicker toward another person's groin and when it hit, the person would noticeably relax. Tension, release, relaxation. The beam almost certainly traveled at the speed of light.

Using Freud's theory of dream symbols as the expression of an unconscious wish, a sexual wish, in his theory, perhaps because the beam always seemed to travel toward a person's groin as if to grant even the slightest sexual fulfillment, and examining myth symbols as social extrapolations of dream symbols, I came to the conclusion that the beam, which all people developed to some extent, was symbolized in Christianity by the Holy Spirit.

That would explain how the entire culture was unconsciously devoted to developing the beam as a higher power.

There was much more to my theory. How did this beam develop in a person?" One's sexual habits, a pattern of abstinence and orgasm, mainly through the sexual training that ended masturbation in adolescence, a sexual training I believed to be universal among men and women. It was the psychological pressure created by this training, a pattern of as if socially enforced abstinence that ended with nothing other than what had once been an ordinary but now would become a highly undesired act of masturbation. This same pattern would be repeated throughout life, usually in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles, with praise and acceptance followed by rejection and sacrifice as in the Christian story.

Did that mean I rejected belief in God and Christianity? No, I only added another level of meaning to an already greater mystery. What if the Holy Spirit symbolized the beam? That was not its entire meaning, only one extra level of meaning in it. No, I had not become an atheist. I did not mean to reduce Judeo-Christianity to one interpretation. That was not my intent at all. But I was not sure what my intent was. I had arrived at a subject more taboo than incest. No, I did not masturbate. But I had, as I believe all adolescents did. I was celibate and had been so since before Alona and most of the time afterward. But I had gone through the pattern and developed the beam to a degree that appeared to me to be unparalleled in the life of any other individual.

It was around 7:00. I heard the garage door open, then the door from the garage into the house. I heard heavy footsteps down the stairs. The door to my room was open. I stood in front of my desk, looking down at my tea kettle and cup of sugar and water.

The voice I heard was a man's voice. It was loud and authoritative. I knew it was a policeman's. I didn't move. I was barefoot, loose white jeans hanging from my hips.

"Moody?"

I didn't answer but saw out of the corner of my eye the policeman throw his head into the room and then back out as if afraid I might have a weapon.

Then he came in and said, "Moody, do you want to go to the hospital and see the doctor?"

He took out handcuffs and pulled my arms behind my back and put the handcuffs on.

"Let's go and see the doctor, Moody. All right, Moody?"

I didn't answer.

"He needs shoes," another policeman said. There were two policemen. I slipped on a pair of white tennis shoes, dirty boat shoes. I could perceive a force field and didn't want to break it, so I started to walk backward out of the room. The policeman said, "Is that the way you want to do it?"

Then I turned and walked out of my room and up the stairs, then through the garage and out to a waiting police car. My father had stood at the door to my room and given me a vindictive look as I went by, offering a vinegar sponge to my continued observance of silence.

In silence, the police drove me to Suborgo Hospital. What was happening to me was not in keeping with anything I had imagined possible. I had thought I might be evicted from the house. How was it possible that I could be arrested like a political prisoner in Russia—without warning? The anger built in me. No one was going to frighten me into breaking my fast or speaking.

When we arrived at the hospital, which was only a few blocks from my parents' house, the policemen opened the door for me to get out, but I didn't budge.

"C'mon, Moody, let's go in and see the doctor."

I had determined not to cooperate. I had seen protests on television. I had seen protesters dragged into police vans. I would not cooperate.

So the policemen dragged me out of the car. They had parked a ways from the entrance. One took my left arm, with my hands still handcuffed behind my back, and the other took my right arm. My legs dragged along the sidewalk, the sloppy boat shoes coming off. I was not a small man and the policemen huffed and puffed as they dragged me. I wondered what I would do if they started to punch me. I was plenty scared, yet I maintained complete silence.

I was an individual and this was my individual protest. There would be no news cameras to cover me. There would be no interviews, no outraged reporters or public. The sum of my crimes? I had thrown a vacuum cleaner down a hallway. I had refused to eat or talk for two weeks. And for this I was arrested without warning. This was not the America I thought I knew.

The police deposited me in a large room. It reminded me of a room Jesus Christ might have known when they brought him to see Pontius Pilate. I was now in a mythical world, no longer in the world I had known as reality. What was happening to me? I lay on a long black bench with a plastic cushion like a bench in a museum hall. The room was illuminated by a desk lamp like a room in a person's house. There were no overhead lights as one might expect in a hospital.

Suddenly, the police began fastening leather restraints around my ankles and making them fast. Then they took off my handcuffs and replaced them with leather restraints that tied up around my waist. The leather restraints were much more confining than the handcuffs and I felt claustrophobic. Now I really was frightened. Why were they doing this? Yet I was determined not to speak. They could kill me but I wouldn't speak, not one word out of fear.

I lay on my side and stared across the room in the dim light toward a great wooden desk. I could have screamed from the fear I had of being bound as I was, yet I fought down the fear and remained quiet and still.

Is it a crime to be unemployed? I was unemployed. Is it a crime to have strange ideas? I would admit that my ideas were strange. Yet I knew them to be true. I was not delusional. The beam was real. My explanation of its meaning in terms of sacred symbolism might seem offensive to many, offensive as evolution once was and still was for many, but I knew my ideas to be accurate.

All well and good: let us say that I was wrong. Could I be arrested for my ideas? They harmed no one nor meant to do anyone harm. No, this was not an America I knew. I would not speak.

My mother sat in a chair near my head. She maintained total silence. A man in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie came into the room and took a seat on the opposite end; he seemed a long ways from me. He crossed his legs in the feminine manner, one knee upon the other.

He began to ask me questions in a low, unemotional voice: "You seem to be having some trouble. Do you want to tell me about it?"

I said nothing, nor did I have any intention of speaking to such a man. He asked me a few more questions. He said nothing about involuntary commitment, nor did I know that that was what was happening to me. He gave me no warnings, nor advised me of any options, but simply got up and left the room.

The psychiatrist who had come to my door the previous night—Dr. Emmanuel Devel, as I later learned—and whose voice I now recognized, approached me and slapped his hand on my forehead: "He's burning up with fever," he said. "He's dehydrated." Then, instead of simply lifting his hand, he pushed it off my head, like someone pushing off a railing. The last thing I wanted was to lose control with these restraints on me. Next I would be sobbing and begging for mercy. The prospect of such a loss of self-control kept me from losing my temper.

"He's catatonic," the asshole shouted.

I wasn't about to argue with him. I would enter into no discussions with him now but I resolved in a place deep within myself only known by me that I would answer him one day.

After awhile, it seemed a long while, the police came with a wheelchair and piled me into it and took me to the police car and threw me roughly across the back seat. Where was I going now? They threw my boat shoes in after me, hitting me on my back and head with them.

The humiliation of this hurt me deeply. These policemen didn't know me. And I didn't know them. My mind was a blank. I had no idea where I was going or what would happen next. It was dark, of course. All this was happening at night. If I thought I had been picked up from my room at 7:00 and it's normally still light at 7:00 o'clock at the beginning of April, then I had the time wrong. The whole thing happened at night.

The policemen talked animatedly in the front seat. They were both white. Yet I was surprised to hear them talking and laughing about "niggers." I was surprised to hear that word. I had supposed it had gone completely out of usage except among blacks themselves, who seemed to use it liberally. The policemen made a joke about "sucking nigger toes" and laughed heartily.

When we arrived at our destination, we waited a while in a dark parking lot. The back door opened and the police dragged me out to put me in a wheelchair. This time I cooperated. Wherever I was, and I had no idea where that was, I knew that I had protested enough.

The police began to take off the restraints. "He doesn't need them," the one policeman said to a man in a white coat who stood by the wheelchair. I knew I was at a hospital.

I was so grateful at having the restraints taken off I could have wept. Tears filled my eyes. My heart surged with thankfulness and I thanked and praised God and almost wept.

I stood up and began to walk toward the hospital. The man with the wheelchair left the wheelchair with the police and walked with me. I realized I was being put on a mental ward, yet I still knew nothing of involuntary commitment nor had ever heard of it. When Blanche Dubois get carried off at the end of _A Streetcar Named Desire_ , it's as if she were being rescued, not arrested. That was as close as I could come in my experience to anything like what had happened to me.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to stay in a hospital, I thought. We went up in an elevator. The attendant looked like a college or graduate student. He said nothing to me. He led me through a series of doors to a room. Someone was sleeping on the far side of the room.

"It's like I've been arrested like a criminal," I said quietly to the attendant.

He looked at me with surprise but not sympathy.

"That's right," he said just as quietly: "Is there anything I can get for you?"

"Can I have some water and some sugar?" I asked. I intended to carry on my fast.

To my surprise, he brought me a plastic container of sugar packets and a plastic pitcher of water and a plastic cup. It was late at night. It must have been 1:00 in the morning.

A low light was on over a sink and counter near my bed. When the attendant left me, I walked to the door in the dim but harsh fluorescent light of the counter and started back the way I had come. The attendant had gone down the hall the opposite way and disappeared. I was going to go right out the way I had come in. My mind raced to think of where I might go without money or transportation in the middle of the night. Double doors loomed before me. I guessed these people were crazy to think they could keep anyone here who didn't want to stay. I pushed against the doors, expecting them to give way. I pushed again. Christ, they were locked! The realization hit me. This was a mental hospital. I was locked in here. A sob sought to rise in me. I fought it back and stood at the door, staring out the little glass window in the direction I thought the elevator might be. The glass was crisscrossed by little wires. I had no idea that from that night on my life would be forever changed.

I went back to my room and fixed myself a cup of water and drank it slowly. I got undressed, feeling very uneasy about the other person in the room. The room was as if swathed in bandages. It smelled of antiseptic and surgical tape. I turned off the light and lay in bed. This is what my relationship with Alona had led me to. I wondered where she was or what she was doing now. Ever since I met her, I had been incapable of forming a relationship with another woman, a relationship that might have saved me. I was here because I had no friends. America was not a country for individuals, no, that was wrong. I had learned that without a web of relationships, the individual was nothing and that thought did not inspire me, it made me sad.

I could not sleep but lay awake all night. Sometime around 6:00, I think, the attendant who had brought me to the room came back to wake me up. I got up and got dressed, putting on the sloppy boat shoes with no socks. I had bought the shoes with Alona on a trip once to Ocean City. They were not really the kind of shoes I would choose on my own to wear.

I was weak, skinny, and nervous. I felt unsteady on my feet. A nurse came into the room and asked if I needed any help.

"Where am I?" I asked

"You are in Lincoln Hospital."

"Where is that?" I had never heard of it.

"College Park."

I'm sure I was slow in responding because I was plenty confused. I had been brought from Bethesda to College Park. Why, I had no idea.

The nurse had thick lips, a very white complexion, and a puffy body. She was not fat. Her hair swept back on each side of her head to a bun in back. She stared directly into my eyes like a cat staring into a rodent's.

"Where do I go now? What do you want me to do?"

"Come on out to the Day Room. We will have breakfast soon."

"I don't want to eat," I said.

"Of course, you must eat," she said. If I had appeared like a rodent to her, I was now like an empty space.

"Show me where you want me to go and I'll go with you," I said.

"OK, c'mon out to the Day Room."

My roommate, a black of only 16 or 17, moved to pass by us.

"Did you meet your roommate?" the nurse asked.

"No," I said politely.

"This is Stanley. Stanley, meet Moody."

Stanley looked like someone who had been at fault in an accident. He shook my hand with an air of distraction that might have been appropriate for a defendant on his way into a courtroom.

Then I followed the nurse, taking her by the arm for guidance, but letting go when we got to the hall. It was a long hall. When we got to the end of it, in front of the nurse's station, she said, "Why don't you have a seat here?"

I took a seat in a wooden chair with a table that swung up in front like a student's desk. "Would you like some orange juice?"

"No thanks," I said.

"We have some medicine for you to take."

A few people straggled by me into a room about fifteen feet to my right. I didn't look up at them but kept my eyes on the floor. I was nervous and frightened.

The nurse put a little cup of pills in front of my face, then set them down on the table when I didn't take them from her. Then she put two orange juices on the table and a few straws.

"We want you to take this medicine," she said insistently.

"I want to be examined by a doctor first," I said.

"The doctor has already ordered the medicine for you," she said.

"I still want to see the doctor first before I take any medicine." I imagined I would tell the doctor about how I had discovered the beam and could prove its existence if I only had access to an EEG machine. That means electroencephalograph, a machine used for measuring brain waves.

The only problem was I had no voluntary control over when the beam would be emitted. In relaxed surroundings, nothing happened. It was not emitted. A certain threshold of tension had to be reached for it to be released. It was almost impossible, if not impossible, to arrange things consciously for this to happen.

My statement about wanting to see the doctor first had put off the nurse, at least temporarily. I remained seated in front of the nurse's station, my eyes cast down in fear. I was afraid to look at the other patients. I could hear someone talking in the room the woman had called the Day Room. The person was addressing what I imagined to be a large audience. I couldn't see inside the room the audience was in, but I imagined people as if in a gymnasium. I could picture the patients seated in stands as the man addressed them.

The speaker was emotional. His speech reminded me of the inspirational talks I had heard at basketball camp as a boy of 14.

The nurse came back to me and said, "Did you take your medicine? We want you to take your medicine."

"I want to be examined by a doctor first."

She left me. She was not happy with me. Then I heard the people in the Day Room begin to sing. They sounded like a professional choir. Chills went up and down my spine from the heavenly sound of their voices.

A large black man in white hospital clothes appeared before me and grabbed me by the arms. Two other attendants or nurses appeared just as suddenly, one each side of me, holding me down by the shoulders. A middle-aged woman, her face screwed up as if she were about to attempt the most severe and nasty of tasks, held up a long needle on a translucent syringe and then plunged it into my upper left arm where another nurse had pulled back my sleeve. I struggled as if to stand up as the syringe emptied into my blood, then gave up struggling. The woman withdrew the needle, then quickly dabbed my arm with a cotton ball moist with alcohol.

Without a word to me, the attendants released me. I felt violated in a way I could not describe. I stood up and walked into the Day Room. There were no bleachers as I had imagined, just a run-down room, a very large room, with a few people watching television from chairs around the perimeter. There was no group as I had imagined or anything like what could have been a choir.

I felt anguish so great I could have wept and wept. How could other people do this to me? What had I done? I was innocent. Where was I? What was this? What had happened to me?

I walked through the Day Room toward the door back out to the hall that led past the other side of the nurse's station. But in fact the experience had been more than I could endure. About a minute had passed since the injection, maybe more. I could feel the medicine taking effect.

It took effect like an explosion, the explosion of an atomic bomb, which swept through me as if with the spiral of a mushroom cloud. Pain ascended in me on gale force winds, spiraling up into the mushroom cloud. Even as I felt the pain, I was able to stand back from it and observe it like a scientist. I could almost verbally articulate the observation in my mind that I did not believe it was possible for a human being to experience so much pain and live. The pain seared through me, physical pain with as great an intensity as any pain I had ever experienced. And it would not stop. If the pain had gone through me like the explosion of an atomic bomb, it remained like radioactive fallout, blasting me without respite from one interminable moment to the next. The scientist in me could observe this and at the same time refrain from screaming, crying out, pleading for help.

I was lost on an ocean of pain. I could see but I was blind. A part of me could hear and answer questions in a monotone, but the inside of me screamed and screamed in a voice that made no sound. So I would remain for the next two years, a vegetable in the eyes of my family. I was released from the hospital into my parent's care a month after being admitted. I sought comfort without success. I would lie down on a bed and then restlessly pace the halls. I would stand in front of a window and look out, seeing only the landscape of my inner agony. A millionaire lived in a house just visible from the window of my parents' living room. The large house, like a Swiss chalet, burned into my mind with a heat as cruel as the heaps of gold that might be gathered to no use around the body of a dead man.

I went to meetings with a psychiatrist who seemed to suffer from a personality disorder so intense it was hardly to be believed that he was human. He tried me on every different medication available to stop the pain. The shot that had touched it off had been of prolixin. He tried me next on stelazine, then halidol, and countless other drugs, too numerous to remember or to name. Meanwhile, each change of medicine took weeks, spaced out by meetings with the psychiatrist that were a week apart, and I lived on in an aura of excruciating pain. I had no language with which to even attempt to describe the pain. The most I could say was that I was as if standing naked in the freezing cold for days and days on end without relief. A year stretched into two years.

Once I exploded at the hospital, I had lost all ability to defend myself. I could answer simple questions with a yes or no, but I certainly couldn't think. A nurse told me I would have a hearing within a few days to decide if I were to be kept at the hospital or allowed to go home.

When the day came for the hearing, I was introduced to a young black lawyer whose defense strategy consisted of having me tell the court I felt better and was ready to go home.

The hearing was in a room like a classroom. Several men seemed to be judges. My mother was present and did not speak to me. A man who seemed to be the hearing officer or presiding judge looked at me with cold, impersonal eyes and a demeanor that seemed to judge me guilty before ever having heard a word I said. I addressed him and the others through my vortex of pain. I said I was sorry for anything I had done wrong. I was now eating, I felt better, and I was ready to go home.

The judge turned to my mother and asked her what she thought.

She said, "Moody refused to eat and was a danger to himself. He was also a danger to other people."

"How is that?" the judge asked.

"He threw the vacuum cleaner at the maid!"

It was as if at that moment, the judge's gavel went down and he recommended that I be kept for the required minimum stay of thirty days at Lincoln Hospital, at the end of which time another hearing would be held, if necessary, to decide whether I should be moved to a long-term facility.

Afterword

As far as the historical record is concerned, Moody Santo died in 2000 at the age of 42. NIH has no record of any Moody Santo after the early 1990s. In the early 1990s, Moody had, at the urging of his family, qualified for an experimental program at the Clinical Center at NIH but failed to participate. Dr. Sophie Henchman, who had been in charge of that program, may never have met Moody. Although the article from the _Bethesda Gazette_ was real enough, the Moody Santo it describes could not have existed at that time. There is no question that Moody had died and was buried. The myth that he had somehow lived again, however, has been difficult to put to rest.

Stories persist in Washington of a dark and violent vigilante-like figure who haunted some of the most dangerous areas of the city, wreaking vengeance on evildoers, a number of whom simply vanished without a trace as, for example, in the story of the sodomite who had victimized a young deaf boy at DC Jail. In plain view of multiple witnesses, the sodomite disappeared from the spacious, gymlike visiting room as if at a glance from a dark stranger. But these are ghost stories to be told around a camp fire.

For those in doubt, who may yet want to attribute the disappearance of such persons to the power of Moody's beam, a power he is said to have developed in the mythical place called Other World, there is simply no scientific evidence for such a beam. Emanations of electromagnetic waves from the brain, though real enough, are far too weak to accomplish such a task.

One hundred and fifty years have passed since Moody's death and in that time, not only has there been no evidence for such a beam, there is no question but that human evolution is moving away from, rather than toward, the development of any such power. The brain may be a part of the human anatomy of many mysteries, but the psychological orientation of the human individual has been toward greater and greater levels of intimacy. A power such as the one Moody described could only be developed in the brain of the most alienated individual. What we have in _Other World_ is the story of just such an individual, a paranoid schizophrenic by Moody's own admission.

The mysterious disappearance of Dr. Emmanuel Devel, of course, remains a sticking point for those committed to believing in what can only be called at this point the myth of Moody Santo. There is no question but that the writers of _Other World_ , which we may safely assume to have been, originally, Moody and Norma, with the aid later of one or more ghost writers, certainly could be said to have seized hold of the story of Dr. Devel's disappearance and made full use of it, milking it for all it was worth. There is simply no substantial proof that Dr. Devel had been a victim of Moody's beam. Absent such proof, there is nothing more to be considered than the clothing said to have passed from Other World to this world on the night of Moody's so-called resurrection.

The clothing, a grey tunic, is no more authentic an accoutrement than the shroud of Turin could be said to be. In fact, the family of Norma Kim, who claim to possess this precious garment of Moody Santo's, have not permitted the garment to be subjected to any further tests beyond the simple fiber analysis with which they point with such certainty as absolute proof of the garment's authenticity. In fact, there are more sophisticated tests available. Such rigorous scientific testing has already proved without a doubt that the shroud of Turin, which has been said to have captured a photographic image of Jesus after death, could not possibly have pictured Jesus, since the shroud itself, according to the most sophisticated carbon testing methods, dates back no further than to medieval times. Until Moody's tunic has been submitted to such tests, no claim for its authenticity can be entertained by any reasonable person.

There remains the question of the marriage records for Gallaudet University Chapel as well as those kept at the Office of Marriage Records at DC Superior Court, not to speak of the birth certificate for the purported son of what can only be described as the fraudulent and fictitious union between Norma and Moody. It must be remembered that at that time in American history, immigration fraud was rampant. With the borders of the United States besieged by immigrants from around the world, there was no limit to the lengths a desperate immigrant such as Norma, then on a student visa, would go to remain in this country. Upon examination of the marriage records, it is clear that she married a man by the name of Edward Ruscel, the same individual whose name appears on the birth certificate as well as all other legal documents of the family.

There is no reason to believe the fairy story advanced by the descendants of Norma Kim and Edward Ruscel that Edward Ruscel was but the fictitious name adopted by Moody for the sake of expedience, the argument being that it would have been impossible at that time to propose the idea to a disbelieving public that a man who had without a doubt died in the year 2000 had actually risen from the grave as only Jesus Christ is said to have done 2,000 years before.

Finally, the DNA evidence advanced by the family shows only that a male from the Santo family was definitely the father of the descendants who claim Moody Santo as their progenitor. The descent of the male Y chromosome in the line of Norma's male descendants may be explained by the sexual union of Norma and Moody's only male relative, his uncle, Henry Santo. As repulsive as the idea may be to some, we may confidently advance the argument that after Moody's death, Henry and Norma drew together for mutual comfort and support. In fact, there is simply no other explanation. The attraction between an older man and a beautiful young woman is legend. Henry had signed as the guarantor on Norma's application for a green card in 2001, the year of her marriage to Ruscel. Her gratitude for Henry's generosity must have known no bounds. For his part, Ruscel, according to records, had been an orphan raised in a Richmond, Virginia, orphanage. Of that there can be no doubt.

And what of Ruscel's body? The family claim that the body did not die a second death but passed on whole and intact to another world beyond this life. If Ruscel is Moody, let his DNA be put to the test. But there is no body, the family maintain—what more need be said? The descendants of Kim-Ruscel have condemned their own argument with resort to such a fantasy.

Although _Other World_ cannot hold up as fact, there has been sufficient interest in the book to qualify it as entertaining fiction. Here there can be little room for dispute. If the book is entertaining to some, to others it provides a signal warning and cautionary tale, illustrating the popular dictum, albeit in our largely secular world, that there but for the grace of God go I. With all the issues faced by Christianity of late, too, the book has found a popular audience among those fringe elements, especially of the Catholic religion, which have come to experience a certain skepticism in regard to metaphysical matters previously withheld from such close scrutiny.

Finally, as a case study of mental illness, the book dramatizes the medicine-oriented treatment of mental disorders that was prevalent in the latter part of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. This was a time when pharmacology, through the use of psychotropic medicines, enabled the release of vast numbers of the mentally ill from mental hospitals, many of them becoming homeless, and a few like Moody Santo just managing to make the transition to a somewhat normal life. The real Moody, however, never lived long enough to see the tranquility that seemed to characterize the life the fictive Moody came to know with Norma.

So there you have it, a book that has created much controversy, stripped bare of its aura and revealed for what it is: a fiction with which to while away the hours of an idle day, a chapter in the tragic history of mental illness in the United States, and a lesson in the psychological maturation of an individual who as a somewhat engaging antihero manages to dramatize for us so much of what in life, as Melville said, we know in our heart to be true, yet would be madness in our own proper persons to utter.

If art is a lie that leads to the truth, then _Other World_ may lie to us in just this manner. One can only hope that the truth we thereby come to know does not disable us as it did Moody Santo. A hundred and fifty years is a long time ago, but not so long that the ghost of this highly troubled writer cannot finally be put to rest.

Jenny Thistlewaite

Harvard University

2150

Appendices

Appendix 1: Fiber Analysis

Brockhurst Laboratory

2839 Keller Street

Braintree, MA 02184

(781)794-3561

July 7, 2000

Ms. Norma Kim

1401 Blair Mill Road

Silver Spring, MD 20910

Re: Tunic

Dear Ms. Kim:

The fibers taken from the garment submitted for analysis shared many characteristics of flax.

Like flax fibers, the fibers were long, up to 900 millimeters in length, and much longer and coarser than cotton fibers. The thickness of the fibers was irregular, but the diameter averaged 15 to 18 microns. A lengthwise view through a microscope revealed a structure that resembled a stalk of bamboo, with nodes or joints as crosswise markings along its length.

Like cotton fibers, the fibers continued to burn after removal from flame. The odor was like that of burning paper.

The specific gravity of the fibers analyzed was similar to that of cotton (1.52) and the fibers exhibited good conductivity of electricity.

The garment did not crease and wrinkle badly like linen.

However, the primary difference between the fibers analyzed and those of flax was that, while all textile fibers, except glass, metal fibers, and asbestos, are organic, the fibers analyzed were inorganic: carbon was conspicuously absent and not all of the elements making up the fibers could be identified. The fibers were neither natural nor manufactured (synthetic or regenerated).

In conclusion, we could not identify the fibers taken from the garment submitted to us for analysis.

Sincerely yours,

Ethan Hemstitch

Brockhurst Laboratory

Appendix 2: Trinyon Halaka

Zein Nima stood on the balcony of her summer home and watched the swelling waves of blood-red ocean curl to crash upon the sparkling gem-bright shore. The sand was a rainbow of tiny micro-gems crushed to pieces over a billion years and now soft as a woman's skin—red, gold, purple, and green—all sparkling in the morning light. The sky was clear and green as far as one could see—deep and fresh and green—so green it seemed orgasmic in its color—warm and full as love's embrace.

Through the bright green sky swirled rings of sapphire sun—three rings around the fiery ball of gleaming blue.

The shore sloped off on either side into the dazzling radiance of violet palm trees, with trunks black as inner space, which waved their shaggy heads, scattering rays of sapphire sun into the deeper jungle of violet creepers, ferns, and undergrowth.

Zein Nima stood and looked out upon the sea, her golden hair tumbling in waves blown back like a fiery comet's trial, her fragile chin tipped up and sensuous lips half-formed as if to smile, her sheer lilac robe wrapped round her in the wind, clinging to reveal her shapely perfect form.

She felt the tingling in her naked breasts as the rosy nipples raised and swelled against the rustle of her sheer soft garment in the wind and warmth upon her skin, round and round her tingling till her whole body was aglow.

She could then have tumbled off her robe and gathered in the sea and sky forever to her swelling breasts and pulled them closer closer till they entered sliding filling full her streaming womb. The universe she would transform into a rose whose velvet petals pulsed and held upon the edge of bloom until they shattered throbbing pulsing, roaring, waves on waves of crystal light that showered through the dark transformed to rain.

Zein Nima felt her every perfect curve—the upward curve of her breasts and slope to her slender waist; the outward curve of her hips, and rise where her buttocks swirled; her full thighs rounding rounding to curling calves and feet—shoulders so slight and arms so slim, all smooth to her slender hands; the skin was of a perfect creamy whiteness, perfect as marble and still as sculptured stone.

The sun would not take away her whiteness, it would deepen it to a golden hue, and touch the flame of crimson to her cheek.

Her face was so perfect in its beauty, it seemed a stillness set forever in stone. It was the beauty of immortality, for it was a beauty so much larger than life it seemed to partake of death, and yet to be beyond death, too. It was the beauty of perfection—perfect balance, proportion, unmoving motion moved to eternal bliss.

Her nose was sharp and graceful, narrowly curving down to voluptuous lips; her cheekbones were high; her cheeks long and slender, smooth; her eyes were large and crystal blue—those eyes were large enough to contain the entire universe; their blue was as bright and big as the sun's—more bright, more blue—and bright as wisdom and truth. And all her beauty, all her blue golden beauty under the halo of long golden curly waves of flaxen hair that streamed from off her lofty brow and gathered midway down her back seemed poured as if to a pool of perfect placid stillness and calm, poured and flowing as if from the fountainhead of God.

It was morning on Other World, morning on the holy blue star Sin within the galaxy of Ghod.

Where was he? Zein Nima thought. When will he come? Will he be strong as the waves that swell and pound to the shore, and handsome as the sun that dazzles the brilliant air? Will he come to me light as the wind, and pull back my golden hair, and fill me as full as Other World with a love more deep and pure?

She looked far out into the green and red under the gleaming blue, and the cry of love leapt from her soul.

The blood-red waves crashed in regular cadence upon the rainbow shore, making a constant rumbling sound, now louder, now less loud, as near or far they curled and wheeling flung their frothy spray into the air. The sea could make a soothing sound, hypnotic in its loneliness.

What did the sea say, the many voices of the sea? Perhaps in the roll and toss of the waves she would hear the answer to its mystery, if she could only listen well. Perhaps she would hear the voice of her lover calling to her from the sea. Had he drowned there ages and ages ago, the wreck of some dim vision of future ecstasy? Had he glimpsed her beauty by the light of some strange time warp in the waves and dived perhaps to meet her, but to find oblivion where he thought her love might be? Or had he descended living, or perhaps transformed, to find another world, lost golden city, at the bottom of the sea, where even now he reigned and called for her to join him, there to share his sceptered realm? Yes, great gleaming ruby pinnacles, turrets, towers, and walls, diamond spires, domes, and canopies seemed to waver just one instant neath the surface of the waves before dissolving in the glitter of the sun's bright morning rays.

The sea beat on as before, throbbing with impenetrable mystery. And was she too not like the sea? Did the blood in her veins not throb so? Was her heart not just such a mystery, its waves as tumultuous or serene, yet rolling ever ceaselessly to the tides of the seven moons? For if the sea was her heart, then all of nature was the cipher of her soul. But the sea spoke of her loneliness, and the lover who was still but a creature of her imagination, a half-formed faceless thought like some strange fetus forming in the sea. It was almost as if she expected the waves to part at any moment, and hurl him to the shore, some wild watery birth of love loosed from the womb of time, a sunrise soaring up from the sea, radiant with divinity. She hugged herself, cradling her febrile breasts in the sea-spray breeze; yes, the air was ripe with the sea, smelling of seaweed, salt, and jungle marsh like some primordial soup sparked with the ghastly lightning bolt of God, and quivering toward new birth.

It was hard to tell just what might come from the sea, whether some slithery, saurian savage or golden god hero of man. The one would make a whoredom of her flesh, the other a paradise. And yet there were moments, she could not deny, when the two—both god and savage—seemed by some strange metamorphosis to be one: cool naked with her lover, straining sweetly in his arms, she could feel the transformation of his skin; then the savage hot upon her, boring full her writhing womb as he pressed the frog-faced horror of his head down close to hers and pumped the bowling buttocks of her breasts with lizard hands; he would vent the raging pleasure of his lust upon her loins until her weeping turned to cries of joy and all her struggling stopped as he would stop and seem to pulse and glow within her, then begin the lightning strokes again, and again and again and again, showering her body flaming sparks into the sea where cold and glowing with reptilian light she pulsed in purple, green, and red dissolved in sparkling gold.

Then the alien was gone; she would feel the smooth skin of her lover as he slumped upon her breast, panting happily; she warm as glowing embers, breasts full jiggling gracefully, would run her smooth hands through his hair and kiss his cheek, and hug him joyously, and they would laugh and laugh and laugh, then, with delight as she hugged and kissed him and he lay there slack and happy on her breast; then he would moan loud, playfully, and rolling off her take her hand, and she would curl around him, slide her arm across his chest, and twine one warm leg's curves in his.

He was so strong, so beautiful as he lay there next to her, so delightfully peaceful, warm, and calm. He was slender, but not small, with broad shoulders narrowing to a slender waist. He was well proportioned, the chest broad and deep, and muscles well-defined, but not too sharply. He was dark, the skin dark, hair curly, black. And his eyes would be hazel flecked with gold, the lashes long, the eyebrows arching gracefully. His cheeks would be ruddy, and she would kiss his cheeks warm and aglow, and rub her thigh upon his thigh. His arms would be muscular, smoothly traced with deep blue veins, the wrists small, hands delicate, and sparsely covered with hair. His legs, she thought, would be almost as shapely as her own, yet hairy, masculine, the buttocks almost womanly, but narrower and firm. His every muscle would be hard, from his chest to his shapely feet; his body was so inward, so concentrated with form, while hers was so expansive, infinite, like the sea or outer space, so full and flowing to receive the plunge of planets as of stars.

How she would look in wonder on the riddle of his sex—to hold the darling phallus in her hand: it would rise then, full up-swelling like some serpent from the deep, distending its long neck in some unfathomable breach until it straining swallowed up the sun. Then all be black as darkness, primal chaos in the void, before it trembling plunged its full tremendous length into her sea. "Ah," she gasped now audibly, then, "Mmmm," as it thrashed to the deep. "Oh!" In her tidal waves were mounting to submerge the universe. He had pulled the flaming sun down from the sky, and now the stars were falling, falling, flames of darkness to the sea, one gleaming watery globe that glowed in tremors of delight: some rift was opening deep within her, opening, sliding back; the waters now were sliding, hurtling, soaring to each hot crest's glittering joy: "Darling," she cried as the raging sun bundled up the flashing sea, "Darling," she cried as the blissful stars crashed to the shores of eternity.

A flock of flaming pink gulls swept across her horizon, fading into the brilliance of green sky, a dark fine line which gradually disappeared. The sun was rising slowly, yet it was morning still and all was quiet save for the whisper and roar of whitecaps on the waves and rush of wind through the trees. A holy calm had settled over her, perfect tranquility, a mystical musical feeling of pure benevolence and bliss. She was euphoric now in a quiet, still, unmoving way; her body was a perfect unity.

She shook her head to loose her curls; flashing they tumbled fiery back, golden ringlets tickling her ears. The wind laved over her so smoothly and gently it seemed to kiss and caress her, praise her, bless her, adore her every move. The wind was cool and moist with the sea and the blue sun warm in the sky; Zein Nima's rapture grew. She could feel every convoluted swirl in her brain: it was a silvery ball of perfect bliss set in the velvet vault of her cranium, and radiating pleasure like a sun, all down her spinal cord, round her breasts, and glowing womb; yes, all her brain and perfect beauty were like a finely crafted lace of silver filigree containing the solid golden globe of her gleaming soul.

She watched the last waves tumble or slap and stream over purple sand: every wave seemed a separate tragedy. For the sea's gigantic spirit must fall and break on the shore. There was something terrible in the fall of the waves, some dread speechless suffering; each wave seemed locked and confined in its arc and struggling to be free. Yet only in the moment of their fall could the waves find somehow the liberation which they sought. There they would roll in majestically as if resolved to meet their fate, yet heavy still with sadness and thoughts of turning back or escape; filled with the contradictory feelings of fury and doubt, they steadily moved toward the shore, neither quickening nor slowing, neither toward nor away: soon they would be in their agony, yet momentum carried them on. For it would no longer be possible to think of injustice or escape; there would only be time for one final summoning of the will and the insane rage to rise and destroy. And suddenly the moment of terror and beauty would arrive: caught up in the fury of the land's last savage blows, each wave would rise up mightily as if to curse the sky. Yet in the full majesty of that final stirring arc, when the crest of the wave lifted as if to soar out of itself, would come one strange and fearful moment of triumph which the land could not destroy. For wheeling, crashing, roaring in frustration agony, each wave would now be falling as it must, yet with such grace and force there must be beauty in the fall, and fear, and wonder, mixed with awe, the wave wheeling, pouring, streaming, yes, and hissing to its feet but to be beaten down again, till frothing at the mouth—eyes red, tail thrashing—then it lunged and rolled up groaning on the sand as if to grasp some long forgotten goal before drifting back so darkly on the tide.

If only he were with her now. If only he were pressing up behind her with his lips upon her neck, firmly fondling her breasts with manly hands. How they would swell then full within his grasp, so big and pointy big and thrilling to be sucked, as he draped the lilac gown across a chair, still to press upon her buttocks and she snake within his arms, reaching back one vibrant hand to stroke his hair. She would feel the tragic dragon wildly snuffing for its lair; she would turn and fondly take it in her hands.

Ah, such sweet enchantment charms her, such a darling mystery, she must have her lover's lips and arms and kiss.

So sliding cool arms on his arms, and cool hands on his neck, she brings her bosom to his chest and lips to ruby lips. Then she feels weightless, lost in space; her tongue swims out to his, and warm and wet they float in bliss—the water is luxurious. Their lips part slowly, breathlessly; now eyes swim to embrace. And powerfully swimming on that sea, he lifts her from her feet.

Now to carry her to her bed, he turns from the balcony. And the sun streaks blue across his back as he enters her marble room. There, the center, on a circular bed, high under a frescoed dome, he lays her on the purple sheets, himself in her golden arms.

Now the dragon must come home to his cave by the secret sea; she feels him sliding through the waves toward the silent opening. Then he enters suddenly as if from day to night; he fills the cave where the crashing waves wash round him with delight.

Zein Nima and her lover sway within each other's arms, her golden hair on purple sheets, his dark skin on her white. One hand she twines within his curls, the other strokes his back, her thighs clasped round his slender waist, her feet high on his hips. She feels a ball of perfect bliss, like a globe of land and sea, glowing in the heavens bright, an orb of eternity.

The dragon roaring fires her loins to the glow of a dying star as she looks up through the purple light at the fresco on the dome. Red and gold, blue, green, and white: nudes couple in the sky; the colors deepen, nudes take life in ecstasy attitudes—stretching, clasping, hugging, straining breasts, hips, arms, legs, toes—love so pure and deep and good: the glowing star explodes.

Now liquid light streaks through her womb, like milk streams from her breasts, her body radiant soaring like a star cloud through deep space. She hugs her lover in her bliss, as he hugs her in his, as milky light blasts outward rumbling through the black abyss. Billowing milky flower, holy rush of ecstasy, streaming sweetness, atom halo round the dragon by the sea, fading, fading, slowly on thy husk of timeless light, yet fade, they seed has scattered to new shores, where fade thy lovers will not from the night, but gleam as constellations fixed among eternal stars.

Then to be still and quiet as the tomb, to hear only the rush of waves and nothing more, as if the waves somehow had understood, sounding their sacred sympathy over the incommunicable murmur of the wind.

They would lie still in each other's arms as he panted on her breast and her clasp released as he released to perfect calm, her cool feet sliding down his thighs, and they floating off together on the tide, far off on the glittering waves. She would see by feeling—if her eyes were open they would look upon objects saturated with herself: the great circular bed high up in the center of the room upon three pure white marble steps; the flow of marble to the perfect curve of marble walls; the great high narrow windows curving round the walls, their pink crystal casements flung open and scarlet curtains fluttering gently in the wind; and the pink crystal doors flung open to the balcony high above the blood-red sea, and the curtains fluttering gently there, too, as the sea-spray breeze came through, the green air flowing like an elixir and blue rays splashing from the sun; and above, the tumultuous fresco painted by a master's hand, nudes swirling through a green sky of desire, some with streaming capes of blue or red or gold, all swirling amidst tremendous clouds of burly pink and white and blue-gold rays of sun, and a youth on a blood-red dragon, veering upward into space, and soaring off with a golden maiden in his arms.

Zein Nima would look long into her lover's eyes as he raised himself upon her breast, his eyes so dark and deep and brown, and glistening in a kind of mist, warm as his glowing cheeks, which would be red as flame, as if a flickering taper burned upon each one, his lips full and flushed with color, glittering like rubies under the halo of ebony curls, which would be black as night and shining, mixed with stars, his whole body radiant and warm upon hers and the two of them glowing as if at the center of one star, luminous in an almost perceptible aura of love and tenderness: she would want to climb inside his skin to be one with him as she held him—close to tears with happiness—and he bent his lips to hers once more to kiss within the shadowy stillness of the high domed marble room upon the altar of her bed, luxurious in their nakedness, as holy breezes played upon them, flickering shadows on the walls, and they coiled within each other's arms, he kissing gently down her neck upon her breasts to take their nipples in his lips and suck their swelling full to mobile hardness as she writhing snaked her hands within his hair and he kissing downward stroked her hips, and thighs, and calves to hold her feet.

Upon her thigh the deity would rise to his full height, a fleshy god of wrath and mercy seeking paradise, a sea creature ascending into jungle marsh, from sea to land evolving, trembling upward toward the light, but to seek in darkness some food greater than the sun, some sweet fruit in the jungle trembling on a taboo tree; he would seek forbidden fruit within the garden of her womb; he would slither, entering full to find the tree, slithering, sliding through the marsh of tangled hopes and dreams, struggling fate to fate for freedom beyond destiny, and he was in, one wild leap to the jungle, and surge from the tragic sea as he clung to her white shoulders and she coiled around his hips, shuddering up around the center of his world.

They would be one world then, revolving on one axis, one violet garden filled with light and flowers, sky and trees; in such a place as in each other's arms they swayed, high up in blue mountains where great violet trees waved rustling and quivering in green sleepy peace, the mad snake would dart up the great taboo tree, and coax her to eat of its fruit. She had the freedom to choose. For there was wisdom in the fruit and a passage to some higher world with terrors of its own, and she would eat, reaching up among the golden clusters of the glittering limb to pluck one pulsing globe and press it to her lips, so warm and full and nubile trembling in the starry wind which trembled through the trees, and there would come a stillness and a beauty to her bliss as of the opening of a lily on a bank of melting snow whose petals poured pure sweetness into liquid rays of light. And this was freedom, as she shuddered in her bliss, the chance to do what she must if she would love and pass beyond the dream to its reality. For if there were a way to paradise, it led through the garden of this world, and all the blood and toil it took to bear its fruit.

The vastness of the sea was nothing in comparison to the immensity of the strataverse. And with that she quit the balcony.

Appendix 3: Excerpts from

The Million Dollar Wound

by

Domenic Santo

Excerpt I

In December 1944, we were somewhere in Belgium in a forest called the Ardennes along the German border. German tanks and troops overran our troops. This was the Battle of the Bulge.

We could not fight the German tanks head-on. They had frontal armor so thick that our three-inch guns couldn't penetrate it. Their bigger guns could shoot right through our frontal armor, so we had to attack them from the side.

* * *

Heading south on the road to Bullingen from Krinkelt, 1st Platoon, Company C, traveled over snow-covered terrain, four tank destroyers with open turrets, going at a good clip—somewhere under 30 miles per hour—leafy tree limbs tied down on their hulls as camouflage. The sky lowered dark horns like a bull tossing its head and the thunder of distant guns clapped like a crowd roaring for blood. Lieutenant Aaron McPherson, the platoon leader, surveyed the battlefield from the turret of C-11 as he might have surveyed a cattle range in his native Montana.

He had a calmness about him that was at once warm and fearless. Even in a war where there were no heroes of the stature of Achilleus or Patroclus, he stood out to many as the best soldier they had ever seen in the war. C-11 was second in line in the column, right behind C-14. The mood inside the tanks was intense. The men were on their way to ambush five much larger German tanks which were on their way from Bullingen. This was to be no chance encounter, no, these men were headed for certain battle, and they could be fairly sure that within a short time someone would be dead.

The crushing weight of this knowledge was like the weight of stones dragged into place by slaves who would be buried alive in the tomb of their oppressor. There was no release. Only the minutiae of heightened perceptions could distract from the oncoming inevitable.

At McPherson's order, the tanks turned off the road onto a snow-covered field. The road coming up from the south, headed east for about 900 yards in front of this field before heading north again so that, taking up a position on the field's steep incline, the tanks looked down on the road where it crossed in front of them at a distance of about four hundred yards. McPherson kept watch from the turret of C-11 while Domenic, his driver, flapped his arms in the driver's compartment to keep warm, the hatches for both the driver's compartment and the assistant driver's compartment being open.

Save for the whisper of wind across the field and the distant rumble of artillery, there was complete silence, as at a duel between two bitter, longtime enemies where one contestant had arrived early. In plain view on the hill, the American tanks, covered only by minimal camouflage, waited fifteen minutes before the German tanks appeared, unconcerned, plodding forward, the menace of their big eighty-eights showing like the muscles of a murderer with whom one had to share a cell in jail.

As the German tanks turned and began to cross in front of the Americans, their wheels squeaking, their engines whining, Hank counted the third one back—there were five—and trained his three-inch gun on it.

"Fire!" McPherson shouted, and the landscape transformed into five flaming wrecks, black smoke rising from their turrets. In his driver's compartment, Domenic did not rejoice in the deaths of the German soldiers. As the smoke went up from their graves, his body began to tremble so that his arms were actually shaking. He tried for a few moments to wait until the shaking passed, but when it persisted in jangling in him, he got on his headset with his commander in the turret: "Lieutenant, my nerves are shaking."

"What?" McPherson was familiar with what was called battle fatigue, a psychological condition brought on by extreme stress, but he was not prepared to see it happen in one of his men.

"My nerves are shaking–I don't know what it is–I can't stop it." It was all Domenic could do to maintain control. His body had risen up in rebellion against the killing of men, even if they were the enemy.

"You'll be all right," McPherson reassured him. The anxieties McPherson felt were in the normal range. For him the recent victory was sweet. He and his men had fought against evil and won. God would punish the souls of the enemy.

"I'll be all right—OK—I'll be all right. Oh, God!" The shaking would not stop.

"Domenic," McPherson said.

"Jesus! I'll be OK—my nerves are shaking. I can't stop it!"

"Are you gonna be all right?" asked McPherson. It was cold outside and Domenic needed comforting. The battlefield was an inhospitable place for it.

"I don't know," Domenic replied, encouraged by his commander's sympathy.

"OK, buddy, take a rest for a minute."

Excerpt II

We were in the twin villages of Krinkelt-Rocherath. The Germans were in the town and all around it and we were in the town and all around it. Fires flickered from confused buildings, shells crashed into Old World houses, alleys, and streets, and the night shuddered like an old dog having bad dreams.

* * *

Two soldiers crouched in a doorway. Across the street, part of a building was in flames. An incoming shell crashed down perilously close, tearing a roof to splinters and destroying the inner sanctum of a house. "I'm gettin the hell outta here!" one soldier said, his face shining like a moon off the reflected pallor of the snow. Not waiting for a response from the other soldier, whose greasy, tortured face gave off menacing gleams from the nearby flicker of flames, he threw down his gun and ran.

An oncoming tank destroyer whined down the empty main street as the soldier's shoes made solitary claps upon the snow. From his open driver's compartment, Domenic saw the man approaching like some condemned spirit from looming circles of hell. Up in the turret of the 30-ton tank destroyer, McPherson let the man go by unharmed. He could have shot the man—he couldn't tell whether the man was German or American—but warnings about Germans dressed up as Americans had not yet been issued.

This was just another nerve-jangling experience on a night more jittery than a hangover in a noisy freight yard. McPherson tried to calm himself, recalling, absurdly, material almost verbatim from his training school handbook: 3" gun motor carriage M10 mounts a 3" gun in an open top, hand-operated, 360-degree traversable turret. Vehicle weight, 32 tons, carrying crew of five and 54 rounds of 3" ammo; powered by 375 horsepower twin 6 diesel engine. Fording depth: 36".

McPherson looked out from his open turret like a charioteer in the raised seat of a houseboat headed over Niagara Falls. The ghastly hulk of the Krinkelt-Rocherath Church loomed like the back of a giant seated on the shore, momentarily distracted from grinding the bones of pleading saints. Suddenly, the giant turned and vomited up a German Mark V tank.

"Ram him, Domenic!—he can't bring his gun around!" McPherson shouted, loud enough to be heard without the need for the headsets each crew member wore. Domenic threw his steering levers forward, propelling the tank headlong toward its enemy like a panther toward its prey. The two gigantic hulks crashed together, their tracks churning in the snow, inch by inch churning in a slow circle, like two bulls with horns locked, the guns entangled, the German turret jammed. The American 3-inch naval gun pointed directly at the German turret; the big German eighty-eight pointed at buildings across the plaza.

"Fire!" McPherson shouted.

C-11 rocked with the concussion. Black smoke rose from the German turret.

"Get him again, Hank!" McPherson shouted to his gunner.

In the fury of the second concussion, the Virgin Mary appeared to Domenic. He glanced up from his compartment to see her high up on the battered steeple, bathed in light like the light that breaks through bundles of clouds on a summer evening. C-11 strained up against the bigger German tank. The Virgin waved her hand over the scene in blessing. C-11 pushed the German tank back over a wounded or dead German soldier in the street.

Hank fired a third shot. Black smoke billowed from the turret. The hatch opened like a jack-in-the-box and out popped the German tank commander. Drawing his pistol, McPherson extended his arm straight out toward the blackened figure who was desperately gasping for safety and fired three times into his exposed chest.

Domenic found leverage as the tracks of the German tank began to go up in the air.

"Push 'im over, Domenic!" McPherson commanded.

Domenic drove forward under the German tank, the German tank climbing upward toward the sky like some animal doing tricks and flipping over, exploding into flames.

Moving away from burning metal and fuel and exploding ammunition, Domenic advanced C-11 toward what looked like burnt-out shacks and chicken coops in a jumbled heap across the plaza. Hunched over the turret's .50 caliber machine gun, McPherson poured two tremendous volleys into small arms fire coming from the debris. Over 15 bedraggled Germans threw their hands up and came forward to surrender. A wave of American infantry, appearing out of nowhere, swept up to take them prisoner.

The conscienceless ferocity of an incoming shell smashed into the church. More shells smashed into the plaza.

"Jesus!" Buddy muttered.

"Hey, Buddy..." McPherson began.

The whole tank ignited in a wave of fire and smoke that annihilated the night, throwing Domenic, out of control, up against his levers. In the moments of confusion that followed, Domenic reached down to his leg. It was as if a bully had kicked him with a pointed shoe. His leg was wet. Blood? He brought his hand up in the darkness. It was blood. He shouted to the assistant driver in the next compartment, "Jimmy!" The crackle of dangerous flames was the only reply. Jimmy wasn't just out of it. Crumpled below the open hatch, mouth agape, face frozen, eyes like glass, he was dead. A ribbon of blood spilled across his brow.

Domenic scaled the hard metal side of the tank to the turret, looming up against the smoke and flames like a father searching for a child, ignoring the incoming shells which continued to pound nearby houses. The groans of McPherson and the Assistant Gunner Buddy were welcome contrast to the silence of the Gunner Hank who had been thrown almost upside down to the floor, his head lost in the dark like a bucket dropped into a well. Domenic checked him for vital signs. There was no question he was dead.

Domenic moved to help McPherson.

"Get Buddy, Domenic, I'll make it."

Domenic grabbed Buddy by the shoulders and lifted him toward the hard edge of the turret. He buckled Buddy over the turret edge, then climbed over himself and hauled him off the turret onto the sloping back of the tank, jumping down and then dragging him off, a bumpy, rough ride for a severely wounded man who talked deliriously all the while Domenic dragged him in the snow away from the burning wreckage.

"I've got to get back in the tank. I've got to get back in the tank to fight the Germans," Buddy repeated over and over again.

Domenic left Buddy and limped back to the tank. With flames licking at it, it would explode at any moment. He scaled the hard metal, looming up over the turret like salvation: "I gottya, Lieutenant, I gottya!" He figured the only way to get McPherson out of the turret fast enough was to sling him over his shoulder. McPherson was a big man. Domenic bowed his head and wrestled into him: "Can you move? Help me, Lieutenant! Get up! You gotta move, Lieutenant— c'mon, Lieutenant, you can do it! You can do it, Lieutenant!"

With the heavy man slung over his shoulder, Domenic lurched up and over the turret onto the hull. Domenic shouted: "Jump with me, Lieutenant! Get down—put your feet down. OK, jump! C'mon, jump!" Face to face, Domenic hugged McPherson, holding him up under the shoulders—they leapt off the burning tank together, the snowy ground coming up fast and hard as they landed apart in an ugly sprawl. Domenic jumped up and dragged McPherson with every last inch of devotion through the smoke and snow away from the tank, huffing, puffing, nauseous.

Domenic dropped McPherson beside Buddy, falling back on his elbows in the snow. Buddy spoke: "I got a million dollar wound."

"What's 'at, Buddy?" McPherson answered, but Buddy made no reply. More shells hit. They seemed far off, but they made the sky around them light up. Retreating soldiers made a clatter as they came across the plaza, one man with thick black whiskers giving off tremendous bursts from a machine gun. Two healthy Cupids of soldiers bent down and grabbed McPherson, carrying him off between them. Another soldier extended his arm to help Domenic. Like a wax doll mangled by a dog, Buddy stared up at the overhanging sarcophagus of night as the ammunition in the tank began to explode.

* * *

Buddy's younger brother, Joe, strode into Winky's Soda Fountain in Pittsburgh with his best friend, Doug. Winters were cold in Pennsylvania and Joe and Doug were bundled up in worn dark woolens—layers made up of a sweater, flannel shirt, and long underwear, with a coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and heavy shoes. They were bundled up good, because they were going to town for a special reason.

Winky's was warm and bright inside. It was as if the room were sprayed with mist. Sweet perfume hung on light reflected with a dazzle off the chrome polish of the handles, lids, and urns behind the counter, catching on a watch or ring as if this cheery place were either a recreation of some memory of Elysium, where the blessed went after death, or an attempt to create such a place. This place was the opposite of death, an intimation of the limitless possibilities of the human spirit in the delicious thrill of an ice cream sundae.

Women thronged the counter, shopping bags at their feet. Approaching open bar stools, Joe and Doug gulped down the sight of whipped cream and chocolate topped by a cherry in the form of a woman with intensely beautiful blond hair, a fairy white complexion, and sweetly pursed, shiny red lips. Her figure was trim and fragile, her shapely legs covered in dark stockings. Below the trailings of her skirt and overcoat, her dainty feet peeked out gracefully in high heel shoes.

Like an actor in full command of his audience, Joe sang out to his friend, "That's what Buddy wrote. He wrote, if there was one thing he wanted, it was a banana split down Winky's."

"At's it!" Doug exclaimed.

The blond woman smiled.

"You said it! So I'm gonna have one for him!" Joe said.

"Right!" Doug said.

An old man in white, with a white cap, came up to get their order, his face radiant. "What'll it be, boys?"

Joe felt the blond woman's beautiful smile playing over him as he answered, "I'll have a banana split for my big brother, Buddy, in the 644th Tank Destroyer battalion."

"And I'll have the same!" Doug ordered.

The lovely woman turned her beautiful smile away and reached in her purse. This was disconcerting to Joe and Doug, who did not want to see her leave. As the woman was getting up to leave, Joe turned to her and said, "Think the war will be over soon?"

The woman smiled, leaned toward him, and silently pointed to her ear and then her mouth.

###

About Garden Urthark

A garden is an ideal or archetype that gives the Earth (Urth) a human shape. Garden Urthark is an enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.

About the Artist for Other World

"Hearing people want to speak. Deaf people are the same. Deaf feel they know the concept without the words. With both hearing and deaf, the result for me was always frustration. Growing up, I lived like an animal, a pet, dependent on my keepers. But animals have a brain. They think, they feel. I live to capture light, the spirit, colors – to transfer myself, my energy, and my labor into art – to show the world I am creative: I think, I feel." (Sung Kim)

The Artwork

Cover: _Other World_ (see below)

Flowers, 2007, oil, 16"x12"

Moody Santo Nude, 2010, oil, 16"x20"

Moody on His Motorcycle, 2010, oil, 14"x18"

Other World, 2002, acrylic, 16"x20"

Train for a Child, 2006, oil, 16"x12"

Death and Life, 1989, oil, 20"x16"

Green Still Life, 1988, oil, 22"x20"

**Other Titles by Garden Urthark**

<https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/GardenUrthark>

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

All parts of this book are fiction, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my deaf friend Willie Santiago for her invaluable friendship and encouragement over the entire 18-year period I devoted to _Other World_. I would especially like to thank her for acting as my advisor on "Chapter 3: Book of Life" and for reading and commenting on my work at the most important turning points in its development.

I would like to thank Father Jerry (Reverend Gerard Trancone), the Catholic chaplain at Gallaudet University, director of the Center for Deaf Ministries, and pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Deaf Catholic Church, for reading and commenting on my entire manuscript as well as making contributions to the actual speech of my character Father Mat.

I would like to thank the University of Maryland and Gallaudet University for providing me the opportunity to immerse myself for a year as a full-time visiting student among deaf undergraduate students at Gallaudet, one of whom became my wife, then an art major who eventually came to provide all the beautiful illustrations, as well as cover illustration, for _Other World_.

I would like to thank my late Uncle Willow (William P. Visnich), a decorated World War II M10 tank destroyer commander who guided me on the research which led to my portrayal of the battle of Rocherath and Krinkelt.

I would like to thank Philippa Burgess of Creative Convergence, Inc., for guiding me toward publishing _Other World_ as an eBook.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife and son for supporting me in my quest to make _Other World_ a lasting contribution to literary art. The sacrifice, especially economic sacrifice, required in the pursuit of so high a goal has been great, but not without reward.

Copyright Notice for Other World

Copyright 2005 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

Copyright 2010 Albert J. Miele, Jr.
