

Semblances: Even More Short Stories

By S. P. Elledge

Copyright 2013 S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

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### Semblances

Even More Short Stories

by

S. P. Elledge

for my friends

### Table Of Contents

1. Translator's Foreword

2. Big Blue '62

3. The Theft

4. Love Is Love Is Love Is

5. Larger Than Life

6. White Child

7. Horses

8. How To Write

9. The Park

10. The Wreck

11. Elephant Hunt

12. The Secret Life of the World

13. Edgell and Me
Translator's Foreword

You have bought it, kind reader, and now this book in your hands is yours. Or maybe you stole it—pulled it surreptitiously from the clean, fluorescent-lit racks of the galleria's bookstore and slipped it under your grimy raincoat. Then again, you may have been guided by some unaccountable force to the bins in back of the used bookstore downtown (the one you never dared enter before), where you blew dust from the cover and cracked these pages open, breathing in the smell of mold and must—the smell of time. However you came by it, here I am before you now. Hello up there! No introductions necessary.

Remember, this is _your_ book now. Go ahead and inscribe your name on the title page—cross out the former owner's if you like—and read on; I am sure we are going to become quite good friends.

You've noted the foreign name on the spine and did not recognize it—likely someone well-known in his own country, you told yourself, someone long-dead or maybe painting pots in an asylum. Now, flip back a few leaves to the title page, past the "Other Books By," the untranslatable dedication, and sundry publication data (those things will mean nothing to you)—see, there I am in the (far too) small print: "Translated By"—what does that mean, really? Are not all books translations, in a sense? Translations from the writer's unconscious language, if you will. Translations of an artificial dream. Are not all translations merely substitutions for the real thing, a bridge to communicate across, to be sure, but really of subordinate value in appraising the work? I beg to differ. I will not become lost in translation. I am not just translating our trusted foreign author, you see—I am translating yourself, as well.

Oh, stop—I hear you scoffing. Pretentious, pseudo-metaphysical, and what could I possibly mean? I know _you_ , all right. Still, you may read on without fear. Why shouldn't a book know its reader just as surely as a reader knows his book? We are dependent upon one another. I do not exist except when you lay your eyes upon these pages; you do not exist to me except when I imagine you sitting there, thumb pressed into the bulk of the book, lamp brought down low so your head casts no shadow across these pages. Again I say, Hello up there! Yet you are my figment as much as I am yours, as much as God is ours.

Can't you just see me? Here in my dim, cluttered study, surrounded by scattered manuscripts and the peculiar original editions of our esteemed foreign author (see, even the alphabet is different, like a secret code!), a little tired from a late and greasy supper, a little hazy from the special cordials my housekeeper brought because of some forgotten, pathetic anniversary. Well, that's wrong. You'll have to try harder than that. But I see you, I see you, all right—leaning back in your uneasy chair, feet propped on a worn hassock, sipping that domestic port-wine you can't stomach but buy because it's cheap. I could go on—but why bother? I know you; we've known each other for a couple of pages now; that's more than many married couples ever discover of one another, believe me. And as for our beloved unknown famous author and his monolingual editors: They have no idea what I am really transforming this book into; they do not speak our language and their trust is in me alone. For all they know—or you know—these stories could be from first to last my own inventions. What a clever way for a frustrated writer (all translators are) to finagle himself into print! But that would be too complicated after all and not a little immoral, would it not? You'll just have to abide in me as our poor "well-known in his own country" author does. What power I have over the both of you!

And what power you, dear, kind reader, have over me—for at least half this book's readers I presume will skip this odd-looking hors d'oeuvre in their gormandizing pursuit of a more rewarding entrée, banishing me into limbo without the least bit of compunction. Certainly only now that a few of you have finished the rest of the book are you slinking back to read my careful foreword—but look at me, look at me; I exist just as solidly now as if I had been there all along guiding your thoughts... and of course I was.

"Allow me to translate." Isn't that a bit like asking to play ghost, to shun the spotlight for the sake of the star? I am supposed to be humble, to defer, to become invisible.My name is seldom—almost never!—mentioned in the reviews. There'll be no picture of me on the dust-jacket (it's gone now, is it? pity, it was quite lovely), no blurbs about my history or past triumphs, no self-satisfaction on my part—I am merely the servant, carrying in heavy dishes, these splendid stories, and I am not to interfere with master's repast. God, but you all bore me!

So you've set the book aside for a while or skipped ahead to the first story—very well, then; you've come back, anyway. That story was not quite what you expected, was it? A little on the peculiar side, a shortcut down an alley you did not really want to enter. Admit it—I fascinate you as much as if not more than any of these fabrications that follow. I am the real thing, either a joker or a lunatic. You can believe in me as you cannot Our Author's scribbled scriptures. So you return to me, come back into the fold, as it were, with a sheepish look about you; a few bitter swallows, and you've given up on those precious, hand-colored, hand-sewn little fictions, haven't you? Perhaps you will have faith in me because I know both languages—not the author's and ours alone, but that of the "real" world we share as well as our poor writer's. A go-between between worlds I am, mercurial lackey of gods and men. I am supposed to haul these uncatalogued creatures up from the depths and give them names, to put into words we both can understand what were another man's nightmares in another man's language, am I not? All this heart-wrenching labor, and you would be surprised how little I am paid.

My little girl is lame. My wife is sleeping with the next-door neighbor. I have six months to live. Have I shocked you? Have I overstepped my bounds? Do you really believe me? But aren't these statements just as valid as the ones I create on the author's behalf later? Like you I have my problems and I want someone to believe them, and in believing them, share them, and in sharing them, disperse and reduce them, make them less threatening, less real. If you are going to bring your entire history to this book why shouldn't I introduce a small part of mine to you? We have met here at last on these pages: The paths of our lives have been leading to this lonely intersection on a barren plain, and now you are my true, my trusted, my only friend! What ever you do now you cannot deny that you ever knew me between the covers of this book, and it is a great responsibility—though no less than the great responsibility I have been shouldered with in presenting our author to you. It is best we both carry the weight, and I may add, the great guilt inherent in reading a book which has already demanded so much of any author, may even indeed contribute to his or her eventual breakdown. Are not Poe's readers, for example, at least partially culpable for sending him to his death in a gutter, a few coins in his pockets? Didn't we aim that despondent playwright's gun, tighten a thousand failed poets' nooses? We demand thrilling final pages. And aren't all we who read this book's stories to blame for forcing our imaginary author to write more and more and more until (let's use our tired imaginations) he literally bled onto the pages in his madhouse? Think of any number of tragic authors, and how we are always asking for endless translations from their visions, yes, and their nightmares.

But I am not writing a critical overview of the artist's role in society; neither am I interested in delegating blame or credit like a teacher with a boxful of stars and demerits; I am merely asking you, friend, to refrain from putting this book down or returning it to the bookseller's: "Defective foreword," you might say. You owe me this much now we are friends. Instead, I want you to turn to a random page—page forty-six, for example, and reconsider this monster we have assembled from our memories and our prejudices. (Storyteller, who shall tell your story?) You'll see that the man carrying the box which he thinks contains the glazed almond cake but is really filled with nothing but straw, the man "with a questionable mustache," was described as "clean-shaven as a priest" not twenty pages back. Is this a slip on the author's part—or have I planted this land-mine waiting for you to step on it? ...All right, then, maybe you will forgive him that. But what about the "hat like an emu's flattened egg" on page sixty? Is that merely a bad description—or a bad translation? Were such mistakes intended or are all the translator's own intentions mistakes? I'll let you decide. My little girl is lame. My wife is—well, haven't I a right to be angry? Like you, I work too hard for too little. I accept my assignments and then I am expected to dissolve myself within another man's personality. I'll tell you something: I met this author of ours once. I was a graduate student in Baku or Belgrade, it does not matter; this man was on one of those panels composed of other such refined gentlemen and ladies, I was nothing, he was something. "Do you write from 'real life'?" I asked when the firing squad was aimed at me. He stared at me, eyes swimming like minnows behind aquarium-thick lenses, fists whitening on the table. "You insult me, sir!" was the first of many invectives. And then he laughed, the other esteemed ladies and gentlemen laughed, the whole room, the whole world was laughing. That night I hung myself from the pipes running through my lonely cellar room. Or maybe I drew a knife from my jerkin and went for his miserable heart.

It's for you to decide, kind, kind, most kind reader! Just as the author invents his tales, I invent him, just as he dreams me, I dream his tales, and we all try to catch one another on this carousel. Ah, but don't think I can't see you out there smirking, scratching your soft dyspeptic belly, just about to close the book! Wait, first, turn to the fifth story—that child on the street who gives the hero a tender loving frown—she is mine, all mine! And likewise that sudden passion which invades the crippled seamstress's meager thoughts in the last story, and that ball that mysteriously skips down the esplanade in another, that plum-colored sky in yet another—all over I have left my thumb prints Can you believe the liar when he tells you he lies? This translation is my prison; my god has damned me.

Hello up there! I said, Are you listening to me? Do you care? Kind reader! You may now be my enemy as much as he is mine, but read on, read on.
Big Blue '62

Matinee

What she'd really like to be doing, instead of sitting alone with hands folded on her lap in this movie theater in this godforsaken mall, is to be riding in the broad back seat of that big blue 1962 Saturn Esquire sedan her parents owned during their best years. The back seat was springy and plush as a couch, there were deep aluminum ashtrays in the armrests (which were better to prop feet on), recessed buttons which silently raised or lowered the windows, and two illuminated mirrors affixed to the back of the front seat—"lipstick mirrors," her mother had called them. On the way home from a drive-in, falling slowly into luxurious sleep, she watched through the fringe of her eyelashes the back of her parents' heads as they glided in their new car through the empty, starry streets of suburban Phoenix. Father's hair was Brill-Creamed blond, Mother's was V05-sprayed into a perfect bronze-highlighted wonder. (Why then does she, who once was that girl, herself have raven-black hair she has always, always worn swirled up into a sort of seashell?) Through the crack between the front seats she could see a portion of the car's futuristic dashboard, hooded over the multicolored control panel, looking just like a TV spaceship's. How did adults ever make out what all those flashing lights and spinning dials and rocking meters meant? So sophisticated and streamlined, always looking sleek and wet (which it often was, since Father washed it almost every other day), the car was a time machine, although it transported her family noiselessly and bump-free on its cushioned shocks not just through time but space as well: You set foot in it and magic seconds later you'd be in a different place and time—or so it seemed when you invariably fell asleep on its prickly gray (yet warm, comforting) upholstery. It had a glorious clear-throated radio as well—the new FM stereo—and it would be playing softly, Vic Damone or Dean Martin, in the prismatic darkness, her mother whisper-singing along between Bel-Air inhalations. Father's fingers (purple cat's-eye on left pinkie, tarnished wedding band on ring finger) spanned the thick, oversized steering wheel and spun it like a ship's captain; he might be murmuring a thing or two to his wife about the Panavision western they had just seen. The music and smoke and whispers enveloped her like soft, scented rain. And the almost imperceptibly vibrating engine would lull her to sleep on her side while she breathed in and out mother's tobacco and Avon lily-of-the-valley talc, dreaming of cowboys forty feet tall.

Desire

She wants a man who walks a big black dog. She wants a man with a crisp white shirtfront and money in the bank. She wants a man who spit-polishes his shoes and knows when and when not to say please. She wants a man who's won his wings. She wants a man who whispers sweet nothings. She wants a man who shaves with a straight-edge, drives a long quiet coupe, and who could walk a tight-rope through fire and never once stop thinking of her. She wants a man with a cool forehead. Always.

Driving

They've closed all the real big-screen theaters (no more art-deco marquees, no more balcony seats) in the whole county, so which movie, which cinema of the three or four in the city a half-hour's drive from her own town she doesn't care; she just wants to sit in the dark a couple hours, thinking of nothing. No one squeezing her hand or prodding her shoulder or offering up popcorn to the not-so-virgin goddess. No one to have to think up things to say to about the movie as he drives you home and hesitates before the door... A musical—now that might be good. The last musical she saw was an octoplex revival of _Paint Your Wagon_. She had seen it with her second husband before he was her husband and afterward he had taken off her shoes and told her he loved her. "OK," she had said.

The movie she sees today is _How The West Was Won_ , in an old theater she used to love which has been remodeled, split right down the middle to show twice as many movies to half as many people. She likes _How The West Was Won;_ it's bright and loud and filled with good-looking men and meteoric horses. She's seen it several times before, remembers almost nothing.

Dance

Every night she goes out dancing with her past. Doesn't everyone? Every night she removes the bones of all those she has known from under her bed: these are the scrambled skeletons of lovers, family, friends. It takes half the night just to separate the bones into the right piles and reassemble them. She puts on an easy-listening station, begins the dance. To "The Beautiful Blue Hills of Ohio" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" she and her silent partners waltz and two-step—those who are dead aroused by desire for life, for flesh; those who are alive elsewhere summoned by this freedom from flesh, this flight into dream. They dance until they drop in a xylophone arpeggio, a catacomb heap of ribs and skulls. When she wakes she has a migraine and remembers nothing. Doesn't everyone? She eradicates any trace of the night and the past with the bitter taste of aspirin, then coffee.

Holiday

It is, after all, Memorial Day. Day of Memories. Day of the Dead. In Mexico there would be parades of ghouls and sugared skulls and bloody, weeping statues of saints and patriarchs. (But that's another time of year there, when bronzed leaves are falling here... ) In America there are picnics, reunions, peonies. Her grandmother had always told her peonies wouldn't burst their swollen buds without help from the big black ants which crawl over them. This year their pearly heads hang heavy in her grandmother's garden, already shedding their petals on the grass. The flowers leave a stale scent in the air, like old perfume uncapped after years in the back of mother's vanity. If the wind picks up, there will soon be no more petals, too soon to go this year, as do the lilacs every year. She thinks of her grandmother as she looks out on the remnants of her grandmother's garden from her grandmother's kitchen window, what had been her grandmother's little blue heaven before it was surrounded by gray urban sprawl, here in the middle of the world, in the middle of Ohio.

Not by design is she wearing black, although these days few Americans really associate this holiday with death and dying (no need for thoughts of sad flowers, sad good-byes), but as the checkered flag waving on another summer. Surely some people do as her grandmother did, still plant their plastic wreaths, no words said, but quickly and unceremoniously as possible between barbecue and baseball game. It isn't disrespectful, it's just how everyone she'd grown up with did, too busy concentrating on life to contemplate death. Besides, everyone moves on nowadays and the graves (her own mother's and grandmother's both in Phoenix, although both called themselves Midwesterners until the end) and the memories are left behind in another state, to another time. As she supposes they should be.

Questionnaire

What do we call that bird which pierces its breast to feed its young? And the bird that sings so beautifully from within its burning nest? And the state bird? Was it my grandmother's favorite? How blue were her eyes? My mother's? Was my mother untouched by men before she married my father? How was the west really won? Is there life after Ohio? Were the citizens of Herculaneum first smothered by the ashes or asphyxiated by the smoke? Did she love him or merely come to love him? What constellations, if any, can the average suburban child identify above his or her neighborhood's streetlights? What names did mother call him, in bed, in the middle of the night? Did she cry out when she gave birth to me or was she silent? Does she love me, even now? What bird is it that abandons its eggs in the nest of another? What bird is immortal? And finally, can someone be struck by lightning and survive unharmed?

She pictures the students at their desks, heads bowed as in prayer, scritch-scratching away. Oblivious, praying not to be called. Except one girl—the one who looks like herself at that age, right down to the contemptuous eyebrows—that girl laughing to herself in a corner.

Television

Meanwhile the Jetsons are ricocheting against the curves of space in their bubble-topped space-buggies: It's the glorious future of the early 1960's. She remembers this false prophecy with an ache, a longing. When she was seven she, too, believed in the future, a time when there would be no more space on earth, but no matter when the moon is covered with apartment complexes and cars can fly and pills feed a family of six and robots serve the Tang. Time of course passed much slower then, not just the relative time of children, but adults' time as well—much much slower, although no one noticed or took advantage of this and not a lot was done and things did not change much after all. Ohio had changed, though, the PTA mothers said, but how, where? Looking out through the frame of the kitchen window, past the abandoned pump, out over her rows of young corn, out beyond the ugly new edge of town into the smoke-blue horizon, it is hard to believe time exists even as a concept—at least on a Sunday at the very end of a hot and unremarkable May. No mechanical men or beasts will ever roam this town or the skies above, no machines will plow through Main Street and its oaks, no ceaseless line of cars even to come fill up the roads. Nor clouds to mar the sun or perfection of this last day, hour, minute, everlasting second. Sunday, widow Sunday, headstone of the week, each hour a car in a long slow procession toward the ceremony at sundown... Such thoughts—such thoughts she has! wiping the dishes, rinsing the sponge, folding the dishtowels. Though it is, after all, Memorial Day.

Voices

The words he used made even your fingertips sting, as if the letter were nettles held in the hand. So you burned it up, flushed ashes down the toilet. Consider this: how can people be happy? When they have sinned Holy Roman Catholic sins? All those headaches; it's no wonder. You shouldn't have, you should have, you shouldn't, you should. Do other people ever wonder if it's all a lie, all these broken props, trick water glasses, _tromp l'oeil_ doorways? Have you witnessed the primal scene, screamed the primal scream? When you were an infant you longed to pluck that pretty blue flower on top of the range, but it burned your pretty little fingers. Are all your favorite colors black? Can five minutes be more important than your own grandmother's, mother's, father's death? Yes, it is like... those berries dropped down a long well. Pegasus flying to heaven, to join the constellations, wreath of lilies around his neck. Your husband waving from the cockpit. You, dizzy with abandon. Light years from home, among winged astronauts and cowboys. Ashes falling like snow, children smothering. A color plate in "P-PR" in an old Brittanica. A moon like a yellow cantaloupe splitting itself open on a serrated horizon color of sandstone. Which bird is on your city's crest? Which bird never lives, never dies, is not a bird at all? Can someone hit the lights, please; we'll roll the film.

But more, more than that... giving the self up to sleep and all its mysteries, or to ether and scalpel. Saying: Here, lover, this is me; do, lover, what you will.

Father

Ohio had bored him, his wife, too—all those white wood-frame houses of their mutual childhood, and snow on the jonquils in April—but the west was not the wide-open spaces the cigarette billboards promised it to be. It was only large enough for a desk and chair in a mirror-glass office building housing one of those quasi-governmental firms, the type of place which could be anywhere, where a TV sitcom father would work (a work of irresolute nature neither intriguing nor demanding enough to ask about or be told about at home). In fact, she still casts Danny Thomas or John Forsythe in the easy-going role of her father in her memories of growing up, though her real father had metamorphosed over the years into a man bristly and sun-blistered, bald as a baby and as unpredictable, who—now that her mother was gone—spent all his days in a lounge chair by the pool, listening to a radio that always wavered between stations—a jazz program and a talk show seamed together, just unsettling enough to keep him forever on the edge of sleep but not quite asleep. When she visited, which was less and less often for shorter and shorter time periods, he was usually in that state of semi-wakefulness, conversing softly and drifting away now and then like a patient under hypnosis. She wonders if he ever woke completely after she left or if he remained in saurian stupor throughout the hot days and swift twilight rains. The prescription medicines lined up on the kitchen table seemed to breed among themselves, producing stranger and stranger combinations of tranquilizers and vitamins. Yet he was so relaxed, as happy to see her go as to see her arrive—could death be any more pleasant or still? It was possible to love that tired old man by the blue water but not in the way she had loved and missed that white-shirtfronted, gray-suited man to whom she had once said goodbye, so long daddy, goodbye forever when she had made her ultimate departure from the glimmering and lifeless suburbs of Phoenix.

Dream

Something to do with a cattle rustler or horse thief; perhaps she's a schoolmarm in a straw bonnet. He looks and sings like a young Dean Martin blended with a younger Tony Curtis. She and this rustler are in bed, an old-fashioned iron-frame one, with no mattress, and he's riding her like a bronco buster. This has been going on for some time. All the while he's singing "Goodbye Ol' Paint" in her ear. The strangest thing is how cold he feels, cold as steel, or maybe it's the bare springs pressing into her back or the silver rosary binding her wrists: there is no pleasure, only pain, only blood. He is naked but for his ten-gallon hat and holster. None of this bothers her too much, however, because at the same time he's on top of her she is on the other side of the room, mechanically pumping bullets into his back—although he doesn't die; he's still tearing her hair and biting her shoulders as they floor the accelerator, gallop fast as flight into the sunset, a painted sunset on the side of a frontier store. The dream's closing pun: How much horsepower in a '62 Saturn Esquire? If she had woken then, she would have woken laughing.

Badlands

In the Badlands of western South Dakota she discovered, at the age of fourteen, a glittering trail of dinosaur bones winding through the sandstone minarets and watchtowers and cathedral spires, as if the monsters had slowly disintegrated as they walked their final walk, falling apart bit by bit, the vertebrae slipping off their spinal columns like pearls off an enormous necklace. Nothing seemed even as real as Disneyland here. The Badlands must have always been badlands, barren as the moon, and it was easy to imagine all manner of prehistoric beasts coming here to die, like elephants to their legendary graveyard or saber-toothed lions trapped in the La Brea pits. And even today the ancient retired couples come here after somewhat the same fashion (that is, those who didn't make it to Miami or Phoenix and are vacationing from the Midwest) or so it appeared to a wry and contemptuous teenager who dared to smoke in front of her parents and call them by their Christian names. She had always despised the aged and the invalid, mostly because it was they who sapped her mother's strength in their nursing homes and care centers. Everything old but her grandmother, who held her like a doll and sang sad old funny songs but couldn't speak since her stroke. Of course these couples would be driving their Ramblers or Rumblers on toward the rejuvenating heights of the Black Hills, but why not just drop the bones here, mingle them with some more imposing figures of the past? Age is the prelude to death but death alone does not frighten obstinate fourteen-year-olds. Their bones are still green and pliant. But age, old age, meaning baldness or incontinence or, worse, loss of memory, is something repellent, something fearful. And so on, so on, so on... She followed the signposts toward a distant, sauropod Valhalla (each fragment and petrified footprint under a hard plastic bubble for tourists to identify), view ahead obstructed (all Elysian vistas get obstructed) by a violet-haired woman's wide hips in lime-green stretch slacks bobbing always ahead of her until they came to an abrupt stop... the woman was peering dubiously over a steep but inviting gorge. And though the girl could think of no reason why she should detest in particular this comic old lady, she did; she wanted to push her overboard into oblivion. And she could do it—this thought alone empowered her; no one would see or know. All about her she felt the presence of fangs, spikes, claws from millions of years before—why not do it, why not? No one would do any more than question her at most; it would look like an accident. Murder, the very word, never flashed in her mind, just as revenge never occurs to the child who swipes at the playmate who has stolen her cookie—it would be an almost innocent act, more like a game of dare, a very casual game at that. If, she contemplated, I push that woman off the edge, my life might be quite different from what it would otherwise turn out to be, not so typical, so predictable...

Trivia

The sight and sound of some adolescent girls, especially those who snap their gum and crack their finger joints, can make her wince. She owns six pairs of black patent leather shoes and none of them is the exact right fit. If truth be known, she frequently lies about her age. She has occasional strong yearnings to snitch pomegranates at the grocer's. Card-playing she considers the biggest time-waster of them all; still, there is nothing like a good game of solitaire when you are alone and lonely on a stormy day. She never prays as a good Catholic girl should. When she was twelve she kept a wasp trapped in a preserve jar until it died just because she liked the sound of its buzz. Unlike almost every other person, she is strangely satisfied with her hair and hairstyle. Once she screamed at her mother for incinerating her movie magazines. She loves above all Westerns, musicals, and Copland, "Grand Canyon Suite," that sort of thing. Her first husband looked hard but had the voice of an angel, wasted on rock and roll. For a while he said she could be an artist, and the second husband bought her expensive English watercolor paintboxes, but now she teaches history and some art when she can at the middle school, a job she says she hates but might well love. When it was still possible to talk in such a fashion, she used to say she "had a thing" for ancient Greece and Rome. She has painted a mural copied from Pompeii on the side of her grandmother's old chicken coop but admits it's no good. Her vision is one of dark towns, castles of ash, lost birds singing from the bottoms of wells.

And sometimes she would, instead of the American West, prefer to be wandering on the moor, to be swept away by a hooded shadow on a black charger, to be taken to a certain boudoir of a certain year of the eighteenth century where the scent of tea-roses which have long died and been discarded lingers on in the dusty air and the light is dappled through vines and blinds and the shadowed figure ties fine silk ribbons around each and every digit, every limb and a dozen locks of her hair, about the wrists, ankles, her softly palpitating throat ...

Moon

When they first landed she was pasting pictures of television cowboys and magazine playboys into her birthday scrapbook, not because she really idolized any of these slick-paper men but because something had to fill the scrapbook besides her charcoal drawings of a winged Boucephalos and Alexander; her fingers stuck together with the starchy white paste and her hair was a teenage mess with it. Told to come look at the moon outside, she said, yeah, it just looked like the same old empty moon to her. Besides, it was only half a moon, who could land on that—wouldn't they just fall off? A joke, mother. And, look, you could trace Kennedy's profile in the stars, his new frontier. Back to work, trying to make all the cutouts look like they were at one of those swank Hollywood parties together, except no women allowed. Told to come watch the astronauts doing their space ballet beneath the falling static, she said, yeah so it's a desert—who wants to live in a cold white desert with no horses? Then she went back to cutting and pasting, reminding herself again that life is nothing to waste time or effort trying too much to believe in.

Monologue

Here am I, Mother Mary, hard and ornate as a jewel, avoiding mirrors, stepping on all the cracks, smashing mirrors, walking under ladders, wary as the biggest black cat that ever crossed your path. Waxing, waning, this moon of my heart, treating it like nothing but a pin cushion, this brain stuffed with all these brambles and briars, senseless as a footstool. Combing my raven hair, letting the comb fall, falling to my bed of nails. Polishing memory's bones until they gleam in the starlight. The blessed actress in her widow's weeds, forgetting to laugh, laughing to forget. Drawing a thin silver line of pain down the western breeze. Speaking in that soft sibilant tongue no one taught me at college. Open your umbrella, put your hat on the bed. Here am I, blessed among women, blessed art me. My sorrows are my pearls, my peonies, enough for one hell of a dolorous rosary. All my men will henceforth wear blinders. I shall not fall from grace. My slip is showing. Mary, my mother, watch over my father of the blue grotto. Hail, hail full of grace.

Husbands

The first husband, high-school sweetheart, hometown boynextdoor, is little more than a studio photograph above the sofa, growing paler in the Ohio sunlight every day: well-remembered, however, the clothes he wore, the dark tie, the navy-blue uniform, the silver wings on his lapel. The way he bowed to remove her wet slippers when she'd run across the lawn to say goodbye one more time, the broad blue expanse of his back and the pink, tender, shaven arch of his nape which she loved so dearly to kiss. Not much more is that vivid, except for a hushed death in a desert raid on the dark side of the earth, a military blunder not much talked about then and forgotten now, although it is as real to her as a just-seen movie, as if she had been flown there to witness the burning blue ring of flames like an overseas correspondent. Strange, because she has never been provided with any Pentagon details to furnish the imagined scenario. After fifteen years, still no amount of blue hills and green leaves can compensate for the cold and empty sands of that sudden death.

The second husband looked like a cowhand or an astronaut, too, even though he talked like the city councilman he actually was. He wore oxblood loafers with dimes where the pennies should be (always was the big spender). He whispered what you might call sweet nothings but always made a big deal out of it and expected her to "perform." He liked the rarest of steaks, would probably have eaten it raw if he'd been given half a chance. He was so tall he made ceilings appear to lower with his presence, as if they might close in on you like a vise if you stayed too long in the same room with him. He was an angel to everyone but her. He bought her too many things to make up for his temper. He bought her the palomino she'd always wanted, but he was as timid as a jackrabbit before its hooves. He sold the horse one day without telling her, returned a lot of unworn dresses to the stores, liquidated his emotional assets, as it were. He agreed to the divorce before, it seemed, she had even mentioned the word. He once slapped her in anger and cried in their bedroom for hours but never asked forgiveness. He loved her madly.

Plot

Memorial Day, a small town near the H in OHIO on interstate maps. An empty Sunday to fill, as empty as that grave. And later, a summer and its heat, no respite until the air-conditioned classrooms after Labor Day. Just a day, doing dishes, watching some blurred television out of boredom, driving the car to the lake maybe. Maybe going instead to a movie, a matinee, maybe taking a walk—how will one complicate the minutes to make them go away? You could weave a strand through the day, give yourself a storyline that will hold your own interest, or you can let go the thread... Pick it up again in a room you left twenty years ago, people it with phantoms never alive and never dead. Trace the bouquets on the wallpaper with one moist tongue-licked finger. Hurtle books down the stairwell and scream. Try this: take a day, any day, in your childhood and remember everything, re-feel everything down to the most minute speck of dust, wake with yourself at dawn, walk long-forgotten hallways, greet faces out of scrapbooks; then tear it apart, warn people of their futures, set the whole world on fire...

Cemetery

There is no one she knows buried here (that veteran's flag marks an empty grave, for they never retrieved his body from the shifting, annihilating desert sands), no one anyone knows anymore on this hillock patterned with day lilies and tombstones, enclosed by a rusted fence which years ago burst from the pressure of weeds and yew roots. No histories remain in this cemetery, for low-grade granite dug from the nearest quarry, unlike the imported marble in the newer cemetery on the opposite end of town, doesn't believe in the past, prefers to let time and the elements (the same thing) erase what was once so dutifully recorded of these lives. No one, anyway, has cause to remember them, for unlike the other cemetery this one is forever unmown, unvisited—-no satin sashes, no wreaths, no urns overflowing with peonies, no toy flags save the one on his grave. She, like the granite, prefers it this way, this anonymity. When school is out within a week she can become anonymous again, too; her students will chase each other across her yard, her mail will slow to a standstill, she can spend all day watching the Jetsons travel through non-Einsteinian time if she likes. Or she can drive to the next county to watch a movie and fall fast asleep in the dark.

This is the cemetery she prefers, though her grandfather and his parents, that whole half of the family, are buried in the newer cemetery on the other side of town, the one with regulations that require those marble headstones to be flush with the sod so rider-mowers can make a clean, quick sweep of the hillside. The last time she went there was with her first husband and they got lost in the conformity, never could find her grandfather's grave, so they placed their lilies on some unknown person's grave and walked away more angry than sad. (That was why she knew he'd prefer to buried in the older cemetery, buried by proxy at least.) She was glad that when her father died he'd break tradition and be reduced to ash and bone, placed in an urn on a shelf in a suburban mausoleum next to her mother and her grandmother for an eternity she'd never have to witness. That cemetery out west was too far away, too foreign to care about or visit. As for herself, she wants to be left in the trees like an Indian, picked clean by the birds and lifted up by the branches as they grow, lifted into the heavens.

Memories

Driving her old rusted Karmann Ghia (parting gift from husband two) through the countryside, she expounds mentally on this perhaps well-worn theory: that memories really exist only in the present and not in pristine suspension in the recesses of the brain, and they may have only superficial resemblance to the actual past. As the memory is called forth—or rather, reinvented—the event or image is re-fabricated through some unknown process and hence becomes a new, unique thing in itself. Each consequential memory of the original instant is therefore altered and even eventually unrelated to the original stimuli. Thereby, no such thing as a true memory can exist, only poor reproductions and transformations of the genuine article, like photocopies of photocopies. (For instance, what I recall of that blue stoneware teakettle resting on my stove at home in my kitchen is not that kettle at all—and it is a ghost kitchen in a make-believe house.) This is true even of abstracts. Three times three equals nine but our conception of what amounts to nine of some thing or essence of a thing is as unstable as radium atoms. Well, that may not be the best example, but all pseudo-scientific or quasi-metaphysical hypotheses have their gaping loopholes, all crumble when touched, and I never made it past Philosophy 101.

All right, better perhaps is a more mundane example: I remember my father as a tall, burly man with a ready smile, thick gold rings on every finger and wiry black hair on the back of his broad hands, when in actuality (corroborated by photographic evidence and the testimonials of mutual acquaintances) he was much slimmer, fairer and moodier, with only two rings, his modest wedding band and a class token. (Or am I even wrong about that: on which points do the snapshots and anecdotes concur?) My mother, try as I might, I can only picture in her somber gray nurse's uniform, so stiffly starched it felt like cardboard, with pleats up the back of the blouse and matching steel-gray stockings that ended in a wide elastic band just below the hem of her pleated skirt. However, she wore that particular outfit only during a short stint as a private nurse to some old infirm retired couple from Omaha. Most of her life she wore only cool, clinical whites as she paced the always just-waxed halls of public nursing homes, taking smoking breaks in the restroom like a conniving middle-school girl. First husband memories grow slighter despite constant tending—shy glances at the pep rally were the start, a yellow telegram the last; second husband suits shades of charcoal to blue in a row on the closet rack, one added every six months. A doll he bought me, too, to replace one I'd mentioned losing down a well as a child, had undergone several costume changes in my mind, until now it resembled a horrible, bat-winged toad. Well, there were lots of fresher memories crowding out older ones by the second and you could catch only a few, like melting snowflakes, at a time. As for my grandmother—somehow I won't even allow myself to remember her, though I once did so vividly. It seems, in all these fallible memories, that Phoenix and all its bedroom 'burbs contained little else but shining nursing homes and that my mother never breathed without exhaling gray and blue smoke, my father was the one who wore the suits, the homeroom boy in cowboy boots never got any older. Maybe you lose memories just by conjuring them, like sins left behind in the church confessional.

Naturally these are the most elementary ideas—but here we are: the marquee, the mall, the parking lot... and the western sands await me.

Drugstore

After three days of traveling—though it was nothing but a whir and whiz of sound and vision in that time machine of a car—the family from Phoenix or thereabouts stopped in the middle of a vast dry colorless flatland (an emptiness like outer space itself), opened the sedan's solid heavy doors, and planted its feet onto the soil below like astronauts who have landed on a distant planet. The air was so dry, salty it seemed, it burnt and stung her eyes, and the sun too was dry, too hot of course, and the searing wind kept whipping one sticky tendril of hair into the corner of her mouth, which try as she like, she could not help sucking on. Inside the sprawling barn of a store an air-conditioned blizzard was raging; there was the free iced water which had been advertised for the last several hundred miles between the yellow scallops and red-winged stallions, as if cold water were a rarity in the upper Midwest (which it might possibly be; the green-and-white signs had also informed viewers of other pertinent data, such as mileage to far eastern cities in comparison to the store: "Bangkok 8347 miles, Wall Drug 208 miles") and there were gee-gaws and doo-dads and gee-whizzes of every possible invention, all stamped with "South Dakota" or "Badlands USA" though they came from places 8347 miles away like Bangkok; there were tourists, sightseers, gawkers, rubberneckers from every state and overseas country: the weary, the wounded, the wasted. And she felt the weariest of them all, as if she had walked all the way from Phoenix—an adult enervation in a teenage body that no amount of ice-cold holy water could rectify. Oddly enough, all the children of travelers looked somehow more exhausted than their parents, as if car games of "count the cemeteries" or "look for license plates from all fifty states" were as demanding as school-year homework. In the loudest and brightest corridor a crowd of rangy teenage boys in T-shirts and dungaree cut-offs was haphazardly shooting at mechanized sharpshooters, fifteen cents a round. Curious, she stopped to watch them. A tall, tow-headed kid of about sixteen smiled at her and offered her a try at Pecos Pete, an unshaven outlaw who hee-hawed like a mule and aimed his six-shooter out of a broken saloon window. She bashfully took the rifle, which pivoted on a metal post, in her hands; the boy's own queer dry and light hands—moth-wing hands—lightly spread over her own, guiding her aim. "Come 'n' get me ya yella-belly coward!" the tinny recorded voice of Pecos Pete dared, and she shot him four times in rapid succession through the heart (so fast the boy's hands fluttered off her own in surprise); Pecos Pete fell to his knees and, dying, made the guttural sputtering sound of a wind-up toy winding down.

Sex

It is at its best—this she understands—like falling (not flying), sailing over a canyon wall only to be buoyed up, like Psyche of the myth, by a strong wind smelling of catalpa blossoms after a storm. The first time, yes, with her first husband, it was like that. She'd imagine him Bellerophon, hurtled earthward from her back as she burst into the stars and caught a carousel ride on the zodiac. Other times she felt like a lone lost kite which had slipped from the shy boy's hands, singing higher and higher into an empty western sky. Letting go: that vertiginous sensation of not just falling but leaping over the precipice, diving into the deep end from the high board. Shouting into an elevator shaft, getting deliriously dizzy on the fairgrounds roller coaster as it takes its Niagara plunge, and so on for a thousand metaphors and none as true or good as the real thing. Except maybe hanging on for dearest life, like an Apache brave on a runaway stallion, to the back seat of your father's shiny new rocket-ship '62 sedan as it breaks all limits of speed and barriers of sound and vision, melting into the very substance of the night, soaring off into the metallic face of the moon.

Phoenix

Arizona, the suburbs, morning when everything glistens as if glazed with ice. And the hard gemlike shine of dew on the hoods and roofs of cars. Always the feeling of wetness and damp in the morning. Yet in the southwest it seldom rained—it must have been the lawn sprinklers left on all night—and oh how she hated being left alone in the mornings, in summer, while her mother and father drove off into the gleaming city in their gleaming car. Sometimes she would rush into the street after them, but as if they had been commanded by a catechism God, they never looked back, never said goodbye more than twice. Grandmother was here, too, but she was in a nursing home far from here where her mother was now headed. If Grandmother were still able to speak she'd have demanded to be taken back to her farm in Ohio before it was subdivided into oblivion. She liked to sit with Grandmother and play her old heavy scratchy records of the funny people, but that would have to wait till Saturday. Waiting was all the girl could do, since she was still so new to this new world and none of the kids on the block would play with her. So she would go back inside to the cartoons and crayons or more likely press her forehead against the cool plate-glass of the living room picture window, trying to forget Phoenix and the horror of what it was: its slick wet sheen in the morning, its stick-candy buildings outlined hard against the flat sky like a store display, the endless desert beyond like a vacuum ready to suck you in... and the waxy taste of grownup-lady lipstick on the lips after mother gave you a smoky kiss bye-bye, be a good girl today. She would try hardest of all to forget the dry smell of pine needles and gooey black tar for all the new driveways and car exhaust everywhere, everything adding up to heat, suffocation. Instead she tried to remember Ohio, the Ohio landscape she had left behind before she was even three, just a blue-green blur reflected across passing car windows and the soothing flavor of summer, mown grass and gravel dust above the roads, not much but enough in which to find solace. No matter how tight she squinted her eyes and pressed her head to the glass that was the most she could ever remember before everything faded into painless space, an empty land like that she crossed before her tonsillectomy—in a few moments the anxiety, the sense of abandonment would pass as it would every day and she would be content just having that blue and green bit of Ohio glowing inside her along with the belief that one day she would return—not to find happiness necessarily, but to confirm and amplify memories that lingered.

Today, in Ohio, the air seems thicker than in those dreams she had as a child, thicker and charged not with electricity but a kind of magnetic radiation, and the clouds are lower, the storms weak and sluggish, the leaves of the trees turning wrong-side-out as they always do, revealing not the silver seen elsewhere but yellow, bronzed like old paper, crackling like old paper, too. Someone had told her it was the acid rain, another the fertilizers the crop-dusters use, a third that Ohio had been this way since the dawn of time. Ohio is dying. Ohio is dead, all the PTA mothers who had grown up here and never moved away said; it's one dirty factory town merging into another, all a big parking lot for the factories of Akron and Cincinnati and Toledo and Columbus; if it's clear air and open spaces you need, try Arizona. But she can accept what Ohio gives her of a warm late spring morning, and it is a bounty. Mostly the bounty of silence. All is still for some reason but cloudless like the hiatus before a storm that never quite approaches: She feels like she is walking into the false glimmer of the real world after a movie matinee; at first colors and brightness overwhelm you and then they fade into an inferior version of Technicolor. It is a Sunday, coda of the month, and nothing really to do.

Chance

Walking to the cemetery, thinking: No, life would not have been much different after all if I had pushed that woman—no one would have suspected a model student of fourteen, and extensive analysis would have been sure to alleviate my conscience in time. Another idea—smaller, more random acts have the power to exercise a much more profound influence on the rest of private or public histories. Missing that bus by a half-minute may very well trigger a concatenation which even now might be imminently wreaking misery or bringing joy into my life, situational dominoes knocking down one after another and always me just in front, being shoved along by a kind of manufactured fate. But for that bus I may not have married a second time, but for that boiling kettle I would have stayed in Phoenix, but for an untimely letter I may have been in that four-car pile-up on the freeway. A fall of a leaf onto the wrong head may cause the downfall of a civilization (says some Greek, I suppose) and other things like that... I was up too late again last night, wasn't I?

Lust

She wants a cowboy. Not just any ol' cowpoke, but the kind who might step right out of _High Noon_ or "Gunsmoke," knowing every trick, every trail. How to tie a knot, how to win a schoolmarm's heart. A man who can twirl a lasso and break a horse as easily as he can break that schoolmarm's heart, too. A man who can make a spittoon ring a high "C" from across the saloon. One who'll play sweet teen-angel ballads on a geetar to his horse beneath that great big prairie moon. A guy who could crush a rattler's head under his boot heel without a single good goddamn. Someone who stepped out of a cigarette ad in chaps and spurs, someone she can slap across his craggy, stubbled face. A hero, maybe, but one who wouldn't know it, a seraph who wasn't even aware of the wings.

Mother

Among the dead now, too. The cigarettes had, inhalation after exhalation after inhalation, stealthily sapped her strength over four decades and left her desiccated and curled like a November leaf in her hospital bed: like a leaf—that brief first impression had stayed with her—like a leaf that had slowly spiraled its way from treetop to earth and crumbled away. But a nurse is never as at home as in a hospital and she kept those candy-stripers busy fluffing pillows and drawing the shades and running to sneak her a pack of Bel-Airs until the hour she died. The first fragile impression must then have been wrong; she gained a second wind in that hospital room, gained weight, too, acquired that power which comes with at last realizing what it must feel like to be Head Nurse Mary, queen nurse in control of the whole hive. That was the way, at least, her father described the situation over the long-distance line, after she had returned again to her Ohio classrooms and knew she would only leave again in tears, which could be months but was only a matter of days. The second wind had been her last. Mother had always been a comfort and now, less substantial and less starchy than she had been in life, she was a warmth to pull over herself in the solace of bed on sunless days: she need only concentrate on the large, coarse but careful hands, the stiff uniform-front gone soft in death, the breath of lily-of-the-valley talc and tobacco smoke blown in her face... After musical cowboys at the drive-in, a car ride. The singing radio: "When whippoorwill cry..." The hot scarlet ring of the car's electric cigarette lighter, the illuminated mirrors, the glowing panel. The hum and whir. Sirius, eighty million light years; home, five miles.

Argument

Why do characters in this movie, any movie, act so much like characters in a movie? That is, to have all your choices pre-ordained, your history and future presented with as much detail or lack of detail as it takes to evoke a reality, must endow you with a kind of omniscient quality which movie people somehow can't bear or won't dare to acknowledge. The same with characters in books, stories—no wonder people want to become like the pretenders they see or read about, so they can resign themselves to predestination, the way fundamentalists are so willing to believe in the same business—why fight the inevitable? Take comfort in what has already been willed by God, your director. The people in this movie never shut up long enough to realize the advantage they've got; they never hear the audience shout that there's a villain behind the door. It's better to be an amusing secondary character with perhaps a meaningless subplot of her own, because then you can insouciantly enter halfway through the action and skip out, unscathed and untroubled, as well as forgotten, anytime. Nobody really wins in _How The West Was Won_. No matter how many times you see it, the actors all do the same thing. Everyone makes the same mistakes. Indian horses, cowboy riders gallop right off-screen into the black void of outer space, whooping and whistling all the way.

Grandmother

She's in the root cellar out back; I can hear her in there, under the earth, singing something like "And The Band Played On" or maybe "The Darktown Strutter's Ball." She's a girl from another century again and she has a girl's high pure melancholy voice. You'd think I'd hear her in blue moonlight, but instead it's high silver noon, when it hurts your eyes just to stare through the kitchen screendoor into the yard. Well, anyone else would say it was the boughs of that big oak scraping in the wind or maybe deep well-water trickling under that old rusted pump, but I can tell it's her, I know she'd never let death take this farm from her after all the life she'd put into it. Maybe she doesn't realize that half the land was sold to developers by my parents and the rest would have gone, too, if I hadn't come back here to stop it. I can still plant a few rows of corn to hide that ugly strip mall and those even uglier townhouses beyond, hide them from my grandmother's sight. Those trees down near the road won't go before I do, either, and I'll keep the lilacs, the lilies, the peonies blooming as long as possible, even if the rest of the garden is a mess. The root cellar is just like she left it; there are even a few old rhubarb preserves in dusty Mason jars way back where you can hear Grandmother best. Grandmother got younger in death, she became a wide-eyed strawberry-blonde in a gingham dress running away from nowhere's nowhere again. She sings like a bluebird in love, like one of those nice operetta ladies on her old Stromberg-Carlson. Sometimes I go into the root cellar, go through the scrapbooks and albums I keep in a chest out there, and listen more closely. She's found a good home in the earth, or maybe the earth has found a good home in her, and she's very happy. She'd want me to pray of course, say a few Hail Mary's, but still it's best to say nothing, think nothing much as I dream and dream of the dark town, the band that plays on and plays on. We bury the dead deepest inside ourselves, don't we?

Summary

Memorial Day: She wakes up. She makes tea. She lets in the cat. She does the dishes. She reflects. She takes a walk. She visits the cemetery. She drives to a movie theater. She buys a ticket. She watches the movie. She falls asleep. She wakes up. She tries to remember where her life left off, the movie began.

Death

Not like sleep, she believes, but like waiting for sleep and welcoming its mysteries; not like peace, because one needs to be aware of peace as one is aware of silence, and there is no awareness, no anything; more like the space one feels after a book has been closed for the last time or a film has unwound off its final reel. But the moment of death itself must be an implosion into the self, the conscience smashing into a billion bits like a crystal goblet hurled against a wall—yet something which comes not at all violent, snow melting in the palms or soap dissolving in the bath. A gradual slipping away into the void, a thought which wanders off on its own and leaves the mind suddenly blank. What to fear is not the moment of death but the moment before the moment before death. When you are dying, which is forever, every second must be gained with tremendous exertion, yet they are the most delicious moments—the reddest of berries dropped, one by one, into a very deep cold well, listening for the distant plashing (yes I am still alive still alive still) then diving after to bring them up between the teeth and tongue, lips all crimsoned. Only in the rarest solitudes, when one is alone from oneself as well as the world, is the threat and promise of death which hour-to-hour existence camouflages or subtly shuffles into the deck implicated, implied. This, she knows, has nothing to do with simply mortal fears or the voices one hears whistling through the boughs of yew-trees in a winter storm.

Remembrance

What she'd really like to be doing, instead of sitting here almost alone in the dark in a little movie theater in a mall on the outskirts of a dull Ohio town on the edge of the Midwest on a forgotten Memorial Day (the official holiday wouldn't be until a day after tomorrow, the way the calendar works these days) is to be riding in the broad back seat—wide as a bed—of her parents' big blue '62 on their long way home from the Badlands of South Dakota, USA. Her father would be in the driver's seat, fingers spread and lightly thrumming the steering wheel as if it were an angel's banjo, the glowing tip of his Marlboro her beacon, a Polaris in this vast vacant night of the plains. Her mother, palms patting her starched helmet of hair, would be gently humming along to the radio, its glowing green dials under the overhang of the dash illuminating just the contour of her profile whenever she turned to glance through the window at the lunar landscape outside. And she herself would remain curled up on the roomy backseat, the aroma of tobacco and lilies inflating her lungs, awakening and slipping away and barely awake again after some half-dream with real cowboys and winged horses galloping down the western wind. Eventually she would raise herself up on one elbow from the scratchy upholstery, a strand of hair in her mouth—-and watching the enormous golden moon, a moon upon which men were dancing together at that moment, she presses the recessed silver button next to her shoulder and lets the whistling wind unfurl the dark seashell of her hair.
The Theft

After the Screenwriters' Guild semi-annual dinner, on their way back to the canyon, Claire first mentioned it. She couldn't help but notice, she told him, how he had subtly fidgeted through most of the awards and speeches. "You were pulling on your sleeves over and over. I was going to say something then, but it was always time to clap."

"Oh?" he said, steering the silver-gray Mercedes into the drive. "I didn't realize I was that obvious. I don't really feel comfortable with these turquoise links. They're a little—Did I mention that I couldn't find my lucky pair? It's a good thing I don't wear French cuffs too often." The car silently entered the garage.

They got out. "Well," she said, "it was a little tiring, but these things always are. Still, don't you think Charles could have said much more about the digital copyright problem? He was so..."

"Hmm..." It was a noncommittal utterance, of the sort he was prone to when his wife discussed her business. They were both tired. Nothing much more was said between them until after he had paid the baby-sitter and they were undressing for bed.

"I wonder..." he said to himself as he placed the turquoise links back in the small brass chest on top of his dresser.

"Say something, dear? Wonder what?" She was sitting at her vanity with a jar of cold cream poised before her like an offering to the god of the mirror.

"Oh, I was just thinking about those cufflinks—silly. Guess I'll look for them again in the morning." The pale blue silk of his shirt crackled with static electricity as he took it off.

" _Those_ ," Claire said, undoing the braided twist in her hair. "You've got others."

He started to say something, said something else. "I've only got those cheap-looking turquoise ones left since we came here. The ones I lost were special, they had my initials engraved."

Now she was combing out her hair (a new reddish tint). "Oh. The silver ones... Diana gave you those, didn't she?"

He pulled off his oxfords (he'd been the only one at the dinner not wearing moccasins or loafers, he'd noticed). "They had sentimental value... " And stripped off his socks. "They're the only things I've kept ... too nice to lose."

"I am sorry," she said, not apologetically. "I'll help you look in the morning. For now, I'm too tired—"

He knew what else she meant by that. Claire slipped as easily out of her Armani as she had their discussion. Watching her shed her lingerie, too, he could not help but think how much she had always looked like his first wife from the back. In fact, that was the whole reason they had first met, but that was a long story. He moved to put out the light.

The following morning proved to be futile. Their bedroom was strip-searched, the adjoining bathroom, and all the rooms down the hall. He went through every last one of his pockets, including ones in suits he hadn't worn for years. On his hands and knees, he combed through nearly every carpeted square-inch of the floor. They couldn't have been lost away from the house—cufflinks usually don't drop off unnoticed, he assumed. Out of desperation, the children were called forth from the TV room and gently interrogated, but they all unconcernedly denied ever having seen the jewelry. Going one step further, he dared to call up the new cleaning lady, but he could tell by her surprise and indignation that she had neither seen nor "borrowed" them. He painstakingly went over the house again, this time even checking sink and shower drains. While doing that, he strained to remember when he had last seen or worn the links. But all he could recall was the dim memory of having placed them in the brass chest alongside his tie clips after dinner with either the Worths or the Goldblatts months ago. French-cuff dinners were few and far between.

The links, he finally and reluctantly concluded, must have been stolen.

"That's nonsense," Claire said. "Who'd want them, Galvin?" She had become too involved with her new project to help him look, after all. Now they were sitting together in the bare white kitchen, Claire having finished her lunch of (apparently) little more than kiwi salad.

"Either that," he surmised, "or they disintegrated into thin air."

"But who?"

"And why just those cufflinks?" He raised his very first cup of black coffee that day to his lips. "It doesn't make sense. Suppose we've been robbed, and the thief took some other things besides, things we haven't missed yet?" He had not thought of that possibility before.

"As a matter of fact," she said, setting down her seltzer water, "I haven't been able to find that one pin, you know the Soho one with Boris and Natasha on it... and it's been a while since I've seen that ivory pendant you brought back from the Boston convention."

"A jewel thief," he mused. "Back on Lexington Avenue I wouldn't have doubted it, but way out here... "

"Think of all the people who've been through here lately—delivery people, caterers," and she went into a list of suspects he had no reason to suspect. He failed to mention he had already called the cleaning lady.

"You're joking, aren't you?" he said, pouring a second cup. "Grover Kaine? Come on, Claire, we may have the same initials, but really. I don't think being an executive producer he's that hard up—or that devious."

"All right. All right. Then what about the next-to-last baby-sitter, the Malaysian one? You know them."

Her distrust of recent immigrants was somewhat renowned, surprising in such an intelligent woman, nevertheless about as attractive as the way she liked to gnaw on her lower lip when thinking. It had something to do with growing up poor on the East Side, but was no real excuse, and she knew it. "No," he protested. "Not her. I drove her home and she wasn't a bit nervous. She didn't steal a thing. Her mother's a broker in the Valley, for Pete's sake." That wasn't quite true (he couldn't remember what her mother did; maybe she cleaned houses), but he felt a need to protect the girl, who he had liked. "No, definitely not her."

"If she didn't—"

"It wasn't her or anyone we know. I'm going to take a swim." With that he emptied the rest of his cup into the sink and went to put on his trunks, something he usually couldn't be bothered to do. Today, though, he didn't feel like starting anything in the pool when Claire showed up for her afternoon dip.

He backstroked for awhile, read part of the latest _New England Journal of Medicine_ , and returned to the water to float on his back and think. By the time he found he couldn't, Claire had joined him. She was wearing the maillot he'd bought her on the honeymoon—had the suit shrunk or had she gained weight despite all the kiwis and seltzer? Nevertheless, she was still quite pretty in her new West-Coast way. She'd said it herself: some plants don't bloom until you transplant them into the sun, and Claire was thriving. He'd been too hard on her, he knew, knew maybe it was just because he was a little jealous of how well she'd adapted, never seeming to miss the bagels and subways the way he did. Nostalgia may be nice, but memories can hold one back from...

"Saw you from my desk," she announced, more to the poolside furniture than to him. "It seemed too much to resist." She unrolled her beach towel neatly parallel to the hexagonal pool and placed her tube of Bain de Soliel on top. "So I put my characters in a holding pattern. Monica and Gail and Scot were about to make love. I hope they don't mind." She dove in.

He said nothing, not wanting this to evolve into another discussion of her latest bestseller adaptation (she would no sooner want him to explain some of the finer points of reconstructive facial surgery). Instead, he swam to the other side, got out, and lay prone in the sun. She followed and began to rub his back. Involuntarily, he groaned with catlike pleasure.

"What are you thinking about?" She was tracing the long S of his backbone.

He could not help but say it and immediately apologized for saying it.

"Jesus." Her finger trailed off his back and she seized the tube of tanning lotion.

"Well, I can't help wondering why the thief took just those links when all our other jewelry was right there."

Claire squirted some of the lotion into her palms and rubbed it hard onto his back. "We've been through all this, damn it. Maybe you just left those ones lying out in the open. And you still can't be sure you didn't just drop them somewhere, Galvin."

He turned on his side and studied her: The recent trip back to New York for one of her many family crises had faded her tan; she looked positively anemic in the face. "Do you suppose," he ventured, not wanting to go on with the subject, either, but bound to resolve it any way he could. "Do you suppose it might have been one of the children, after all?"

She closed her eyes—which were small and pale in the afternoon light—and sighed. "This is the limit. Why would any of them bother with those old cufflinks? Lisette couldn't even reach the top of your dresser."

"I wasn't thinking specifically of Lisette."

Her eyes, open again, seemed to grow still smaller and paler. "It's Sasha you're thinking of, isn't it? Of course you wouldn't dare accuse Mandy of anything, ever. Because she's Diana's, while the others are Claude's, and of course... Her voice had not risen in the least, but it had acquired a distinctive and increasingly familiar edge.

"I didn't say who, Claire," he stated, emphasizing each word in turn. "But since you mention it, Sasha is the most likely candidate." He knew he was in over his head now. "She's the oldest," he went on, sitting up. "And she knows the value of things better than the others. Maybe she was playing dress-up and lost them or gave them to one of the little Filipino kids down the street and is afraid to admit it."

"I don't want to hear you accusing my daughter like this any more, ever again." Claire stood up and shook her head dramatically, spraying him with water. "What is this concern of yours about those goddamn cufflinks, anyway? I'll buy you a new pair, a dozen new pair. Why you insist on wanting to wear hers is beyond me. Look at me. You don't see me wearing any of Claude's things, now do you?" She revolved furiously and a bit pointlessly in her (yes, it was obviously too snug) maillot. "And he gave me plenty of things, more—" She stopped herself and stomped back inside, leaving a trail of wet footprints which rapidly, one by one, disappeared in the dry heat.

Probably she's back to her characters, he thought while watching the prints dry up—characters infinitely more malleable than he was, or ever would be. He slipped back into the blue-gray water (the sky had just gone cloudy) and floated on his back again, letting the gentle current of chlorinated water relax and numb him. A better method, he considered, than hers: the wonderful little pills he himself had prescribed for her.

When the children had been sent back into the TV room and the remnants of the take-out supper cleared away, he continued to contemplate his glass of warm beer (imported, he saw on the label, from an Asian country he had seldom heard of). Claire slid her chair beside his and took hold of his digital wrist. He wished she would just return to her den; the laptop's electronic clicking and chirping would be more welcome than anything she had to say now.

"Try to forget about them, Galvin," she whispered. "They weren't that good-looking on you, if you want to know the truth. Even those cheap Navajo ones look better." She curled her hand under the collar of his polo and around his neck; he stiffened, she backed away. "It's no good being reminded constantly of the past," she continued in the same tone, taking his beer away from him. "You'll survive without them. Millions do. You'll forget about all this in time."

He heard her talking, but the words passed through him like specters through the walls of a house. It was the late hour. He was worn out after spending the rest of the day going back over the house a third time. "I've already called the police," he informed her. "But I didn't do it for the insurance money."

"Don't be foolish." Then (he didn't notice at first) she had left to join the children before the plasma screen—maybe it was one of her credits, after all. He carried the little bottle of beer into the living room, where he opened a coffee-table book which a well-known actress Claire hardly knew had recently given her. It was almost as big as the table itself, full of photographs but with very little print, and he soon lost himself in the rarefied but fascinating world of Melanesian cuisine.

Later that night, they lay sleepless on their very wide bed beside each other, not touching. Neither of them had even suggested lovemaking while preparing for bed; this in itself was unusual enough. Something told him she was gnawing her bottom lip in the dark. "Funny," he said then, very late into the night, "how sometimes when you lose something it's no worse than switching off a light—click—and it's out of sight, out of mind." Two silent, wide-awake minutes passed.

"You're not making a bit of sense." Claire placed a palm on his chest, over his heart, making the move which had not come earlier. It was to get his mind off the subject, he knew.Although he was scarcely aware of her body, let alone his, he cautiously reciprocated her actions.

"This is different, though," he explained—he could tell she was doing her best not to listen by pressing her lips against lower and lower points of his body. She had reached his pelvic bone. "I do miss them. Can't get them out of my mind, like a bad song with a good hook. And I don't understand the motives of the thief, if there was one."

"Save me!" she interrupted, withdrawing from him all at once. "Here we go again. Why don't you get off the merry-go-round and forget those damn cufflinks?"

He turned away from her. "If it had been anything else—that awful Kenyan medallion I never wear, any of those tie tacks... "

"You're obsessed. Obsessed!"

"I have to be. I'm a specialist. We care about small things, details. You know that's the way I am."

"Do I. Scot even mentioned shirt cuffs today, damn it." The hard-drinking anti-hero; he sometimes hated those characters as if they were real-life rivals. "See how you've affected my creativity?"

"To hell with your 'creativity.' To hell with Scot."

Claire cringed—he could feel her cringing in the dark—as if he had attacked her own flesh and blood, her daughter, again. "To hell with you," she said, barely audible.

"Maybe _that_ 's where they went."

She beat the bed with her fists and pushed herself up against the wall. "Galvin, I'll get you some more damn cufflinks exactly like them," she said, her voice cracking. "I'll buy you anything for a little peace of mind. Can't you relax, god-damn it? Can't you be more _California_ for once?"

"You hated those links because Diana had picked them out, didn't you? I told you how she gave them to me just before I took my state exams and they've always brought me luck. You don't like anything that had to do with her; you redecorated the entire Manhattan apartment before we left, just to erase her presence. You didn't want a trace of her or her sickness left, so why should you care if I never see those cufflinks again."

She began to cry softly; it was Claire's next-to-last way to deal with tension—his prescription would be next. Unlike the other times, he did not move closer to her or lick away her tears with his tongue. The minutes passed.

Tomorrow, he thought, lying on his back, adrift again as if on water, they would go up to the bay with the children to watch the Sunday sailboats and eat at a seafood restaurant on the pier. They would be your typical robust western family: he could picture them in a TV commercial, riding bikes together in a line. Then maybe they would drive down Rodeo and he would begin to buy back her forgiveness. During the week ahead he would be busy at the clinic, too busy to meet her over lunch at those sushi places in the hills she liked, too busy to take in dinner at La Maison. When he got home, it would be late and he would probably say he was too tired to join her in the pool or hear her read the latest episodes of Scot and Monica. He had a lot of reading of his own to catch up on. Claire would retreat to the comforts of the Macintosh and the new Nautilus equipment.

This was her golden land—no disease for her, no city but this city-which-isn't-a-city under the sun—and she needed it to be this way. Of course, they would pass each other at the breakfast table now and then, as professional couples here do. Then how many days, how many weeks of that sort of estrangement before he could forgive her?

Maybe she was asleep by now. Moonlight—or just a tardy streetlight coming on—had discovered the room. Her naked back was to him, head buried under a pillow: the very likeness of another woman he had once known, it seemed now, much better. "You hate being reminded," he soliloquized to himself as he faced the opposite wall, as someone late at night who can't sleep may do. "You know I love you, Claire, but you can't just slap paint over memories or move away and be done with it. And no matter how much better for me you might be, you could never be first. I never realized until now. That's what you hate the most, not being first... You don't care who stole them—you would have been glad to get rid of them yourself, wouldn't you have?"

After a while Claire said, "That's a silly question."
Love Is Love Is Love Is

##

An old adage from the Greeks:

In the gardens of Venus there are two fountains: one of sweetness, the other of bitterness.

from our heroine's notebooks

Love! Love! Love pours into me, water into a vase. I am brimming over! Love quenches me and even so merely whets my desire for more. Invisible love, not to see but to feel...

Is love music? Music knowing not space but time. The song of my soul... Before, I was deaf deaf deaf. Now, I hear!

Love is my sun. Love is my light. Love is my warmth...

Dearest Diary:

A week of marriage, a week of paradise: They are the same. Bliss bliss utter blind bliss. A love so divine I never imagined. I exist in love and love exists in me. Love's center is contained here in my heart and its radius is boundless, endless. I write speak breathe love—for I am so much so so much in love!

Today it was roses roses roses everywhere. Breakfast served within a rosy bower, rose nectar to drink. Sugared rose hips. Roses in my hair. Attar of roses on the breeze. The softest rosewater bath. Rose petals falling through the air to make my bed for the day. _He_ thinks of everything.

Yes, everything is perfect here. This is a wonderful house. Endless amusements. Lovely furnishings. Servants appear out of thin air to appease my slightest fancies. I shall grow fat if I eat one more red pomegranate! To write my little poems and thoughts I have the finest sheepskin and peacock quills and golden ink. And our bed, our bed, our glorious jeweled boat of a bed... But most of all there is Our Love.

Ah, love, Love, LOVE! I write it again and again and again and never tire.

Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love...

her latest poem (rough draft)

"Ode To Love"

O! Blissome heart!

Two souls, one love

Are naught apart.

Love, like Zephyr,

Is never seen—

Yet feel its might!

Thou art my Moon

Who hides by day

Yet brights the night.

When thou art here

I am thy flute—

Thou plays me fair.

Love is the wind—

My breath, my air.

When thou art gone

Vine longs for limb—

Do I hear wings?

Calm this wild breast

Lest it be him!

(Perhaps my best attempt yet, but must practice my meters. Should try heroic couplets next.)

Dearest Parents:

Surely you would find it in your hearts to forgive me if only you knew how very very very happy I am. I understand this is difficult for you to accept, but then I am no longer your little girl and these things happen—as they must.

Already my sisters have written (my servants see that these messages are delivered) but I can tell they—as well as you are still skeptical. If it were only possible to bring you all here to live with me here in my wonderland forevermore! But the time isn't right—and he is still so very modest, so very shy.

All right, I know what you must be thinking: It was, I admit, quite spontaneous (to say the least) of me to run off the way I did. Believe me, at first I was even more surprised than you, though now I know how much he loves me and why he had to sweep me away like that. It is true I didn't expect to love him but oh I do I do I do...

(left unfinished, unsent)

Dear Diary:

My hand grows heavy from exalting my happiness—four poems today, all of them quite long. But I discover my nib gliding on, anticipating my thoughts before I can silence the worst.

Sometimes I worry that it won't can't couldn't possibly last. Like one of those exquisite poppies which bloom for an hour and are gone. A moment of glory, years of sorrow. But if the poppy lives because it remembers that hour, I'll chance it all for these days of wonder and joy.

Why must I taint euphoria with these petty fears?

Yet there is this bright little fly buzzing about inside my head, waiting to be snatched. I would not betray my Love in any way, Darling Diary, but I am sworn to tell you the truth, even to my least apprehension. Of course I mistrust him not at all, but I would be lying to you if I did not admit his extreme secrecy bothers me a bit. For one thing, he has never even shown his face to me. The engagement was short, so now that the honeymoon is over—never! never!—would it really be asking too much for the smallest peek?

Then there's the fact that he's so reluctant to speak of himself and his past. Not to suggest he has any dealings with what some call the underworld, but I've often wondered how he spends his daylight hours. And what of his background, his parentage? Once he mentioned a mother—who sounded horrid—and immediately he silenced himself.

True, I do complain and complain and complain. I should not need any answers—when his love tells all I need to know. Is not the warmth of his body next to mine at night answer enough? Are not his kisses worth a sonnet each, his embraces equal to the most passionate of romances?

No, I must not will not cannot doubt him. I should—do consider myself very fortunate. After all, there are other husbands who toil all day and have no time for their wives at night; their dull beds are made for sleep alone. My own sisters would be so envious so so envious if they saw how happily I spend my days. When my Love is here in the darkness I may not see his face, but I can caress his body and he mine. That alone is enough rapture for any woman.

Love. Love. Love.

I must close now—how many hours have I been writing? for I hear him approaching. He is putting out the lamps before him. Love, come unto me!

an invitation

Dear Sisters:

I am the luckiest woman in the world! Everyone speaks of Olympus, but my heaven is here on Earth. I am so sorry so terribly sorry I haven't written to you or mother and father, but there is much to say, much to explain, and even though you have always called me the "little poetess" I just can't seem to put it all into words and even if I could you probably wouldn't believe me. It will be best for me to show you in person. Yes—in deference to your entreaties my husband—the divine dearest—has finally consented to your visiting here soon. You see, he loves me so much he's been perhaps a bit too overprotective. Now he realizes that and bids you welcome into our house the day after tomorrow in the afternoon. (Be sure to come early so you can get back home before sundown. And don't worry—he'll be away on business as usual so you won't have to make small talk.) I'll be looking forward to seeing you, my dear good sisters. Maybe afterward you'll be able to speak to mother and father. Already I'm more than anxious.

Love,

Your Psyche

PS Even though I have more than I'll ever need here, could you please bring—for strictly sentimental reasons—that ruby and ivory medallion I left in my jewelry box? And a few of my old books?

from her notebooks (again)

Love is music indeed—the beat of our hearts, the harmony of our sighs. I hear with my soul, my mirrory silvery soul. Love is easy as drawing in air, closing eyes, falling asleep. Love is indeed my air, life, breath, being. Rain sweet rain love showers me like rain. Invisible love beating a sun burning within my heart, a fire a flame, it—

Where has my Love gone this morn?

the two sisters arrive

—And here are her ornamental gardens, I suppose.

—Well, for once she wasn't exaggerating. No wonder she seems so deliriously happy—I would be too if I had married into this sort of wealth.

—What an incredible fountain!

—Oh. Well, if you ask me, the Doric motif's been done to death. Still, it makes me wish our husbands weren't such sloths. Then maybe we'd have something nice, too.

—Speaking of husbands, do you think I could get mine to buy me one of those, those...

—Obelisks, dear. Don't fool yourself. We might as well admit it—Psyche's face is her fortune and that's what won her all this. She calls it love. Those silly, sentimental thoughts of hers. That poetry! Can you actually stand it?

—You aren't the least bit jealous of her, are you?

—Me, be jealous of a temple like that in my backyard?

#### attempted letter

Dear Sisters:

How dare you come here and say such awful, damning things! I won't allow you to...

Dear Diary:

Spent all day by window overlooking canyon and waterfalls. Tears. Brooding. Tore up letter. Will try to write again (no more letters) tomorrow.

Gadflies at my heart! Still I love Love.

There is a cloud over the sun today...

(idea for poem)

The Compromise

If my love promised a bed of soft rose petals

When all he could give were stinging nettles

Then gladly would I bleed in his briar patch

For ev'ry kiss of thorns, ev'ry tender scratch.

(Would I? Yes.)

Dear Sisters:

I have been thinking a great deal about what we discussed the other day. This is the fourth letter I've begun, and I am still not sure I have the strength to finish this one, for your insinuations have weakened me immensely. You know I have no real reason to doubt my husband, yet you have made it seem so easy to discover what I need to know. Or do I?

You have been married so much longer than I. Yes, it would be wise to listen to the voice of experience.

If my husband is indeed more than he appears—or rather, does not appear to be, it might after all be dangerous to go on living with him. I know how unfortunate your first marriages turned out, and I wouldn't want to make the same mistakes.

Perhaps it is true I did rush into this arrangement. Oh, but until your departure I did not regret one moment. Now the idea has been seeded and its roots have sunk into my every thought. This is like living with a tigress in my breast. Am I confusing metaphors with similes like the poor poet I am?

Sisters, you have—intentionally or not—disturbed me. I should burn this letter. The four winds should seize it from my hands. But did you not say that where there is the mist of deception it must be swept away? Pardon me for going on like this. I simply do not know what to do or think. I entrust this message with my swiftest servant.

Your little sister,

Psyche

### from her notebooks

Listened to an invisible minstrel playing the lyre today in the diamond-studded grotto near the spring. So melancholy and yet so lovely. Wept—from sadness or joy I cannot say anymore. A silver finch alighted on my shoulder. Wish _he_ were here at such times.

Silver the theme today—silver apples, silver ambrosia, silvery butterflies fluttering through the air around me. Even a gown of silver thread. Mirrors, too—but I could not look at this face. A hammock like a silver cobweb in which to lie, thinking of him, of love, our love. A silver crescent moon arising (my soul!) and angry for his return tonight.

If love is a disease of the heart as a poet once said, I do not wish to be cured.

Even if it be fatal.

This trembling in my bosom: his fault or mine?

Dear Old Diary:

Tonight I shall act. I have secreted the bodkin under my pillow; I have refueled the lamp. When he has had enough of me (ecstasy though it always is) and falls fast asleep, I shall light the lamp...

Even if he is a beast, how could I slit his throat?

I still love him. Always always always will I love him. I hate myself. I hate myself for doing this, but something unnamed unknown within me is forcing my hand—the hand of fate? I find no answer, no precedent in my books...

the sisters at home

—You can't think she'll do it?

—Naturally she will. She wrote this letter, didn't she? She's probably doing it this very moment.

—But if he _is_ a beast and he does devour her...

—Don't be ridiculous. Things like that only happen in old tales. I'd welcome a beast like that in my bed any night! Besides, he's sure to be very handsome; these rich men always are. Psyche is too scatterbrained and impressionable to realize that. And of course he'll be furious with her.

—Meaning?

—Meaning... lots of possibilities. Don't forget his money, his desires...

—But why must he act the way he does in the first place?

—Oh, men are just like that, haven't you learned?

from her notebooks

embers, ashes, dry rustling reeds

my heart—a dusty seashell

soundless

the empty cup of the new moon

wings

the crying winds, stirred by

stillness

tears—silver—the mouth—golden—of a poppy

wings

loveless, love-loss, love lost...

(damned meaningless words!)

Diary:

My Love is gone gone gone, my heart empty. Tears water this page, dissolving my words. Oh, dissolve! What I had once has vanished. Forever. All because I was thoughtless, foolish, childish, wrong wrong wrong. If only I had not listened to my conniving sisters!

Alas, it does no good at all to wail into the face of Things Done.

I write this with my left hand, feeble as a leper's, for the oil burnt my right...

How can I banish from my brain the sight of him, curled fernlike on the bed, naked and pure as morning sunlight? His golden hair framing like a corona his eclipsed face, his countenance innocent as a babe's, wise as an oracle's... His wings (those _were_ wings I'd heard before!) white and downy as a newborn cygnet's. Here, here was Love made incarnate, and I ended it all with a splatter of hot oil on his shoulder!

He gave me but one look—the look of betrayal, the cruelest look.

All my dreams flew away with him when he spread those snowy wings, those wings like—

Dear gods! How can I wax poetic when he is gone and he will never never never return? My Love is gone! My Love was my life my happiness my solace and now I am lost, oh lost. My tears my burning tears do not cease. They flow eternally as...

Dear Parents:

I am so very very very alone. My husband has left me, you must understand. It is all my fault. I doubt if—I _know_ he is not coming back. I am so very very very sorry.

You were right: I should not have married so young, should not have forsaken the homage I garnered in the streets of my birthplace. I should have stayed at home and learned to play the harp and embroider prayers and plait flowers even while I waited for a more appropriate, more predictable suitor. It was wrong of me to come to this place where all my wishes were granted—but one. Forgive me. Forgive me!

If you must know, my sisters are partly to blame, for they...

I am so alone. Have I written that before?

Would you want me back, in this state of disgrace? I promise there will be no more new gowns or jewels or even sweets and having my hair done up all the time. And no more especially no more of those books and scrolls and my clumsy poetry. I realize now just how worthless how misleading such things are and how untalented I am. Instead I shall sweep ashes and tend swine and scrub temple steps if that is what you ask. No more arguments. Just take me back if you will. You will, won't you? This house is so large and silent and empty.

One humble request: that you please not ask how this all came about. You would never believe me...

the sisters meet in a courtyard

—It's true, it's true. Psyche's husband was handsome and he did leave her.

—Yes, how unfortunate. Now we'll go to him and he'll marry us.

—But so soon?

—He will marry us because he lusts after beautiful women and he'll want to forget her. After all, we're just about as lovely to look at as she is—and we have more charm, and most importantly, much more experience in the ways of men.

—I see what you mean.

—Of course he'll fall for us—it's inevitable—and we shall live in his fancy house and order those servants about and wear the latest fashions and drink the best wines and throw endless parties—

—And sunbathe in the gardens while he drops olives into our mouths!

—Come on, then. Let us go find and marry this man!

from her notebooks (later burned)

It is worse to lose a love than yearn for one never had. A lost love is like an exquisite melody which once played cannot be repeated; it is the remembrance of a flute's last shimmering notes after the flute has been broken.

These insipid words do not soothe me in the least but only serve to rake the cinders of my sorrow and my pain. Every word seems trite, every phrase a cliché, and they are all nonsense... yet I write on and on and on.

Love lost is a goblet of the rarest wine—once enjoyed, it will not sate again. Love fleeting is a poppy—once it blooms it is only doomed to wither. Love rarest is a breath which once taken in should never never ever be expelled.

Love is my moon. Love is my mirror. Love is sweet. Love is bitter. Love is light. Love is dark.

Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is Love is not.
Larger Than Life

or,

## Amazing Grace

"The greatest director? God, I suppose I might be compelled to say. Just look at what He does with sets and lighting, scenarios and screenplays—and what actors He makes of us all! If I were only a believer, I'd be an evangelical, I might even be the goddamn pope."

—W. W. Barnett (from an interview [no source given] quoted in the unpublished monograph _Larger Than Life: Portrait of a Director_ , by John J. Haberle)

##### DIRECTOR DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT

Fort-de-France, Martinique, August 24—

Famed director W. W. Barnett, known to millions for films such as _Silver Shoes_ and _steel_ , died today in a tragic accident which also claimed the life of an unidentified companion. The couple's automobile, a 1926 Zephyr Jet-Stream, appears to have suddenly gone out of control on a coastal highway west of the capital, when it swerved into the path of an oncoming hay-wagon, hit an embankment, and then plunged 500 feet down a ravine. Both Barnett and his passenger were dead by the time rescue workers reached the site. Found along the highway were the remnants of what appeared to be a working film-script and a jewel box from Cartier, which witnesses said had been thrown from the car moments before the accident. Barnett was 35.

— _The New York Watchman_ , Aug. 28, 1928

"He toyed with people. He saw the whole world as his _mise-en-scène_ , and he would deliberately touch off arguments among friends, just to create scenes, while he stepped back and watched dispassionately, like a bored man at the cinema."

—Countess Malevich, from an unfinished novelette published posthumously as a postscript to _Our Fleeting Images_ , her collected memoirs.

He was a man with a cold drink forever in his hand and a finger pointing towards that open hotel window or that girl with a broken shoulder-strap or that black coupe's glint in the sun. He would often press the palm of his hand to his forehead, as if the pain of imagining something flickering within the theater of his brain was too much. There was always an idea on the verge of becoming reality. His eyes clicked like cameras, his speech flowed as if it had been scripted. There was always an idea. He'd stop talking, pause for a very long minute, and start talking again as if nothing had happened. He had a gift for making people see. Even if you didn't know him, even if all the rest of California in those days struck you as strange or even insane, you would have no trouble guessing that here was a man whose very soul was in the pictures, here was a man with vision—here was the real thing.

Though he is all but forgotten today, for at least a year or two during the mid-1920s (a very long time in Hollywood) William Webster Barnett was the man everyone, at least everyone back then who wished to make an impression, mentioned if this very modern subject of film directors was brought up. Everyone claimed to know him or know someone who knew him. It seemed he stood for the very concept of "auteur," and though his output was small and reputation short-lived, his accomplishments became amplified by their confusion with the accomplishments of others. If there was a movie in town with his name on it, you went, didn't you? If there was a _cause célèbre_ which revolved around his work, you championed it—naturally! (Or were those other directors, other movies?) But there had undoubtedly once been a time—we can leave those years on the cutting room floor—when he was known about the studios as merely an "aspiring" director, which was to say he might have talent but it hadn't paid off so far. Those circumstances held true until his third official moving picture was released. The first two had won friends among a few astute critics, but were box-office bombs (the second being the cult classic, _steel)_ ; his producers were considering dropping him from the payrolls when something happened. Some say it was because Barnett had noticed and utilized the practical genius of cameraman "Mugs" Marko, an Albanian immigrant who pioneered deep-focus photography; others that it was all because Vilma Banky (then on the precipice of her leap to stardom) agreed to do the famous semi-nude scene.

Whatever it was, _Silver Shoes_ turned out to be one of the major films of the nineteen-twenties and a turning point in American cinema history.

_Silver Shoes_ had been quietly released during a slow post-Christmas season and was already fading from sight when the wife of the head of a rival studio and her traveling companion, described as "an elderly minister," saw it on a double-bill with the latest Chaplin and left during the middle of the infamous atelier scene involving the beautiful but destitute Vilma being forced to model undraped to the waist for a lecherous but wealthy student artist. Though the deep-focus had gone soft and the camera angles were oblique, the wife and her minister friend were outraged (they obviously had not seen the latest much racier European product) and fired off angry letters to several prominent entertainment weeklies. (Only much later did a lone journalist assert that the puritanical wife and her minister friend, or at least their letters, were products of an over-eager publicist's imagination.) The letters did their job: _Shoes_ was quickly banned in most major cities and became the subject of front-page editorializing. During the ensuing controversy over censorship and the moral obligations of an artist to his public, Barnett and Marko managed to redo the scene shot from the back and slip it into place. When the film reopened due to popular demand, few noticed the sleight-of-camera, but now everyone was talking about the integrity and progressiveness of W. Webster Barnett (though even Barnett admitted the subject matter was more than mundane and that he had been forced to shoot the third-rate screenplay as a last-ditch attempt to please his bosses). Those who weren't so esthetically minded were eager to see what this "Piece of Babylonian decadence," as it was widely denounced from the pulpit, was all about. _Silver Shoes_ was praised by the intelligentsia for its "daring innovation," its "youthful exuberance," and even for its lengthy dialogue inserts on title cards "which challenge the viewer to participate in a multifaceted literary charade."

Not just the highbrows were eager to promote Barnett. Now every fan magazine was aflame with stories about the latest boy wonder of Mogul Studios, and they ran off their versions of the facts as they chose to interpret them: How he had been born on Martha's Vineyard to vaudeville actors, but practically raised behind the scrim sheets and under the lighting booms of the growing days of the latest New York industry. How his father, who had become an extra in nickelodeon features, had died in the arms of an operetta diva, and how his distraught mother really did commit suicide during filming of a Kinetoscope adaptation of _Salammbo_. How the adolescent Barnett then drifted to California, where Erich von Stroheim, just out of Germany, hired on the adolescent orphan as a best boy for his latest epic. Over time the stories became a bit more incredulous: It was said that Sara Bernhardt performed Hamlet at the boy's twelfth birthday party, that Roscoe Arbuckle took the seventeen-year-old Barnett on tours of the brothels in Tijuana, that there had been a secret marriage between Barnett and Miss Banky, soon annulled when it was discovered one of the two was infertile. At last the movie magazines promoted their wildest possible fantasies of Barnett's early years: In 1917 he had been the sole Romanov tsarevitch to escape the Bolsheviks. President Wilson's wife met Barnett in Palm Beach for regular private "luncheons." Barnett was working on his own version of the Fatima sightings, for which the Vatican had supplied a top-secret script.

A few things about the young Barnett are without dispute. He had been kicked out of half the prep schools on the east coast, "because they bored me," he said, "and because I bored them." As a youth he revered Kuleshov and then Pudovkin and other "serious," Marxist-leaning, socialist-realist directors, though he made allowances for any motion picture featuring the Gish sisters; he wrote the sisters fervid, frantic fan letters which were answered, if at all, only with eight-by-ten glossies. He hated modern literature, especially James Joyce and T. S. Eliot; like most movie people, he read only the classic historians and an occasional true-life mystery. (Indeed, in his brief biographical notes Haberle mentions his "almost hysterical fear of becoming stuck in the sentimental quagmire of fiction.") He also grew up detesting chamber music, parlor games, holiday camps, Italian cuisine and Italian opera (in fact, anything Italian), horse-races, dog-races, car-races, and "people who start to tell you about how wonderful their neurologist is before they've even ascertained your name" (Barnett quoted in _Collier's_ , July 1927).

Through his deceased parents' connections in theater and movies the young Barnett was able to work his way up the studio ladder rapidly from best boy to assistant director on a series of B-pictures starring erstwhile cowboy William S. Hart as a pioneer aviator. Though the series was not a success, Barnett managed to surreptitiously begin shooting his own project with his own funds (said to be all that was left of his parents' legacy) during extra time the studio had booked when Hart was out drinking and/or philandering. The result was a thirty-reel tragedy based on _Tristan and Isolde_ , which for some arcane reason the novice director saw as a romance between an ice-delivery man and a taxi dancer. _Dear Desire_ was conceived, Barnett later begged to explain, as "a musical without the music."

Mogul Studios, though puzzled by the silent musical which Barnett presented them, was impressed by his skill in doing a job quickly and inexpensively, and especially how he got his actors cheap from "stock" to give reasonably effective performances (a then-unknown Mary Miles Minter winked and wriggled her way through the role of Isolde, "as if she were naked under her costumes," as one latter-day pundit put it). This was at the crest of the Hollywood "boom" years, and more product meant, quite simply, more profit; Mogul immediately commissioned the precocious director to churn out four more Biograph-style melodramas within the next six months—none of which was completed, though they got plenty of "press"—because in actuality Barnett was working on _steel_ , which is what he presented to the studio bigwigs when they finally summoned him forth into their throne room. After the smoke cleared, Barnett was forgiven and _steel_ (said to be an adaptation of a Dreiser novel, though exactly which was never clear) was released to moderate second-billing success, if only because Barnett's famous charisma won them over. Indeed, the young man's engaging if evasive personality was known by far more people in the business than those who saw his first few efforts.

He was what used to be called a "complicated" man, and this is what fascinated friends and even enemies so (and he was just as adept at acquiring the latter as the former). The sources of his complications are obscure, though his unusual upbringing, living from hotel to hotel and going from tutor to tutor, studio to studio, may have had much to do with it. His parents were "progressive," which at the time merely meant "too permissive." Although they had raised him a good atheist, he often felt as if someone's God were pursuing him, speaking through the earth, in the way, for instance, clouds may scrawl cryptic messages across the purple sky or pines whisper in the night. The modern pagan, he told the obscure European film journal which took due note of these quirks of character (such things were not repeated in the American media), "is man displaced from nature, and the movies, more so than any other art form, are entirely unnatural, if only because they come closest to fooling the mind as well as the eye." He had dwelt, in younger and more impressionable days, upon making a daring avant-garde short, to be called _Cloud_ —it would consist solely of a single white cumulus drifting serenely from one edge of the screen to the other. Instead, he used Vilma Banky in a similar scene in _Silver Shoes_. Much has been made of how he could draw bankers in a lobby or shopgirls in a mezzanine to him with just a sigh, an insouciant removal of his gloves, and perhaps a tilt of his chin. Subtleties were his passion. The most talked-about scene from _steel_ consisted of an actress tracing her fingertips, slowly and sensuously, down an actor's sleeping face. Once he had asked a redhead in latticed stockings and red pumps who was walking before him on the Serpentine in London to kindly adjust her dress-belt a half-inch farther down her hips. She complied.

With the immodest success of _Silver Shoes_ , Barnett's fame as a director was also catching up with his local fame as a dashing, if somewhat difficult, bachelor-about-town. He was being invited to all the "right" parties now, mentioned by all the "important" women's page editors. Lesser lower-European nobles (they thronged the Hollywood hills and canyons in those days) were to be found scheduling luncheon dates with him at this or that watering hole for the known and the knowing. Lady novelists and big-game hunters alike were eager to interrupt him for an autograph on their napkin or a weekend in the country. Clara Bow, the "It" girl, declared mysteriously that Barnett had "That;" he countered by quipping that Miss Bow had "Those." All the popular weeklies were besieging him for interviews. Ghost-written articles in _Photoplay_ were illustrated with such exemplary photographs as Barnett at Pickfair or Falcon's Lair, in crisp linen and highly tanned, beating Doug and Mary at tennis or Valentino at billiards ("At Play With My Friends"), and coaching a mule to dive off a board into a pool for a forgotten scene from one of his unfinished projects ("At Work With My Rivals"); the text, usually a primer on romance, informed the public that Barnett did not like "women who know too much." Ever inconsistent, he also stated, "Looking back on making love to a stupid woman is like being left to savor a cold cup of coffee."

Fortunately for himself, Barnett's affairs were seldom given time to cool; the spring and summer after _Silver Shoes_ was released he had allegedly made and broken engagements with no less than five young beauties, starlets, for the most part, but also one or two producers' wives who wrecked their marriages and their health for the sake of a weekend on the director's infamous bearskin. Only one woman survived this period of revolving-door romance—Bianca Rosenhaven, the daughter of Beacon Hill publishers (one version) or Mission Hills whalebone corset magnates (another). In all versions she was a beauty, with jewel-like eyes, jewels in her hair, and jewels liberally ornamenting her body. More than one Sunday supplement photographer managed to capture the sparkle of those gems, those supple shoulders, that swanlike neck as it curved upwards into a chin poised above Barnett's well-tailored shoulder, her glossy lips surely whispering secrets into his attending ear.

Yet even Bianca must have had her moments of doubt, for above all the glittering appreciation hung that always unspoken Hollywoodland question—was _Silver Shoes_ just a fluke? The brass at Mogul were also a bit nervous, happy as they were to discover the film out-grossing all competition. They suspected perhaps even then that Barnett might prove too difficult for his own good. (It is no wonder they had their misgivings, for despite his success Barnett had completed a remarkably small number of feature films at a time when even the biggest-name directors were slaves to as many as a dozen movies apiece a year.) Cornering him at poolside parties and pinning memos onto script girls, Mogul's top men tried to prod Barnett gently onto new projects. Various titles and concepts were brought before him, all of which he politely agreed to "mull over." The right ideas needed time to ferment within his mind, he told his superiors, adding, "The muses call no man their master."

Word by word, phrase by phrase he began to mold his inspirations into being before his superiors, though their form was vague and details were all but nonexistent. Quizzical outlines and mysterious synopses he had drawn up by the high-priced New York writers he preferred for company (he once claimed the Hollywood hacks "wouldn't know Einstein from Eisenstein") were sifted over pine, walnut, and lastly, mahogany desktops. Sensing Mogul was finally running out of patience, he worked long hours with his head writer (a playwright escaped from the Algonquin Round Table) on an elaborate, three-hundred page monograph on his "exact intentions" and "theoretic integrations," which he had bound (some might say facetiously) in green silk and formally presented to his producers at a monthly board meeting. In retrospect, it could be said he was trying to buy time since he couldn't buy a muse's attentions.

After several days of deliberations, the board members were in a state of supreme agitation. Some of the junior executives were calling the idea "cinematic genius," while others nearer the top snorted that it was "pretentious poppycock." Somehow, for all of Barnett's studious preparations and belabored exactitude, the plans were interpreted as being more ambiguous and unrealistic than anything he had presented to them so far. Finally, by group vote, a telegram was sent to Barnett, who was on a ski vacation with Bianca at Lake Louise, requesting that he present himself with a definite screenplay at an especially prepared meeting in three days flat. Barnett, now nursing a sprained ankle, cabled back: "IT WILL MAKE A HELL OF A LOT OF MONEY STOP AND BE DAMN GOOD STOP PS VITAGRAPH INTERESTED IN BUYING OUT MY CONTRACT STOP." The board members at Mogul hastily voted to allow Barnett to make his "little film," as they insisted on describing it.

Even with pre-production of _The Divine Dead_ (its working title) underway, Director Barnett remained definitely indefinite about just what it was all about (though a half-dozen writers would eventually be credited for the screenplay, everyone knew that except for the dialogue it was almost wholly Barnett's work). Barnett himself called it, perhaps ironically, an "Allegorical Post-romantic Dramatic Neuroticism." Cameraman Mugs Marko, who probably knew more about Barnett's "exact intentions" than anyone else, testified in a Saturday Evening Post puff-piece that it was to be a radical remaking of David Wark Griffith's _Intolerance_ , although the director vehemently denied this, explaining it was to be "possibly" a "rethinking, in part" of Griffith's warp-and-woof concept, but concerned instead with "basic human worthlessness and that sort of thing." One of the less reputable news syndicates released an article claiming that the new "epic spectacular" in progress was to be "a Soviet-inspired sequel to _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_." Barnett was not able to find time to demand a retraction. The storyboard, always changing, and half-finished at the start of filming, involved several interweaving plots, subplots, and sundry asides, barely linked except by an unseen narrator's autobiographical musings and ramblings. The film, as Barnett envisioned it, would run at least seven hours, something the producers could only fear... if they were to guess. The working title had been Hollywoodized into _The Dead and the Divine_. It would take nearly three years and three million dollars to finish (said to be the most time and money ever spent on a picture up to then), and the story of its creation would become both the central drama and final chapter of Barnett's short life.

" 'Would you say what you're doing is an art?'

" 'I would say that moving pictures are... just pieces of the world up there on a large screen. Except no colors. It's like when I see something I like—say, a pretty girl brushing her hair or a leaf floating in a pond... I don't remember the colors.' "

—from "On The Other Side of the Camera With W. Webster Barnett" in _Collier's_ , July 1927

" 'The movies!' The movies!' he bellowed at me. 'They are nothing but illusions and I am nothing but a cheap magician.' 'And what of our love?' I sobbed, my naked back against the frosted panes of the boathouse window. 'Is that an illusion, too?'

" ...He stared at me with those icy steel-gray eyes, twisting something—the diamond necklace he had ripped from my throat—in his hands... "

—Countess Malevich, _Our Fleeting Images_

"Barnett, was of course, horrible with his actors; he treated them like slaves or robots, necessary but bothersome; if he could have produced movies without them, he would have done so. But such an attitude was common in the Golden Age, when the whole business was suspect, a whiff of lower-class seediness having been carried over from burlesque theater. Barnett wanted to change that. He called his works-in-progress 'cinepoems,' he spoke of using actors like metaphors, props and sets like 'fancy language'—odd phrases considering his considerable contempt for experimental literature and art. Cecil B. DeMille was later to call him a 'fake, an impostor, but one hell of a nice guy.' "

—John J. Haberle, preface to _Larger Than Life_

The director was, unsurprisingly, dissatisfied with the casting job Mogul had done for him. He had wanted the exotic Natacha Rambova; they had given him the wholesome Blanche Sweet, a very minor starlet at the time. At the last moment gigolo-manqué Roman Navarro had been replaced by boy-next-door Wallace Reid. Barnett wanted, insisted that Viola Dana play the part of Christina, the wayward heiress; Mogul came up with Mabel Normand, noted for her comedic prowess but not her dramatic finesse. Barnett informed them that Biograph Pictures was dangling a hook ("I don't want character actors, I want actors with character"). Mogul got him Viola Dana and even Mona Rico. But, and this caused him endless sleepless sweat-soaked excruciatingly intolerable white nights of torment, he never did get Rod LaRocque for the crucial role of the Grand Duke Ormonsky, the hero's illegitimate father. To borrow from film lingo, we cut now to the action as it happened (and was duly reported by a hundred fan magazines):

It is the ninth week of film production. W. Webster Barnett has gone nearly hoarse after two especially intense days of directing a troublesome scene in the heat of Isla Cedros, off the western coast of Baja California. He has not shaved in three days. His usually unusually well-pressed shirt and trousers are rumpled and stained, as he has scarcely taken them off all week. It was particularly hard on him when he found out that this locale, which seemed a subtropical haven on paper, is not much more than desert in reality. The shooting schedule was, in the director's opinion, inadequately revised—why would New York socialites have gone to a resort in a wasteland? Viola Dana is sipping a gin and tonic under a striped beach umbrella at the edge of the set, which consists mainly of a type of stucco villa cum makeshift desert isle habitat. Despite the heat Viola looks cool and detached in her somewhat odd costume, a sleeveless silk shift and riding breeches, and she currently refuses to converse with any of her fellow actors. There have been previous brief, but bitter, disputes. It is almost time again to start shooting, and Wallace Reid, who plays the opposing role, is still not done in makeup. Barnett is upset and frustrated with him for making it a habit to be late. He has already taken a dislike to the actor, suspecting him of certain homosexualist tendencies and jingoistic politics (he seemed to totally overlook Reid's morphine addiction). It is common knowledge that Miss Dana cannot tolerate Wally's presence, though she is to kiss him madly in this scene.

The director, in his trepidation, has decided to take Viola Dana to the very limits of her acting abilities, if it breaks both of them in the process. "Viola dear," he says, taking her dainty, gin and tonic-chilled hands between his two much larger and darker palms. "I want you to give of this scene your life. Sacrifice yourself to it. Make of this take a monument to your last, most memorable moments." (At least this is what he is reported to have said by a watchful if over-imaginative scribe.) He looks into her slowly responding face, perhaps mindful that the production crew has been patiently playing whist since Miss Dana's last blow-up on the set an hour before.

"You're saying I should _emote_ more?" Viola asks, her languid face showing just a touch of strain about the temples. Barnett groans within (an easy conjecture), but manages half a smile.

"No, no darling. I simply want you to perform so stunningly a man in the act of committing murder would stop, turn, and applaud you. Inflame passions and inspire genius! Understand?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so. I just don't care for all this talk of sacrifice and _murder_. Not while the sun's shining." She rises abruptly, smoothing the knees of her breeches with the palms of her hands, and positions herself on the edge of the set like an ivory chess-piece.

At some point the articles are always anxious to get into the director's brain—he feels an uneasy attraction to Miss Dana, mixed with longing for Bianca, who is attending a cousin's wedding a thousand miles away, but he has never stooped to bedding his actresses and won't start now. Instead he chooses to get on with the filming, as he is growing slightly nauseated, possibly as the result of his breakfast and lunch having subsisted solely of coffee and a tin of sardines. "Someone get that Reid on the set!" he roars through a megaphone (this directorial cliché must be thought of as an authorial intrusion). A moment later Wally Reid slinks out, tearing off his makeup cowl and blowing a kiss to Viola, who deflects it with a glare worthy of Medusa.

Mugs Marko is perpetually cheery, the only quality Barnett actually dislikes about the man, but he does save the day by suggesting a thrilling new angle in what is known as the "Morgana's Destiny" episode. But all does not proceed smoothly after that: Barnett unravels a loose thread from his tie as Viola stumbles on a climactic line, ruining the fifteenth take. "Cut!" he moans, and calls it a day.

It is a violet dusk made just for long stretches of purple magazine prose as the director paces the impromptu screening room assembled on the lower deck of his rented yacht, anchored off the coast of Cedros. We are halfway through today's rushes, but Barnett's mind is no longer concentrating on the oddly juxtaposed images on the screen before him (and here we may dip into our enforced interior monologue once again, and beyond to a higher plane of omniscience). He is wondering what happened to the relative calm of the past few weeks, when the actors were waking in time and even the garbage-picking gossip columnists were failing to turn a good story of lust and greed between takes. Besides, he is thoroughly unhappy with the day's work. He has already decided to throw out all that he has seen, except, perhaps, an extended shot of Vi and Wall staring, motionless, at each other across an open, windswept verandah. He would throw this out, too, if it were not for a unique quality of the light which could never be duplicated this season. The other scenes, which seem flawless to his associates, are, in his eyes, fraught with glaring errors. Reid, the fool, should have known to place that cigarette three inches further to the left of the orchid on the cymbalon. Someone who must be terminated has allow a distracting shadow to fall on the piazza in another scene. And why didn't Miss Dana look directly into the camera here, and why did she there?

As the reel is changed one of Barnett's crew, a dapper woman with crimped hair dyed the color of dead marigolds (and a devotée of slightly garish lipsticks), leans obtusely over him from the seat behind. She is a seasoned wardrobe mistress, but in her director's opinion, she tries too hard. "Mr. Barnett," she whispers at a level louder than her normal speaking voice, "I hope you saw how that chiffon peignoir really picks up the moonlight rather nicely in the conservatory shots. Actually, I thought the whole scene was done... exquisitely!"

Barnett, who balked at the framing of the scene, but did enjoy the sensation that Miss Dana was walking an inch above the parquet floor in that chiffon gown, replies, "Ah, I see. As if she were a ghost afraid of the living."

"Exactly!" the woman interjects, and as many have before her, proceeds to puzzle over the director's words until well into the evening. Before she sits back down, however, the lights have dimmed; a shot of the director in jersey and trunks standing outside a bathing machine flickers on the screen. Marko has shot this as some kind of an inside joke. Barnett, slightly embarrassed, slightly amused, nevertheless feels an odd sort of pleasure at seeing himself enlarged on film, the foaming tide lapping against his bare calves.

Ten weeks later, things are, to put it mildly, "In a goddamn hell of a muddle," as Barnett often likes to say, knowing the journalists would then invent more illustrious and printable quotes. The director and his crew have been filming the "Wisteria Parallels" sequences throughout central and western Europe for the past two months, and everything that could go wrong has been going wrong. Two all-important electrical generators are malfunctioning. At several very inopportune times film stock has turned out to be defective. Someone has misplaced an extremely crucial piece of Meissen china which a whole subplot pivots upon. A shipment of Malaysian teakwood has not arrived on schedule. Mugs Marko is down with a mild liver inflammation and his son has had to take over for him. Emil Jennings is not cooperating with Thelma Todd, and Thelma Todd will have nothing to do with Mona Rico. During one tiring take, Miss Todd has an attack of the "vapors" which does not subside until she is granted a personal bodyguard (spurring rumors that Mona Rico has been threatening to "scratch her eyes out"). And the European actors hired for local color are intolerable with their pinstripe shirts and constant manicure appointments. W. W. Barnett, who has grown a sudden mustache, is not quite content.

Bianca Rosenthal has, however, joined him for the remainder of the summer. She has forgiven him for what happened with Viola Dana as long as he says nothing more about what she did or didn't do with her cousin's new husband. Harry and Caresse Crosby, the avant-garde arts patrons who they had met on the Riviera, have graciously lent the couple their "little place in the country," a converted medieval mill on the edge of a forest in the middle of France, which Barnett visits on weekends. Imported apes and antelopes roam the ruins and the parklands around the mill, and Bianca has filled the grounds up with her Parisian friends, mostly socialites and artists, though Barnett prefers to be alone when not directing. He never allows her near filming sites, telling her she has "too delicate of a metabolism to be around such insanity." When he finds a chorus boy sleeping in the bath with a chimpanzee after a Bastille Day party he bans all weekend visitors against Bianca's protests so he can work on his script revisions in peace.

Already tiring of Europe, Bianca is taking Italian lessons and, as is the fashion for ladies with stories to tell, trying to write stylish little memoirs, less fact than fiction. (Later she is to base a happily unfinished romàn a clef on them.) She spends the rest of her time riding and at the racetrack and before her designers' mirrors. But Bianca is bored and bored again. "Most of the actresses Willy has introduced me to are second-generation or worse," she writes to her sister back on Long Island, "and most of the actors are _you know_." So she spends hours with her hair. She practices painting her toenails to match her fingernails. When she goes to see Barnett on the coast she builds sandcastles just to watch the sea carry them away bit by bit. Barnett is so preoccupied he never senses her restlessness. He enjoys watching her before her vanity mirror, watching the movements of her mouth and cigarette holder while she pretends interest in what he is saying. He wakes one night to find her staring into the kitchen dumbwaiter. When she tells him she is "dying of ennui" he laughs and suggests a sleeping pill. More than anything he likes to see her when he returns early on a Saturday evening, floating on her back in the pool, her blue-black hair spread in the water like a Chinese fan.

Barnett has only one other obsession this summer—the two books he keeps between the shirts in his suitcase: _Three Weeks_ , the racy potboiler by Elinor Glyn and Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ , neither of which he admires, neither of which he can finish, and both of which he almost completely misunderstands. Yet he is constantly reading them between scenes, thinking of incorporating them somehow into his current project (which, even though it is half-filmed now, still makes no coherent sense to anyone involved). He also keeps voluminous notes to himself, this one being fairly typical of the sort Bianca often finds crumpled on the floor of the tower room (and transcribes into her memoirs): " _Providence and The Divine._.. Providence and the Dead... Mankind is unsuited/unprepared—for the future of cinema... !? No no no _no_ no no no... Negress/Chinaman waiter/waitress (Scene 93)... Dianick [sic] statues... intvw M 5 pm... The slightest shadings of her soul like a theramin's wail... "

During a long week's enervating shoot in some ghastly tourist resort, Barnett often finds it necessary to take long baths, followed by midnight constitutionals just so he can bring himself down to earth and think without an aviary of chattering voices in his head. Sometimes he has been drinking hard with the crew, other times not so much. Once as he is walking back to his hotel, following the distant trail of beach-house lights, like diamonds on a strand, he sees someone else on the empty waterfront street—the figure is rattling a walking stick ahead of him along a row of darkened shop-fronts. Barnett stops, sensing something familiar about the man's peculiar dress and manner. The man in the shadowy distance has halted as well, and Barnett suddenly sees how to deal with a shot he had been working on with Colin Clive and Mugs Marko throughout much of the afternoon. The acute angles, the disparity in proportion between the whitish figure and the looming black facade behind him—the approach he must take to that shot is now clear. He tucks his malacca walking stick (an old gift from Mack Sennett to his father) under his arm, raises his hands to his face, forming a primitive frame, and squints through it, trying to imagine this silent scene magnified and more silent still. The man in white has done the same; it is of course his own reflection in the buildings' mirrored black windows.

It is late summer of the sort too-too nostalgic American ex-pats say they have only in the Provençal countryside, full of overripe fruits and grapes heavy on the vine and young men and younger women relaxing under the poplars in their tennis whites, arguing over Proust, no doubt. But even when generators have been fixed and actors are at truce, when the parties have fizzled and shipments are in, W. W. Barnett is not relaxed, especially while directing. However, he likes it this way, the way he grows heady from the chill and rush he feels when making movies, as if an ice-cold bolt of lightning has shot through his brain. Sometimes he feels as if he could direct for days, until the high tide comes in and sweeps the entire production away and the ebb tide leaves it beached again—he would go right on directing. One afternoon he feels so invigorated he runs onto a set and lifts Colleen Moore, a small actress in a small part, high above his head, an act which Mugs Marko memorializes.

Yet, for all this summer's warm spiritual salve, Barnett knows that he is being worn to a blunt end. The frequent, uneven increases in his heartbeat sometimes wake him at night. Movie-making, he tells Bianca, is like the jagged high he once experienced when he tried cocaine at a private screening at San Simeon. Except that this feeling rarely goes away. It is like making endless love to the most beautiful woman in the world, like driving a fast car over a cliff, again and again.

A forward young interviewer, a fast-talking Princetonian to whom Mogul's public-relations men gave their blessings as well as the _moulin_ 's address, had disrupted an entire evening earlier in the summer when he went far too far and asked the director whether movies are, truly, "Art." Barnett later chances upon the consequential story in a copy of _Collier's_ while waiting for his barber's lather to set. The article begins opposite what the director considers a horrid shot of himself tracing the thematic diagram of a scene in the beach's white sand: "It was the same backlot type of hushed excitement," the article reads, "with its shifting patterns of actors and technicians, the quick succession of whirs, clicks, and relaxed laughs, which have existed since Edison first... " Barnett flips a few pages ahead. Another horrible picture, this time in color, of Bianca and himself lounging beside the Crosbys' pool—the director frowns at their bored, somewhat blurred expressions and remembers the very moment the interviewer snapped the photograph; Bianca was just about to mention an interesting Balkan she had met that day at Deauville. The magazine is giving him a sharp pain in his right temple—fortunately the barber has suddenly clicked his straight-edge open and is closing in on his neck.

One September morning on yet another broad shell-strewn beach, Barnett pokes his walking stick into the moist sand, trying to think clearly. He watches the crew working farther up the coast. Cheesecloth is being spread across the scaffolding on three sides of a set to diffuse the sunlight. High-beam kliegs are being hoisted into place to illuminate the shade under an artificial palm-grove. Mugs Marko is carefully re-plotting camera angles while the actors argue over someone's passkey. Shielding his eyes, Barnett tries to imagine how these actions would look in black and white, on a large screen.

He is tired and far over budget. Mogul is needling him for what they describe as "unnecessary expenses," such as: two-hundred dollars for an "authentic Saxonic krummhorn," six-hundred and sixty-five dollars for lamé bunting, and fifty-two hundred for a chorus of "imported marble caryatids, etc." "Et cetera" for what?! Mogul wants to know. Production has been under way for over a year and the movie is barely half-finished even by the most liberal estimates. Mr. Barnett must finish promptly or not at all. The new chairman of the board at Mogul Studios (what his name is Barnett can't remember, since he had immediately torn apart all their telegrams) does not like unneeded extravagance, hot-shot director or not. "What does he think I'm directing?" Barnett says to Bianca, across from him in the bath. "A goddamn penny-farthing magic lantern show?"

With no choices left him, Barnett is having to alter his plans. The location shooting in the Himalayas and Jakarta will have to be scrapped. So will intentions of recreating Hannibal's elephants crossing the Alps for a dream sequence, a crucial symbolic moment Barnett had long counted on. Production workers will have to be laid off. Inevitably, fewer names will make it to the roll of credits. He will have to hurry on to Greece, finish shooting there, and rush back to Los Angeles to edit. Miss Rosenhaven, who with her perpetual hangover has lately lessened to little more than another parlor game, will be left behind in France with a large weekly allowance and that Roumanian count she swears is nothing but a convenient fourth at bridge. (That nasty business with the pills he'd just as soon forget.) His sleep, he knows, will be interrupted by urgent trunk calls from frantic freight shippers and Turkish financiers. He will constantly be at a loss for time and the thought alone sickens him. And if we are allowed a bit of writerly contrivance, we will add this: Perhaps he suspects even on this pleasant September morning in 1927 that this motion picture will be his last.

In Crete, a supporting actor unexpectedly commits suicide by consuming a large amount of hair dye, an untimely act, as it leaves a telltale hole in the casting. A double has to fill in for some long shots, while the script is once again revised. Colin Clive is in a rather sticky wicket with the local constabulary involving an underage masseur and a pair of stolen goggles. Lawyers have had to be flown in to prevent a possible scandal. Barnett has taken to smoking thin Egyptian cigarettes, when he has never smoked before. A one-legged village boy named Saolo found the missing left-handed pince-nez which Blanche Sweet had regretfully thrown into the Adriatic following an impromptu cast party. The boy is rewarded with the job of an extra in a fiesta scene before he runs off with someone else's pocket-watch.

Bianca has not helped matters one iota, as she is fond of sending him quizzical penny-postcards from all different corners of the continent, which she is touring with a group of "friends, darling, and nothing more." Just the other day a card bearing an artist's rendering of the first dirigible flight in the Crimea came with his breakfast tray: "Willy, dear," it read in poison-green ink, "you know that no matter what happens I love only you you you. The count and his fencing instructor are simply insufferable! I could kill Boris for making such a fool of me, but you know dear how these landed gentry are. See you ????" He was surprised how neatly the bath-water washed her words away.

During the course of an extremely hot day even for the Aegean, of the kind which withers the sturdiest olive trees, an eager scriptwriter hired by Mogul to "speed things along" approaches Barnett, who has just received yet another exasperating _carte postale_ from Bianca. The director recognizes the young writer's type: someone who would rather be writing verse, who considers himself "sensitive" and "not of this world;" he has already approached Barnett several times, ready with innumerable and grossly insensitive changes in the script, probably egged on by Mogul's new chief. This time the youth has brought along his latest girlfriend—a quivering, tarted-up creature, who if backstage talk is true, until very recently has been making her livelihood under a lamppost in the village.

"I told Angel here, short for Angelica, you know," the writer explains, waving his hands in small circles, "that we could find something for her. I was thinking about the part of Miss Colleen's sister... "

"You mean cousin."

"Sure, anyway, Angel, Angelica, has got loads of talent and I thought if we beefed up that role with a little more action, a little more drama... " The writer has moved in for a close-up, practically spitting in the director's face. Barnett has removed his hat and is mopping his brow with the hem of his shirt. One cannot see his eyes beneath his sunshades, and he does not give any indication of being pleased or displeased. Angel emits a series of sharp trills, batting her kohl-lidded eyes.

"... and Angel here," the scriptwriter uneasily continues, "knows a lot of English and everyone says she's photogenic as hell. I've already altered the plot-line here and there to suit her, and she fits all the—"

It is at this point that Barnett cracks him sharply across the shoulder blades with his walking stick. The girl from the village gasps, or at least inhales very suddenly between giggles. The writer is dazed but a second, after which he does an about-face, dragging Angel, Angelica, all atwitter, thinking it a marvelous joke, by the elbow.

"You impertinent imbecile!" the director rages after him. "You couldn't script a pie fight! Do you hear me? Get out of my sight before, before I—" Barnett (who certainly does not seem to be the same man he was a year ago) has to be calmed with a moist Turkish towel and a double-shot of rye. He has never struck anyone in his life, and is as shocked by his behavior as the members of his troupe. (The zealous scriptwriter is said to have bolted company that very day and is later rumored to be writing either speeches for the National Socialists in Berlin or horticultural reports for the Chicago papers.) Barnett, at last subdued by the alcohol, spends the rest of the day in a hammock, dreaming of a day when movies would have color and sound, when they would be even better at annihilating and replacing reality.

Several months later, back in California, Barnett is doing his best to encourage his film editors onward, although more often than not they end up having to pick him up off the floor and revive him with generous doses of rye and praise. He has still not quite gotten over all that happened in Europe, and no longer dares to carry a walking stick for fear of what he might do with it. Incipient panic stalks him. Every clock in the city seems to be challenging him to complete his project before the world runs out of time—or he runs out of life. Ninety-five hours of acceptable footage will have to be honed down to five hours' playing time. Worse than that—shortly after returning from an enforced fortnight's drying out in a sanitarium, he is informed that, by Mogul's decree, the film will have to be cut to less than two and one-half hours for the American roadshow version. A mighty blow indeed for any director, Barnett has taken this order like a glove in the face, a stinging insult affronting his esthetic judgment. But his fighting spirit has been crushed. He no longer goes out for meals at fashionable restaurants with beautiful women. Instead, he takes his suppers in his rented bungalow with the blinds drawn and the radio playing funereal jazz music. Frequently he indulges in more than three twilight Manhattans, which he prefers to mix with his own shaking hands. He has finished neither Freud nor Glyn. He has not looked at a woman in months.

The Filipino cleaning lady who comes twice a week chances upon Barnett at eleven o' clock one hot California winter morning. He is still in bed, footage of a Mediterranean sunset spinning silently from a projector set up in a corner of the bedroom; huddled naked in the sheets, smelling heavily of Sen-Sen, he is crying shamelessly. His picture is "a failure, a complete failure, a dismal, unspeakable failure," he wails. The cleaning lady restrains him before he does serious injury to himself with a film splicer. What she does not know is that he has just had a nightmare about the première where the theater was on fire, elephants and gorillas were charging through the screen and women were screaming and children were shooting guns and a lynch mob made up of prominent critics had crucified him on the "H" in the "Hollywoodland" sign. He knows now that he is not just frightened of the public and its response, but more frightened of his own shortcomings, his inability to create just one small perfect thing in this imperfect world.

"There was this camera spinning behind his eyes... I think he got to imagining that I was no more substantial than a ghost, a flat, projected image. Sometimes he would walk behind me on the boulevards, as if not to eradicate me with a wayward shadow."

—Countess Malevich, _Our Fleeting Images_

"[Barnett] was the last of his breed, for too much money and too many new talents had changed—some would say ruined—the studio system. 'Production supervisors' like Thalberg and lnce were usurping the creative duties of the director-general. 'The demon mike' had chased many of the best-known but foreign-born actors out of town; 'white voice,' that inability of some actors to project themselves for the microphones, was spoken of as if it were a contagious disease. It suddenly seemed that even comparatively young men like Barnett were part of the Old World, the old order, and the _débâcle_ over his last film would not likely be repeated, for it would no doubt have been his last whether he had died or not. In retrospect, decades later, film scholars can only guess at its greatness, its everlasting influence, for, alas, no prints remain. Burned up as celluloid will, dissolved into acidic jelly in their cans, or the canisters consigned to the Los Angeles County dump: all or none of the above.. "

—Haberle, in the afterward to _Larger Than Life_

"Everything everyone purports to know about me, Johnny, is a lie—that I drink too much, that I bought my way into the system with my parents' money, that I'm some sort of aging _enfant terrible_... Well, everything about Hollywood is a falsification or cover-up... which is the most admirable feature of the place—you can make yourself up out of nothing, create a beauty or a beast. Maybe the only kind of artist I am is a con-artist—I could have been a rag-picker out of the tenements, I could have been the product of some over-achieving copywriter's over-reaching imagination, as if I didn't really exist at all... "

— _Colliers_ , July 14, 1927

At the last moment, over Barnett's severe misgivings, the title was changed from _The Dead and the Divine_ to the equally alliterative but less morbid _Larger Than Life_.At exactly two hours, fifty-one minutes long, it was less than half the motion picture its director had originally intended. It featured a much-touted all-star cast, a multi-million-dollar budget, innumerable sets and costume changes, and scenes shot around the world. That is all anyone, even those who worked very closely editing the original behemoth down to size, seemed to know about it. Some insiders averred it would be the first truly legitimate work of art on film, the beginning of a new age for "the industry." Others on the outside said if such self-indulgence were allowed to continue unabated it would be the downfall of an empire. They might have been saying close to the same thing. It definitely wasn't going to be treated by anyone as mere entertainment. Even premiering like any other blockbuster at Graumann's Chinese Theater wasn't enough; Mogul, still bedazzled by Barnett's charms despite years of frustration and unfulfilled promises, decided this would be the first feature film to show at its very own "top-dollar motion picture palace," which it had recently built in neo-Gothic-Baroque-Palladian style near the mythical nexus of Hollywood and Vine. There would be simultaneous premieres at Mogul's identical picture palaces in Chicago and New York City: The producers hoped to launch a chain of their own theaters around the country, exclusively for showing its own product. Never before had such an ambitious project been instigated by a major motion picture studio... and never again.

Evening fell swift as a guillotine on the night of the opening, but, in the words of the radio broadcasters-in-waiting, the night was still young, just-deodorized, and alive. The gathering crowd outside The Mogul Wonderland was in unusual good humor, almost as if it were expecting a modern revelation indeed after having seen all the ads, handbills, and billboards Mogul's p.r. people had posted and placed to arouse interest in the film, most notable being a centerfold spread in Photoplay which showed Blanche Sweet, in a state of not-so-sweet dishabille, being confronted by a shirtless Colin Clive brandishing a luger, an artless blend of sex and violence (Barnett did not approve) which nevertheless found its way to many a collegian's dormitory walls. (We need not mention Viola Dana's sensationalistic below-the-border marriage and quickie divorce from costar Wallace Reid—a first-person account was serialized in all the tabloids, which even the most gullible took as a publicity stunt.) The Mogul Wonderland was lit up with flashing multicolored lights "like Christmas in Times Square," as a man-on-the-street announced to his wireless listeners, and Hollywood Boulevard had been cordoned with state troopers to accommodate the anticipated crowds. Amidst the mayhem there was a sudden flurry of flash-pops, bright and furious as an electrical storm, as Dolores Del Rio, the latest screen sensation with surplus S. A. (what we now call sex appeal), stepped from her silver limousine, a chinchilla stole balanced on her shoulders and hips and a look of studied nonchalance on her face. But she was fooling no one. The rabble knew that she, too, was just as giddy, just as nervously expectant as they were.

After Dolores, as if to break the slight chill she had brought on, strutted a soon-to-be-famous comic (so the radio men said), followed by his three clownish brothers. They may have been new to California's optimistic glare, but were still the consummate showmen with their wax noses, baggy pants, and false mustachios. The brothers aroused a fine laugh from the crowd by mocking Miss Del Rio's stilted walk before slipping through the cathedral-sized doors to join the rest of the box-seat holders. After that bit of levity things got slightly more serious with a dazzle of gleaming Silver Shadows and an interminable parade of cigar-smoke-fogged movie tycoons, once-poor-but-reputable novelists turned rich-but-disreputable screenwriters and other assorted artistic types, gleeful poseurs, politicians, athletes, and stars, stars, and more stars fallen from the heavens and caught in the floodlights' glare. Even the relatively obscure and the completely unknown were given an exuberant reception. The rest of the film's cast were all waves, gratuitous bows, and lipsticked smiles, even though they too knew little more than the public about the movie, not one of the actors having seen it in its entirety. The director and his date, Bianca Rosenhaven Malevich, recently divorced and fleeing her horrid European existence, had not been seen. Barnett's custom was to arrive at openings from a rear exit, a practice which Bianca only just lived with.

Slowly, interminably slowly, the lights within dimmed and the audience ceased its anonymous rustle. A few flashlights sought empty seats (there were none) in the vast theater and its many-tiered balconies, but otherwise all was still, all was dark. There was a silence like that which exists before the creation of a new world. An usher coughed. Someone uttered a loud curse—or a prayer? At last the heavy velvet curtains parted with a dramatic groan, revealing the screen which would enable miracles and magic to unfold, and there arose from the silence ululations from an oboe-like register on the specially designed Wurlitzer organ, big as an orchestra in sound and size and with a thousand keys and stops (Barnett had commissioned a score by Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky being beyond budget). Accompanied by an earth-quaking chord, the screen burned with blistering white light, seemingly hot enough to start a fire. Already people were transfixed in their seats. As the Mogul trademark lightning bolt cracked a colorless sky, no one noticed that W. W. Barnett had already left one of the gilded loges, leaving Bianca alone and frightened and angry in the dark.

Everyone knows the rest of the story—to call the film a disaster would be, in the Hollywood scale of things, like calling the Battle of Waterloo Napoleon's little faux pas. The film proved to be the downfall of Mogul, its new chain of megamillion-dollar theaters, its star system, Barnett's career, and half of the movie industry. The audience that night was silent as no audience had been before; people left the theater as if they were leaving a funeral, which is what the film in effect turned out to be for most of its participants. Everyone involved in its making blamed one another, though in the end all fingers were pointing in one direction—Barnett's. Reviewers across the country took delight in reviling it, giving them an excuse to rip apart the movie industry, its lax moral standards, its pretensions, and its maniacal greed. ("If the complex plot weren't so incoherent," sniffed the _Boston Evening Transcript_ , "maybe we'd also notice how dreadful the Christmas-pageant acting is." "A classic case of the artist stretching his limited talents past the breaking point," meowed the _Chicago Daily News_ , "and clear evidence that movie makers better start getting back to the sweet romances and gangland opera that the public demands.") Even a hastily re-edited and re-titled version (back to _The Dead and The Divine_ ) which tried to make a simple seventy-minute love story from "the morass of inexplicable material surrounding and smothering it" ( _Variety_ ) in the original version failed miserably at the box office and was withdrawn within two weeks. Mogul Studios went under so quickly due to its enormous financial losses it was almost as if a mighty conflagration had consumed it whole in a matter of hours. The humiliated executives who had supported Barnett in the making of his monster either managed to jump ship to other studios or walked the gangplank and drowned themselves in their own swimming pools. _Larger Than Life_ seemed to leave nothing but catastrophe in its wake; everything it had touched was destroyed, and those left alive are not willing to speak. But where was Barnett? He was nowhere to be found in all of sun-kissed California; those who did not read the papers too closely assumed he had done the honorable thing by doing himself in. In actuality, he was not around long enough to survey the long-term consequences of his failed masterpiece—he was said to have flown to Havana for an extended vacation on his savings once the editors were done extracting the love story and he had incinerated or otherwise vanquished all existent negatives and prints.

In retrospect, this now-legendary Hollywood tragedy seems more than a little suspect. For one thing, it was not entirely Barnett's fault that "talkies" had appeared during the making of _Larger Than Life_ and changed the way people understood movies. Not only was the more mime-like, melodramatic style of silent acting quickly becoming passé, but people were more willing (for a time, at least) to watch a kettle whistling on a stove than a thunderous battle without the thunder. Barnett's habit of inserting lengthy title cards (complete with footnotes) which only speed-readers could comprehend in the midst of the action was also off-putting to even the most intellectual of viewers. No doubt the American critics did unanimously despise and make a laughing-stock of the film (it could be argued they were reacting as much to Barnett's renowned egotism and overdone public image), but theirs thankfully have not been the final words on the subject. W. W. Barnett did not read reviews "as a matter of principle" (by the age of sixteen he had decided they were all totally meaningless), but if he had picked up one written by one of the film's handful of foreign witnesses, he would have read such cryptic, hyperbolic, and yet ultimately enraptured words such as these, from a Franco-American cultural gazette (and here we give a rough crib from the French of a certain J. D. Chalfant): "[Barnett] has directed... an iconoclastic cinematic concerto, which although it lacks a certain [self-definition] in regard to its esthetic goals and relies heavily on a received indebtedness to [art], it is a triumphant tribute to... mankind's 'deistic gratification.' The film's ... transcendence of the socially theoretic, often Hegelian dialogue is impressive ... Through derisive manipulation of the sometimes didactic standpoint, the [film] reveals to us ... an anarchic and ipso facto, skillfully realized return to what Lumiere as well as Melies called... " Enough of M. Chalfant, of course.

This lengthy excerpt from _The Tenth Muse_ , a recently discovered and hitherto unknown Cambridge (England) arts journal, serendipitously gives us a better if still a murky idea of the director's intentions: " _Larger Than Life_ is not, obviously, a simple or simple-minded movie. It might be more approachable if we were to compare it to a multilayered multipurposed modern novel, say, for example, Joyce's now-infamous _Ulysses_ , and if we 'read' it like such a novel, it reveals a wealth of surprises. (This reviewer saw it but three times before it was closed due to lack of public interest, and he might add that three viewings is not enough to fully assimilate the myriad and magnificent complications of the film's style, substance, and plot.)

"Also, in understanding Life, we must bear in mind the director's much-publicized battle to keep the original nine-hour [sic] opus from being amputated to a more palatable length; indeed, we can only guess now that had the film been shown in all its Wagnerian amplitude, it might have garnered the serious audience which it so rightfully deserves (if such a one exists). Analyzing the film as it was presented to the unwashed American masses is somewhat akin to having to examine and explain a fifty-page condensation of _War and Peace_...

"Barnett's film begins in an old-fashioned, almost primitive fashion, with unsteady camera-work, a degree of pixillation, images sometimes doubled as if we were looking at old stereopticon slides, and sundry late-Victorian embellishments. A seemingly straightforward and at first uninteresting tale of a young married couple at the turn of the century begins ordinarily enough. They are Shakespearean actors in somewhat 'reduced' circumstances, on an extended continental junket doing _The Philanderer_ and _Lady Windermere's Fan_ , and they lead a quasi-bohemian existence, shuttling from one dingy theatre to the next. It is only after about fifteen minutes that we are led to understand that the camera is just as much a participant in their lives as their fellow thespians. They speak to it, they resent its intrusions, they tell it to go away. The puzzle is solved when we realize they are addressing their own unseen child, who is relentless in his pursuit of even their most intimate moments.

"This is all very well, and use of the 'first-person' camera as narrator is something we cine-voyeurs have long observed in small doses, when, for example, Ben Turpin is clubbed by one of the Keystone Kops and we then get a glimpse of the whirling world through the dizzy comedian's eyes. However, after about a half-hour of Barnett's film there is a sudden break; we go 'behind the cameras' into a more-focused yet still outdated world and discover this is a film-in-progress that we have been watching, almost as if we had wandered into a screening room by accident. Judging by their costumes, it is the penny-arcade era, and we discover that the couple in the earlier sequence are indeed married and struggling to make it as serious _cinéastes_ in a vulgar world of sawdust and canvas. Once again we watch their lives progress quickly through several years, and it is not long before we again guess that there is an invisible witness to all their arguments and traumas. Here the film branches off into new territory—the camera enters schoolrooms and schoolyards, invades the privacy of several comely young ladies, disappears into Pullman cars and reappears on loading docks, is bullied at summer camp and then, suddenly, at an orphanage, as well. The camera escapes under grainy moonlight and heads west in a gypsy caravan...

"The action is abruptly halted when the film seems to get stuck, begins to burn, and then breaks—so realistic is the effect that several members of the audience in the theatre which this reviewer had the displeasure to sit among began to stamp their feet and call for the head of the projectionist. When the action resumes it is about a decade past, and we are led to believe that we are watching the making of a film which has run into some degree of artistic or financial trouble. The camera, while carefully avoiding the looking glass, seems to be having a jolly time of it, however, and we are soon dipping in and out of studios, following orchidaceous young actresses into their flats, driving very fast along tortuous coastal highways, making wobbly essays into speakeasies and into dreams, and even splashing about in the bath. At one point a man who claims to be the narrator's real father is confronted, but like a bad stage-trick he disappears in a puff of smoke.

"This reviewer realizes he is making all this sound rather too trite, too elementary, for the several distinct gemlike facets of the movie are not quite happening consecutively, but often simultaneously, something like the dénouement of Griffith's _Intolerance_ , but with even more rapid-fire cross-cuttings and use of split-screen effects. By now the viewer is perhaps exhausted but not surprised when the narrative control again steps back, or should we say forward, into the modern day, to a film crew on a beach and a beautiful woman (Thelma Todd, one of the worst actors in a film full of bad actors), who the camera lingers lovingly upon. There is a certain tropic lull in the onrush of imagery, but it is too late to halt the madness running rampant in Barnett's cracked house of mirrors. In the best tradition of American kiss-but-don't-tell moviegoers, this reviewer will not reveal the totally unexpected ending, but turn instead to why this film, despite and perhaps because of its 'hermetic self-reflexive mind/camera/memory unison' (I quote a Gallic review), fails perhaps as autobiography [sic] but succeeds as a fair impersonation of art... "

Scanning the "notes on contributors" at the back of the journal, one might be tempted to venture that "John J. Peto" is none other than our director writing in disguise to defend himself, but the assumed British accent and figurative false Vandyke, preposterous as they might seem to the more observant, are more likely to reveal upon closer inspection a prankish Rhodes scholar than a director who was known for the great pains he took to avoid having to explain himself, ever.

When more modern and sophisticated film scholars in their search for the evermore obscure exhumed the sole remaining print of _The Dead and The Divine_ a number of years ago, something actually unearthed like an ancient artefact from an underground vault (as deep as one of those in the Valley of the Kings) during the construction of an underground parking garage near where Mogul Studios used to exist, it was found to have disintegrated into nothingness inside its carefully labeled can. All we have now to judge _Larger Than Life_ by are the contemporary reviews and a few puzzling production stills that do not seem to concur with what the critics were discussing at the time: for instance, a deep-focus shot of a man in a white dinner jacket (Wallace Reid or Emil Jannings) at the top of a small ziggurat-like tower on a barren plain; below him an unidentifiable woman in a black evening gown is sprawled upon the ground, her arms lifted toward him in a supplicating gesture; it is not clear whether she has fallen or has been thrown from the heights, or if she has merely chased the man and collapsed or fallen. Another still shows an elegant picnic, complete with blazing candelabras on a field of crisp linen set with fine china and ice buckets big as bathtubs, set up beneath the gothic arches of a spreading sycamore—very painterly, but no one is present for this haunted feast but what appears to be a troll or a pitifully ugly doll propped up against the tree trunk. A third is a close-up of Viola Dana's wan, pinched face, an orchid behind her ear and her hand shielding her eyes from the sun—and so detailed is this photograph that you might argue that you can see a reflection of the director in her pupils. Yet another is of a pie-fight in what looks like a charnel house, but it is doubtful if this still is authentic.

Two transcriptions from the film's notoriously lengthy title cards have also survived the decades, albeit as quotes within the aforementioned French review, and therefore both their translation and their legitimacy are suspect. The first card reads (according to our somewhat arch and over-intellectualizing French friend): "Little men with funny accents entered the Los Angeles canyons with big ideas and came out with fat bankrolls and cigars in their mouths. They lunched at the Derby, _kaffee-klatched_ at the studio canteen, dinner-danced at Ciro's, were buried at Forest Lawn. Some were recluses with bodyguards and bars over the stained glass, others idled for weeks on end in opium dens or worse. They were constantly 'between' things: contracts, agents, pictures, wives, engagements... "

This sounds rather more like an outsider's idea of what Hollywood was like in those days than any real thoughts Barnett himself might have had on the subject, but we can assume at least part of this transcription reflects something of the film's tone. The other transcription reads simply: "NO! LEAVE THE DAMMT DEVIL TO HIS OWN DEVICES!" This seems more believable.

A movie finished was always a forgotten movie to W. W. Barnett. He once told a pressman that "movies don't thrill me at all. I only make movies; I haven't watched them since I was a boy." This may have been only more self-conscious myth-making, but it did seem to be true that he was barely aware of _Larger Than Life_ 's disastrous aftermath. Before the Mogul Wonderland's doors had closed for the last time in sepulchral silence he had already booked passage on a cruise ship bound for the Caribbean via the Panama Canal and was gone before the edited version was released. He seldom left his cabin on the storm-wracked voyage, lost in a daze of seasickness and the multi-volume history of the world he had packed. The bright opulence of the beachfront hotels of the Windward Islands, sailing past his porthole like gaudy steamships, left him unimpressed; he obtained a suite in an unfashionable quarter and retired to bed to nurse his lingering illness and finish his Macaulay. There was nothing left to fear and nothing left to care about. Thoroughly tired, he forswore alcohol, sipping guava juice instead all afternoon in the balmy shade of his balcony, shooing mosquitoes and, for a lark, occasionally buying last week's _Sunday Times_ (New York or Los Angeles) to glimpse at the society pages and chart the trajectory of Bianca's newfound life as a merry widow. This was the off-season, and he enjoyed walking unknown and unnoticed along the shady esplanades and boulevards. He had used to like changing his friends as he did his decór or locale; now he no longer saw, nor cared to see, anyone he knew at all, especially anyone having anything to do with Hollywood. A svelte Latin girl named Carioca now swayed against his side like a supple royal palm. He had met her at a casino, followed her into an atheneum tiled like a bath-house, and had been surprised to discover she cared nothing for the movies but was a voracious reader. Born to wealthy Colombians and educated in England, she was constantly revising what she called her "hagiography" of the British royal family up to Queen Elizabeth, and she kept the palimpsest locked within the glove compartment of her convertible.

Sometimes Carioca and Barnett danced intimate dances that had no names on the beach outside his hotel. Later, in his rooms, they would dance again, into the small hours to the static-flooded music of a radio with tubes which glowed crimson in the dark. Carioca always held out her dark and delicate hands as if expecting them to be kissed, which they often were. With some affection, she called him Webster, which no one else had ever dared to. He begged her to marry him, but she refused his little velvet-upholstered box each time. The days lingered on, long and unseasonably cool, the way Barnett liked. He declined to answer angry letters from his producers (who'd tracked down his whereabouts) and declined again, until they stopped coming. He had known all along, he told Carioca, that the film had been ruined, and what did he care for those bastards? Anyway, he had enough money to last him. After that, well...

The local cinema seemed to show only American westerns, the now-outdated silents, old cliffhangers starring Buck Bartlett or Tom Mix. Barnett preferred to go to them on hot afternoons and watch until he fell asleep, while John Ford's Indians circled the ranch or James Cruze's cowboys set out for the last roundup. He began to believe again in Manifest Destiny. The empty plains of New Mexico, where the iron-gray sun seemed so distant, and yet so warm and gentle on the backs of cattle rustlers and their sweethearts, soothed him like a tonic. Most of all, he liked the way the whole world glared like sun on chrome when he came out of the theater, as if he had been blind, and now could see. An actress named Mae Marsh had sung "Amazing Grace" to him once when he was a boy and his parents were far away, a song he had never heard in his agnostic upbringing, and he agreed across time with Miss Mae Marsh that the movies were, and are indeed, an amazing grace.

One tipsy afternoon as he was ambling along the labyrinthine hotel corridor leading to the birdcage which would lower him to Bianca's waiting car, he turned a corner and saw a man standing in the penumbral light at the other end of the passage. Barnett paused; something about the man's posture in relation to the corridor's wallpapered angles and the gilt bars of the elevator struck him as suitable for that album of inspirational snapshots he kept stored in his memory. The man was dressed like himself, white summer-weight suit and Panama hat. The stranger seemed to be every bit as frozen as Barnett suddenly was. The director squinted his eyes to focus better, bent over a little and looked through a frame formed by his joined hands, trying to imagine the scene in black and white and on a large screen. When he opened his eyes wider he saw the stranger bent over, as well—of course! It was only the dust-veneered mirror at the end of the corridor... Barnett laughed aloud and heard the echo of his laugh when the man in the mirror stood up straight and waved. "Got a light, fella?" the comic said, stepping toward him.

Fifteen minutes later Carioca was telling Webster that he should slow down; they were in no hurry, they had nothing important to do, they had the rest of their lives, the panatelas were in the glove compartment, and no no a thousand times no she didn't want to marry him...
White Child

THIS IS THE CHANT

White child, white child, white child, my lovely lost one. Listen to my poem, my chant. You are white as the moon, white as the sun at noon, white as the sand of this desert. Come to me, my child. White child, white child, come to me in the dead of night. Speak to me, my one, my only, my whitest. Dear white, white child.

CROSSING THE DESERT

When the child comes to mind fill your mind with desert: Sonora, colorless, empty. White sands blazing in the noon of the day, sands to burn you, heal you. She fills her mind with this hot white emptiness. So flat the horizon falls away on every side, sun so far it can't be there, moon nothing but a memory, not a sound night or day but the wind and your breath carried away by the wind. Hurry through this desert. I'm lying in the back seat, I'm falling into sleep, my husband is driving me through this desert. Driving her back home. Wind pours over her through the windows. Think of wind. Wind over desert, desert under wind. And the sun, always there, a pulse just behind the eyes. Sun, wind, desert. Not a bird bleeding in the boy's palms, not a woman whose very whisper is a scream, no white face following you in the night like the moon riding the sea.

This place so far from the ocean, from sweet green, this place we must cross, the end of the world where everything dies. Yet here I am safe. The elements shield me: wind, desert, sun. The sun is so hot it will surely burn away all those memories. Here you shall heal and write again.

THIS IS THE VILLAGE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Waking up in a cool blue darkness, suddenly alone. Waking up to the jaguar scream, like a woman in childbirth, high hideous notes disturbing nightbirds in the jungle beyond. Down there in the canyon miles below, where the stars fall, like a woman dying alone under blind sky. Giving birth to monsters. I scream. I tear the sheets. I stretch my body wide to let these words, these memories come out, like a woman in childbirth. Wanting her white child. Wanting to be saved from herself and the suffering. And so the unwanted poem begins.

Time plays tricks on you here, all the tourists say. No, it is not possible she had slept so long. Your husband is on the balcony, it's the middle of the night, he's taking pictures of the shooting stars. Then it was morning, sky on fire, bed blazing like the desert. She has no dreams in this place, none she could remember. That only makes it worse, no dreams. You escape the bed and think: I want my white child, I shall have him yet.

She stared into mirrors, pressed her ear to her husband's chest, bit into her tongue, but always a shadow came between herself and the face, the heartbeat, the pain. Always the child burning into the night, a small white jet of flame.

THE HOTEL, NOON, YOUR BED

Get out of this place, you will say to yourself each time you awake. Head north and drive until you fall asleep at the wheel. Escape, madwoman. Race ahead of the coming storm. Leave your husband in the middle of the night. Find a place you can name, a place where most people are the same pale color, where one white child would not be noticed, would not be remembered. Where new visions can begin to shape themselves on these pages.

You came here first to forget. To take your time and let the words come singing to you. She took long walks through these hills, down dirt roads, through dusty gardens, waiting for the right words. There is a lake here in the mountains but the water is cold, glacial. I sit by the lake every afternoon, useless notebook at my side. It is so blue, this lake, it is nearly green at noon, more restful than any sanitarium, any deck chair on a sunporch... any hospital room. Where your own flesh was cut away from you, the disease buried deep within you, cut away and disposed. Do not remember! I warn myself. There is our little hotel here, with crystalline scorpions running up the walls. In the morning she longs for the pierce of its cool cool sting, its sweet poison. There are many things here to help you forget—houses filled with simple life, with people and chairs and talk. The Indians are descended from the Mayans and they looked at her with black impenetrable Mayan eyes. Their boats are drifting out on the lake in the chill of the morning, like golden water beetles in the sunlight. I am far from the desert and yet I feel great thirst. Look at these people, their ancient faces. This could be a thousand years ago, and just saying some things makes them true.

It was in the village square—that was where the white child's small face first looked upon her, bobbing like a pale moon over the sea of dark Indian children. This burning moon, this white, white face. A storm was suddenly upon them. She seized her husband's camera and threw it in the weeds. The doves in the belltower looked down on her, knowing. I am a madwoman, you said to no one. They must have cut out part of my brain by mistake. He says: you need to rest and forget. Holding her in the rain, trying to silence those terrible words. But none of this can be true, and I must not want the white child.

THE FACE OUTSIDE IN THE COURTYARD AT MIDNIGHT

Eyes suddenly opening like pale pink flowers, staring into your own. A face like a clenched fist. I want to scream, can't. I remember the lights, how I bled, the pain. You open your eyes again. A hallucination: a moth beating white wings against the screen. And a voice like a lone horn wailing into the mouth of the night: hers, mine alone, one woman's. Saying: take away these thoughts, leave me in peace, don't let the words come now. Later you'll write the white child's poem, let it be your exorcism, the brand that sears flesh, cures the disease.

She could not picture the child when he came to her all at once; he came to her like a poem, line by line; he comes to me like a puzzle, in bits and pieces, to be assembled anew each time. When she yawned wide, washed her hands, heard the music coming from a dozen distant radios, looked too long at the sun as it dived into a bank of clouds—then she could remember certain things about him. The face so formless, incomplete, evolving over time into something, someone she might recognize. Hair fine and white as spider's silk, through which one can see the delicately veined scalp, a bluish skullcap of arteries. His wide, almost translucent hands braced with fragile birdlike bones. The thin, stooped little body. Eyes the faded pearl of a shell found on the beach—the palest pink, sometimes shining with iridescence, shifting colors in the light, like prisms. He was not real, that much was granted, but what did he represent? Why does he want you, long for, cry to you, myself alone?

It is better to forget your pain here, her husband will say. Go out and talk to the people, he says. Things will make sense, in time. He would tuck me in like my father used to, leave me in the dark while he walked out in the rain with his camera, paying for the darkskinned children to pose.

I am from far away, you might tell them in words they would not understand. I am a foreigner; be kind to me. I am a poetess who has mad visions. You have stared death in the face, so the doctors said. My husband has brought me here out of love. We are really quite harmless. We come from the north; we have snow in our skulls. It took us forty years to cross that white desert. Your lake is a looking glass, I have been told; indeed, it is coated at dusk with silver like the surface of a mirror. Speak to us. Do you know of a strange one in your midst? Is there a child unaccounted for? When her husband took their pictures, she wondered why they cowered as if it were a gun he held.

THINGS TO REMEMBER, THINGS TO FORGET

The children who died when you were their age. The fetus who dried up in your mother's womb, after you were born. The children who did not return home from the corner store. The children who went off on their bicycles and never came back. The cousin who did not live. The thing growing inside you, like a child and yet not. Madness, words, this sudden storm.

A girl who drowned in the lake outside of town when I was nine—I remember her. I remember her blue lips pressed into the sand, her blue fingers frozen in a clutch. Many years passed and you remembered even that. At home in the city left behind, when the nurse laid her gently on the table under the bright lights, when they gave her the ether to drink down like water, then she remembered. She felt it all when they said now close your eyes, felt their needles and scalpels. The pain was part of you; it could not be divided from you or masked. The fire burned inside you. I saw the blood and thought this is me, I am dying. And I longed for the lifeguard's kiss, to be risen from the dead. Now kiss me, white child. Become my poem of death.

THIS IS THE MOMENT: LOOK, LISTEN

He must have been there all along, watching her, unblinking—a fish, an insect, a lizard. And the small bird in his hands, held out to her: it was on its back, writhing, bleeding, the jewels of its innards pulsing through a knife-slash. Feathers flying up like snow. I saw the blood, felt the knife, knew I must be dying.

She was in the ruins. The hum of high noon was in her ears: all was very dry, very still. These were the Mayan temples high up in the hills. The jungles had been burned away, leaving the stone behind like bleached bones. You were on the broken steps, your husband gone into the temple with his flashbulbs. The child was tearing the bird apart in his hands.

Maybe he was only white in the bright sunlight. The sun was blinding you. Eventually she was aware again of the air pouring in and out of her lungs, the sun now at some high, distant point in the sky. When I closed my eyes, the sun went black behind my eyelids. Tried to say something, or maybe you didn't. I don't want you, white child, don't want you.

It was only a moment. The child was gone the next. Then her husband's hand on her shoulder, to lead her back through the blackened jungle to the hotel—unable to respond to him. And no one in sight at all. Just an empty sky, fallen stones.

When her husband had put her to bed and asked again what was wrong, she realized how little there was to tell. Just a child she has seen here and there about the town, nothing so very peculiar about that. Was it because she was in a new country, seeing new things, that even the smallest details shone with a mystery, became significant?Was it because the operation had left you insane? Did I bleed too much when they made their incisions? No, that excuse is too easy. No, my mind was setting visible before me certain signs, certain suggestions. Look at these pictures, her husband will say the next day: the children here make traps, catch birds live, make headdresses from the feathers. Like a thousand years ago.

HERE IS THE LAKE WHICH REFLECTS THE WORLD

The Indians say one can see everything happening anywhere in the world reflected somewhere in the surface of their lake. The deep sapphire-green mouth of the lake. The wide-open O into the underworld. She saw only her wan northerner's face. Wading out over broad flat mossy rocks, longing to dive beneath the water's surface, which magnified the clouds, magnified all that was the Indian's world—she wanted to dive into those clouds, but it was too cold. Coins jangle in your pockets; you throw the silver coronas into the depths. One wish to a coin. You watch them flash as they hit the water that instant before they disappear. She wished for: strength, life, soundness of mind.

And looking back at me from the water—the white child, laughing.

Turn back—to the fishermen standing upright in their boats, wearing white looking whiter in the sun. Turn back—to the women washing clothes along the shore, the women the same, sharing the same secrets they had always shared, since before Cortez first rode his stallions up from the sea. Their laughter rising up from the rocks like the cries of gulls. She tries to picture the scene reduced, flattened, like one of her husband's photographs. To put distance between myself and the pain. To give it the illusion of unreality.

And looking back at you from the water—the white child, laughing, too. Asking you something unanswerable. Eyes opening wide and staring into yours. Go away! I don't want this poem to come to me anymore, I don't want it forming inside my mind, constructing its skeleton in silence, stretching its terrors across the void within me, insisting it is part of me, growing on me, a cancer. Go away, words. The poem of the white child is a disease, it is an art of sickness. And you no longer want to create, only to get well and leave behind all that is unmentioned or unmentionable, to leave this world behind.

YOU, WALKING AFTER NIGHTFALL, THE VILLAGE

A dull green fire, phosphorescent, from the lake. The lake reflecting back on the low clouds above, so low they shroud the hilltops in perpetual fog. A weak moon melting through the clouds, dissolving its image in the lake below. A storm stalking across the sky, ready to overcome the village. All so silent and dark I feel I am underground, in a cave, cut off from the world. Slowly, sounds begin to describe themselves from the darkness. Nightbirds, a distant jaguar, the wind. This hotel speaking with many barely heard voices, heard like pages flipped through at random, not really catching anything. I don't want you, poem. I take more pills and wonder where to go, what to do. You must get out of yourself. She begins to walk through the town again to find at least one answer out of many.

Wanting to get away, to go where bright lights burn away the dark, revealing anything as only this or that and nothing more. But there is not even one streetlight in this village, only open windows and doors glowing with kerosene lamplight, a tarnished Mayan gold. Was that a voice calling you back? Or toward something?

Concentrate:on the thrumming of moths against the windows, on the whisper of palm fronds overhead, on the real world of rhythms and footsteps.

See, hear: this is all.

That cancer they tore from your flesh—has it left you dying, or merely expecting something greater? All your life you have been waiting, waiting for something... but what? For death alone? For him? That white boy-child? For his eyes, my senseless poem?

When I lay bleeding on their table I thought: now the madness has been cut out of me at last, now I shall go into the world sane as the rest. it was not my husband's child, only a fist of flesh, and now it is gone and I shall live.

White child, here you are, forming yourself again.

Eyes now seen: pale flames quavering in the dark of a doorway. His lips, small bright teeth, shaping vowels, forming words as in silent prayer. Like good children at their mass. And when she closed her eyes, it was like closing your eyes after staring into the sun—the image is still there in all its brilliance, and at the center of that brilliance, a depthless black, a wound, unhealed.

Immeasurable minutes will pass. Moths beat against the kerosene lamps. A shadow, an arm passes over the child, draws him into unseen rooms. There is a whispering in the night, a snuffing of candles and wicks, a mosquito buzz in your ears, a far-off voice saying terrible, obscene things. Where are the jaguars? Have they all turned into mere women?

THIS IS WHERE WE HAVE BEEN LED, IN DARKNESS

To think—for hours, of fish swimming deep within an underground lake, sightless crystal fish forever feeling only cold, forever in darkness. Sunless white fish fading into white, blinding you. My husband led me into the caverns here, to the black river sparkling in his camera's flash, to where they say the Mayan warrior made peace with his god and died.

Did you see bones and jewels? I am not afraid of the dark, though, I see things better then. The cavern was filled with bats, they swooped around you in the blackness but not one touched you. I did not scream, I felt no pain. Only coming up into the sunlight carried me away, the sun blinded me, I felt the faint overtake me like a storm. Time weighs on you here like iron chains. Hours later, you will still be unable to sleep. Sprawled on her hotel mattress, sweating, speaking in tongues. Bound to that burning bed as if with iron chains.

And then a buzzing in your head in the morning, a high sharp drone like insects, like tiny voices. She sat up and looked around the small room: the veils of cobwebs draped in the corners, the peeling wallpaper, a fly circling the face of a window, the dusty mirror reflecting only a silvered void. Is it true if you lick the silver off a mirror you will die? Mercury poisoning? But how much quicker would be the sting of a scorpion... How many pills must one take, and then how long?

Her husband is nowhere: he is probably off with his camera, at the lake, capturing clouds and water, clouds in the water.

He had wanted her to rest. Told her sometimes she had been saying things in her sleep, calling out for something. Said the drugs were wearing her out; true, they were eating away at my sense of place—call it a sense of self—in this life. Things run backwards here; future precedes past and my tenses are all jumbled. A glass of water and a smooth pill under my tongue will not be enough now. I will surely suffocate in this hellish little room. Give me water, take my hand in yours, lead me into the desert. Her husband could never understand the pain; she must leave him to his work, get out of this bed, away from this room with its scorpions and dust. Soon she would be walking out the door, suitcase in her hand.

Your head was cold, as if pressed for too long against an icy window, but the rest of your body was hot, heavy, shiny with sweat. Can't get enough air in your lungs, can't can't can't: a breathless rhythm, like the lines you had attempted here, words now crumpled and discarded. Someday I will burn all my poems. All you want to do is walk until you can walk no more, away from this place, until you drop into sleep, empty dreamless sleep, with your suitcase filled with books you dare not read now at your side, your stupid unfinished poem left far behind.

Down this forgotten street there is a woman crying, her sobs rising into screams, the screams breaking the silence of noon in the village, giving voice to a darkening sky, like distant thunder. This did not surprise you: it was as if you had been listening to the weeping woman for days and days. As if that had been her inside your breast, clawing like a jaguar to escape. Before the storm comes, the sun goes black, the moon sinks into the sea. You hear it now, the woman's voice, and think: this is where I must stop, this is where I cross the street, this is the door I shall knock upon. This is my fate.

Another woman, not the woman crying, comes to the doorway. She was old, dressed in a sad yellow, yellow ribbons pulling back her thick braids. Her face is a thousand years old, a face you might see in the ruins, carved in stone. You listened to yourself talking to this stranger, as into the mirror's void, as if you were whispering down a well.

At last the old woman answered you: No, no, no—the woman you heard has lost a child... no, please go away.

How? She must know.

At the lake. Wading after bright things, shells probably, in the water while his mother washed her clothes. He slipped, split open his head, went under. The fishermen were too late. Now go away. Run from this place, northerner.

The Indian woman stood with her back flat against the faded pink wall of the adobe house, a corner of her yellow dress lifting in the wind like a wing of a bird. Were you imagining all this? Surely; you do not know a word of Spanish or their ancient Mayan. But there had to have been words exchanged, and I understood—if not then, though it had been an answer a long time coming, the mystery slow to reveal itself, but always is there. So the woman had lost a child—drowning, childbirth, all the same. The feared poem has written itself, and now you will be able to sleep, to dream, to sleep.

And meet in sleep a face, know his touch, hold him tight and weep. For he had once been yours, hers, mine alone.

CROSSING THE DESERT AGAIN

In the desert, chanting to herself like an ancient Indian woman alone with her pottery or her loom. While my husband drives, north and north and north forevermore. Through white sands rising up before them like the waves of a fire, through white fire they went. North. Against the sun. Through storm. Now—fill your mind with desert. Leaving that world behind, locked back up, its secret not to be revealed again.

And he holds your hand, aims his camera at an empty sky, kisses your eyelids while you drowse, the book sleeping in your lap. What can he know, a man, to suffer, and lose so much? What can you know, now that your words have dried up, left nothing but blank pages waiting to reflect you in new ways, like a hall of mirrors? These pages, these words, they were your sickness, and they will shape visions anew.

So I leave my journal and I summon the white child, saying: white child, white child, my only one, my infant, I want you now. Burn away the disease, exorcise the pain. My love, my poems, my white child, here I am—do what you want, help me to live again.
Horses

"Welcome your barbarous bearded guests from the east, who bring the signal of God, who comes to us in mercy and pity. The time of our life is coming..."

from _The Prophecy of Chilan Balam_

I

Between the new moon and the full, the dreams came to the Emperor. They came to him forbidding and unyielding, and roused him from sleep. They came telling him of things unknown, things he did not want to know. Despairingly, he told his court astrologers of them. They frowned and told him the dreams were omens of events certain to pass: a great fire in the northern part of the empire, a flood in the west, an earthquake in the south. Only the east remained a mystery. The dreams the Emperor had had of the east made no sense. They were of a more urgent nature than the rest, more frightening. He looked to the quiet, dark eastern regions of his empire each evening from his palace towers, waiting.

The Commander was a strong-willed man, and he had guided his platoon of mercenaries on a long journey across an unknown ocean to this distant shore, all to find jewels for his Queen, and perhaps to take the country as well, if doing so would not be too costly. The Queen's mystics, who did not call themselves such, had divined that riches would be found far to the west, and so she had sent her most beloved officer, the victor of many a battle against her enemies, away. It had been a hard voyage, but now the soldiers were happy once again to find land where it was said to have been sighted by earlier navigators. Even the horses in the holds seemed to neigh with anticipation. Once the men had anchored the ships in a cove, they began to force the horses from the decks and into the shallows. The strongest horses would swim to shore first, the weakest last, and by this method the Commander believed he could determine which horses would be best suited for cavalry and which best suited as slower-paced pack animals.

Once in the water, the horses swam frantically, with terrified eyes and heaving chests as their limbs beat against the waves. The Commander took good note of the great white stallion which stumbled onto land first, its eyes pinkish and squinting, its mane dripping with seaweed. This horse would be his, then. Snorting water from its nostrils, the stallion looked to the other beasts, which were gradually making it to shore. They tore with their teeth, and their sharp hooves bruised and slashed one another as they struggled to gain land.

For a moment, when his eyes were clouded by salt spray, the Commander had a strange vision: These horses seemed to be hippogriffs, midway between mermaids and centaurs, with pale breasts and glittering eyes, calling him to sea as in an old legend, where they would drown in embrace.

The last horse to struggle to shore was a little black mare, an old beast of burden, once fat but quick, though she had grown thin and sickly and slow onboard ship. The little mare, who had a sunny spot of reddish gold on her forehead, collapsed at the Commander's feet and stared up at him with her great sad black eyes. The Commander kicked her in the ribs until she rose to her feet, blood flowing from her nostrils. Drag her to the ship's cook, he told the stable boy. But the stable boy protested, saying that she would soon be well and stronger than any of the others, and so the Commander relented, with a warning that unless she carried half her weight in supplies, she would be left behind. The stable boy kissed the Commander's hand and led the mare to a patch of beach grass, where she fell, still bleeding, to her knees.

The Emperor must appease the gods, the court astrologers told him, and the gods were hungry for human flesh. But the young Emperor was a gentle man, and wanted no more bloodshed in a country which had fought against its enemies for so many decades. The Emperor had many beautiful wives and children, and he did not want to offer any of them up on an altar, as was the custom in times of trouble. He told his stargazers that they must wait—perhaps he would have more dreams that would instruct as well as threaten. Grumbling, the advisors went away. The Emperor withdrew again into his moonlit palace rooms, fearful of his dreams of the east.

The Commander was a hard man. Against his men's wishes, the Commander had their fleet torched; this would ensure that no one would try to leave before they had ransacked the land of all its wealth and new ships built. It might be years, but they would go back rich men. Such had worked for him before in other countries. The soldiers' armor glinted in the light from the burning ships as the men built their camp up from the reach of the tide. The entire world—the beach and the jungle beyond, the dome of the sky, and the hushed ocean—was black as tar pitch, but for the stars and the distant fires. Like the diamonds above and rubies below, the Commander thought, all this land's jewels and much more besides will be mine. He breathed in an invigorating lungful of smoke and turned from the charred skeletons of his ships to the west, sensing that beyond the jungles lay his undiscovered Egypt, a vast unconquered treasure house.

Reports soon came to the Emperor of a horrible conflagration in the northern provinces, where lightning, sent by an angry moon, had sparked the destruction of several cities. Just as your dreams warned, said the court astrologers—now are you ready to sacrifice a wife, perhaps, or a few of your children? But the Emperor refused. Perhaps it was just coincidence; he was not as fearful or superstitious as they were, and though he had always been told an emperor's dreams never lied, they might not all come true for a very long time. In the meantime, the cities could be rebuilt, and his people of the provinces appeased with a few jewels from the royal mines.

The first inhabitants of this land which the Commander and his men encountered were meek and compliant. The Commander quickly realized he and his men were being treated as gods, as the people held their distance and prostrated themselves in the dirt. Naked and childlike, these people had never seen muskets or armor in their poor fishing village, and were glad to give the gods as many of their wives and daughters as the newcomers demanded. The villagers were most in awe of the horses, so large and powerful, which they treated with the most supreme reverence. They gave the tired, hungry horses their beds to sleep in, their food to eat, their sons and daughters to lie with. When the horses did not do as expected, the villagers were afraid they had offended the gods with their poverty and ignorance. The Commander was pleased to see how easy these people would be to conquer and, speaking with his hands, made it be understood that he wanted to know in which direction the country's ruling city could be found.

As the Emperor's dreams had foretold, far beyond the City of the Dead and the jungles beyond, toward another ocean, a great flood devastated the western reaches of his empire, and many lives and settlements were lost. And though the astrologers pressed him to do something, their ruler remained unmoved. Sometimes, he told them, things are not the gods' doing, but man's—the westerners had built their homes along rivers which were certain to overflow now and then, and so they had learned a lesson. The astrologers knew the Emperor balked merely because he was too fond of his wives and children, so they warned him that his people would not be pleased if they knew nothing was being done to prevent further disasters. The Emperor listened carefully, and then asked to be left alone.

The Commander had soon taken a beautiful strong girl he renamed Marina to be his wife in this new land, and as he lay with her at night she told him fabulous tales of the imperial city far to the west, past the jungles and upon a high desert plain. There, Marina related to him in words she quickly learned from him, everyone wore jewels all about their bodies, and they drank from diamond encrusted goblets and walked upon ruby strewn streets; their clothes were sewn with emeralds and they wore great sapphires and amethysts in the crowns upon their heads. In truth, she knew what none of those jewels looked liked; she simply liked the sound of the new words, and she had never seen this city. As a very young girl, however, she had been held captive by the city's soldiers while her peoples' lands were conquered and her people themselves forced to the edge of the sea—and so she had nurtured a great hatred for her captors ever since. She would be glad to see all her enemies die, to see the imperial city conquered by anyone who could accomplish it, but she did not tell this bearded foreigner of her hatred. Unlike the rest of her people, she did not believe he and his men were gods. They were flesh beneath their steel. Understanding what her husband wanted to hear, Marina told him even more fabulous stories of vast goldmines and fields where one picked precious stones like fruit. The Commander listened intently—he could not believe all she told him, but he knew there must be an element of truth in what she was so eager to tell him. He promised her all the jewelry she could wear if only she would guide his men to this city of riches. He knew he might be able to use her in other ways, as well, and hoped her beauty and superior intelligence might help him conquer these simple people. As for herself, Marina did not care for necklaces or bracelets or other baubles, as her people had always lived without them, but she would be happy to assist him if she could, if it would save her own people from their long exile on this impoverished shore.

One morning, when the sky was purple dark, the Commander struggled to wake from a dream. He clung to his new wife's hair as if to a life rope, but the dream kept forcing him back down, like a stone tied to his ankles. He cried out and Marina shook him awake. In his dream, he whispered to her, as though someone outside the tent might be listening, he had been trampled by his own horses and then dragged into the sea and drowned. His wife listened carefully, and then spoke. It is not your dream, she told him, it belongs to your enemy. The gods had revealed this to him because he was so chosen to lead her people to freedom. The Commander looked into her face, now illuminated by the dawn, and wondered if it could be true.

When reports of an earthquake reached the imperial city from the cities to the south, the Emperor was not surprised. Thousands of people had been killed, the messengers told him, and some of them were beginning to blame him for what had happened. There must be a sacrifice, everyone agreed, a sacrifice now. Reluctantly, the Emperor agreed, but he chose his oldest and least favorite wife, and his weakest and ugliest children. His wife and children did not protest; they knew this was what had always been expected of them, and now they would go to join the gods in the City of the Dead. But the Emperor was sad nevertheless. He was not a cruel and courageous man like his father, and he was sorry to have to bend to the wrathful gods' wishes. The astrologers, however, were pleased. Perhaps now, they told him, your fourth dream will not come true, but remain as a warning that you must always obey the will of the gods.

The Commander and his men headed west, with the Commander's wife and her old battle scarred father leading them through the jungle. The jungle was very dense and hot and the horses had a difficult time making it through. Eventually a few of them died and the natives who now carried their supplies were surprised to discover the creatures were not immortal, after all. The little black mare fell sick, too, but managed to struggle on with the special care of the stable boy. Some of the Commander's men died from unknown new diseases; a few ran off into the wilds in mad desperation, never to be seen or heard of again. Many of the ones who survived doubted if there was anything to the west but more jungle, but the Commander's wife and her father insisted, and the Commander believed.

Of the few people they encountered in the jungle, most were frightened of these warriors with smoking sticks and silvery tortoise shells on their backs, and bowed down before them and their even more marvelous horses. A few were taken on as slaves; others volunteered to help fight their imperial oppressors. So, despite the losses and deaths, the small army grew to more considerable ranks. Marina often spoke angrily and persuasively to her people of reclaiming what the soldiers from the imperial city had taken from them, even if such things could not be weighed or traded. Hatred held sway over them. The Commander's rule was tough but effective. Like the horses in the ocean, the soldiers and slaves in the jungle were being tested for their strengths.

The jungles came to a sudden end and desert just as quickly took its place. The Commander liked these dry flatlands, where one could see for miles. He liked the uncompromising feeling of menace in the air; a man without water would soon die here. The idea that nature might be the only thing which could outwit or overpower him excited him and spurred him ever on, even when his own men had grown increasingly reluctant. In the desert, he admonished them, there are alert men, or there are none.

Still more men and horses died in the desert, when it grew too hot and there was not enough water to go around between springs. The peoples they met here were more aggressive, as well, and there was much killing. The desert dwellers did not all speak the same dialect and they did not heed Marina's words. Most of the time, however, the mere sight of the horses would frighten any potential enemies away, and news of these awful armed monsters spread from village to village. The gods, people were saying, were come to seek a hard vengeance.

For a while it seemed the Emperor had been successful in appeasing the gods. No more news of disaster reached the imperial city, and even the court astrologers began to believe that the Emperor's fourth dream would indeed not come true as they had foreseen, or even that it heralded something good for the empire. The Emperor missed the wife and children he had had sacrificed, but he was glad that in, losing them, he had saved the lives of all his other wives and children. Peace and not combat or catastrophe reigned in the land again, and it seemed a new epoch had begun. They had conquered all their enemies and rebuilt their destroyed cities and amassed great wealth, besides. Their civilization was marvelous and proud and would last a million years more. There was feasting in the streets, royal games were played for the delight of all, and abundant happiness abided in every household. The Emperor had taken yet another wife, younger and prettier than all the rest, and he was content for the first time in a long time.

And then came reports of wondrous visitors crossing the eastern desert, surely congratulatory messengers sent from the heavens by the gods, if not the very gods themselves.

When the Commander and his men reached the gates of the imperial city after many weeks and looked over the high stone walls, the more gullible of them were disappointed—there were no streets paved with jewels, no jewels or gold in evidence at all. It was, in fact, a wealthy kingdom, but it was the Emperor who owned most of the wealth and had most of it locked away in his vaults. The rest of the people were not poor, but neither did they have much to show, or care to show—they were expected, first and foremost, to serve the gods above themselves. To prepare for a happy death was the goal of life. The Commander's wife saw that she had been completely wrong, that these people who had conquered her own people were not so awful or avaricious as she had imagined; therefore, fearing her husband might otherwise kill her, Marina lied and told the Commander that some passing travelers had told her that all the precious stones and metals had been buried when news of the army's approach came to the city. What does not glitter above, she said, as if quoting an old proverb, does so below. The only way to get to the treasure would be to kill everyone they could and then escape this awful place. Just one horse or one musket, she told him, was enough to frighten a hundred men, and no matter how large their army these people were very stupid and easily conquered. Tired after their long journey and heavy with her husband's child, Marina was impatient to have their battles over; besides, her old father had grown querulous and anxious to kill, conquer, and then return home to die.

Marina's husband listened, but did not act—he already had guessed that everything was not as it seemed: the soldiers at their watchtowers held back their arrows, but the army was obviously large and could have attacked his scouts if they had been commanded. He ordered his men to camp not far from the gates while he revised his plan to steal the city by his superior wiles, not by force. Marina cleverly told her people from the jungle, including the slaves, to pretend to be willing emissaries of these gods, and though they did not completely understand, they complied. The Commander was pleased to see how quickly she acted. Once they had camped, he sent a runner to the Emperor, begging him to visit their tents so they could discuss the great days to come which they would share together.

The Emperor was troubled by reports of the bizarre army approaching the imperial city; unlike his astrologers, he did not believe this was a harbinger of another golden age, and once more he slept in fear. His last dream, he now saw, was coming true, but not in the form his astrologers could have predicted. He had lived his entire life by their words, and did not know what might happen now, when all they had said might be meaningless. The army now at the gates of the vast city was said to be composed of strange godlike beings made of silver and the beautiful swift creatures on whose backs they had crossed the eastern ocean, where the moon rose. The creatures were like nothing his people had ever seen, half of the sea, half of the stars; these beasts were said to be deities themselves. A few of his advisors thought the visitors were indeed from heaven or the moon (which might be the same thing) and the moon was of course the enemy of the sun, whose family controlled the royal house, but who would not agree the sun is routinely conquered by the moon? All of history was a cycle of creation and destruction, they reminded him. If these gods did come to their city, the astrologers advised him to invite the chief god to the royal palace immediately, but the Emperor was more cautious. The creatures sounded more horrible than beautiful to him, and what if these "gods" were demons in disguise? It would be best to test them before allowing them within the city. They would just have to wait and see. He had already ordered his much larger army to keep the travelers politely at bay while he thought things over. And then a runner came bearing a message from the invaders, requesting that the Emperor come to them, as if he should of course be so beholden. What was there to do now to keep the calamities of his fourth dream from coming true? To keep from being dragged on the backs of those armored beasts into the sea, where the sun nightly drowns? Already he saw that he must lose still more of his wives and children in sacrifice to whatever gods the astrologers invoked for protection. The Emperor and his newest wife sat in his chambers, read to by a scribe from an endless scroll, and wondered how to keep the inevitable future from happening. Hearing again the ancient deeds of his people, the Emperor longed only to retreat to the glories of the past.

The moon pale, black bearded invaders from the east were provided with never-ending baskets of food and jugs of wine from the Emperor's gardens and pantries; in the meantime, a court official explained most apologetically, the Emperor was preparing for his imminent visit. The warrior gods, for that is what they were now believed to be, were also given all the women and boy slaves they desired, though these were the least of what the Commander was interested in. Yet, he knew he must take things one step at a time, and so he thanked the court officials and sent them on their way with somewhat sterner words. Days passed and still no one dared come escort the visitors to the royal palace. The Commander thought of plunging ahead toward the royal safe-houses with firearms sounding, but then greater gifts began to arrive: brightly plumaged birds which could speak and lavish scrolls written with pictures and idols carved of jade and things for which there were no names but which were as lovely as they were strange. Pleased but growing impatient, the Commander sent forth another runner to the palace with a more demanding message: Soon his entire army would be obligated to come to the Emperor if the Emperor did not come to him.

The next dawn a high priest and his temple consorts came to the gates to invite the Commander, his bodyguards, and Marina his translator into the city. They were led down the wide boulevards as thousands of curious citizens looked on, shown the city's lush gardens and enormous industries, its numberless temples, museums, and libraries. The priests pointed to this and that, a thousand things at once, reminding them that all was in tribute to the gods. The city was obviously very old, but also very comely, filled as it was with flower gardens, marble friezes, and brightly painted murals.

Impressive as all these were, nothing interested the Commander very much; he was a single minded man who had come for that which could be carried back to his Queen. The whole city was poorly if elegantly built and could be torched and razed in a matter of hours, these cowardly people corralled and slaughtered. But even all of that would not be worth it if there was no treasure to steal. Marina, on the other hand, grew fearful of the city's vastness and walked holding hands over belly, as if to protect the child within from powerful spirits. This civilization was more than she could comprehend, and she knew that however friendly these people appeared to be, they were the keepers of dangerous secrets: She began to wonder if it was wise to betray these richer cousins of her villagers to the foreigners, no matter how godlike they pretended to be. Her husband did not notice her doubts. When they were led back to the gates, the high priest immediately sent a third runner off to the royal palace.

At last the Emperor, who did not want a whole army knocking at his palace doors, agreed upon a time to meet the Commander, on one small condition: if he also were given an audience with one of these creatures called a horse, such a thing being possible. By this time the Emperor had learned more of horses, of how they did not speak except in a monstrous tongue, of how they ate the very grass upon which men stood, and how they had strong hooves of iron which could maim and kill. The Emperor understood now that the creatures were, however, docile servants, and yet perhaps because they still carried themselves so proudly and regally it seemed to be important to understand them if one was to understand the beings camped at his gates.

The Commander was puzzled by the request, but so relieved that he did not have to use force to see the king that he agreed to give him one of these animals of which he had probably already heard much. At first he wanted to send his favorite white stallion to impress the Emperor with its grace and size, but Marina insisted that the Emperor would either place it in his zoological gardens or else choose to sacrifice it, so the Commander selected one of his more useless horses instead: the little black mare who had barely made it to land from the ships. And so, with an escort of several tall, helmeted soldiers, the emaciated animal, who had survived the rigors of jungle and desert despite its sickly condition, was led to the Emperor.

Alone in a leafy courtyard of the royal palace, the Emperor bowed before the gentle little mare, which had been led inside by his own awed soldiers. Although somewhat disappointed that this particular creature did not have the upper half of a human, as a few of his more effusive reports had claimed, the Emperor was pleased. The gods themselves must have bred this being called a horse. As a man who had always been interested in collecting and studying wildlife, he appreciated the mare's sculptural beauty, the glossy blackness of its hide, the fierce animal power apparent in its sinewy muscles. Yet, the horse did have more of a human quality than even the monkeys in his zoo. Its eyes were intelligent and expressive, and when he touched the spot on the mare's brow she flattened her ears and nuzzled his shoulder as if in obeisance to her emperor. Surely this horse was, if not a god itself, a sacred conduit to the gods. It looked as if it should speak in a powerful voice and be able to tell him of profound things, of the cities of the gods in the stars and all which would happen in the future—he could imagine the horse running over the desert like a storm cloud, tail in the wind, lightning flashing where its hooves struck the stone covered earth. It would be a sight to behold, indeed! He should make an offering to appease it, perhaps some of the medicinal leaves he had been chewing to calm himself. First, as if trying to divine what sort of spirit coursed through the creature, he played his fingers down the length of the mare's bony spine. Suddenly, the horse whinnied, a sound as deep and terrible as thunder. The Emperor bowed again, as the sound shuddered throughout his body and a subtle fear rose again in the chambers of his heart.

He rose, sweating, and stared directly into the horse's eyes, which were black, rimmed with gold, like eclipsed suns. The Emperor spoke in a low, reverent voice and told the horse how he was the son of the sun, and of how in his dreams he had already seen a horse galloping across the sky like a comet failing—far, far to the east of here and how then he had seen a horse's visage in the moon itself. He told the horse how he was frightened of what this meant, and how he did not want his people to be harmed. Horse, he said, we will do as you wish if you do not harm us. The mare stamped a foot against the ground and tossed her head back; she had not been watered or fed since early that morning, when she had been taken from her post, and was now growing restless. The Emperor placed his palms against her neck and felt the strength trembling within her warm flesh. He embraced her as if she were a courtesan, kissed the amber disc between her eyes, and combed his fingers though her lank hair, trying to soothe her. The mare shook him loose from her neck and began to pace the courtyard in search of food or water. She appeared neither angry nor interested any longer in the man before her. The Emperor stood back, watching her with a mixture of delight and fear as she chewed on a plant, and then called for his priests to come take the horse away; they would have to talk of the future and of his dreams some other time.

The following morning the Commander was to meet the Emperor at last. By the time the sun had risen, the Commander had assembled his mounted troops at the city gates; he rode on the back of his favorite white stallion, with Marina his interpreter at his side on a smaller horse. The horses themselves seemed restless for conquering, or so it seemed to the Commander. They shuffled against one another in the twilight, their breath misting the cold air, and kicked the ground. But for the first time, as the Commander faced the city, a flash of doubt struck him—could it really be possible that his motley, bedraggled army would be able to cheat this people of their greatest wealth, to take from them the very land upon which they lived? Was there, in fact, any wealth to be gained at all? Then they heard the distant sound of cymbals, drums, and priests chanting to the rising sun; the gates opened, and through them came first a phalanx of painted warriors and robed officials, and then the Emperor, alight in a bejeweled litter which caught the first rays of the sun. He was draped in an emerald feathered cloak and headdress, looking to the Commander like nothing less than an exotic bird, thin and nervous, ready to be seized and plucked.

The little black mare, well fed and groomed for a change, followed the litter, awkwardly led by a palace official. The priests helped the Emperor from his seat, and the Commander motioned his men to stand back.

When the soldier and the ruler came face to face, they fixed eyes on one another for the first time. The Commander saw that the Emperor was not much older than a boy, and that he was almost as small and delicate as a girl, with pretty, fluttery eyes ornamented with gold powder, eyes he thought a man should not have. His nails were long, at the end of soft hands which had never known work, and his skin was glistening with oil. Although the Commander had been prepared to despise him, he sensed he would only be able to feel pity for this weakling. Speaking through Marina, the Commander conveyed his most honored and exalted greetings and praise. The Emperor saw that the leader of these demons (for now he was certain they could not be gods) was an evil smelling giant on the back of his white horse, a rough, hideous being with a black beard pointed in defiance and restless eyes darting beneath his brow—eyes he soon noticed, as the Commander spoke through Marina, had a habit of coming to an affixed, decisive stop on matters of concern. I do not like these demons, the Emperor whispered to his head priest, so we must make the necessary offerings and send them on their way. Most of all, he did not like the way these beautiful horses suffered their terrible riders and the way the strangers all stared at him as if he were one of the animals in his own zoo.

Sensing that the Emperor was growing hostile, the Commander swiftly removed a necklace of pearls from Marina's neck (a gift from his Queen), dismounted, and placed it over the Emperor's head with a low bow. The Emperor was startled, saw that he was being mocked somehow, treated as an inferior, but conveyed his priests to remove their heavy gold chains and hand them to the leader of the demons. Amused, the Commander placed them around his neck and Marina's. _It is a dream_ , the Emperor whispered again to his high priest, _I am walking in my sleep... I have seen them at last._ His dark eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. The Commander bowed again, and the priest said to the Emperor: These are no apparitions, Son of the Sun. We are most definitely awake now.

It was the Emperor's request that the Commander come with him immediately to the City of the Dead, where the spirits of his ancestors would give him proper welcome. The Commander was wary of entrapments, even if by spirits, but consented when the Emperor said that he would go alone with the Commander, Marina, and a few of their guards, while the rest of the soldiers stood watch at the gates. His own priests protested, but the Emperor hoped that seeing the sacred City of the Dead would frighten these demons away. Instructing his men to do as the Emperor's advisors said, the Commander and his small band left on horseback. He was confidant that if there was an attempt at ambush their muskets would drive off any attackers. The Emperor himself, though he was at first very afraid to be lifted up so high and placed on a saddle, was led on a trusted gray mule, and with his elaborate trappings of feathers and beads, he and the mule looked to the Commander like an incredible chimera from an old book. Such a ridiculous being, he thought, would be easy to seduce into doing whatever he wanted.

The travelers reached the City of the Dead late in the afternoon. It lay on a high flat barren plain, and, Marina told the Commander (for she had heard much of this place in the legends of her people), it was timelessly old. It was ancient when the Emperor's people had first invaded this land, centuries and centuries ago. Not even the priests knew who had built it. Marina was frightened and wanted to go back; she knew the Commander understood enough words on his own, but he would not let her go. More and more, she wondered if she, too, was playing too easily into the hands of the strangers, but saw there was no turning back.

The Commander, instead of looking fearful, as the Emperor had hoped, looked elated, for he felt that he had found his Egypt. The City of the Dead was a city of tombs and temples. Like the grand realization of all his dreams of conquest and plunder, two pyramids rose high above the city's highest towers. The small band of men passed through a massive stone gate and between forests of columns, down the sacred Street of the Dead, where, Marina told her husband, those who would be sacrificed were carried to the altar on top of the largest pyramid. There were no jewels here. No one lived here, only the spirits of her murdered ancestors. She begged to go back before they were sacrificed, too, but the Commander seized her horse by the reins and forced her onward. Whatever will be sacrificed will be sacrificed to us, he told her. The Emperor motioned to the Commander that he wished them to scale together the larger pyramid, the one dedicated to the sun, which faced a smaller one to the moon. There, he said through Marina, the spirits could best greet them, and so the men stopped and dismounted.

The Commander told Marina to stay below, he wanted to be alone with the Emperor. He was amused by the Emperor's superstitions. But here, in the city of his ancestors, the Emperor was not afraid. He knew that even if he were killed, his spirit could not be lost in this place, for this is where the sun dwelled at night, during the reign of the moon. When he died his soul would again become one with the fires of the sun, whose first rays struck the temple at the top of the larger pyramid before anything else on this desert plateau. It was a hard climb for him, since he was used to no amount of exertion, but the Commander was patient and at last the Emperor struggled to the flat top of the pyramid. The summit was sunny but cold. The Emperor knelt in exhaustion before the temple and stretched out his arms, as if to take in all the universe from this vantage point. No words were necessary. Both men were praying, after a fashion. The great plain spread out below them, spilled with the light of the setting sun. Away to the southwest one could barely make out the low, clustered buildings of the Imperial City, as if they had fallen to ruin and returned to the earth.

You mean to take all this, the Emperor said, gesturing with open palms at what lay below. The Commander did not reply. You could kill me here, the ruler whispered, as if to himself, for he did not believe the other man could understand. It would be an honor, here—But aren't you afraid of the sun god's revenge?

The Commander sighed and lowered his head. He had understood only a few words, but made no sense of them. In his own tongue, he said, slowly and deliberately, as if praying, as if somehow the Emperor might understand and this might absolve him in the eyes of his own god: I am a man and not a god—if I were a god I would have the power to save you. As I am a man I must take what I need for my queen, and for myself, yes. Your fate is out of my hands, and I am sorry for that. However, it must be so.

For months, the Emperor said, knowing he, too, would not be understood, I have been hunted in my dreams. I feel myself at the end of your silver lance, always. Your horses will no doubt carry me on their backs into the spirit world. I am ready. The moon always steals that which is the sun's. The sun steals that which is the moon's. So, I am ready.

The Emperor looked at the Commander a long time. It seemed to him, and perhaps, in a way, to the Commander as well, that they had both done all this before, over and over again, each knowing the other's most minute thoughts and gestures. It was hypnotic, this sensation; all seemed fixed and inevitable, no turning back. Both men were silent for a while. The wind, like angry spirits, tore at their hair. Somewhere far below them a horse was whinnying. The Commander stared at the Emperor, who stared back, his eyes seeming to flicker and flare in the last rays of the setting sun; the moon was rising in the east with a cold light which glanced off the Commander's armor. Seeing this, the Emperor gasped as if for the life he felt fading away in this new age of the horse, alone at the top of the great pyramid of the sun.

II

What came after came swiftly and terribly, and so follows the rest of the tale. Voluntarily, as if to save his own people he must sacrifice himself, the Emperor was to hand himself over a little more each day to the power of these demons his people believed to be gods; the Commander and his soldiers with their horses and muskets had in effect kidnapped him as they circumscribed all he did. Meanwhile, Marina and her mercenary slaves from the jungle had stirred up revolt within the Emperor's own army by circulating talk of how their leader had stolen the wealth of their families' labors, had stolen the very light of the sun, had cheated the gods of their due. For a long time many of the common people of the empire had been wary of losing their prosperity, and the recent disasters, still fresh in their minds, seemed to them omens of the gods' anger at the excesses of the royal house. The empire was ripe for revolt, even if it meant usurping the rule of the sun god for the more chaotic rule of the moon god, and now that the gods from the east had come to free the people, change was imminent. There was sabotage and subterfuge within the Emperor's army, seeded by Marina and the gods on horseback, who had taken over the barracks outside the royal palace and who were coming and going throughout the city as they pleased. And so over the course of many months the empire began to almost imperceptibly crumble. The epoch of peace and plenty was ending, not beginning—or so now even the Emperor feared.

Eventually, too late, the Emperor realized he had become a prisoner in his own palace. He had let the power be drained from him for months, as if he had severed his veins himself, and now he felt as weak as his smallest child. Why had he not had his army overcome these demons as soon as they had approached the city gates? What was it that held him back and allowed his most corrupt officials to be taken in by such a small army of invaders? He could only account for it as the will of the gods, who would destroy so they could rebuild. Still, he was a man as well as the son of the sun, and he wanted to live, too. At night he begged for a dream to come to him, telling him of the future, but now his sleeping mind was empty and blank as the new moon.

Conspiring with a few easily bribed high priests, the Commander had taken over many of the Emperor's official duties. It had all happened so easily the Commander often felt that surely he must be dreaming, or else he was replaying a dream which he had been practicing his whole life long. He knew now that these people were not stupid, for they had built and discovered many marvelous things, but they were innocent in their own way, believing that a few odd strangers could usher in an age of violence and destruction followed, perhaps, by even greater deeds of creation and artistry. Yet even his own soldiers seemed to sense that one day the imperial city's people would all awaken, as if from their own dream, and murder these strangers in their in their midst. Horrible, unspoken things hung heavy in the air, like black rain clouds before a storm.

The Emperor was well treated; he bathed daily, walked in his gardens, saw his wives and children, consulted his priests and astrologers each morning, as though nothing had changed or was changing. He did not even question why he was no longer allowed to leave the palace grounds—one would have thought he had never known anything else, or that he was accepting his fate completely because he did not believe in such a mad idea as free will. The priests and astrologers were surprisingly quiet or cryptic when asked direct questions. The Commander would often visit the Emperor in his courtyard, and with Marina's help in interpreting, they would have long talks on many subjects. With continual amazement the men learned of theirs separate worlds. The Emperor told his stories, which he had learned well from his court scribes, with the skill of a Scheherazade. His people had done great things, were timelessly old, had conquered and tamed a vast land which spread from ocean to ocean. They had invented useful methods for accomplishing difficult tasks, and had developed sciences and arts which rivaled even what the gods were capable of. They understood the way the planets move in the sky, and the systems by which all things in the universe operate. Their country was rich and powerful, but it was the spiritual which they most cared about, and so their worship of death had reached great heights. This life was only a temporary one; the afterlife was an eternity for which one must carefully prepare. The Commander listened carefully, learning the complexities of the Emperor's language bit by bit. Marina, too, was fascinated, and often had to guess at the meaning of fabulous words for fabulous things about which she had no knowledge. She reluctantly admired the befeathered ruler, although his army had killed her mother and raped her older sisters, and began to wonder if she were helping to hasten his death—for surely her husband's men were planning to assassinate him. Still, night after night they listened to his stories, as if under a spell, as if he knew that he was always one story away from death. The Commander even sometimes mused on taking the Emperor with him when he left this place, making him an interesting addition to his queen's court, though he knew this could never be.

Our time, the Emperor told the Commander early one quiet evening, as they wandered through the elaborate palace gardens, is different from yours. The Commander stroked his beard, a gesture the Emperor had learned indicated the man did not understand. The Emperor sat on a large calendar stone and pointed to the sun, which hung heavy on the western horizon, dark and swollen like the heart of a man. He continued: As you know, I was chosen to be emperor, the sun himself chose me, for my father the last emperor, the last son of the sun, had many children. I was just one of many when I was a boy. I was but another child content to lie in the sun, the same sun under which I am now the lord and ruler of all. One day my father had a vision and knew I must be chosen, that the rays of the sun had touched me when I was born. But you see ... I am still that child. I am still lying in the sun, watching the eagles in the sky. Every moment in our lives lasts forever. It is like when you toss a pebble into a pond and the pond ripples. If you look hard enough, you see the first ripple is still there as the others grow, only moving out, and beyond...

The Commander pondered the burning core of the sun. He raised his thumb before one eye, covering the other, making the sun disappear and reappear again.

Oh, I can tell you do not understand, the Emperor went on. You see time as a river, it flows by you, you let it flow, and you do not know where the past has gone. To you, only the present is _now_. You chop time up: Past, present, future—what are those? My people live in Now, and Now is always.

I see you are a philosopher, the Commander said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his doublet. But now the sun has set and so to me it no longer exists, at least for a few hours.

The men walked back to the Emperor's rooms. Before the Commander left he frowned and stated: But men like you and I must live as if we don't know if the sun will rise in the morning. That is the way of the philosopher and the warrior.

The weeks passed slowly for the Emperor. Sometimes the Commander did not visit him for days; then he rarely spoke even to his wives or the astrologers, for he feared what they might tell him of what was happening beyond the palace walls. The priests stared at him as if they wanted to ask him questions, many questions, but were afraid to. The Emperor stared back, but not really at them. The gods could have willed it otherwise; they could have been him, he could have been any one of them—what did it matter when they were all joined in the City of the Dead? Let these gods or demons have what they like, then; though he was still a young man he felt his days drawing to a close and welcomed whatever might come next.

At night he chewed his medicinal leaves, upon which he depended to calm himself more and more, and held his newest wife closely for hours. However, she would not say much to him because, she whispered, she was frightened and there were too many of the bearded strangers about. They were all over the city, shoving people this way and that, and though no one as yet had been harmed, it would only be a matter of time... And yet, how could they attack these unnamed gods? One morning she finally told him that things in the empire were changing, that the people were turning against him, but before she could say more the court scribe came to resume his readings for the day, the only thing in which the Emperor continued to find joy.

At last the lull of their days was broken, but not quite in the manner even the Commander had expected. First, Marina gave birth to a child during a rare downpour, when the child's wails could barely be heard above the roar of rain and thunder. When Marina awoke at last from a heavy sleep she discovered the Commander had already had the child given away to a household in the village; he had no use for such a bastard when he had another wife and more than enough children in his own country. Marina swore at him and wanted to run away. Only when the soldiers prevented her from doing so did she come to realize at last that she was as much a prisoner as the Emperor. She, too, had been heartlessly tricked, and cried aloud.

When she would not stop, the guards carried her screaming to the stables, another converted barracks farther from the palace. Here, she would be out of the way, her angry tongue unheard. She was thrown on the straw, and the stable boy told to watch after her. Marina spat on him, but he brought her water, washed her, gave her a curry comb for her long black hair. When she had calmed down, he told her what he heard had already happened in the city that morning: Her father, who had been growing crazier by the day, had started an argument with a merchant in the marketplace; he claimed to have been cheated when he traded one of his daughter's necklaces for a gold bracelet which had promptly broken in two. The merchant said the old man had not treated such a delicate object with care, and soon there was much shouting and fighting. Somehow, a musket had gone off, wounding a child, and for the first time the city's populace had become aware that the foreign gods might not be all they seemed.

A crowed rushed at the soldiers, and Marina's father was killed. Perhaps torn limb to limb by the townspeople, perhaps by the Commander himself. For being too much the troublemaker, the stable boy at Marina's tent explained. It does not matter, that was only the half of it, and he went on above Marina's wild sobs.

People had run from the market in fright, but a mob soon approached the palace, gathering size and momentum with each dusty block of the city. Even as the boy and Marina spoke, although they did not know it then, the mob was demanding that the Emperor make whatever sacrifice he must to these gods and then force them back into the desert, back across the eastern sea fleeing on their mighty horses.

The Commander reacted harshly. His guards surrounded the palace, firing into the gathering crowd. Several citizens fell and the rest fled. But he knew they would be back soon enough, and in larger numbers. The only way to save themselves now would be to have the Emperor plead for the moon gods to have their way. The next morning, the Commander and his bodyguards burst into the Emperor's chambers to wake him from his slumber.

The ruler did not bow before the Commander as was his usual manner. Instead, he lay back down upon his straw pallet. His lips moved but there was no sound. He was staring at the blank wall, chewing on a mouthful of leaves. The Commander could tell that he was looking much further, to the east, past the gates of the imperial city, across the burning desert and through the dark jungles, to the incoming tide of the eastern ocean. The Emperor had already heard what had happened beyond his walls, and he was frightened as well as angry. But this change in him, the Commander knew, had not happened all at once. For weeks he had been becoming less and less of this world. He slept as much as possible, in order, it was said, to hold divine communion with his visions. But his dreams continued to haunt him. The angry gods rebuked him in the voice of the strangers. These gods had abandoned him. Nightly, he scratched talismanic signs on walls, symbols which he would not or could not explain to anyone. At last, this morning, he raised his head and spoke to the Commander: The world is coming to an end, an end indeed, he said wearily; his dreams had revealed this. He told the Commander that the world was going to end in stones and fire. Cities would turn to ash. Oceans would boil. Men would slay one another and themselves. Women would give birth to monsters. The Commander, shaken, told him he must speak to his people, to help them understand that a new era was upon them. The ruler's degeneration upset him, but he could not see things happening any other way. It must be this way, if fate and his queen had destined it to so be.

I will speak to my people on your behalf, the Emperor told the Commander, if you grant me one last favor: I want to speak again to your horse, and then I will speak to my people. The Commander paused. He was convinced the Emperor was no longer sane, but did as he was asked. After all, the ruler had already been compliant as a good child and had asked for nothing else in all his weeks of self imposed retreat. This would be yet another chance to impress the Emperor with the powers at his command, the Commander thought. Confident that no harm would be done, he chose not the scrawny black mare this time, but his own finest white stallion. This horse, the one which had swum the swiftest in the ocean and was the entire army's pride, was bathed and curried and pomaded until his braided mane waved in the sun like spun silver and his hooves, when he galloped toward the palace with the Commander on his back, flashed like lightning. The stallion seemed a white vision, a ghost of fire and light when it was unsaddled and led down the palace halls.

Even in the late afternoon gloom of the Emperor's most secluded inner chamber, the horse gleamed almost phosphorescently. At first the Emperor thought such a thing could not be real, but a phantom, and yet this horse was so powerful a presence it was the most real thing he had ever come face to face with outside his dreams. He steeled himself to come closer and stare into its suspicious eyes. The animal backed off, but the man held his gaze and crept nearer, knowing this is what he must do. Cautiously, full of fear but also curiosity, the Emperor came still closer. The animal before him raised its head and withdrew, backing itself into a comer. Somewhere outside a child shouted and the stallion, which for all its size was a nervous creature, started. Its nostrils flared, exhaling moist, fetid air into the Emperor's face. A smell like blood and grass, dung and semen filled the room. It was the smell of violence and all life. The ruler stretched out his arms and ran his fingers through the stallion's thick white mane. He had never smelled nor felt such a beautiful, unearthly thing; the black mare was nothing compared to this magnificent creature. He caressed its soft, warm nose, felt the tensed muscles in its massive chest. Cupping his palms around its velvety ears, the Emperor confronted the horse eye to blue, luminous eye. The great muscles of its flanks quivered and its eyes widened in the growing dark. The Emperor knew he must act quickly. He removed his robes and loincloth and pressed himself against the horse's side before it shook its big head and began to back away again.

Then the Emperor dropped to his knees and seized the stallion by its mane, begging it to hear his prayers. For a moment, the Emperor in his delirium thought he saw the horse's face soften and slip into shapelessness. Its eyes, which were sky blue and ocean blue, so bright silver moon fires seemed to be burning there, had dissolved into silver mirrors, like stars spinning against a stormy sky. He saw himself doubly reflected, drowning in a rain tossed ocean. _Horse_ , said the Emperor, I have seen you falling among the stars; I have seen you in the moon, in the ocean; I have seen you in my dreams. Horse, why have you come such a long way to wreak such terror upon my people? The stallion snorted and curled back its lips, showing its teeth, long teeth like those in a human skull. Suddenly the Emperor fell to the floor, crying as if pierced with a dagger.

After a few moments the Emperor opened his eyes as though he had just returned from some place far away and looked about himself in the dark, coughing on the dust and his own fear. All was quiet but for the horse's rapid, anxious breathing. None of the Commander's guards was in sight. He looked up at the horse, which was still standing in the corner, his ears and tail twitching as if the air were full of flies. This was the moment. The white stallion's eyes had turned into the cold, clouded eyes of a snake. The Emperor stood; he was directly in front of the horse, and then, like a wild beast, he had leapt onto its back, tearing and slashing at it with his long nails and teeth. The horse reared into the air, bellowing in pain, and kicked and bucked aimlessly about the room, its blood flowing over the Emperor's naked body. But the Emperor, like a bird of prey which has seized its victim with all its strength, clung tightly to its mane, digging his nails in deeper, until he had scratched out each of the horse's bright blue eyes. At last he fell from the animal's back, and the stallion, giving the Emperor a furious kick, ran blinded and bloody, like a specter of itself, into the courtyard. The Emperor lay dazed and bleeding, too, listening to the horse's hooves echoing down the long corridors and the swift approach of soldiers' boots. A wound had been opened in his side and he felt he must be dying. But it did not matter what happened now. He had guaranteed in his own way that his world would soon be as vanquished as the new moon is by the full.

That same night, after the horse had been shot to ease its pain and the Emperor thrown into a heavily guarded cell, the Commander walked for the first time through the palace as if he were its rightful owner. Forever after, he knew, things would not be the same or so easily done. But for this night the palace was his, and he was the last man in the world. There were so many rooms he could easily become lost; it would take weeks to remember all the passages and doorways, the turrets and courtyards, colonnades and galleries. This night, the palace seemed endless; the palace could have been the entire universe, so small and insignificant did the Commander feel as, torch in hand, he walked its halls and climbed its stairs. Every now and then he saw a lighted window or heard bare feet retreating in the dark, occasionally a child's laugh or a woman's whisper, but he saw no one—perhaps the palace was haunted by all those who had lived there over the centuries. And perhaps if he searched long enough he would find the store rooms, where he could cover himself with gold and jewels as a raider in an Egyptian crypt might do. Soon, before he died, the Emperor would have to turn over his keys and lead him to those chambers...

An idea came to him. Lighting a torch, the Commander entered a tower in a far, hidden comer of the palace grounds. He climbed the steep, winding stairs, watching the sooty spiral his torch's smoke left on the wall. At the tower's top he extinguished the flame, allowing the stars to illuminate the summit. There was no moon. There was the black sky and the blacker city crouching below. The Commander knew that beyond that blackness lay the desert, and the jungles, and then the ocean—and tonight, the last night before the fall of an empire, he was not so insignificant after all, for all things were faintly reverberating with his presence. For a while he understood what the Emperor had said: Here in the ancient dark, there was no past, present, or future, just the now he felt forever bound to, like a slave. Why should he care, then, what was to happen? If not him, if not his command to take this country, it would have been another's. He sighed. A cooling breeze swept in from the plains. Falling stars fell like dying torches down the dome of the sky, to land, it seemed, almost at his feet. Those were the townspeople lighting fires along the empty streets, conspiring in the depths of the city. An aroma of damp wood and a hair of smoke braided upwards from the nearest fire. All was so deceptively peaceful! The Commander looked to the west, far beyond these fires below and the falling stars above him, to the invisible pyramids of the City of the Dead. The entire world, he thought, not understanding why he would think such a thing, is walking in its sleep.

At the fall of dusk the next day, the Emperor, arrayed in all his feathered finery, walked out onto the ramparts of his imperial palace to speak to the gathered mob below. This time, the mob was not just irate merchants and frightened townspeople, but also the leaders of his own army. The Emperor wanted to tell them, partly because he was being forced to by the Commander and partly from his own desire to gain peace at any price, to give up all they had to the warriors from the east, to accept their rule and do as they said. This is the new age, he said, we must welcome new gods. He was only able to speak very slowly; he was still in a great deal of pain, and the wound in his side had not yet stopped bleeding. The war chiefs felt betrayed by their once-proud ruler, Son of the Sun, one of a long line of triumphant conquerors who had never surrendered. They murmured angrily among themselves. Voices cried out. Then many things happened at once. A musket fired, then several others, and there was a scream which sounded half human, half equine. Almost at the same moment, from the other side of the rampart, Marina appeared, breasts bared and hair in her eyes, like a deranged Fury. My father has been killed and my child stolen, she said to the crowd. And now these strangers will make us all slaves! Fight them to the end! Kill them all! The Commander and his guards tried to silence the crowd as she was dragged off and beaten by soldiers, but already a rain of arrows, stones, and firebrands was being hurtled down upon the Emperor. Betrayer! Betrayer! the voices cried. The Emperor sank to his knees, blood streaming down his side, and though few heard him, he made a last plea to his people: We are none of us dreaming, he said. Everywhere—and here he looked into the crowd, searching for the faces of his wives and children, but seeing only frightful beasts—are horses, everywhere these spirits of death and destruction, of change. We cannot remain changeless. Time must now flow, like our blood, like our tears...

Suddenly another cry went up from the grounds before the palace, this time from the Commander's own soldiers, who were now struggling to restrain the crowd. Already some people had been trampled, others beaten, and with a word the Commander gave permission to fire. At once the crowd hurled itself upon the soldiers, but the townspeople and the Emperor's army fell by the dozens before the muskets faster than they could raise their bows. But the Commander's attention had already been distracted once the arrows began to fly from his position on the ramparts; he saw smoke rising from the makeshift stables where the horses were kept, where they were being rested and readied for the imminent battle, which was really yet to begin. As soon as he had ordered his men to keep the Emperor's army away from the palace at all costs, but not yet to enter the streets, the Commander rushed to what he had been the only one to notice in the midst of the riot.

No one was about the barracks, not even the stable boy, so the people of the city had not yet dared to approach the horses. The gods might have been reduced to demons, but the horses were still above reproach. It might have been one of the disgruntled slaves—it might have been Marina herself—who had set the building on fire. Flames rose high into the air, and from within, the horses, as well as the fire, roared with an almost human ferocity. Was the stable boy trapped inside, too? Someone seemed to be calling his name. The Commander began to hack at the locked gate with the end of his musket, the horses kicked from the other side and next the gate fell in, the Commander fell to the ground, and the horses, his own horses, rushed in a frenzy from the stable, their manes, it seemed, on fire, their bodies made of sun fire, breathing fire like dragons. They were all around him, burning and screaming, blinded and driven mad. The Commander began to crawl on broken knees into the blazing building, toward whoever called him, when from out of the blinding darkness of the fire the little black mare with the sun upon its brow—the last to break free from her burning tethers—rose up like an avenging angel or the flame of justice itself and trampled him under her hooves. It is said by some that there was an eclipse that day, or even that the sun did not rise again the next morning. Who is to say, so many centuries later, what the truth might be?
How To Write

How to write, dear readers? Actually, as I tell the star-struck aspirants an author such as myself is obliged to meet at parties, book-signings, and the like, it is more than a question of how to write—it is a question of how to live. You must create yourself as surely as you do your characters; and you must not settle for a "lifestyle," but a life of style. A stylist instinctively knows the difference between what to do and what to avoid doing. As a well-known late-Victorian wit said, or should have said sometime, in response to a persistent interviewer: "With a pen, thank you. How _not_ to write—now, that would be a much more interesting topic."

I have been known to be irreverent about this matter. Some people are just dying to be told how to run their own lives, and naturally, I consent. Take risks, I have told my acolytes, if just to frighten them away—don't let the risks take you. Just as your fiction needs plenty of action, so do you, so find a gal or guy who's wild about you, charter that boat, pack that pistol, and set sail for Avalon. Beneath my flippancy, however, lies a tone of serious urgency, of urgent seriousness. Today's bright young things are tomorrow's dull old objects, so burn, burn at a fevered pitch and get it all down in black and white, where it really counts. You won't regret a thing when it's in the windows and in the ads of the chain bookstores. (Prepare to take the consequences, however. Certain people—ex-friends, business rivals, let us say—insisted they saw shadows and shadings of themselves in my third and most popular novel, going so far as to threaten libel suits. A million soft-cover copies of _Private Parties_ later, and I can attest that it's all farce in the end; there were real people indeed in that book, but no one matched the names and masks correctly, and the masquerade went on. So live dangerously. Or why bother at all?)

Imagine the blank stares; still they want to know about "writing" itself. All right, then. The art and act of writing, I say from rote to these tiresome sycophants who have cornered me on some stranger's patio, is akin to picking the lock of the brain (that vast treasure-house crammed and cluttered with broken bits of imagery, shards of ideas, and dusty themes torn from the great scrapbook of the collective unconscious); you need a feel for words like a safecracker has a feel for the tumblers. It is not, indisputably not—although many would have you believe so—a matter of entering some casino playground and plugging some infernal amputated machine of the mind with endless silver dollars until you meet with success: the jackpot of a best-seller. Life, I explain, is a gamble, art is not. The winners and losers are predestined from the start, and the game has been fixed by those nine fickle whores on high. I used to have another extended metaphor comparing and contrasting it to skeet-shooting in the Hamptons, but I am afraid it would take even more valuable space than the example given here.

Forgive me if I digress, but I like to think I'm at least half as complex as my own more immemorial characters.Much of the time I myself don't know when I'm being serious, either, but you see that's just one of my many charms ... wouldn't you agree, Father Confessor? Oh, slide back the metaphorical screen and let me out of this coffin—I'm suffocating! Just this morning I had to watch both those idiots defaming me on the idiot box, and I'm in no blithe spirit. Perhaps I won't hide the facts behind my fiction anymore. Speaking of fiction, however...

Allow me to introduce Mr. Joe Average and his charming monochromatic family—you'd know them from any recent demographic survey. Alas, they've been the object of much derision lately from certain ivied and laureled factions of academe. It is said all he, wifey, and kidlings three want is four-letter sex and bloodied-to-a-pulp violence, that he is more sensitive to the vibrant advertisements my (unfortunately, not so) hypothetical novice is inevitably sandwiched between in our finer magazines than to the poignant little dramas attempting to be staged before Joe's very eyes. Of course this may be true enough, but now is no time to bring the curtain down on our well-trod stage. Joe needs just a nudge, a teensy winking come-on here and there. Subtlety is a pretty girl who flirts but won't move into the back seat.(Remember, we can always read that "true-to-life" testimonial a few pages ahead instead, the one with the nice illustration of the happy loving couple though he is not happy and she is loving someone else.) So I say to you—if I may address my concept in person now—the hell with it all, saturate your lame little tales with sexy violence and violent sex if that's what it takes to hold Joe's attention— in the foreplay of the story and once every other chapter if you've decided to engage The Great American You-Know-What. Do it for Joe, though, not for some clutch of scrambled eggheads who wouldn't know a decent plot if it whistled and lifted its skirt at the corner—who wouldn't know how you've slaved and slavered and wept for years over your most wondrously, ingeniously wrought magnum opus, only to be ridiculed by the very hack editor-slash-critic you once rescued from oblivion and the "red-hot property, only twenty-nine" who turned so ice-cold on you. Make yourself some bucks, fellas and fillies, don't try to make yourself appreciated in Mod Am Lit 101 like those parvenus in the previous sentence. Now and then I've contemplated buying up all existent copies of _Finnegan's Wake_ or _Swann's Way_ or somesuch overrated, overweighted "classic," inserting two or three hundred pages of my own very worst "literary" folderol between Chapters Two and Ten, and sitting back to await the plaudits of future pundits and perfessers. I have this "friend" (I use the quote-marks judiciously) who writes nothing but what her jacket blurbs describe as "psycho-sexual thrillers," in fact borrowed pathological studies of a singularly low order. If these were not labeled "novels," they might be failed classroom texts instead of "soon to be a major motion picture" Rook of the Month Club selections (while the books of far superior authors, authors who have dallied—even madly rutted—with success in the past, authors praised by the more discerning critics and readers, are remaindered at the height of their maturity before sales are given a chance to "snowball"). If my "friend's" thick, slick volumes were not liberally doused with "aesthetic" pretensions, they would likely be relegated to the lower racks at the "adult" bookstore, next to the primers on coprophilia. Since I have the funny feeling this article will never see the light from a kiosk (already I foresee the tense, terse note on eggshell-colored stationery: "Sorry, this is too acerbic for our tastes..." Acerbic, acidic, ascetic—since when did "taste" ever have anything to do with it?), I will go on: This writer writes smut for publishing houses and glossy drivel for "glamour" magazines and she would forsake you for your own "best friend" and the quotation marks should have been pinned on them like medals of dishonor long ago. There is a moral to this paragraph which I'm sure you, my dear would-be, has-been, never-was author, will discover.

Should I erase that last bit? I asked myself in an earlier draft. No, I see no reason not to tighten the thumbscrews where appropriate.

As Heroine says to Hero in my novel-in-progress, "Your problem is you want to screw them all blue with your precious prose." Hero's retort—"That's no problem, that's my genius."

Let me get on with my lesson: Think before you write, my future famous talk-show guests, _think_ , I say. Walk about with those ideas for awhile, pamper, don't hamper them, and don't neglect daily nourishment—I prefer straight vermouth from a bottle I keep in my lower right-hand desk drawer, though you may already subscribe to the communal tap down at the neighborhood writers' bar. Once your ideas have matured to the point where they demand independence they may—just may—be worthy of the waste of ink. Erase more than you write, shred more than you save. Perform cheerful euthanasia on all mongrels, mutants, and monsters. Every sheet of foolscap, dears, is priceless! (Is everyone out there listening? You! third row, the four-eyed carrot-top—sit up straight and take your pablum.)

As I once dashed off on a passing blackboard, fiction is composed of _ficts_ in the same way that its antithesis _faction_ is composed of facts. "Ficts," as I coined them, are your building blocks by which we erect our monumental lies: writing "she had lovely russet hair," for instance, is but an elemental atom in need of linking up with other "fictual" particles such as "though she had a cruel mouth" and "she slammed the door." At times unskilled hands fumble the fusion and produce highly unstable fiction, radiating incredulity; ofttimes fission is the unexpected result, and Siamese twins, divided at birth, go off to live in separate stories. This all has made vivid sense to most of my students—not, however, to one ruddy undergraduate at a lecture who rejected my well-intentioned advice (but not my publisher's advances) in the end; after delivering up her first-born novel, she retreated to the more comforting enfoldments of a third-rate women's monthly and one of its more obscene contributors, an editor we've met before, and they've been begetting smut ever since. They, needless to say, have their facts and ficts mixed up, so let us all breathe a mighty "ahem" together. Amen!

Perchance some especially unforgiving reader out there will remember my ephemeral bit of juvenilia, _Larger Than Life_ , being the nasty exploits of a nasty movie mogul. Much as I would prefer to incarcerate all mention of that novel (my only excuse is that I was but an adolescent thirty-three when I penned it) within the subterranean footnotes of a future bibliography, it does contain one not-so-crucial scene lost in the flotsam of its first fifty thousand words which may prove revelatory to this lecture: Veronica, crimson bob flying, has just fled the villain's vile villa in a sleek and speedy roadster, not, it turns out, her own. She is lighting and tamping out one foul Gitanes after another, thinking about Roderick, Roderick's vices, the bloodied handkerchief, the unfinished afternoon in Gstaad, et cetera, all very muddied stream of consciousness (again, blame it on youthful excess). Oh, yes —it is a moonless, cloudless night.The reflective eyes of some nocturnal animal in her rear-view mirror are actually the headlamps of my producer-hero's Pierce Arrow. And so forth... a near collision, stumbles, apologies, a shudder and embrace on a wind-lashed scree above sibilant waves whispering "kiss me, kiss me" as they break against the sand... Permit me now to quote directly: "Meanwhile the party had wound down like the Victrola's reedy alto- _cum_ -basso. Some guests had silently left, others traded glances infused with ennui.James pressed his forehead against the cold pane, the drizzle on the other side better than any tears he might have shed.'Where the deuce has she gone this time?' he wondered." The appearance of those phantom raindrops on an icy clear night— misplaced ficts—should serve as a warning to any over-anxious young scribes out there.

Cocktail-party critics on either coast and that vast wasteland between are always querying me about writer's block, which by the way is more accurately portrayed as a Great Wall self-imposed betwixt the writer and the Tartar hordes of his imagination. This wall does not exist.Mediocre writers pretend to be hard at work trying to raze the wall when they are really just too plain uninspired to even slip in the floppy disk or flash-drive. Then where do you get your ideas?I hear the next question coming. Well, that vintage repository in my desk is a convenient expedient, but inspiration doesn't always come by water or on wind: it comes in a crumpled pack of filter-tips in the gutter, in an insomniac's electrical storm, in a fast top-down ride at midnight, in inane television "infomercials," in insane pop songs, in an advance of five-hundred grand for the next completed work. True, there are times when I can't, won't, shan't write, but do I fret and fuss about it? No! I merely take it as a cosmic hint from that divine ennead that I should instead be knocking them back at the club or on my way to Tiffany's in search of some bauble for some bubble-headed ingrate of a girl.

(Before me is an incredible interview my clipping service has sent me. It is from a small magazine that pretends to deal in big subjects, and the article turns out to be nothing but an overlong forum for a former, youngish but no longer young, comrade in arms of mine—speak of the devil! This issue's oh so very _au courant_ editor favorably compares his "very popular discovery's" latest greatest to my earlier best-sellers while in the same breath of a paragraph drubbing me soundly for what I've done since—since a certain betrayal, gossipmongers.He refers to what he calls the social evolution and I call the social disease of modern literature; his alliterative heart professes to bleed purple peanut-butter for my "spectacular failure." Far better a brilliant mistake, I say, than such a dirty, boring success. This is a weak-kneed, limp-wristed, yaller-bellied diatribe if I ever read one... Let me bite the bitter dust in a calamitous shoot-out, fellow hacks and paperback writers, rather than suffer the soaking of so many critics' water-pistols. Listen, expiring aspirants everywhere, if you can't be good, as Miss Mae West should have and maybe did say, you might as well be good at being bad.)

(To continue parenthetically: Let us suppose an established writer who teaches "just for the sheer fun of it" has literary interests in a budding young student with whom he is more than willing to spend time away from classes and office hours to help.With proper guidance and a gentle but insistent hand, buds will blossom and mentor will be sweetly rewarded. So kind and generous teacher practices every precaution, fending off all the wolves and vixens in the department while he nurses and nurtures student's supple growing talent—and coordinates the necessary contacts and contracts. Unbeknownst to teacher, a dangerous _ménage_ has been developing in the dark like poison fungus—he, she, and the publishing world make _trois_. It all starts with late nights "poring over her work" with the associate editor of the college's literary review. The treachery escalates. Must loveress leave her calling card between the sheets, be they of silk or parchment? Should spurned lover slap a soft kid glove across the faces of all those publishers who sealed the deals with kisses?Where have she and that editor gone—off to support one another's incipient drug habits?Ah, but teacher knows, and so does everyone else who reads the tabloids... This is only an analogy, of course, and one I must follow at some fork in the road of my future fiction, but perhaps one sees the watermark of the sort of back-stabbing—not just back-slapping—so common in this profession shining through the page of this anecdote. Right parenthesis.)

"Writing is hell!" Gulliver, the brilliant young author in my most autobiographical early work, _Gulliver's Travails_ , writes to his dear devoted, a volatile Rossetti-haired mistress, one bright dawn's-break from his freezing _rive gauche_ garret after a blurry night spent buying cheap cognac for a round of grisettes with lopsided lipsticked mouths and his brand new best friend, a gargoylian deaf-mute fallen from Notre Dame who constantly snaps imaginary photographs with an imaginary Nikon (but what masterpieces of gritty realism they would be, and so my mind holds the images that develop on these award-winning pages): " 'Writing is hell, but there is no paradise. There is no salvation. We all must ultimately abhor that which we most cherish. And remember, _I loved_ and _never_ are very nearly the same word to a Parisian.' Gulliver rose from his seasick desk, seeking the right words to explain his passion in the dregs of his tumbler, but could think no more. Beyond the begrimed windows, the sun was waving hello to the world from the banks of the Seine and he heard the tragic cry of the old one-legged violet vendor in the cobbled alley below. Impetuously he threw down his pencil and flew down five flights to pay for her entire stock with the last of his francs." This may have a slight air of contrivance about it, but once when I was still but an impecunious poet (how many of us start out so stupid and idealistic, as if sonnets could be exchanged for bread on the black market!) I did almost exactly what my novelistic counterpart did, although—since we're in a confessional mood—it was the lunch hour, the flowers were chemically colored carnations, and the money order from Uncle was due to arrive that afternoon. But would that be half as romantic? _Art is a lie._ It's been said many times before, and I will add my voice to the choir: Art is all lies! Writing is the art of lying. Every word you write should be a clever lie impersonating some truth.We are only punished when we adhere to the truth; it is the lies we have fun with, believe me. Better to devote your art to lying than your life, as have some former very close acquaintances of mine.

My notes here say "money." Pshaw and hooey. If you don't have it, who are you kidding? The salt mines and chain gangs were made for the likes of you and you and you (but not _us_ , of course).

"Messages" are another thing: they are like child's toys at the top of the stairs; one must carefully avoid the blunder and the fall.(A good writer already has enough literary devices set to spring in our path, but here is where certain somebodies never listened to me—and so came the "politically aware" novels—and the movies—and inevitably the latest sequel from Dracula's daughter, promised to be full of the fashionably homeless and dying.) I caution against any "messages" left lying carelessly about—please pick them up and lock them safely back in your chest, darling. As we must know, writing to "state a cause" is coma-inducing if not lethal (even if the costumes are lovely and the sets expensive).Besides, we probably don't agree, so refrain, refrain, refrain. A social conscience is a fine good thing ... in its proper place, which is among social workers and not writers.Oh, it might sell, as insufferable bores like Dreiser and Zola discovered, but you must think about to whom you are selling: the indiscriminate masses or a tasteful elite? This is not a simple case for spoilsport "art for art's sake"— it's just Art, for Pete's sake.I don't care what's correct on campus. Some have integrity; others have tenure.

If you are seriously contemplating becoming a writer, I do so hope you will come to a full stop right there and think again. I should not have to be the one to convince you with sundry reasons not to write; those reasons should be abundantly clear to you already. If you can't think of enough, then you haven't got a writer's mind, anyway; if you can think of far too many, you must already be a writer. (Writers are so nervously full of excuses and neuroses and insecurities. Once, when I was lecturing at a college you would recognize if I named it, I received an envelope care of their "Writhers' Workshop." What an apt slip of the keyboard!) As I was saying, writing is best treated circumspectly, something always rather in the way, like an awkward piece of furniture or a dental appointment between tennis dates. That, I grant you, is a bit of a harsh assessment, even for me. Better to think of it as a minor leisure activity, something to fill the time when they've inadvertently printed the same crossword puzzle twice in a row. Don't spoil the pastime by thinking career, prospects, fulfillment, posterity (not to mention endorsements, magazine columns, interviews, million-dollar promotions). Just hunt-and-peck on your laptop a while by the pool with a tall cool one by your side as you catch glimpses of yourself in the mirrored sunglasses of the strawberry blonde two towels down.

Despite the allure of fame (fleeting, elusive, never with a money-back guarantee, I warn you) I would sooner have received the calling and spent the rest of my earthly life in a cold and spidery cell than shackle myself to a word processor until death do us part (where are the "pulp" and "puree" switches on this blasted thing, anyway?). Of course, why anyone would say they "choose" to write is sheer bafflement to me. Real writers don't do it for trifles like love or money (are you listening, you-know-who?) but because they have no choice; they are compulsive, pathetic addicts who need word fixes to survive. Besides, you don't pick your obsession; it picks you. I do go on. My analyst draws on another mentholated cigarette and says I want to slip sentences around my neck and kick reality out from under me—but then she hated her mother, too.

(And, incidentally, esteemed board members of this impromptu inquisition, I managed to get hold of our former protégé's latest proofs, and that is definitely _not_ me in those pages, even if it is flattering to think that we can't be so easily buried and forgotten. I would never steal a single idea except to transplant it to richer soil, and never, never do I recall reviewing an enemy's book without having cracked its shell at least once, nor would I judge a fiction contest like a beauty contest. And I was not fired; I dutifully turned in a letter of resignation. Besides, I am much more handsome than that poor fool she describes.)

Writing, they say (come on out, you faceless critics cringing in the back pages of book reviews and arts digests everywhere, you cowards, you poseurs, you nursery-school scribblers, I know you're there) is a lonely art, a solitary enterprise, self-abuse of the soul, mental manipulation. Writers, they say, must stand aloof, alone, apart—by rising above the swarming masses, casting a cold eye on the drones and workers buzzing far, far below the ivory heliport. I say, and will say again, that this is all philistine propaganda of the meanest sort.I do not stand alone. I will not stand alone. (Am I standing alone?) For one thing (I could name many more, but someone out there—up there—has already poised this article between guillotine blade and lunette), one's characters are often one's most loyal friends. Old Henry James was known to celebrate their birthdays and anniversaries with more punctuality than his own family's. John Galsworthy would cry when he had to delete even an extra hired just for the day. What is more, and is unfortunately not the usual case in what we conspire to call "real life," the writer is in complete control. I would sooner spend a thousand listless evenings before a cold grate with my Natalie the narcotic demoness from _The Fiery Queen_ or Samantha from _Angels Without Wings_ than one evening on a tiger-skin rug before a roaring hearth with a certain precocious female who now stoops so low as to dish it out and splatter it all over the "mass market trade" displays at chain bookstores everywhere. (Do you at last see yourself reflected here as in a warped pierglass, my narcissistic authoress? Then, good!)

Today I think I'll scrap the latest work-in-progress—it was going nowhere, anyway.Since I last looked in my muse's eyes and passed my hand through her brassy hair (the deceit of a dye-job!) I have come to realize that such light-hearted wordplay is not for the heavy-hearted.It's time to be brutally ruthless, or if you may, ruthlessly brutal.Allow me to conjecture: A simple love story, gone awry. It will be hard on the heart.It will harden the heart.Details of a business where people become nothing more than flagstones on the paths to power. Implicit within the last few chapters is a searing indictment of society's crucifixion of the artist—how's that for a message? The back cover portrait I can already see quite clearly—a man in herringbone tweed, symbolic pipe burnt out, tie loosened, something very very awful in his eyes. The motion picture based on the book is shot in bleak Scandinavian grays, and the leading lady has a fatal flaw in her beauty which is almost imperceptible and always noticed too late. No music at all. The credits come crashing down like so many chops of a hatchet.

Now let us once more be hypothetical. Suddenly you—definitely not the same "you" I was addressing a few pages back—are renowned because you have, as someone (Ford Maddox Ford? William Carlos Williams? Hell, I can't remember!) once put it, that rarest of all endangered traits: the knack. The know-how. The writer, after all, belongs among the Olympian gallery of the privileged, the talented, the celebrated—those few who truly count and are counted. You—the writer—publish when and if you feel like it, damning the sales figures; the dailies shame themselves for your quickest quip, the monthlies halt the presses for your every change of comma; reporters hound you, photographers dog your trail; every cockamamie society of do-nothings fêtes you; fellowships bear your name and trophies that ultimately mean nothing crowd your mantel; lesser writers grow unbecoming shades of chartreuse in your presence, and we've come spiraling back down to where we began—at one of those whiny, cheesy parties where some bearded and degreed tyromaniac dares to step on your royal train to proclaim his deep respect for all your books, especially _Private Parts_ (sic), except maybe they're a bit too well, _arch_ sometimes, and he's backing you against the hackneyed Hockneys, popping his pepperminted p's in your face and wanting to know if by some chance you'd look at his stories and when, where, why, what, and how how _how_ in the very literal sense of standing up or sitting down, using a broken crayon or a well-burnished Apple. You'd like to quote that nineteenth-century wit again, but you are jet-lagged and woozy from the cheap Chablis and thinking of that love scene you've planned for the next novel and why that lean-limbed redhead hasn't returned your glance. You want to be rude but wry, as wryly rude as all your work supposedly is, but you are too tired to be spontaneous or clever, and so prepare to give the amateur your stock reply, hoping the host will overhear you so you won't have to repeat all your best lines: that the only redeeming thing about being a writer is that once you've obtained all that writing has to offer—wealth, power, prestige, whatever— _you no longer have to write_ , and isn't that why you wanted to become a writer in the first place?But before you can draw in a sufficient breath, two more preening graduate students have encircled you, quoting from the trash-heap of the bestseller list for your benefit—and here comes that robust redhead (though it's a disappointing auburn at closer range) with an extra martini in her hand, and she's clicking her pearls and asking you that same old question that started everything, and someone's put on some chi-chi cha-cha music and they're wanting you to dance and discuss the classics at the same time and especially wanting to know all about those former famous friends of yours and why should people say those things about you and eventually it's all enough to make you want to reach out and crumple them up like failed characters on paper or else to simply finish the whole thing off by typing THE END across their serious, serious foreheads.
The Park

The park had once been renowned for its beauty and history; Ted could look back across time into the pages of his first book of wonders and see fountains and towers and gardens, but like the rest of the miserable country the park had fallen into disrepair after decolonization—so it may not be surprising that he and Tania had never been pressed to visit it by any of the taxi drivers or hoteliers they met here. Even Natia had never mentioned it, which was strange, since she had loved everything else about this city. In fact, they had read in their guidebooks that it was no longer considered safe after dark, and during the day, it was hinted, the park was frequented by sorts with which one wouldn't care to populate one's photo albums. But Tania and Ted were not really tourists, didn't even carry cameras, and when they had finally stumbled across the park on what was to be their last morning here, they saw no reason to hesitate before its fantastic, crumbling stone gates.

"They're modeled after a Gustave Doré engraving?" Tania said; Ted had learned she was a frustrated artist, just as her sister had called herself a failed poet. As for himself—well, he was in bondage to his piano, as ever. " 'The Great Gates of Something'—Dante or Milton?" She had that way of ending most statements with a question mark, or perhaps it was merely her south Australian accent. Though she was a poor imitation of her sister, she sounded almost exactly like her. Every time Ted heard Tania before seeing her, he felt something nearly imperceptible inside him quiver and then subside, like a tiny bird struggling to be freed.

"Heaven or hell?" Ted asked her, but as usual she was already striding down what must have once been an impressive main promenade, now barely recognizable as a path through the weeds and broken pavement. A few gray old men and their dogs wandered like lost children looking for the way home beyond a phalanx of rusted flagpoles, from which colored tatters hung in the breezeless tropical noon. Ted had been a flag collector as a boy, and he recognized the defunct Lion of Judah, the crescent and stars of an earlier version of Egypt, the red and gold Tuvan banner, and others too obscure or faded to identify. He squinted to see better. All the shade and haze of the morning had been erased, and the cut-glass glare of the park startled him. His new sunglasses seemed not to dim, but to gild; they burned the world up in amber, increasing his feeling of light-headed expansion—as if he had been drinking champagne, as if the park might break loose at any moment and go soaring away solemn, silent, and monstrous as one of the zeppelins in his boyhood encyclopedia. And where was Tania?

She was a peculiar woman, again like her sister, but Ted enjoyed these walks with her. Without her, this place might have seemed all the stranger and his duties all the more unbearable. Without her, he might never have left his hotel room except when necessary. He liked the pattern they had established for themselves in this city, for without repetition of some sort he might have lost track of time completely. As it was, some days he was constantly comparing his watch to hers, hours and light were that maddening here. He hated the deceptive sunshine which made it between the skyscrapers of the hotel district and the mismatched shadows cast onto the cobblestone and brick and he hated the moist heat which clung to his body like a wetsuit and he hated how no matter what the time of day or night people were always making a great deal of noise about whatever it was they were doing. Although he and Tania had been here almost two weeks the days were all of a set, indistinguishable in weather and routine. Nights were no cooler. Sleep was angry and difficult. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow blurred into one another. There were times, Ted discovered, when this great foreign city seemed to be dissolving into the sticky air, losing all solidity—especially after the daily downpour when steam rose from the streets, absorbing and blunting the morning light. Then, beneath the steady ostinato of dripping leaves, even the buildings appeared to melt as water trickled from eaves, and puddles formed pools which reflected jigsaw pieces of windows and arches and doorways. Everything appeared to be diminishing then, changing, drawing away from what human eyes can see. Ted and Tania learned not to be surprised when boulevards ended in the cul-de-sac of mirage, or when a celestial vista vanished within the mirrored surface of a storefront, and whole blocks became translucent and then transparent as the morning fog smothered neighborhoods. Hours would pass before the fog lifted, revealing a shining new city.

Tania was even slower at revealing herself. Just that morning she had finally told him exactly what it was she did for a living: draw preserved specimens—fish, insects, birds, that sort of thing—in the basement of a museum of natural history. It's what artists have to do to get by, she had told him, defensive and accusatory, as if he had found fault in that. She had a way of jabbing her hands in the air to make a point; he could easily picture those long, careful fingers parting scales or spreading feathers to record the details of beauty, the beauty of details. But she said she hated doing it for money, for a living.

"I sympathize," he had told her then, as they walked between the pastel-painted hotels on each side of the street. "I always tell my students _piano_ is an anagram of 'o pain!' "

A sharp finger poked his side. " _That's_ an old one," she said sourly as if she had bitten into a bad piece of fruit, and then, "You should be grateful for any sort of audience," as if to soothe him, and next she laughed—her emotions skipped around like that. "I never told you, but I heard something of yours on the radio once, 'Ever Eden' or 'Even Heaven,' some jazz concerto thing?"

"You're getting me confused with someone else. I play in a trio sometimes, that's all."

"Don't be modest. Secrets aren't your style, right?" He couldn't tell then if she were angry or amused as she strode away from him, white moiré skimming her knees. She was not his type, mentally at least, and unlike Natia she didn't publicize her true intentions or desires. But he was compelled by the silky cadence of her walk and followed her lead, as if in search of a resolution only she could provide. Once she had dropped her purse on the sidewalk and along with a shower of coins a sheaf of thumbnail sketches spilled across his path—before she seized them all back he noticed several of an older man in black, long thinning hair seized by a meager pigtail, just like his.

When he caught up to Tania in the park she was sitting awkwardly on the back of an overturned stone bench ornamented with graffiti, singing or reciting so softly to herself she couldn't have heard her own words. "You feel dizzy, too?" she asked, turning to him. "I can't say why, but this place gives me an uneasy feeling. Like we were being swallowed up?" Her scarlet-glazed fingernails scratched at the air above his shoulder.

"The sun," Ted said, sitting next to her and shaking a pebble out of his shoe. "And all this neglect—depressing, isn't it? So gray in a place where it rains everyday..." He was watching the old men and their lame, balding little dogs. The only flowers here were dead and trampled—not at all like those in the tinted photographs he knew as a boy. Even the air was bad, a taste on the tongue of dirt, rot. Through his new sunglasses, he had the unsettling impression of looking through an old stereopticon at a cracked and discolored card. When he slipped the glasses off, the park dissolved into monochrome, and the men with their dogs dissolved away. "Maybe we should find some shade to—"

But Tania was already off in pursuit of something she apparently saw in the distance. With her own new dark glasses on and whitened by the sun she looked strained and attenuated, not really lovely, but unearthly. She walked with such spectral languor in her ivory silk dress she seemed to pass through solid objects and to lift with an unfelt breeze—like one of those gauzy muses in Victorian paintings, he thought, one who floats on air and dangles one slender hand through the grass as a girl in a gondola might trace her fingers in the water. A tenderness for her he had not acknowledged before welled up inside him; he would have liked to take her wrist in one hand and lightly encircle her waist with his arm, the way he was used to doing with students who became entangled to the point of tears in the complicated counterpoint he was teaching them and who blushed as he guided their unsteady hands. He wanted to guide her, to say something meaningful, but was lost without a keyboard or practice book. Ted wondered if thinking about her in this way might mean he could be falling in love or something that absurd, when he knew she was half-mad and not at all whatever it was his body desired or needed. Still, he couldn't help but feel a certain pleasure in watching how her dress gave context to her body, defined her neck, arms, and legs with a fluid, flexible line. She probably did look a bit like her sister. He was glad she seemed to like these aimless walks with him; though they often argued, they each staved off the other's loneliness in this lonely place. Natia might have found their relationship amusing, if predictable. She might have even approved.

Ted did not like to be outdoors when the day drew close to noon. Early morning was the best time for searching this city for clues to a life they seldom mentioned, air-conditioned afternoons for the trials of conscience. Ted would leave his hotel at seven and meet Tania outside an identical hotel at quarter after; from there they went wherever the errant street signs or misleading maps led them—the town was laid out for them each day like a freshly drafted maze with innumerable possible routes. Toward what epicenter, what ultimate goal and through which pathway neither of them could say or guess. This was not a place to be learned by rote, but by day-to-day improvisation centering on by-now familiar chords. Each day was a day of looking and following: Nothing much was intended to happen, and nothing much ever did. He wondered what he was waiting for.

So the days had passed, days spent like a long idle browse through a vast antique shop (touching and admiring the curios but always cautiously putting them back in place) and eventually the last day of this unplanned, unneeded vacation had met them as they met each other—with a yawn and a weary wave. At dusk they would take their separate flights to separate cities and probably not even write to each other except at Christmas ever again. No more commitments or moral obligations bound or would bind them; they were not lovers after all and scarcely friends, they were no longer even legally related; there would be no need nor thought of regret. All sentiment and sympathizing had been expended between chapel and churchyard across the broad back seat of a hired car their very first day here. Why they had lingered so long—longer than packing or dispensing of the bequests took, longer even than it took for the city clerks here to process the necessary forms—they could not have explained even if they had asked each other. In the end they would not be altogether glad to go, though they had been reluctant to come. Tania once told him she felt like they were guests caught up in an affair not of their own making, and they could not leave until some secret signal was given.

He supposed she considered the pattern of their days here and their imminent estrangement in the same manner he did, with a mixture of curiosity and remorse, although with Tania it was difficult to tell. She was a difficult, different sort of woman indeed, regarding the world with nearly the same semi-enchanted air of detachment her sister had once more uneasily cultivated. Her older sister Natia, his wife, had never mentioned her family much at all (in fact he couldn't quite remember if she had ever talked about any sister, odd as that was) and Tania in turn seldom volunteered any information concerning herself, in particular her own years of growing up in Adelaide with Natia. Ted knew there was some possibility they had been half-sisters and after their parents' early divorce they had gone off to live separately, each with a new step-parent and on separate coasts, but that was all he knew or thought he remembered. After all, it had been years since he had last actually spoken to Natia. He would have liked to ask Tania more but there was something intimidating about her—not a hardened exterior, but an inner fragility, a vague and shifting dreaminess to her that eluded any probes or invitations to elaborate. He had that certain feeling that if he had asked she would anyway have simply lied, not out of malice, but a desire to avoid embroidering upon the past she assumed he had already assumed. There had been mention early on of a vague sort of husband back in a Darwin suburb, one whom it seemed she hadn't seen since she escaped to New York. Tania did appear to know more than he had ever known about his own wife, and she seemed to know everything there was to know about him, but any other continuity with life as he knew it was fragmentary and inconsistent. Her dates didn't quite match up with the facts as he knew them. She occasionally mentioned certain things about Natia—hair-color, men, travels—which Ted knew to be wrong or impossible. To think about it, Tania could easily have been an invention of his own in a less forbidding world, one of those companions lonely children dream up. But in that case he would have manufactured someone who would have made him feel a good deal less ambivalent, less guilty for no apparent reason.

Ted had been so lost in thought that he scarcely noticed at first where he had followed Tania. He seemed to be among the remains of a formal garden or cemetery. It had been overgrown with weeds, now as dead as the flowers they had supplanted; among the weeds were sculptures and dry fountains and birdbaths. Delicate silver-gray vines had wound up and around the stonework and statuary like the wind-scattered webbing of monstrous spiders. There were great glowering gods and goddesses, imported from another land and another epoch, carved in stone that was mossy and decaying under the knottings of the vines; there were satyrs of copper gone green, nymphs of iron gone rust, much tarnished bronze, many streaked and moldy marbles. Angels with clipped wings, cherubs eroded into demons, headless archers, armless athletes, busts of senators with broken noses and gouged cheeks, blinded courtesans holding cracked mirrors: Time had eaten away everything here, gnawing at columns and reducing the colonnade Tania and Ted were walking through to little more than a row of granite stumps. It was humbling to think of all those years gone by, of torsos carved a hundred years before he was born, perhaps a thousand, and now little more whole than their models—and yet the sun shone above and sapphires and jade—dewdrops and bottle-flies—sparkled in the cobwebs between a maiden's fingers; butterflies and dragonflies throbbed on the shoulders of fauns and emperors, swifts nested in the pediment of a lightning-blasted temple. Tania wandered from one crumbling bust to another, patting temples and tweaking ears. Beyond her, a number of poor old couples bickered and laughed among a trash-heap of amputated limbs and broken trellises, discarding orange peels and spitting grape seeds—seen from a distance, living and lifeless became jumbled, and a bandoleon played in the midst of the picnic, as if coaxing the stone to dance. Ted looked up from an illegible marker and found that Tania had hurried on ahead again, though he wasn't sure in which direction. Why was she always in such a rush in a place where she had so few appointments to keep? Trying to see beyond the patterns of bare branches and carved balustrades, he caught a glimpse of a girl striding alongside a row of yews; behind her, before they were both lost amidst the tangle of vines and faces, a much older man in a dark suit was in steady pursuit. An odd little jolt of recognition pricked at his conscience, as if he had seen these people every day at the hotel, but only just now realized it. In an instant the girl was nothing but a glimmer and the man had become a shadow among the shadows. So where in hell was Tania now? He was sure she did this just to annoy him. The best thing, he decided, would be to sit on a bench and wait until she came back to him. Besides, this would be their last day here and he needed more time to think it at all through.

Just thinking through this morning alone was tiring. As usual, rain had come with the dawn, waking him just moments after he'd fallen asleep, or so it had felt. Each night he would dream entirely in the language of music and each morning he was unable to transcribe these works of perfection. The vacuum cleaners in the hall would roar him out of bed, drowning out the lost chord, and he'd be goaded into action by the sheer inhospitality of the place. Tania would be pacing under her hotel's marquee, having been up for hours, too. She'd be wearing one of three similar dresses, each a deceptive shade of white, and her scarf would be white, too. Room service was absurd and the filthy restaurants unthinkable; so as usual this morning they had gone without eating. As usual, not far from her hotel, a hitherto unseen avenue presented itself to them as if it had been designed and constructed during the night—and off they were. The damp air tasted faintly of garlic and the shifting breezes carried snatches of conversations and music, none of it decipherable. Invisible citizens, heard from backstage as it were, chirruped in their birdlike tongue about (Ted could guess) the morning news and love's disappointments. Tania's dress was frequently drifting away from him like the sail of a boat caught in a wayward current as she glided from one doorway to the next—and then by some twist in the path she would be right behind him, squeezing his wrist in her palm and asking him to come take a peek at some hobgoblin under a church's eaves or fallen saint at a crossroads. His pulse invariably would jump under her touch, and he found it hard to know what he was expected to say: "Never met a martyr I didn't like," or maybe, "If I were a gargoyle, I wouldn't show my face in public." "Yes, I know you don't like them," she'd say, and it was as if she knew all his opinions first-hand and not through her sister. Should he ask her more about Natia? Surely she could explain or excuse her sister more than he could. But he wasn't sure he wanted to know more, when he felt she had buried herself alive here years ago, after she had left him for the last time.

Ted tried to remember the one time he had visited his wife here, at some hazy point between their divorce and her death. She had felt it her duty perhaps to demonstrate why she had been so attracted to this place, and she had failed so terribly that with the benefit of hindsight it now seemed like an unconscious plea for help. Talk proved impossible, so days would have to be filled otherwise: spent squeezed into the backs of antediluvian taxis (the lunatic driver cursing other lunatic drivers in any of three languages), herded through rotting museums bursting with the refuse of the ages, posing in the far lower left-hand corner of tarnished facades that looked faintly familiar or historical, and dragged through tortuous miles of stinking marketplace looking for just the right artefact when the real objective should have been remembering where they had left that taxi with its daredevil driver. What a farce it had all been. It struck him as incredible now that this was the same deteriorating city—could it be that all that before had been but a sloppy rehearsal on a half-built stage, and only now (with his tragic actress departed and an understudy more expertly filling in) he was seeing the perfected, completed city? Her shadow had been lifted: The city was no newer, no brighter, yet—and this was ironic—not so anxious, so sad. Since his descent at dawn from the green peaks to the misty airport runway a fortnight ago he had sensed a change. Tania had never been here before—what could she really be making of it all? Since she acted so much like her sister, did she also react to this place in the same way? No—she seemed, without having to say so, to hate it as much as he did.

Over the course of their days here, Tania spoke less and less—for fear of evoking her name, of course—yet they seemed to communicate something of more significance. Often they were content to eavesdrop on streetcorner conversation, when no two persons spoke the same language (or were they all the same, spoken at varying speeds and intensities?). Passersby would, in exchange, turn to catch a bit of the secret language, English, which they alone shared here, even if they spoke only to point out inconsequential flaws in the cityscape. If he ever tried any of his guidebook sayings, the citizens would only nod and smile as if he were a simpleton, or they were, and men who would have whistled at any other pretty woman ignored Tania, looking beyond the both of them as if they simply did not have the right to exist. Not understanding what people said to them at shop counters and not being understood themselves heightened the impression of all this being somehow unreal, a garbled foreign film watched on an out-of-focus screen. Impulsively Ted and Tania could cut to another scene, another street, fading in and fading out. The script was always changing. Signs pointed to nowhere but other signs pointing back; seductive alleyways beckoned, promising to reveal wonder-book hippodromes or aerodromes around the next corner, when often as not they led to the punch-line of a hogpen instead—never mind—another backstreet would call forth, this time with a glimpse of an abandoned lot guarded by a scarecrow (no, a skeletal priest blessing a parishioner's garden) or seashell stairwells which led to stench, sewers. No bother, turn around, retreat, go forward. They held hands sometimes and felt like archaeologists in a perfectly preserved city of the ancients.

Half their last morning here they had allowed themselves to be guided like blind persons, hands tapping one trunk after another, along a tree-lined boulevard which hugged close a sweep of red-dust hills. Tourist-brochure couples strolled between the parenthetic palms, and Ted envied them, wished for once that Tania were here for him and not for sake of her sister. From the back, with her hair done up in a sort of spiral bound with her scarf, she could sometimes... For a moment he was aware of a darker strain playing _pianissimo_ beneath this metronome-steady morning, but he dared not pause to listen too closely and remember—the better to keep walking in time, tap tap tap. These handsome dreamwalking young lovers they passed—what could they be whispering to each other? Why did the words of their languages all sound like the secret code of romance? Surely no one mistook his and Tania's brittle English exclamations for passionate declarations of love. When Natia had come here to start anew she had forsaken both her heritage and her language, striving to express with more ancient words what was inexpressible in English. Her poetry, such as he became aware of it, turned out to make no sense in any tongue.

He remembered the quiet Aussie girl who had seemed so lost in Vancouver, so starved for sun in his beloved overcast Canada. He hadn't realized then that Brisbane and Adelaide hadn't suited her, either. On that campus, undergraduates were known for seducing startled young tutors and vice-versa, but Natia had never been his student, never spoken to him until after one of his rare concerts. It was a small school and authority frightened her, so they did what few bothered to back then: got married. He already had the house; she quit school against his wishes and began her long retreat into isolation.

As a sort of mental souvenir, Ted had kept an immaculate photographic vision in his mind of that lonely house near the bay, the house they'd shared the short time they were married. For a while they practiced at happiness. She would lock herself in the master bedroom at night to concentrate on the one long poem which in her pursuit of perfection she never finished (or perhaps she had at last and that was why she burned it, afraid others would not agree it was perfect and not wishing to begin again). The house was old and sinking into the earth as if for comfort, and its bones, she swore, cried out at as they settled.

She would wear earplugs at night. They blocked the foghorns and his midnight piano, too. Months passed. He would pace the creaking boards of the parlor beneath her, occasionally striking random notes on the old upright, waiting for her to unlock the door and wondering how the house which at first seemed a bit small, too small to contain their clothes and books and bodies and souls, had expanded and expanded like the universe until all the stars and planets could easily fit in and they looked at one another across the dining room table as across a great, great distance. Only late into the night would the door upstairs open, as if on its own, and he would find her fast asleep. When he had given up after she left, when he had locked the many doors and windows for the last time, he had felt that terrible sick feeling one experiences after doing something dreadful, unforeseen and irreversible, like dropping a treasured vase or hitting a dog while driving, and he would not, could not possibly forget.

The park had funneled down between a double row of live oaks, and Ted had caught up with Tania under the green, breathing canopy. She was looking up into the intertwining branches and inhaling the humid, bittersweet smell of fallen leaves and shade. As they walked deeper into the trees it grew darker, as in an arcade, and once again Ted found Tania's hand in his own, the back of her head exchanged for a profile. "Did you see him, too?" she was asking. "That man in mourning clothes back there in the garden? I don't know why, but he scared me."

"I'm not sure what I saw," he said, finding it hard to breathe within the twisting, suffocating trees.

"Someone at the funeral. That awful priest? I tried to see his face, but he disappeared."

"I think he was following a woman."

"No, he was definitely alone."

There was never any use in arguing with her, he knew after all their mornings together. Natia used to—well, there was no sense in constantly comparing her to her sister. They had come out from under the live-oaks into full sunlight as before. For a moment there was the suggestion of a breeze, and the grass here (though still trampled) was abundant; a few weary flower beds had survived daily torrents and relentless heat. They walked on and the greens became greener, fresher, and he knew either the park was changing or he was changing to accommodate the park—a queer notion, it occurred to him, but somehow accurate. The park was unlike any he had ever visited, though he could not say exactly why—there was nothing that extraordinary about it except its size—yet all the parts didn't add up to a recognizable whole. Later he would have to look up its history, find out how it came to be.

The path they had wordlessly chosen led them on like an impatient guide, challenging them to keep up, not permitting them a helpful view. Ted found it difficult to navigate around the trees and puddles and stay out of the mud. He hadn't brought another pair of shoes with him. Tania was several paces ahead again, but in one mirror-shard of water a hand, a woman's hand, waved, wavered, and was gone—a signal from another world, perhaps, or just an optical illusion.

Beyond a stone gallery half-swallowed by a eucalyptus grove, a chain of ponds glinted in the sun like a series of silver coins on a bracelet; willows traced their reflections in the water, and families strolled along the reedy banks, reclining in elegant postures like figures in a painted landscape. A prismatic haze had softened the horizon and in the pointillist sunlight everything slowed down as in a film, moved sleepily, became heavier, denser. Ted motioned to Tania to rest behind a thick curtain of mulberry leaves. He realized he was feeling almost drunk in the heat. It was like a green-shaded room under the tree and he leaned his head back against the trunk to stop the world expanding and whirling within his skull.

The city's rusted thermometers had been rising since earlier that morning when they had left the hillside and its lovers and entered an empty, burned-out district neither recognized—but since everything here was always impersonating another thing they could have passed through this district before from another direction and never have known it. Now, under the mulberry tree, the spinning inside his head slowed, and Ted began following the thread of his thoughts again—what had happened next? It already seemed so long ago, yet it was important to recall, to relate. He remembered an abandoned hair salon's windows and Tania's billowy dress, how it had been splintered and refracted by a dozen discarded mirrors, and then how her white face had multiplied, divided, was seized for a split second and lost again. He caught glimpses of her suntanned neck, a slender wrist and hand, an ear, a sandal strap, her hat (no, not her hat, but a scarf), but nothing connected, added up. It was as if the woman in the mirrors were warning him of something. (He remembered another time in a restaurant watching her watch her reflected image in a water goblet and that grimace transforming her face before she saw the waiter approaching.) Who was she? What use could he possibly be to her? Then he had noticed a mannequin in a shattered shop window opposite them dressed in the same jazzman's priestly black suit he always wore, wearing the same watch, and it was a heartbeat before he realized he was seeing only a reflection of himself, whole and human—Tania suddenly wanted to know the time again (she had left her watch in her hotel bathroom and had already asked five times that morning, as if the plane were leaving any minute) and he gave her the time literally, strapped the watch on her wrist for her and was glad that the act mended her, stuck her back together and made her more substantial.

By then they had begun to notice that most of the shops were closed, leading him to deduce this was either a Sunday or holiday—without daily checks of the calendar in his faraway apartment, he felt cut free from time in the same way an astronaut might feel cut free from gravity. Nothing anchored him to this place, at least not anymore. He would have been content to float free for hours, but Tania was growing uneasy of the vacant streets and burned buildings, so he was relieved when a bus appeared from nowhere and they flagged it down. They found themselves the only passengers, and soon the bus deposited them in another unknown neighborhood, a more inhabited one. Tania led him into the throng of a piazza and debated buying a straw hat but didn't. Instead, Ted bought them both cheap sunglasses from a sidewalk hawker and fruited ices from a wheeled cart. She held her cone away from her dress; it dripped grenadine down her wrist and she licked that, too. A scene he had repeatedly imagined the past few weeks flashed in his brain: his wife, white bathroom tiles, broken glass, her small white hands, her— _stop_. Small children tugged at their clothes but were dismayed by his dull coins with their profiles of an unrecognizable queen. Tania ignored the beggars. A toadlike little dog yipped at their heels: Tania kicked the ugly thing away, something her sensitive sister would never have done—he liked that. The rest of their ices melted away to nothing. She cursed the sun. He liked that, too. And without planning to, or even realizing it at first, Ted and Tania had passed under the forbidding stone arches and through the heavy iron gates of the city's once-famous park.

That seemed hours ago now, but it actually couldn't have been more than a few minutes. At least that weightless, timeless feeling, that pressure on his eyelids from within had lessened a bit. Tania was resting her elbow on his shoulder, and then her forehead, more like a child than a lover might. Her fingers idling in her swept-back hair, she was saying something about the quaint ways people dressed here. It was true—they could have been phantoms from the past, and when a woman in an old-fashioned print dress brushed past their tree and didn't notice them at all, she looked as pale and insubstantial in the noonday sun as a phantom. The woman had been weeping out loud, her face reddened and enraged. Under this tree, peering through the curtain of leaves as she drifted past, Ted felt himself growing heavier and drowsy. He might have fallen asleep completely if Tania hadn't asked just then for a handkerchief. He manifested one for her and she daubed her brow. "Tired?" she said. "No—yes, quite," he said. "That is..." Then they were out from under the boughs. A small gold-plated kite hovered far off in the liquid, amber sky—that would be the sun, and that odd airship on the horizon—it must be a flock of parrots or parakeets soaring on an updraft. "Isn't it peculiar?" he asked—of no one. Tania was already off in the bushes chasing iguanas, something she presumably might like to draw. When had he thrown himself down upon this prickling grass? He closed his eyes against the hypnotic sun and willfully drowned in the heat.

Ted was not sure how much time had passed before he became aware that Tania was at his side again and they were meandering through the pergolas and gazebos of an ornamental rose garden which had become wildly overgrown. Reptilian topiary coiled around bowers and sundials, and great oriental temple bells, as if left in the wake of an ancient tide, sat in beds of incandescent tropical flowers. Under the pressure of the heat he felt like he was walking underwater. The drone of bees, the smothering scent of roses, the lone voice of a weeping woman or a waterfall heard in the distance: This world of the park was growing quieter, more claustrophobic, much much slower, until it seemed the world had wound down like clockwork... nothing left but a nearly subconscious ticking—his watch on Tania's wrist, perhaps, or merely the metronome of his heart.

The maze of green and gold they walked through hummed with invisible life, yet his senses were muted by the humid air and it was easier not to think at all; Tania was speaking of her sister, but it was only words, words to make sense of later. "She was looking for something in this place," she explained, taking up from something she had begun much earlier that morning. "Literally looking, Ted, right? Natia knew it was here—maybe in the center of centers, I don't know. But she knew. I suppose you think she was taking on lovers, but it was more like she was taking on another personality, you know? Once she was here she knew she could never go back there. There's really no explaining why she acted the way she did. And it wasn't just British Columbia or Queensland, it was everything that ever happened to her. She would write me about it, as if I listened any better than anyone else..." Ted was unable to remember a single one of the handful of letters he had received from his wife the entire time he had known her and was more envious than curious of these apparently much longer reports to her sister. All she had ever written him about was the weather. Hot, always. Tania drew a breath and resumed her speech: "She never had that much to say about the travel bureau, right? I guess they treated her fair enough, even if they didn't understand her, either. But she loved this city, I don't know why. It's nothing like her at all, she didn't have a thing in common with this city ... But there was always something different about Natia. I only saw her a few times when we were girls, but she used to frighten me. I was always afraid she'd carry me off somewhere? Not some place, really, but into a past where she'd be happier. Speaking to her was like getting lost in time—her poems were like that, too..."

As she spoke Tania's voice grew uncharacteristically softer and her figure quavered flamelike a moment before his eyes as if she were diminishing back into that mysterious place from which she and her sister had come. Hadn't Australia once been called Terra Incognita? He was feeling faint—she was growing fainter in that white dress of hers and he wanted to hold her, to pull her back from the brink before she fell into that void or vortex in the center of this park. He hadn't reached Natia in time, but... But just when he was nearly able to pick out that dark line of counter-melody, when it was about to swell into a recognizable refrain, Tania looked him in the eyes and was miraculously whole—flesh and blood once again. "Isn't it so?" she was saying. "So—oh, you weren't listening to me. You never do. No wonder my—"

"No, no, really I was. You're right—she had nothing in common with this place—wanted nothing in common. That's why I think she stayed here even after she found it was no cure, no respite from the real world. Yes, it is so." And now that Natia was dead and her few possessions shipped away, he was thinking, there was not a trace of her left in the city. She might never have lived here, or any other place. Even her poems had disappeared. Probably she had burned them. Some deaths create a hole or a wave that ripples slowly outwards, but her life was simply and unceremoniously erased, as if it had never occurred. That's the worst you can ever wish of a person, he thought, to make of them something which had never existed. When she had left the house near the bay it was like that; in his mind she had died twice, or rather, the second time was merely official. When she had vanished from that falling-down house it was as empty and silent as his heart, and there was not an inkling of her left in any room to prove she had ever lived and breathed.

Tania halted before Ted under the umbrella shade of a palm, studying his face for an uncomfortably long moment. "In common?" she repeated a few times, and he wasn't sure if it was a question or a statement. "That's a bizarre expression, if you think of it." She met his eyes once more, stared hard. "We're more alike than you realize," she said flatly. He saw his tiny twins in her glass-green eyes and shuddered despite the heat. Something had nudged his conscience again and was gone—just a shadow, anyhow. When had they emerged from that sunken garden and when had he seated himself on this bench along this path between well-tended flower beds, strange carnivorous-looking foreign flowers? They must have been sitting for some time. Up ahead, above the tops of the trees, something like a giant's suit of armor shone in the sun; he stood, took Tania's hand, and they dutifully walked toward it.

It was a zoological garden of the sort which exists otherwise only in the oldest European cities. Ted was reminded of the great continental zoos his parents had taken him to see as a very young child, before they had fled Austria, so long ago now that all seemed to have been part of his dreams and not his waking life. This was a zoo of spike-tipped bars and dark, crowded cages, of dirty moats and heavy leg-irons. Apes hurled themselves against their bars and screamed as they walked past. Tania insisted on hurrying because, she said, she'd always abhorred primates of any kind—humans, too? he wondered. She probably felt more comfortable around animals long since dead, nicely preserved in jars or mounted on sterilized boards. He wanted to find the lion house, though; maybe all the power and danger of the big cats would enliven him. He thought of asking the way of someone, but never knew which language to try first among these people. Besides, all the people they caught sight of between the dismal rows of cages were somehow unapproachable; they dressed oddly indeed, as if in costume for a period play: whole families right out of a Victorian storybook, starched and laced, with a few darker servants dawdling behind, carrying picnic hampers and beach umbrellas. Children in knickers and pinafores chased balloons and kites, and nannies in capes flew between. "It must be a sort of theme park," Ted told Tania. "I didn't know..."

"If you think of life as a theme park," she said, staring into a tortoise's milky eye and acquiring a philosophical tone, "it's much more bearable, right? No, that was Natia who said that, after going to some dreadful place when we were girls. _They_ only took us to dreadful places. Being older, she wanted to 'impress upon me' certain beliefs, as she put it. She told me once after coming back from some sort of camping disaster that it's better to look upon all pain or joy as illusions, that way you never get too happy or too sad. Too Buddhist? It works, though. I suppose. At least for a while?"

"Why is it you've waited so long to tell me these things about Natia?" he suddenly snapped. "Now, as it is, I can't bear to hear any more..." She didn't even blink. He decided to change the subject. "Besides, it's probably just a movie being made. We better hurry on or we'll spoil it." It was his turn this time to show the way.

They halted momentarily before an unusual sort of primitive horse with zebrine stripes on its haunches, a beast Ted was almost positive he had never seen beyond the pages of his favorite old book of wonders. Was it ... an okapi? No, that was something else. Tania might know—but she was leaning over the tarnished plaque outside the cage, so he in turn leaned over her; he could smell her sunlit hair wound up above her suntanned neck—an unfamiliar perfume (still, it evoked a stronger sense of—was it or wasn't it?— _loss_ than he had felt all this fortnight together). He bent closer, breathing shallowly, trying to recall his gymnasium Latin but too confused by his interfering conservatory Italian and this new scent for the plaque to make any sense before it faded off into worn lettering and longer, incomprehensible words. _Iqwara_? Of the veldt? Tania had anyway jumped up and darted down the path between gazelles and flamingos, as elegant and slender as either—had she felt his breath too long on her neck?

He passed strangely silent animals of all kinds, but noticed only their twitching, searching eyes in his preoccupation with a past suddenly reborn within him, memories which he was trying his best to forget, or at least subdue—if it weren't for the confounding nostalgia of a pretty nothing of a tune ground out by an old-fashioned organ-grinder on the flagstones (large glass-green macaw with tin cup instead of the usual monkey, a ragged urchin turning the handle), a melody soon augmented, then overpowered by a choir of a thousand birds. They had come to an aviary made of wrought-iron, a fantastic one like a vastly oversized canary cage of the belle époque; one walked right into it and amidst the whirling carousel blur of all the birds: bright brash jungle birds which barked and howled and screeched and stammered as if dawn were breaking on the first day of the world. Miniature waterfalls bubbled down mountainsides of painted alabaster, with palms and pools and white stone maidens among ferns and quartz gravel; the dense, swoon-invoking scent of gladioli and honeysuckle hung in the damp air. A ruby-red finch alighted on Ted's shoulder, as if to whisper something, and took off again. For a moment Tania seemed to be ascending wondrously like a medieval saint (center of a triptych) within the midst of a flock of snow-white cockatoos taking flight (left and right panels) and he felt that despair which he had been evading for days overtake him and hold him in a choking grip. He had become familiar with the stalking shadow, knew its nuances and subtle tricks but until now he had not given into its demands. (There Natia was again before him: brushing her hair in a vanity mirror, a fleeting, almost subliminal grimace crossing her face before she realized he was watching, too.) Of course, it was all her anguish, not his really, this empty and futile emotion which had saturated her short, embittered, broken life, and it was very selfish of her indeed to leave him with nothing but what ruined her. That was always her way—"Stop!" he told himself, possibly aloud.

At that an iridescent dove shrieked in his face, unfurling the indigo-black rainbow of its wings and dancing threateningly up and down its perch. Another bird spread the lyre of its tail-feathers with a melodious croak, flushing several pairs of smaller hen-like creatures (wearing conquistador helmets of gold with blood-red plumes plumped for maximum effect) that as one dived to the ground, and a few more doves wobbled across the black sphagnum in their slightly tattered sequins as dowagers would across a ballroom. "Birds of paradise?" Tania said in that girlish, inquisitive voice that was not hers alone. Ted had never seen many of these specimens other than stuffed and mounted, even in those German and Swiss zoos of his earliest youth. Tania, used to preserved specimens but not the living things, was giddily naming all the varieties she could one by one while they swirled around her, as if identifying them from a guide book—lesser, greater, middling, including one or two species which she claimed were extinct everywhere else. But whenever he looked twice he lost the bird in doubt among the flitting, twittering prisms of plumage (he thought: like trying to catch a sparkling melody that lights before you and is gone before you can jot it down). She must have drawn many of these creatures in her museum. Her fingers swished through the air fast as bird wings, describing this, detailing that as if she were drawing on the air with a pencil. And he was nearly overpowered with a desire to kiss those perfect, expert fingers.

When they emerged from the aviary—a pigeon Tania said the zoo-keepers had dyed to resemble a passenger pigeon flapping stupidly across their path—Ted sensed they had wasted a lot of time in the zoo and that it was getting dangerously late before a quick check of Tania's wrist confirmed the fact; they would have to find their way back very soon if they were not to miss their appointments at the airport at sundown. A field on the other side of the zoo seemed to be a playground for half-naked children—a good sign, because it indicated houses and streets might be near. Instead, the landscape grew wilder and weedier with renewed vigor and the narrow path under their feet bisected and then trisected itself into little more than what resembled deer trails. In the depths of the forest they found stairs cut into a hill, most likely an overgrown fort. No time to explore—farther on they crossed a ravine on a rope bridge of the sort an aborigine might make; Tania nearly stumbled and had to grasp Ted by the shoulder half-way across. "Look! Down there!" she shouted in his ear. "Isn't it that man again, the one in black? Are we following him or is he following us?"

Ted saw only a flash of white between the trees—a dress or scarf. They hadn't seen another adult to ask the way since they had left the apes in their cages behind—back there somewhere, or maybe just a little way ahead. But when they called out, no one answered and it was impossible to tell which way the figure or figures had gone through the trees. They'd been walking for twenty minutes through these woods, but it was too soon, wasn't it, to admit they were lost? Ted thought of a skein of yarn, of bread crumbs, talking crows to guide the way too late. Tania frowned. If she were anything at all like her sister, then she was blaming him. They wound through thick dark prehistoric trees, twisting through another knot in the trail, and the sun whirled in the sky this way and that like a gyroscope—impossible latitude, incredible season. "It's a very large park, isn't it?" he attempted by way of excuse.

"You can't believe we're still in the park?" Tania's hair, he saw, had fallen to her shoulders, her scarf undone, lost.

"We must. The park is in the center of the city. We're in one or the other. I don't see any buildings through those trees, do you?" As he spoke there was a thumping in the underbrush and a silver-white pheasant or grouse shot up from the ground before them, and close behind ran a naked archer, quiver bolstered to his back. The archer leaped past them swift as the shadow of the bird. "Say!" Ted hollered, immediately feeling a little foolish but too surprised to think of pursuing the naked man to ask directions; after all, this wasn't your typical streetcorner encounter. The archer was there and gone so quickly he might have been nothing more than a figment, a silhouette which had passed for a second across the screen in a movie theater. "We're seeing things," Tania stated conclusively, although she had in fact jumped aside and scratched her ankles on some thorns.

"It's a backwards country," Ted tried to explain. "And I'm a long way from my little bay with its islands and pines."

"I couldn't count the miles to New York—or Adelaide. It's like America or Australia never even existed. Or won't for another thousand years. Amusing thought?" She looked at him, green eyes turned verdigris in the leafy shade. She was definitely more angered than humored this time.

There was a fork in the trail ahead, they discovered, with bare human footprints in the soil, though the prints led in each direction. Ted produced a Canadian quarter—tails meant left, right for our monarch's gentle visage, as he put it. Tania volunteered to flip the coin, but when she did it landed in the brambles somewhere—five prickly minutes later they still hadn't found it and ended up laughing despite themselves. "Heads or tails we're lost," Ted admitted. Tania had already chosen the left path, anyway, because it led away from sun into shade. After they had walked for another fifteen minutes they began to realize the seriousness of their predicament. Their bags remained unpacked in their hotel rooms, they would need time to bathe and change, taxis would be waiting for them, and pilots would be glancing at their watches outside the international terminal.

There was nothing Ted could think of to say to set things right; this was as awkward as when they had first met at the city hall. (He remembered that across the marble steps she appeared to be laughing to herself, as if he were the object of a private joke shared by the sisters, one that had survived death and distance.) The trail was growing rockier, harder to see, and steeper as well, at times almost lost in the underbrush, at other times making demands to climb acute hills and descend slippery banks. The park was hushed by the late afternoon heat; clouds had assembled in corners of the sky and no doubt would make a coup. Rain would be the last thing they'd need. Eventually, however, the forest began to exhaust itself and thin out along the edges of a plateau where the earth was more solid and trees gave way to slender grasses and prairie flowers, almost alpine in appearance. The opposing landscape was flat beneath the blue-gray sky, with broad brush strokes of pampas grass running right up to the edge of the visible world and then stopping, or rather, held back by the weight of the leaden sky pressed against the horizon—an unsettling, two-dimensional perspective like those Ted had seen in museum dioramas. They could make out no hint of a city skyline in any direction. On the slope of a granite outcropping covered with pictographs somehow too fresh to have been left by a prehistoric tribe Ted took in a long breath and removed his sunglasses. The world went flat and colorless as a newspaper photo. He knew he must be reflecting Tania's serious expression. Since they had spent so much of the past two weeks exploring the city like lost souls in a new neighborhood of purgatory, they were fairly well-acquainted with maps and routes back to their hotels—maps reproduced on streetcorner signs, on subway walls, in travel guides. However huge, the city's design was simple—roundish in shape, mounted like a gemstone on its mesa, crisscrossed by straight modern avenues except for a cobweb of narrow and winding roads—alleys, actually—in the oldest district; and on every one of these maps, the largest and possibly only park they remembered (usually printed a vivid green) lay somewhere, if not exactly, in the middle of the city—an axis, the central facet of the jewel. That park on the map was only so large, however, and no matter which direction you went in it, you would have to much sooner than later come upon the blue and red lines of the city streets. It was impossible to be truly lost within such a well-defined, contained area. But Tania had another theory.

"Suppose," she said, "that instead of going straight in any one direction we've just been going around in circles? I mean, in some sort of spiral?" They had descended the lip of the plateau and were walking slowly through the tall, waving pampas grass, a few feet apart. "You know?" she continued, turning back to him. "A spiral—we started out at the very edge, or end—I mean, beginning. So gradually we've been circling, but getting closer and closer to its center, or end. Or whatever?"

What was meant to be a laugh sounded more like a cough. "Ridiculous," he said. He was trying to keep closer without walking faster, but it was hard to locate her through the grass. There was mingled in the sagelike scent of the grass a faint odor of her hair, now that it was blowing free in the wind, toward his face. "Besides, a spiral, geometrically speaking, probably can't be considered to have either a beginning or end, like any line or circle. Or both in one. A round in music, you know." He was afraid he was starting to sound the way he did in his classes.

"Well, then, it's a trick," Tania insisted. "Or some type of funhouse ride, or something even stranger. How do you know what it is? You haven't been following a score, or whatever it is you jazz fellows do. Musical metaphors are tiresome, you know?"

"This isn't a maze or infinite labyrinth or what-have-you. It's no metaphysical merry-go-round. It's simply a park. A city—a public park. We read all about it, nothing more special than a colonial cathedral somewhere. Perfectly usual, I remember seeing old pictures in my kiddy books. Cars are probably honking right beyond this field. People right over there—" They stopped and turned to each other. Tania was biting her bottom lip, so hard it had turned white. He knew it was a tic of hers when she was upset, just the sort of thing her sister might have done, though he couldn't recall Natia ever doing just that. Tania looked frailer again in the afternoon light, not at all the solid, strong, sun-bronzed woman he had met at her hotel that morning. _Diminuendo_ —diminishing decrescendo: words that came to mind. Tiresome musical metaphors! As if the park had somehow not so much reduced her as sparked a subtle transformation within her, or his perception of her. Could he be changing, too?

"Well, nothing else makes much sense," she told him, very solemnly, lip nearly bruised. "Don't laugh at me. She told me how—" Tania looked away. "Oh, don't listen to me, either. I'm so hungry and so tired and haven't even settled all the bills." Her sudden sigh became a yawn. They were on rising ground, moving heavily as if under heavy loads. Tania's narrow hips swayed before Ted (she had quickly gained several paces on him) and from the back, he thought—"You're right," she was saying, almost as if to herself. "A spiral doesn't have an end. No end at all?" As she spoke, too much like her sister now for him to bear, she flickered before him like a guttering candle-flame, then faded and reappeared before his eyes, now less like a flame and more like those ghosts on his hotel room's television set—he could see right through her and he thought: She does not exist, never did, never did exist. The refrain could easily build into an hysterical fugue... he would have to consciously beat it down before it wore away on its own. Never did, never did... All the time, the scent of her hair tormenting him, that old song her sister had loved played on that bronchial organ. Metaphors.

He knew he had to say more to counteract her spell—or the park's. "There is an end to everything, nongeometrically speaking," he amended himself, partly just to keep from wildly kissing the back of her neck. She continued to appear and reappear within the tall obstructing grass, always ahead of him, losing him. "We'll leave here, if not tonight, tomorrow!" he called after her. "And we're not lost—see, right over there, we'll see the city again. I promise you!"

She was already at the edge of another woods, on the bony ridge of another promontory, looking out into the wind as if she were the figure on the prow of a sailing ship. "Where are your cars, your buildings, your people now?" she demanded. He could see now that the land ahead sunk away from them on all sides and the scarred slopes of a ancient mountain range slunk down unevenly into the folds and furrows of valleys and canyons. The fluted blue funnel of a volcano (which must have been the dormant one usually shrouded in the smog of surrounding suburbs) rose above the roiling jungle canopy, and the volcano was awake, spouting a tower of steam like a monolithic land-bound whale. "I wish I'd never come, I'd never seen this damned city," Tania said, her voice strained between fright and fatigue. "And now there's no city to see, nothing human at all—I'd like to just, to just..." Her voice failed her as she stood in the wind on the summit, her dress whipping around her knees, and again he felt that intense desire which had come over him in the rose garden—to hold her back, whether it was from the precipice or the return flight to the hinterlands of Australia, the outback or wherever she really came from. What could she expect from him? A guaranteed divine assumption? Far below them, grazing in a shallow green crater, she turned her gaze to some unusual species of quadruped, a herd of a special park breed of antelope or aurochs which (through some mistake in the perspective) appeared monstrous by any present-day standards. The animals huddled tensely together, the sharp sound of their oversized horns rattling against one another like sabers echoing throughout the darkening canyon. Apparently they were aware of the intruders' presence hundreds of feet above. "Trespassers in paradise," Ted remarked.

Tania had seated herself on a boulder at the height of the bluff. He couldn't tell if she were crying or merely trying to catch her breath in the wind. With intense concentration on her face, she combed back the lank wet hair from her forehead with the two longest fingers of her left hand—a small, seductive gesture which Ted had seen Natia perform a thousand times. Unusual, but not so unusual, he considered—most sisters have a great deal more in common. "In common..." Could it be true—yes, it was true—that he was beginning to regret the fact that Tania would be leaving him for good in a few hours, even if she were a constant reminder of that low, murmuring pain in his chest, somewhere toward the center of his heart. Ted moved closer, took her waist as if to balance her on the stone, and she did not resist, but arched her sun-burnt neck away from him. (Did she want him to kiss her throat? Did she want him to kiss her here, now?) Natia had once tried to teach him how she cleared her mind before diving into a poem, but when he tried sending his thoughts into a patch of blank sky, the sadness, he realized, would not loosen its clench-hold on him. The past had not been something after all which it was possible to banish through an irrevocable, irrational act. Natia had left him with the world she had so willfully erased. As if through a pair of cheap but cheerful sunglasses he had seen his own life before the telegram and phone-calls as gilded, wantonly and stupidly happy, when it had not been so perfect or unique at all, though everything had been in its place—his renewed bachelorhood, his tutoring, the free-form and fusion that amplified what it felt like to be alive, and most of all Natia's convenient slip-away into the anonymity of another, far-away city. Not much chance of a casual meeting when you're several thousand miles apart, or need for any more than a vague understanding that the other was somehow doing all right. Only now, now that his relationship with her would henceforth be in the past tense, did he wish he could, he could have... Well, have taken _care_ at least to mind the small things, the most insignificant things, yes, to mind them. Larger, more serious things take care of themselves, one way or another... This was how the pattern of his despair went, Ted knew from past experience: the stab of remembrance, the contorted resentments and remorse, and the quick, quiet resolve to stop stop stop thinking about it all before—before whatever—now and forever more amen. Like a set of chords learned by rote, complete with notations on where to emphasize this shard of pain and where to briskly proceed to other sorrows. Just saying "stop" would not be enough now. There was no way to stop now or forget now—and this was no easy resignation. He bent over Tania's exhausted, emotionless face, bent closer.

How long had they kissed? At least until Tania's unreal face had escaped him like childhood's lost balloon, at least until she had released his wrist from hers and immediately dissolved into the trees and the green shade became black and still. He followed, crying out her name, and wondered if it were even possible that he had really kissed her—or perhaps it was her shadow he had kissed? She was running, he knew that. He saw the comedy: nymph pursued by haggard satyr. The nymph was capable of metamorphosing into mottles of sunlight on cyclamen or a startled swarm of flying ants—Tania slipped in and out of sight so adeptly it wasn't long before he lost her entirely. The satyr was an old fool. In his ears he remembered a few of the words to that organ's ditty: "Like a breeze I come and go, like the past I'm both near and far..." Maudlin melody, worse words. He tripped and took a slapstick fall face-first in the mud.

After that Ted could no longer position himself in the flow of time—if there had been such a thing as time up to that point (or at least that illusion of day-to-day living Ted recognized as time). He felt washed downstream in the flood of hours, minutes, seconds, futilely trying to buck the current, the rapidly dying afternoon ( _diminuendo_ —of a mournful scale played over and over until it evaporates into nothingness). Clouds obscured his watch crystal of sky, promising more rain. And more rain fell. There was no trace of footprints—the underbrush here was too dense and Tania was too quick, unpredictable and deerlike in her sudden movements and changes of direction. Ted felt himself being pulled down into the canyon as if by an unseen hand. He tried to orient himself by following a slender riverbed which threaded and unthreaded itself between limestone cliffs; just beneath the crest where they had been standing he had seen the river and along its banks he discovered something which was probably nothing more than an eroded passage, though it was Tania's most likely route. This trail faltered through the rainforest and across broken terrain, only to confuse itself in a thicket of rhododendron near where he had begun. Much later he stumbled upon prints which may have been left by her sandals—though the ground was soft there and they may have been a bear's or other large animal's; they went a quarter of a kilometer and then dissolved in muck. Ted called for her until his voice weakened into a whisper, but she had simply dematerialized, or more precisely, blown apart like a thistle in the wind, drifting in every direction at once: all these sub-Tanias who he then saw at nearly every bend in a canyon wall or turn in a valley and always at the vanishing point in his ever-changing perspective. None of these Tanias, however, lasted any longer than an eyeblink, and because of his crazed chase in the rain he was even more thoroughly bewildered than when they had been on the summit, unable to guess north or south, east or west. "Vanishing points!" he muttered to himself. "I'll say!" Exhaustion enraged him and he cursed her and all else although he could not hear his own hoarse words above the increasing downpour. Doubtless she had been a bit angry at him and maybe rightly so, but she had not protested when he had kissed her ( _if_ he had kissed her at all) and nothing else he had said or done warranted this degree of behavior. He must seem like an old man to her, but surely she had been testing him. Just like her sister: the phrase was all too readily available.

Still he forced himself on, through this meadow, this bog, this swamp, this slough, this—wherever he was, nothing was like any place he'd ever been before. The park crew (for in his wild weariness he never let go of the notion that he was still traveling within the confines of a municipal park) must have spent decades researching, planting, and landscaping this area to achieve such primeval effect. Ted felt as if he had been stranded on another planet, one which lagged far behind ours in evolutionary matters: tree ferns gesticulated at the chemically blue spaces between retreating clouds, while sleek emerald-green lizards darted in the twilight, snapping at birdlike dragonflies and metallic scarabs that buzzed and clicked like evil little machines; unblinking eyes first, huge leathery amphibians emerged from the quagmire, yawned slowly with toothless pink mouths, and submerged again. Tania—the one, authentic Tania among a false, fragmented set—he might have given up to eternity (or at least to an angry letter to come in a few weeks) if it were not for his fear that she might have fallen somewhere near from a serpent's bite, or was at that moment thrashing in quicksand. He would have to brave muck and mosquitoes, the whole dismal region to find her, though already it was almost too dark under the trees to see. (The equatorial sun, for all its fierceness, tumbled down the heavens with alarming speed, extinguishing itself in a mountaintop lake; the world got dark and cool in an instant, and the stars were a mad jumble.) He would find her though his feet were ballasted with mud and he hadn't eaten since yesterday and he felt tired enough to drop into the nearest pond like a fat salamander and fall fast asleep. Now and then he checked his wrist, but he'd lost his watch, hadn't he? It would be nightfall soon—already the shadows were playing more complex games with him: He thought he saw enormous sluglike creatures hoisting themselves out of the swamp, giant centipedes winding around the scaly trunks of cyclades and cypress knees, lianas suspended from overhanging boughs turning into pythons which flicked their tongues and hissed in his face. He impulsively struck at one with a stick, but it was only a hideous, carrion-scented orchid. He halted in a clearing, looking up into luminous coral-like clouds smothering the sunset. Maybe, he thought, there was no use in going on. Tania was lost as lost is lost... She might never have been with him at all; she might have spent the whole day reading magazines in her hotel's lobby. She might never have flown here. He might have been dreaming her, perhaps even this place, all along. That idea, however ridiculously simple-minded, did not surprise him; he must have been considering it for some time. Despite the initial shock and aftershock he had not felt any real change in his version of the world (the world he had been so carefully constructing all his life, note by note, as it were) since Natia had killed herself, but maybe things were different now and anything—death, illusions, madness—was possible. The way things had been after that final night in their house three years ago when she had threatened him and then herself and things had fallen apart and fallen away without a sound, in impenetrable silence. Certainly something had been altered since morning, this life transposed, and already the old world of hotels and taxis and calendars and Tania the shy sister in her white dresses seemed a shallow memory, just the opening act for the main feature which was about to begin.

In the last few minutes of daylight he finally reached higher, drier ground again: a flat, even plain, treeless and vast, an obsidian lava-flow speckled with lichens, over which no creatures roamed and no birds swooped or sang. This must have been the wilderness Adam saw when the flaming sword was held to his back. Without his having walked far, the rest of the park, the mountains, valleys, meadows, jungle, swamps—had disappeared from Ted's sight; he could turn in any direction and see only this endless black expanse glittering here and there with moonlike mirrors—small, perfectly round rain-pools, within which tiny, twitching monsters swirled and grasped each other with delicate silken antennae. The sough of the thin cool air in and out of his lungs filled his ears and he could hear the timepiece in his chest, it was that quiet, the sky so cloudless and windless (blue-black at one horizon and bronzed at the other) that it was like the perfect sky of a perfect dream and he forgot about Tania; she vanished from his mind as freely as she had vanished into the forest countless kilometers back. Instead he felt as if he were walking again through the bare quiet rooms of that house he was leaving after the failed year of his marriage (a house now unfathomably deep and cold and empty), on an evening when all the doors and windows had been bolted against the horrors of a summer night and his wife had already gone away and he was entirely entirely alone, the only person in the known world. It was good to feel this resigned, Ted decided, this welcome to whatever might happen next...

The distant watchface of the sun hung over the edge of the world. Immeasurable distances gave way beneath his heavy feet and along with them the hard black horizon, until he reached a place where stone dissolved into sand, glassy sand which footsteps had certainly never marred—in an instant that watch in the sky was pocketed, and cold bright starlight now revealed, as if a curtain had been pulled back in a window of that vast house he had left years before, a silver shimmer of surf which broke against a barren, endless seashore. As he walked through the dunes, he was more and more aware of his heartbeat dropping and the blood rising and falling through his veins—either that or the pulse and shush of the ocean itself, like the memory of a slowly repeating minor scale, up and down, up and down, muffled, dampened, _continuo_ , _adagio_ , _diminuendo_... He would walk this way in the dark, the dark of that house, until he could locate by its gleam not that glassy moon shattered into a sliver on the horizon but the crescent of reflected light on a crystal doorknob ... and he'd pause there, take a breath, force that last locked door. And then? Then she would be there, she was there, it was no surprise at all; he knew she would be there all along—up ahead, the familiar viola-shaped back of a sitting woman, hair done up in a spiral, skin white as pearl in the night. The dark keys played. She began to arch her neck as he approached, walking across these creaking floorboards toward the shining water, under the spilled coin-purse of all those watchful stars, all these unknown constellations.
The Wreck

###

Light and darkness, Tom, maybe that's all it's a matter of—trying to find just a narrow shaft of sunlight, say, to have a little bit of faith in. With light, hope. The world is filled with so much darkness—every day it seems like they're painting more of the globe black and all these candles are going out. I'm not talking about big things like war or famine; I'm not trying to be profound. Maybe, though, I'm confusing you as much as I confuse myself and this is no way to begin.

Tom, listen, I'm not a strong man, not really, and you know that. I'm no Hercules on the inside where it counts, where it takes real steel-lined guts. And you know there are some things I can tell you that I can't seem to be able to tell anyone else, even Linda. I mean, I would tell her, but she wouldn't follow me the way you do. Oh, she'd listen all right, and seriously, with eyes locked on mine like she was watching a special report on the ten-o'-clock news, but after I was done she'd just cough a little and tell me to stop it and probably lead me off to bed. Anyway, I've already tried. But now I need someone who knows me almost better than I do myself, because I want to tell you about why I didn't make it last week after I called. I want to tell you about the wreck, though it isn't really the wreck that stopped me and it really isn't just the wreck I want to tell you about. After all, the wreck wasn't even my fault, so why do I feel so funny about it now? You're a smart guy, you've read more books than I ever heard of—maybe you can figure it out.

Last week, after I called you from my room at the Oasis, I must have soaked up half the Wild Turkey because something knocked me out for a quite a spell. You know I'm not exactly dainty, but I've never been a drinker, never could handle it or that bad-medicine aftertaste. Weak stomachs run in my family. I don't know exactly how long I slept, since I'd lost my watch somewhere, but when I woke up sick to my stomach it was already getting dark outside. It was just the ghosts on the broken TV and the black-velvet clowns on the wall watching me while I upchucked in the bathroom, and, Christ, was it depressing. I was wondering if Linda had gone to bed early and if she was expecting me to call her and if I'd be able to make it to Hannibal before you went on midnight shift.

So I left whatever was left of the whiskey to those god-awful clowns, paid my bill, and took off. I watched the plastic palms around the motel sign fade away in my rear-view mirror and turned on the radio to some therapeutic Muzak, waiting room stuff. Funny, I was waiting, but I didn't know what for then. My forehead throbbed a little, but the fresh air made me feel pretty good, sobered me up quick. The night lay out before me wide-open like the map I'd taped to my dashboard. You know there's nothing that used to excite me more than some night-driving. Cutting upcountry to the outskirts of Muscatine or over to Oquawka or down to the taverns in Nauvoo... When I was eighteen—hell, when I was eighteen you were right there with me, Tom.

I say "night" even though this time of year it seems to take hours before all the light's been drained out of the sky. Still, I knew it was going to be one of those clear July nights when almost every star in the sky is visible. Do you remember all the constellations? Linda does and she's always making a big deal out of it—"There's Orion and over there's the Scorpion and there's the Statue of Liberty," getting funny. Anyway, the wind rushing through the windows sent a chill through me that would keep me good and awake. It was like the day was just beginning and all that earlier with Linda had been a dream. The traffic on 61 was heavy, so I was a little testy after all—I'd almost forgotten it was the long holiday weekend. As soon as I crossed the river south into Missouri I saw all the same old ramshackle booths strung with their patriotic red, white, and blue light bulbs. Fireworks for sale! (In another month it'll be watermelon and sweet-corn.)

Right off, the traffic became bumper-to-bumper as cars pulled onto the grading on each side of the road and others lurched out onto the highway. I slowed way down and joined the procession; it might have been a funeral. There were sunburned farm families under the cottonwoods, haggling over last-minute deals and loading whole crates into back seats and trunks; fat women sat in rickety old chairs outside the booths, slapping gnats and hee-hawing at the geezers in their overalls. The night was noisy as New Year's with horns and hollering and firecrackers machine-gunning the cornfields.

Then you would have sworn the sky was cracking in two: There was this group of farm-boys huddled under the trees who sent something sailing over the highway—a cluster of cherry bombs, I guess, that exploded pow-pow-pow over the stream of traffic. My foot instinctively slammed down the brake pedal and my old truck swerved to the left, nearly side-swiping a van coming down the other lane. More horns and teenage laughter. Damn kids, I said aloud, damn funny joke! Highway 61 is too narrow and crowded for that kind of horse-shit horseplay.

I was glad when the cars ahead accelerated again—flat fields stretched out all around me, racing out from the center of my map, and I could breathe free. Then, as I was gaining on wide-open highway, another horn sounded and a jacked-up Trans-Am squealed its tires and blasted past, belching sparks and smoke; a burst of guitars filled the countryside for a moment before a deeper darkness and the rush of wind closed around me like a black suede glove. An empty beer can rattled across the road and that was it. More damn kids. It hardly seems possible that we're only a few years older than them, when it's like a whole new scary generation—"the generation of the damned apocalypse," Linda says about the kids who bug her at the mall. Remember when we were seventeen, the big bicentennial year when the president spoke in the town park and you and I and Linda crossed the bridge to get drunk before the sun went down on the Fourth? Seventeen, drunk, and the whole summer to waste. Nothing's free like that anymore, but just as well, I suppose.

The waiting-room music was starting to make me itchy, the way waiting for the dentist can make you feel, so I switched the radio over to the Carthage station, where they were playing that old song about goin' down the Mississippi way down to New Orleans well hey hey hey now. With the swifter, surer traffic beyond the border, I could afford to sink back into my seat and sing along. In a minute or so I was in Alexandria, where there's that one solitary gas station. The place has that sad displaced feeling roadstops lit up bright and ominous against the night sky always have, with crickets drilling in the weeds and the only other sound the electric sizzle of bugs flying into those ultraviolet traps: zing zing zing. Lonely as hell.

The attendant, this crazed-looking greaser-type, a kind of ghost-of-Elvis all in white with this big Lucky Tiger pompadour falling into his eyes, sidestepped over to my truck and (seeing the telltale green plates, of course) tilted his cap and offered fireworks "real cheap." Elvis said, "We got your black betties and M-80s and Chinese jinxes and the works. Can't get 'em in Iowa!" First I shook my head, but then thought what the heck and went into the office, where I paid for something like a Roman candle along with the gas. Years have passed since we last set these things off together and our moms would yell, "You're gonna lose an eye!" Right? Maybe later I'd say happy birthday to the land of the free with you in Hannibal, I was thinking. No moms around to chase us.

That is, if I got there before you went off to work. With most of my unemployment paycheck gone, I'd have to pull over to the side of the road and sleep in the cab if you weren't there to guide me to where your new place is. Or I could just keep driving all night, no telling where I might end up. About four months ago when I was first laid off and Linda couldn't see why it wasn't my fault, I drove nonstop for hours like I was on some teenage high and wound up halfway to St. Louis before I came to my senses.

A shortcut through Alexandria would lead me to that first-gravel, then-asphalt road that cuts across country to Hannibal in half the time. (Like the back of my hand, Tom... ) Alexandria itself is the same old big nothing, or less—not much more these days than a cluster of tar-paper shacks and run-down trailers rusting away in the river bottoms. Half the houses seem to be boarded up or abandoned—the commercial fishermen left years ago, along with my grandfather—and blocks of town look empty as the fairgrounds after the circus leaves; the few houses with yellow-lit windows were strangely quiet for a big holiday weekend. The town is downright depressing and it's stunk up awful with dead fish. Under the only streetlight around for miles there were these two teenagers sitting smoking cigarettes, ugly fat girls, busy slapping the Mormon flies that rained down on them from the electric light, and laughing so hard together they didn't even notice my pickup pass. The girls in northern Missouri have this special high-pitched drawl I'm sure you've grown to love: "Go ta hay-ell!" I could hear the prettier ugly girl say as she pinched a fly between her fingers. "Ta hay-ell!"

Farther up the street a gang of ten-year-olds turned white as ghosts before my brights; they were night-crawler hunting, armed with flashlights in a muddy lot they somehow seemed to float a few inches above. Spooky sight. They were too busy to pay any more attention to me than those girls had. One boy did dart his beam over my windows as I rolled past the lot, but it went right through me and I had this peculiar feeling again that I was somehow invisible in one of those cities of the dead, where volcanic ash or floodwater had swept over the place centuries ago and left it frozen in time. Like Pompeii in history books—that's it. I just drifted through the rest of the dead town and brought the truck to a stop at the levee, where I hopped right out and ran across the sand to the rolling Mississippi, the only thing that felt alive there. Cottonwood fleece drifted through the air around me and accumulated on the sand like snow or ashes.

The beach was still as sleep. The closest lights were the yellow porch bulbs of some cabins several hundred yards down the shore. The water was black as the sky and reflected all the stars; water and sky merged at some unseen horizon, and there I was smack in the middle. Feeling the power and presence of the river at night makes me feel good and clean and strong; it always has. You've floated on your back in the river, too, swept along like a log by the current—you know how you wonder if it might be possible to fall asleep that way and wake up days later in the Gulf of Mexico? Someone, probably Linda with her ultra-scientific mind, once told me the river went right on flowing out in the ocean, this ribbon of fresh water winding through the salt. The current might even cast you ashore on one of those Caribbean paradises the cruise ships pass by, a long way from this tired old Midwest.

So I dreamed a little and had a good piss in the sand and buttoned my jeans. Maybe Linda is wrong (I was already starting to write you this letter in my head); it's easier somehow to believe that the river ends just past St. Louis (the farthest south I've ever been) and just drops off into nothing—the way old map-makers used to picture the seven seas until they found out the world was round. I turned from the beach and picked up a twisted piece of driftwood from the sand, breathed in the fishy air one last time, and threw the wood at a barge sliding around the bend before I climbed back over the levee toward my truck. Off in the town, a string of porch lights blinked off, right on cue.

The sloughs and swamps gradually gave way to higher ground and cleaner air, that kind of moist green air you smell above a cornfield. Too much quiet, though—I wanted music. Out on the narrow county roads, under a clear sky and miles from other cars and towns and stop signs, where the land is rolling and cut up into endless rows of corn and soybeans, it's easy to tune in a radio to just about anyplace. I whirled the knob, picking up snatches of Spanish and French, northern nasality and southern twang, before settling on our old favorite, KAAY out of Little Rock. It was a nostalgia weekend and they were playing some long-forgotten teenybopper lament. When I first met Linda in tenth grade, we would sneak up to the attic of her house and tune in disco and rock and roll out of Arkansas on what we called our "secret agent" radio, partly because it had these funny old-fashioned tubes that glowed red like cat-eyes in the dark. We'd listen and smoke cigarettes, straining to see each other, counting on touch and whispers. You know, I haven't thought of that radio or that attic in years. The smells—the musty carpet-roll we lay on, the tobacco, Linda's tenth-grade dime-store perfume—are strong as ever somewhere here in my head. You never forget anything, do you? Eventually I lost the feeling—the truck radio crackled from the pressure of heavy metal and the memory and the smells blew away with the wind. The station got lost, too, under static and a country preacher. But I wanted to call the memory of that attic back if I could, so I wound the illuminated marker on the dial down to where there was nothing but dead empty silence. Other thoughts came instead.

In my mind I'd charted a very clear map of where I was, all the towns nearby brightly marked, towns with ancient names taken from ancient maps. History was always my best subject in high school, after all, and I can still remember a lot of it—mostly useless trivial things about the Nile or Napoleon, but a few good facts, too. If I ever can afford to go back to college, I'm always telling Linda, I'll be sure to take classes where they pull down nice big maps over the blackboard. Really, it's easy to picture any place in your mind when you know maps. At night on roads like the one I was on, you can imagine yourself to be some sort of mythical runner thundering across this fantastic ruined landscape out of science fiction—let those grain elevators be royal tombs and that silo can be your tower to the stars. My brain had been buzzing with weird thoughts of every kind that night. See, Tom, in the dark in the middle of the night you can believe in anything.

At first it looked like the distant sun-splash of a motel pool, or heat waves bending light into a mirage above the asphalt, not more than a few hundred yards up the road. But the pool didn't open up and expand as I bore down on it—it grew sharper instead and burning ash, not water, seemed to scatter across the road and grading. By the time I floored the brake it was almost too late.

Shattered glass lay glinting silver and gold like holiday tinsel across the road, and bit by bit as I steered the pickup onto the grading my head-beams revealed the rest of the evidence: skid marks, a wide sweep of gravel, a scrap of twisted metal, a hubcap in the weeds, the flattened stop sign, and finally the red sports-car bent around a telephone pole near the intersection with a dirt road. I trained the lights on the scene, holding my breath, and several stupid, senseless minutes passed before I was able to shut off the engine and step outside.

It wasn't hard to figure out what must have happened. The front of the Corvette had struck the stop sign and then the car had careened, obviously at great speed, into the pole. There was no evidence, however, as to why it had happened—a drunk driver? another car? a deer? When my eyes had adjusted, I saw there was a gaping hole in the windshield and a body hunched against the dashboard, embracing the steering wheel. Jesus, I said under my breath, as if anyone was around to hear me, though I knew I should have expected this. Jesus Christ! My mouth was dry with that bad-medicine taste again, my fingers numb as I ran them down the fractured side of the car. As far as I could tell, no one had been thrown out of the passenger's seat. There was just the driver and his blood on the glass. Jesus, I told myself again as if I were trying to start up a prayer, but instead I found myself retching into the weeds and feeling dizzier than any Wild Turkey ever made me feel. The alfalfa fields surrounding me were stock-still, not a breath of wind stirring the grass. The quiet was unbearable. I wiped my mouth and pounded my fists against my ribs, suddenly unable to feel a thing, not even my dizziness. Without warning the night had closed around me again, but this time the black glove held me tight, blinded me, left me gasping for breath as if the big black sky were sucking up all the oxygen in the world.

The Corvette's driver was young, not more than twenty. The wreck had probably happened instantly, over in a second. Still... he might not yet be dead, maybe just looked dead—not more than five minutes had passed since I'd come across the accident. A heart might be beating, fainter and fainter, within the broken body, trying to be heard. Tom, you know the dead can be brought back to life—arms shaken, chest thumped, lungs pumped with air. A hundred summers ago you were with me and Linda at the riverfront when we saw that little girl who had been caught by the undertow being resurrected by a Coast Guard member; with one long kiss the man had drawn the blue out of her flesh and hugged her until she warmed up. Remember how slowly the girl opened her eyes? I'd wanted to ask her if she remembered anything but blackness, but you looked away and Linda cried.

And yet, Tom, I tell you now as one true-blue friend to another that I could not make myself touch the body, much less press my cold lips against its. The artificial resuscitation we learned in health class is still going to have to remain untried; anyway, I told myself, it's half-forgotten. An ambulance would have to take care of the victim, experts who knew what to do. If the kid were somehow alive, I might only hurt him more by attempting any life-saving or derring-do. Haven't people been sued for less? The thing to do, the only thing, was to hurry.

The truck wouldn't go fast enough. It seemed to want to stall and remain behind to guard the body (the machine was acting more human than maybe I was), and then I couldn't recall at all how far the last farmhouse had been—one mile or ten. The truck seemed to drive without any help from me, as if I were on some fairground ride, swinging up and out higher and higher into the dizzy stars. I saw lights that weren't there. Houses dissolved into trees. Trees became storm clouds. All I was asking for was one door or porch lit up somewhere in the emptiness around me. All I could think about, though, was that Missouri kid's chalk-white face and how young it was—my mind went wandering even further and I saw the kid leaving some bar over in Athens or Bonaparte, drunk and mad at someone or something, racing across the county black-tops, trying to let off a little steam. Would anyone I met know the kid, his family? And then I could picture the kid's sister or girlfriend or young wife answering the knock at the farmhouse or trailer door. There would be a state trooper in mirror-glass aviators standing under the yellow light and there she'd be, veiled by the screen-door, her mouth wide open, unable to scream or cry or...

So it was that I nearly missed altogether the house up ahead, a short way off the road, set back in a shelter of blue pines—I had to spin back around to make the driveway. This skinny old collie barked and chased the truck up the drive to a new prefab ranch house with a clean lawn and crisp white barns in the back. A model modern farm, not what you'd expect out in the boonies. In the backyard three or four small kids were whirling around with sparklers in their hands, throwing them at each other and spelling out their names in light. No one older was around. The kids stopped when I walked up through the yard, the collie sniffing after me as if he could smell death (and probably did), and started yelling for their mother before I was able to say a word. A gray-haired woman appeared in the back doorway; for some reason I can remember very clearly the big pink buttons on her worn-out housecoat and the white socks on her feet. She shouted at the kids to quiet down, and I noticed another detail—a paperback in one hand, thumb keeping her place. "Mac's not here," she told me, but reading my face, I suppose, added quickly: "Something a-matter?"

"An accident," I had already begun explaining, trying to catch my breath. "Next intersection east."

"Bad?"

"Yeah.

"Real bad?"

"Yeah. Dead—he's dead, I think." (A stupid thing to say, especially with all the kids around me. Everything I was saying sounded stupid and false to my ears.)

"God a-mighty. Let me call an ambulance." She ran back into the house, the door rattling behind her. Meanwhile the children circled me accusingly; one of them tossed a sparkler in my general direction. Then they all wanted to hear about the wreck. The youngest girl, holding her sparkler before her like a witch's candle, said they'd seen plenty of wrecks before with blood and guts and fire and everything. The others contributed even more explicit details. One of the boys was beginning an account of an overturned tractor when his mother (or grandmother) reappeared, moving slower than before.

"On their way," she said, as if exhausted herself. "It'll be a while. Had to cut in on the party line. Got to come all the way from Kirksville." She still had the book in her hand, thumb in place. "Say, it wasn't your fault, was it?"

"No, ma'am. Just my luck coming on it like that." Feeling her stare, I looked up into the heavens, searching for the Big Dipper, the only constellation I can identify. But the stars were a jumble and clouds were starting to stretch themselves over the sky. The farm kids ran off toward the barnyard singing O-say-can-you-see, trailing silver-blue fire.

"You kids leave the pigs alone, now! ...You like to help yourself to some coffee?" she asked, watching me pet the dog, which I hadn't even realized until that moment I had been doing all along. "Like to set a spell?"

I shoved the collie down. "No thanks. Best to go back to make sure they spot it OK. Anyhow..." I moved to go, and yet I didn't want to go. Yes, I'll sit down with you in your central air-conditioning and take some coffee and maybe you can read me something from that book that will make me feel better, forget what I've just seen, which really I'm not to blame for, even though every minute I feel more guilty. "Better go, I said instead. The pungent electric smell of the sparklers hung in the air.

"I see—don't think I want to look myself. Enough bad stuff as it is on TV."

I was already turning the ignition key. To be honest, I felt very tired of the whole thing already.

"Say, it was only one car? It have maroon plates? Then he's probably from 'round these parts."

I told her the kid was from Missouri all right as I backed the truck around; she seemed to be stalling for more information. "Anyone you know?" she hollered after me, walking across the close-cropped grass in her socks.

"No. No one." She looked almost disappointed at that. Without even a glance in the rear-view mirror, I gave her a backwards wave and headed toward the scene of the accident once more (although I didn't really want to; I wanted to head toward the river and dive in). And that damn dog who'd been my best friend a minute ago chased me all the way down the road, barking his head off.

I told myself again that I should have at least checked to see if the body had a pulse; the accident couldn't have happened more-than a half-hour ago; there might have been hope when I first arrived at the scene and none now. Linda would say, "You should've done something sensible." You've heard me tell about how I panicked once when she caught her finger in a catfish hook—blood was dripping down the front of her T-shirt, blood, it seemed, was everywhere—and I thought I saw, _felt_ her very life draining away. But she scarcely appeared to notice the hook, laughed, and dipped her finger as cool as you please into the river while I was going out of my mind running for bandages. It almost seemed I had felt the pain more than she had. That, I told her later, is real, true love. That, you both might answer, is crazy.

When I got out to inspect the car again, I was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of doubt—had the body moved? From a certain angle the driver looked closer to the graduation tassel dangling from the rear-view mirror than he had been; there was no way now to be sure. And his right hand—had it been clutching something (a rosary?) earlier? Or did I have even that wrong? All certainty was gone, all I could remember was how dark it had been. The minutes I'd been gone could have been hours. If only I hadn't misplaced my watch the day before. The kid couldn't have moved. It was a trick of the mind, an illusion, rigor mortis settling in. It was that ridiculous guilt gnawing at me. Why couldn't it have been like television, with the driver walking away unscathed? I would have to force it all out of my mind if I were to cope then and there—I would shut out all but the crickets in the horseweeds.

As soon as I heard the siren in the distance I raced up to the pickup to blast the horn and blink the lights. At least they had found the right road. For a moment the ambulance looked as if it might careen right into me, but it managed to pull over to the shoulder in time, spraying broken glass in its wake. It trained its headlamps on the scene. A brown and white highway patrolman's car followed shortly behind. White-suited medics had already descended on the wrecked car before the trooper rose out of his vehicle. The man rapped on my window. His bald, babyish face was glossy with sweat and he tugged at his officer's belt and holster menacingly. Naturally he surmised that I must have been involved in the accident, until I got out, showed him my pickup was unmarred, and convinced, or for the time being, persuaded him that I hadn't seen any of it happen. The officer took my name and number anyhow, led me over to his patrol car, and checked records with headquarters on radio equipment dimly shining in the depths of the car. Then he let heave a sigh, snapped shut his notebook, and with the greenish control panel glowing on his face from below, told me that he agreed with what I had supposed already: that the driver had most probably been drunk or asleep at the wheel, and hadn't seen the stop sign or telephone pole in time. Possibly, he had swerved to miss another car or truck speeding through the intersection, though that wasn't likely at this time of night, when cars seldom passed one another. As he talked on, in that calm, steady manner only someone used to seeing a lot of such accidents could muster, I looked over his shoulder through the windshield at the emergency team hovering around the wreck. They were lowering the body onto a stretcher. Another white figure was brushing bits of broken glass off the windshield into an envelope and a couple others were off in the ditch weeds shining a flashlight. What could they possibly be searching for way out there? The driver's good-luck charm?

"Did you touch it?" the patrolman asked—and I knew from that he presumed the body was not alive.

"I... no, God, no," I replied, unsure of what answer the man would want.

"Okey-doke. We'll be in touch if we need your testimony." The patrolman arose from the car seat and swabbed his big face with a kerchief plucked from his back pocket. It was a signal for me to leave. By the time I had started the engine and was making a slow deliberate turn, the patrolman was back on the blacktop, kicking at the glass and fidgeting with his belt—he had yet to even inspect the car. The man looked disappointed, too, as if he had been hoping for a more involved case to scribble into his notebook. The ghostly white medics slammed the back door of the ambulance and already the silence was once again filling up the night.

Before leaving I thought of asking the rescue squad if the kid were by some miracle still alive, or would live, but deep down inside I guess I didn't want to know, because I sped out of there as fast I could without making the trooper suspicious. Although a siren's wail travels a long way on a quiet night in the country, I heard nothing as I gained more and more distance, and that alone may have been the unheard answer to my unspoken question. Well, if I wanted to, I could read about it in the papers, though another voice in my head made a mental note not to glance at the _Hawk-Eye_ for at least a few days.

Little Rock came in clear and strong this time, so I turned up Johnny Cash singing about going down down down into the burning ring of fire as loud as it would go. The song is older than the both of us, but somehow I knew all the words and sang along, sang to all the songs, even the ones I'd never heard before. The sound of my voice blew out the windows and the cool wind blew in my face and it was easy to pretend everything was all right now, even if that was impossible. I just wanted to lose myself to the pure rhythm of music and motion and momentum. This much I did know: Without planning to or thinking about it, I was heading north again, north to Linda. Sorry, Tom, but it was just as well. You must have already been on your way to work. There weren't any phone-booths out in the middle of nowhere to call you, either. Just as well, just as well. Maybe Linda would be waiting up or maybe she wouldn't. In some way it would be better, easier if she were asleep and woke up in the dawn's early light with me beside her like I'd never left.

And yet we both know nothing is really that easy. It would only be quieter, simpler. The next day we could start our argument anew and maybe even make some progress this time, say something constructive. Dream a little—not much, just a little. Suppose I were able to get back on at the shops and suppose with the money I made she could start those cosmetology classes and wouldn't have to stink from the hamburgers at the mall anymore. We could be happy. Sure. Maybe even buy a new car. Not a new used car, but a new _new_ car. Fix up the house a little. Someday vacation on an island in the south... At least for now we could go fishing.

Last time we talked I started telling you about our first time out on the river this summer. Linda was fuming over something I'd said, something even I forgot about right away, but it was probably about money, as usual. She left me standing knee-deep in the water off the sandbar and pulled away in your uncle's little john-boat by herself—the farther she floated downstream the less either of us could hear what we were yelling at each other. Some of her words reached my ears and others didn't, until she drifted off alone and silent. By then I was standing neck-deep in water as I watched her blur and fade into the sunlight, like something on film that hasn't come out quite right, and I thought, "Well, this is just like our marriage. And here I am stuck on this goddamn sandbar."

It was almost as bad as thinking about that kid—better yet not to make myself think at all. Turn the radio up louder and louder: "Going down to Lonesome Town, to cry our troubles away..." Singing and driving helped. Getting off the county two-lane, I turned left onto 61 and headed home, crossing the border between Alexandria and Keokuk. And it began to rain—not the thunderstorm I'd begun to anticipate from watching all the cloud build-up, but a gentle, springlike rain that I swear filled the air up with the smell of some sort of grandmotherly flowers or young girl's perfume, like only a spring rain can, and it felt right and good. Somehow, too, I felt lighter, less weighed with fatigue, back in my home state.It all brought me again to an ordinary but welcome world: the rain and the current of traffic and life, my old pickup flying along like some big homing bird under the moonless sky. I rolled all the windows down just to smell the fragrance of the rain.

Keokuk and Ft. Madison passed in a dreamlike daze, under that magnesium light that makes everything look flat and pasted-down. It was frustrating having to slow down for all the dirty river towns. I wanted to picture myself tracing a swift and smooth line across the map in my mind, leaving this old world beyond the frayed edges. I wanted to become like that straight-ruled line intersecting points that were towns, like the railroad maps I used to help the visiting engineers interpret. Highway 61 followed the curves and contours of the river; its traffic bore me along in a rush of wind against metal. The rain died out. See, I told myself, there's no end to life, it goes on and on...

The girl would clasp a hand over her mouth. Can't you see her, Tom? She looks like the girls we knew in high school, no prettier and no smarter. She would be able to see herself reflected in the trooper's sunglasses. Other details fill themselves in: the television vibrating in the next room, a dog barking, a baby rasping, the way the Mormon flies beat against the porch-light. Maybe she wouldn't believe him at first—say he must have the wrong name, it was a mistake, this wasn't funny. The trooper would watch her brush the hair from her young face as the truth finally overcame her. And after that, would she become hysterical, knocking things over, or would she faint, to take herself away from the light?

Linda was sitting with all the lamps off when I came in, with that portable fan you gave us aimed straight at her face. The television emitted a kind of underwater light, and the picture was rolling again; she'll sit and watch her favorite old '50s reruns that way for hours until the rest of the world looks funny, she says, not the TV. She'd filled a coffee cup next to her elbow with half-burnt Winstons (trying to quit again) and the smoke from the last butt was still circling her. She shaded her eyes with her hand to get a good look at me and didn't appear too pleased with what she saw. And yet she was as beautiful as any time since I've known her. She was beautiful when she set down her bag of greasy Sterzing's potato chips and returned her stare to the TV, which probably did look a hell of a lot better than I did.

"What's on?" I said, trying to catch what was rolling by on the TV screen. Is that what Ozzie would say to Harriet? Ward Cleaver would say to June Cleaver if Ward had disappeared for over a day? But no one on those old TV shows ever watches TV themselves, so how are we supposed to know how to act in real life when it's the TV separating us? "Linda!" Right away I could tell I'd made the wrong move; even the laugh track seemed to be mocking me. Try again: "Hey, I'm home."

The bag of chips crinkled in her hands and she coughed her smoker's cough. "So welcome home, honey," she said, like Lucy when she's got the upper-hand over Ricky. "Where in hell did you go this time—Egypt and back?" She was trying to be amusing but sarcastic in her TV-series way. "Oh, right, you did say something about Tom—even though he just called looking for you." Thanks, buddy, for choosing exactly the least opportune time.

"Great!" I started."Will you quit—" but then I caught myself. I wasn't going to have one of those situation-comedy dialogues now, not tonight. Instead I wanted to tell her right away about what had happened, what I'd seen... though somehow I couldn't. It was too late, I was too tired, she wasn't in the mood for true-life stories. Besides, I had thought about it enough for one night—in the morning it wouldn't seem so all-important, I hoped. So I started over. "Look, Linda, you may not believe this, but I am sorry. I shouldn't have run off like that last night. It was a stupid thing to do. But everything here just—you wouldn't—well, I'm back now, aren't I?"

"To stay this time? Suit yourself. It's been a fun-filled weekend." She sank down deeper into the sofa cushions. Donna Reed and her husband were neatly bisected and rearranged on the unsteady screen before her. The sound died away, since it doesn't work right, either, and I mentioned it. That seemed to open things up a lot, talking about the TV. We talked a while, wearing the old familiar paths smooth. I even stroked her hand when she didn't pull it away. Ever since I'd walked in the door I'd wanted to make love to her, but knew I had to give her the option. You're not married; you can't know what that business is like—when you've been married long enough you find you play more games than you did when you were dating.

"Linda," I said, now raising her hand to kiss it, "believe it or not, I came back to see you—I had to see you right away whether you'd let me or not, it was like this force—"

"Any other time I'd be asleep by now. Were you hoping you could sneak in here and— How would you have liked it if I'd locked all the doors?" She was being slightly more playful now than angry.

"You have every right to be mad at me, but..." And then I remembered what was still in the cab of the pickup. She didn't act surprised or even look up when I went to get it.

"See this?" I said, back again, standing in the light from the TV. "I thought we could, maybe, do some celebrating." I held out the Roman candle to her.

Remember how much Linda always liked rockets and stuff like that? She should have been in the army; she loves the smell of gunpowder and likes all the noise even more. A strange girl, Linda.

She tasted her cigarette one last time before crushing it in her cup. It was hard for her not to look a little interested, I could tell. "Oh yeah?" she said, rising from the sofa. "Well, why waste the holiday, right?"

We went through the porch into the backyard, under the maples with the locusts whirring in the highest branches. Somewhere down the hill kids were detonating firecrackers on the railroad tracks along the river. Hundreds of lightning bugs flickered across the slopes like a reflection of Linda's constellations above, and the gnats and mosquitoes and the rain-smells were thick. Linda was wearing a nightgown I could see her breasts through, and her hair was falling in her eyes—I tucked it back behind her ears and kissed each velvety, pinkish lobe. She was barefoot. So I took off my shoes and socks to be able to feel the cool moist bristly grass, as well. As usual, the breeze was just a little stronger and purer here than in the rest of town and the valley below. Linda planted the candle—a special brand called a Sky Screamer—in the center of the lawn and I ceremoniously lit it with her disposable lighter. Then we stood back as if it were dynamite.

At first the Screamer fizzled for a few seconds and my stomach sank, but the next second it took off with a wail and soared higher and higher above us until it looked lost. Then with one last howl, it exploded in a hot angry flash, a fist of red light that burst like a flower in a fast-action film and disintegrated slowly, showering down sparks and leaving a lingering ghost-image against the sky like a huge photographic negative. A trickle of appreciative applause followed—a few of our neighbors had hurried out onto their back porches when they heard the noise. A few whispers and all was quiet again, especially Linda and me.

Although quite a critic about such things, Linda seemed pleased with the performance and took my hand. "Make a wish," she told me as one last red spark dived toward the river. Just the other week she'd destroyed an old illusion of mine by telling me falling stars aren't really stars at all, but meteorites; we both remembered that now and laughed without having to say anything else. "Too late to wish now," I said, and she laughed at that, too—a genuine girlish laugh. I kissed the thin white scar, like a ring, on her little finger, and watched the last of the white smoke dwindle into the night clouds. Her face was so close to mine I could smell the salt from her potato chips and see the finest, palest hairs of her eyelashes. We stood a moment like that and then together went upstairs. I've had the feeling now for some time that I'll never actually have the nerve to tell you almost any of this, Tom, but I'll go on anyway—finish the story for myself. Talk to myself.

Mel Torme was blessing America on the clock radio in our bedroom and Linda brushed her hair in the mirror; I sat on the edge of the bed before the east window to undress. Far below the bluff our house is set on you can see the river flowing silently past this little nothing of a town toward the sea. There are strokes of light quivering on the black surface of the water—dock lanterns and cabin lights—and the black-on-black silhouettes of islands and sandbars rising above the water. The river never changes, it's safe to say; it's a constant steady usually unnoticed presence, like a heartbeat or your own shadow, a reassurance even though it does freeze, spill over, and change color with the seasons and time of day. Every night a big powerful searchlight, aimed up and out, revolves over the water below, picking out obscure details of the landscape on both sides of the river—this night, too. Its purpose, I guess, is to guide barges around the sandbars or so other boats can navigate to anchor for the night. Once every couple minutes the light sweeps across our bedroom window on its race along the Burlington bluffs. As regular as a clock, a heartbeat. I pulled off the last of my clothes.

Looking down at the river can make you think of a lot of funny things, some sad, some just sort of resigned. You can't explain it. Seagulls are always flying upriver from the gulf, and it troubles me to watch one in the wintertime spinning crazily back and forth across the dirty ice. I imagine they give up after a while and drop to the broken floes below, joining all the other things the river sweeps into the gulf—mud, trash, driftwood, anything dying or drowned down to New Orleans. There are some things I wish I could talk to Linda or anyone about, but know I never could, since I barely understand them myself. Wait until morning, when everything seems clearer. The silos along the shore would rise up from the river mist like towers in an ancient land, as they do every morning before daylight makes everything ordinary, and then this night would seem to have happened a long time ago, something in a book—but that hour the unknown face still haunted me.

The girl would faint dead away. The trooper would lead her to the sofa and the dog would not stop barking.

Linda coughed. I turned away from the window and those thoughts. Linda was drawing back the top sheet as the last chords of the national anthem washed away on a wave of static. And then silence.

No, the girl would scream. She'd deny it all. She'd show him the photos in her wallet, on the walls.

I snapped the radio off and glanced at the time—not quite one. There was a stale glass of water on the nightstand below Linda's girlhood paint-by-number of golden women in a golden palm grove. And there was my watch next to the glass, wound down.

What would the girl do? Was there a girl? I wanted to know just that much and nothing more.

Linda switched off the light, slipped off her gown, and caught my hands in hers. She acted very solemn, as if we were now to face a bitter enemy. "Nothing's wrong now, is there?" I said at last, just to say something.

She looked at me, her face more serious than ever. "No, silly, nothing is. Nothing..." We seemed to sink a long way down into the bed; gravity alone pressed us close together as Linda shut her eyes like a diver at the edge of the board, steadying herself. I wanted to cover her with more than my body, with everything I could give to save her. Save her from what, I can't say. Drowning? After a while her hands slipped from my shoulders and I found myself counting out time before the searchlight would flash again at the window, so carried away by this other, stranger rhythm it was as if Linda disappeared from under me in the darkness.
Elephant Hunt

# Where are we?

We are watching the great African jungle reduced to the images on a small black-and-white television screen. The reception is poor; snow is falling in our jungle, falling over the small black men following a winding trail across the hills and through the underbrush—all of this via invisible wavelengths in the air, waves that travel thousands of miles across land, through houses, through our bodies, solid as we like to think we are. Tell me you don't believe in magic, even technological magic as common to us as this. Some of us have been known to chant before the TV, to swear oaths with one hand on the radio. I hope I am telling the story correctly, if not quite coherently: This all happened a long time ago, in my life, and in the world's. Through memory and forgetfulness it's been revised a great deal. The things I've taken out (on purpose or through forgetting) might well be the things better left in.

## Who is that speaking to us?

Our Narrator. He, too, is invisible, though sometimes we think we see a slim shadow cast between camera and foreground. His voice is soothing but a bit clipped, somewhat fatherly, more than a little world-weary. This is probably because Our Narrator knows everything—the law of the jungle, the true names of all beasts, what you had for supper last night. He is our conscience, our guide, our oracle.

"From time immemorial," he says, though that phrase never really makes much sense, "these peoples have depended upon the elephant not only for their livelihood but also for its presence as a spiritual power, a strength which the tribe must consume to merge with the divine forces of nature...." We've heard this sort of language before, in a dozen other documentaries we saw at school as we doodled in notebooks. The Narrator is a bore, so I won't quote him much. For all we know, he's making it up as he goes along. Still, let us trust him, at least for now.

#

# What is happening?

We seem to be tracking something.... The small black men are very intent, greasing their ancient flintlocks, building smoky campfires, chattering in high-pitched birdsong. What must they think of these cameras—and the strange people behind those cameras? It's possible each group greatly misunderstands the other, the result humor or humiliation. Is it more blasphemous to watch or to allow yourself to be watched? Perhaps, though, we are being misled. This hunt has all been scripted: these actors may well be authentic, but they will be paid in trinkets. Somewhere out of camera range, the prey is lumbering, sedated and awaiting its cue. But the Narrator would like us to believe, so we believe, we have faith.

I actually wound up going to Africa once, years later when I was working as a production assistant on an airline commercial. As you might have guessed, I saw only airports and restaurants, hotels and highways, none of that National Geographic stuff, no beauty. But I've noticed Africa hasn't changed much in children's books. My son knows as little as I did. If I paint him an animal which doesn't exist, he believes in it, as long as the portrait is detailed. However, this isn't meant to be my story, if this is a story at all.

#

# When shall we begin again?

Now. There is a telltale clue—a large pile of fresh dung. An African slips his bare foot into it, testing the temperature to determine how recently it has been dropped. Or so Our Narrator says. (Pity the poor creature's humble act which will eventually lead to his demise.) But this is no time to contemplate, for tracks are soon found and the hunters are in pursuit.

Things move rapidly now. The next several hours are encompassed in several minutes. The men have forded muddy streams, stalked through high grasses, and made temporary shelters out of tree limbs. They do not seem to be seeking their prey with any blood-thirst or malice. They are too calm. They might be drugged. They might be sleep-walking.

"The elephant is sacred to these people. To take an elephant's life one must beg its spirit for forgiveness. Elephant spirits have been known to possess ungrateful hunters, men who take to the wilds and are never seen again."

What of our cameraman?

He is probably standing on a hilltop for this pan of the jungle, red ants crawling over his hiking boots, mopping his brow and thinking of ice. Does he feel any sort of longing at all for this way of life? Is his skin a shade of black or nearer white? Is he a she? Does he or she ever wish he told time by phases of the moon or wonder what it's like to set the limits of your world by how far you can run into the jungle before turning back? At dusk the tribesmen very well might have offered him pipes filled with strange herbs. What does he see then in his visions? The vast white hills of the Elephants' Graveyard gleaming in the moonlight?

So that is our prey?

Yes—the elephant rises from the savannah, so large he seems to be out of scale, trunk swaying in anticipation, like a pendulum, between two great upraised tusks. He is alone, a rogue male, perhaps an outcast—a close-up of his eye, in which we see something indefinably sad. The tribesman with the biggest flintlock loads and takes calculated, experienced aim. Focus on a fly alighting on the man's tremorless lip.

"It is important that he shoot the beast in exactly the right spot, for that makes all the difference between a dead elephant and one which is merely wounded and dangerous." Our Narrator is serene and precise at a time when battle lines are being drawn and we clamor to choose sides. Elephants, as we've been told since grade school, are nearing extinction. And this one looks so regal and sagacious, certainly once the patriarch of his tribe. But we also know the Africans are doing this as fairly as hunting can be—they must be hungry, after all, and they need the money those great tusks will bring. The film crew are here for a reason, too; so aren't they just as responsible? The elephant should run; the African must shoot. Hurry up, choose sides.

"The savannah is suddenly quiet as man and beast meet eye-to-eye. One of them must die."

## Where are we now?

It is ten years later. I am painting a picture. There is an elephant in it, and he has come to me like a familiar face in a dream. My painting will be called "The Elephant's Memory." The elephant is really nothing more than a symbol—the painting is about memory. Where do we store it, how do we lose it? I am trying to remember back to my past life, when I was a different person from what I am now. With age, everyone becomes a different person—I don't mean physically or even mentally, but different in the sense that all our memories have been reshuffled and recategorized—some articles thrown out and replaced with newer, brighter items. Whether we keep somewhere in the back of our minds an idea or model of our future selves, I don't know. It seems we're always struggling not to change.

I am trying to remember what I remembered ten years ago. I was still fairly close to my childhood back then, when I watched that television program, with not much more than a child's references to draw upon. Now I am older, I have married young, I make some sort of living, I have a child of my own. When we sit together watching television, I wonder what he really sees with his eyes—what he is remembering, what he is forgetting. He sometimes strikes me as a wholly foreign creature, someone I barely know or understand. Where could he have come from? In my painting he is riding the elephant.

# And what do you remember of the hunt?

The elephant was shot, of course—right between the eyes. We see him run off into the trees, roaring and thrashing as if his whole body were on fire. The cameraman is doubtlessly straining himself and putting up with a lot of burrs and thorns to keep pace. There is also the danger of being trampled or gored—another reason for the Africans to think he's crazy. The hunters are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they can't bear to witness such agony. Meantime, the animal slows to an unsteady gait and cannot balance itself. Like a drunk in the first light of day, his knees buckle, he is just about to collapse.

## Is this what your painting depicts?

No, my elephant lives, as memory lives. But life transforms memory and my elephant is undergoing some sort of change, too—I don't know exactly what sort; I'm still working on the painting. The oils mix in unexpected ways, as do sensations related to what we remember.... Sometimes the color I come up with is nothing like what I originally saw in my mind's eye. The elephant has already been several different elephants. In the end, he might not be an elephant at all.

Why are things so quiet?

Because the elephant has died. But despite whatever Our Narrator has told us, we've already noticed how the wilderness has actually been very quiet all along—it's just now that the stillness has a context, though no ape or antelope ever silently or vocally mourned an elephant's death. Nature is not really cruel; it is indifferent, which as they say is worse. However, now even our otherwise nonchalant narrator is speechless, and the hunters are silent too as they approach the fallen giant, spears ready, just in case.... They remind us of those startled New Yorkers crowding around the prostrated body of King Kong below the Empire State Building. Yet they do not rejoice over the death; instead, they dispassionately begin their duties.

A fire is lighted—to appease the angry demon of the elephant's spirit (so says Our Narrator). Let this not be misconstrued: We know the Africans are not stupid or any more superstitious than we are. They are merely respecting an order which they intuitively sense in the world. There is, after all, nothing intimidating in the magic of television or a flintlock, but an elephant's spirit is an awesome thing.

What is spirit?

What moves and controls and guides us, as our catechism classes taught. Also what guides my hand as I paint. That which sparks memory into action. We don't speak of "spirit" much in our adult lives, but that doesn't necessarily mean we've lost it or a sense of it. Children, however, do seem to be closer to it, more aware. We've watched them at play, seen them wonder and weep over small things for the first time, held them in our arms as they fought sleep. A small child may have the spirit of an elephant, but it's not reincarnation I'm talking about. My son rides the elephant in my painting. He already has very wise eyes, as I suppose most children do. The spirit cannot fail you, this I am told. But I lost mine once, lost it to growing up and growing older. Maybe I am learning to find it again. My child has left his handprint in the oils of my painting, and another multicolored print on the wall. For the time being, I'll leave things as they are.

People say no matter who or what I paint, my subjects all look something like me. It's nothing I'm not aware of; you might say it's all done with mirrors, after all. Actually, I'm trying to paint myself into the picture, as it were, so I can concentrate on what's left outside the frame, in the world. Another way to seize the spirit, like the tribesman's photograph. Capture the present, though, and you have only the past... But this particular elephant could be a totem, not my past but my strength, my desire to live through my art and my child. Perhaps one day my son will read my paintings like a diary—but I want this one to be more like a warning: that whatever we have now will in time be lost. And like an admonition: lost unless you use your memory well, use it like a sixth sense. It's so simple and easy you're bound to forget.

Describe the process we witness.

While the men are dismantling the carcass, their wives and children are making their way through the same muddy streams and tall grasses of earlier shots, passing the campfires and tree-branch shelters. A runner had been sent back to notify them of the kill and just as soon as the women arrive they begin hauling off bloody slabs of meat. Four black girls in a row carry off the elephant's feet over their heads, like lovely jungle caryatids, those maidens who support temples in other lands. Here in Africa, hyenas and jackals are already lurking and snarling in the brush. Impatient buzzards circle overhead, casting a moving shadow over the wilderness, a constant reminder that life is dependent upon death.

Lastly, the tusks are removed. They are naturally the most highly valued part of the elephant, and someday, possibly, they will appease the elephant's spirit with chords and counterpoint or instead be carved into marvelous, intricate jewelry to rival the beauty of the beast itself. A wriggling, white worm of a nerve is extracted from each of the tusks. The tribesmen quickly cover the nerves with pieces of elephant skin, for it is "bad magic" for a human being to look upon these vessels of the elephant demon. Too late for both us and the cameraman. Splendid ivory commas, the tusks are transported back to the village over the shoulders of two Africans apiece.

Back in the village, things are again the same as they have always been, or at least as they have been since a dazed white explorer armed with a flintlock strong enough to kill an elephant wandered here sometime in the nineteenth century. Campfires are burning and children are squabbling over pebbles in the dust. The meat, salted and preserved, will keep many stomachs full until the next kill. Money made from the sale of the tusks may very well buy the village a portable television or a new hunting rifle from traders upriver. Life goes on this way. They learned this way from their fathers, who learned it from their fathers, and all the rest. Life, death, life: links in a chain we try hard to break. Each of our generations wants to be different from all the rest, not connected to something larger. My son likes to pretend he's an elephant sometimes, wagging one arm before his nose like a trunk. Exactly as I once did. Our children really only surprise us when they act like us, not when they seem fallen from the stars.

##### So is that all?

### That is not all. The elephant in my painting carries my son, his trunk gently, very gently reaching up and back to caress his tiny hands. The elephant is composed of nothing but memories, as is everything when we shut our eyes and stop to think, and my son is carried aloft by those memories, his head literally in the clouds. My elephant lives in the child and the child lives in the elephant—this is what my picture is supposed to show you, and I would be tempted to tell you that if you were looking at it for the first time. If I am a good enough artist, you will discover that for yourself. What I mean to say is my son lives in the moment, but it is all that past behind him which has brought him to this moment. It's sometimes hard not to sound oblique and mystical, you see, when you want to express something so common and simple. My son draws on the walls of his bedroom—doodles that could be elephants or Martians or gods, more mysterious when I think about it than my dreams. We go on imaginary elephant hunts though the closets and the garden, and end up laughing on our backs, finding whole herds migrating across the sky.

#

# So, why have we remembered at all?

I can't say. It wasn't my tale to tell, at first. Everyone has played "telephone;" stories grow and change. Often through retelling they get better, more detailed, but I don't know.... I sometimes wear an elephant pendant, my only souvenir from that African trip. Ironically perhaps, it's made of ivory from the very animal it depicts. Now that's giving your life for art, I once told a critic friend. I've had my share of longings, but you know what? Eventually the longing passes, no matter how strong. I am mortal with mortal desires—which doesn't make them immortal. The modern spirit is weak. I wonder if my child will ever regret that he wasn't born in whatever's left of the African wilds. Maybe he dreams of elephants, of hot noons under the giant trees, of images and sensations which cannot be translated into practical, pragmatic English. He wonders if I could add wings to the elephant in my painting, so it could fly back to Africa with its trunk curled around himself. And what would you do there? I ask. Just be, he says.

Truth to tell, I turned that TV program off before it was even all the way over. The cathode tube sucked up its light from my dark student's room and I sat there wondering something, I suppose. Yes, I'm sure I felt something deep and if not quite sad, not really happy to be where I was and in that time. Somehow I knew I wasn't going to forget this feeling, even if it was unnameable. The future always seems a long way off; things don't usually change as fast as we always claim they do or want them to. Around that time, even though I'd just been heartbroken one too many times, I began to think about getting married, having a child, guaranteeing some sort of future for myself. Then and there I took up a mirror and a pencil and drew myself looking into the future—in the picture, I was holding the mirror, which reflected me holding the mirror, reflecting me holding the mirror.... but in each progressive mirror, there was a slight change; my face grew older, fainter. In the last visible mirror, I had disappeared. That is how our days go—slightly transformed replicas of the day before, until what we experience now is completely different from what we experienced years before. When I tell him this story about hunting an elephant, my son might look back through the past as if through a crack in the wall, but he might see something very different from what I saw.

To remember is to hunt. I'm not sure what the elephant stands for, exactly. We flick the switch; the credit music hushes into static, the cathode tube withdraws its light. Africa still exists somewhere, I suppose, beyond the hotels and airports. My son wants to see what lies beyond his picture books. He already senses he's not getting the whole story.

There is indeed much to see, but I'm not giving the whole story, either. There is much more in the world than I can express in a thousand paintings. I wish I could paint something beautiful for my son, to last. The world is still beautiful, isn't it? My son seems caught up in constant wonder. A bright color or a bird flashing by his window will make him scream with pure pleasure. Could I have ever been like that, when now it seems such a struggle just to capture a tiny piece of beauty in this elephant I paint and repaint? Beauty makes me weak, makes me wonder if something stronger than us must move inside us, move through us like invisible waves, changing and guiding our lives. This is what people in the past called spirit, called magic. All I can really be sure of or believe in is remembrance, the memories we recreate every day as carefully as good pictures are painted. In the future I am certain, as well: People will live, children will be born, elephants will be born, elephants will die, and things will continue, et cetera.
The Secret Life Of The World

I

Because it is as if he has become as infinite and all-knowing as a god, because he has struck where sunlight fuses with water, gold into silver, where white nakedness dissolves into wild, dizzying blue...

Because his heart whirls within his breast, because water has burst into flame around him, because it is as if all life's mysteries have suddenly been revealed: He sees the sun shining on the surface of the water above him like the mythic shield he has read about which reflects the entire world (one glimpse is enough), and he feels his cold body ascending, the water and the world moving through this transparent, insubstantial flesh of his...

Because everything happened, is happening, will happen at once: The moment the boy dived into the ice-blue water of the quarry it was like waking a thousand senses he hadn't realized he had always possessed; he senses blazing light and force and heat swirling within him, his vision shattered and reassembled again—the inexplicable secret, once exposed, has imploded within him, and he rises up choking, gasping, dying for breath to the surface, waving to the frightened girl at the edge of the quarry.

"I thought you'd really done it this time, you really did hit a rock and drown," she says, a white blur far above him in the afternoon sunlight. "Jesus, you've been down there for years."

The boy splashes, gasping, choking, and draws himself up onto a moss-slippery rock below her, ribs heaving, thin pale body all goosebumps, fingertips swollen and blue. He can't think what to say to the girl, how to communicate this feeling, this bliss—if he could explain and understand it by calling it such a simple name—which had seized him so suddenly when he touched water. It was almost as if he had hit a rock and lived to tell. This bliss had never come when he'd prayed and chanted and fasted for it (all those months in bed and all those books) yet now here it was—as unexpected as revelation comes to a saint, though he knows it won't last, no matter how hard he tries not to break the spell. It's just your brain starved for oxygen, she would say, and you shouldn't be doing things like that after all that medication, when you've been so sick so long. But he doesn't want to give her the chance. He doesn't want her to talk at all. If only he could touch her and make her a god, too, make her as immortal as he feels...

The last day of June, and there was his calendar (a gift from the hospital staff) with the great golden Buddha on it for one more day, and that his face behind the patina of dust on the mirror, and these his suddenly unfamiliar and dirty-fingernailed hands. He frowned at himself and pulled on cut-off jeans, a clean white T-shirt. No sense combing that mess of his hair. His brother was sleeping, snoring so loud he knew he couldn't wake him. There on his desk was the _Mathnawi_ , an epic poem about the mystic path to heaven, three months overdue at the library. He opened it to a page: "Many strange things will happen: silence!" Perhaps it was the translation—it was hard to say what any of it meant. His brother's sacred heart of Jesus print, a catechism reward, stared down from the opposite wall; he crossed himself before it, then bowed to Buddha, whispered "Allah"—better to be safe than sorry—and crept downstairs.

Their shrieking laughter had driven her from bed, and from the screened-in porch where she slept these hot nights she watched them, unsure at first if this was just another in a long parade of vivid dreams which had had her waking off and on throughout the night. But there they stayed, no dream-phantoms:

On their backs in a jumble under the lightning-cracked elms, the group of little children had gone as suddenly quiet as the early morning streets of this drought-dusty little town. The girl wondered what their ritual was, even if she herself had probably played the same game less than a decade ago. Now, their actions were as strange to her as an aboriginal tribe's dances might be. Her clock said it was after nine—already she was falling behind the pace of the day. At least she had most of her packing done, and there was little to do now but her chores and double-check her bus schedule. In twenty-four hours she would be gone from here.

What is it to know everything? he asks himself in that moment of his dive which has lasted for an eternity. Isn't it just remembering everything, making of everything a memory-palace as the ancient Greeks did, fitting every impression of life into one great scheme? Even now, as he falls from the sky into the cold dark shining water, he comprehends this act as a memory—and a memory already this cataclysm of thunder as he strikes water, this shudder up his spine and thrill of speed and light as he continues falling, deeper and deeper into the pond...

After vague but frightening dreams the world was a welcome place after all, and for the first time in a long time he was glad to be alive, because today for the first time he felt truly healed, truly healthy. Looking out of the parlor, he felt like a holy man who has just left his cave and seen the world for the first time in months. He catalogued the sky, framed by the windows, in his mind: He remembered days by their ever-changing skies—in a single day, dawn might break cool with sheet-metal clouds and noon might bring on a black-and-blue sky veined with lightning, even if the heavens would be baked white-hot again an hour later. This morning the sky was cobalt blue polished by sunlight, yet fluid and sparkling as water: It would be another hot, dry day, and the summer's drought would continue. That was all right; he loved the sun after so many months indoors, after a long cold winter and late cold spring.

The children had decapitated their dolls, she saw now, and the heads lay in a heap: blue and green and brown eyes staring up into ragged elm leaves. What is there to do now? They were bored already with their day and their lives. The schoolyard where they played their game was still silent as a cemetery. They'd probably already played ring-a-rosy and crack-the-whip and hide-and-seek, and now there was nothing left to do but sprawl there looking into the sun until they all went blind. She heard her grandfather's radio in the kitchen below—he was nearly blind, and she wondered how he would do when she was gone, even if there was her aunt and uncle and Mrs. Farrell from next door watching after him.

My body is golden and I am diving into a lake of gold, he is thinking as he leaps from the cliff-top; I am a sacrifice to the gods, and as a sacrifice, I am consumed by the gods, I become the gods, all gods. This dive will last as long as Alice's fall, and yet be lightning-quick, and I am the bolt. I am the diver and the dive, the girl on the precipice looking down and the boy sailing through the air; I am all things, and all things are me. After Emerson. How wonderful, he thinks, to be so profound.

Something clicked within his head, like a photographer taking a picture—he remembered her promise, to meet him at one, after her lunch-hour shift, to make the blood-pact that would keep them indivisible no matter how far she went, how long she was away. It was good that he was feeling healthy again, now, before she left, so the plan could be carried out. Years later he might still be carrying this day as a sort of trophy, never tarnished, inside him—of course, none of it might work; he would most likely fail once again. But it was worth a try before it was too late, whatever the odds: Some people, wise men in books he had read, could see the future, yet defy it—even if his own future was swallowing him up, reducing him to nothing. Seventeen and a half years old, and he felt old, prophetic, at the end of this weary world's days, in this the first year of the last quarter of the twentieth century—a significant astrological date, he liked telling the girl. From their bedroom next door, he heard his parents' breathing—his father's hoarse drone and his mother's thin asthmatic wheeze, both still deep asleep at six a.m., and already it was so bright outside, the sun was climbing the sky so fast.

She was glad she was no longer that young, caught up in games and rituals that determined life and death and if other girls will like you. Anyway, she always used to play alone, spiteful of other girls, drinking coffee with her grandfather and reading mystery novels like a grownup. Maybe it was because she had no parents, only relatives here, and that somehow set her apart. She wondered if she would feel any different out west, at the Art Institute, where she could be anonymous and able to begin again as a new person. As the girl washed and dressed in the upstairs bathroom she thought, too, about her promise: She hadn't forgotten it for a minute, and wondered if she really wanted to go through with it—what could it prove? She would be gone tomorrow. Would promises really matter then? He'd be waiting for her, sure enough, in the empty house at one with his book and candles or whatever he would use in his amateur quest for "enlightenment" or "divine revelation." Just to please him, just because she loved the strange boy in some strange way, she would go through with it. When it was over, when this day was over, she would say goodbye to this old world and all she had ever known, but remember it all, especially him, forever.

At first the boy wonders if he must be dead, after all, to have such knowledge bestowed upon him, but as he breaks into white dazzling air he feels keenly alive, more alive than he ever has, and yet he knows with some remorse that it will not last, the glory of this spinning vision within, and it will have to be told before the weight of the material world crushes and drowns him. He is just out of high school, and already he has read too many books, pondered too long the fate of his everlasting soul, fallen under the spell of ascetics and dervishes centuries too late.

No one else in the house stirred—they were all late sleepers, and he was practiced at stealth, at midnight rambles across the fields and silent candlelit rites in corners of the basement. Now he had the chance to drink a glass of cold milk in peace and be done, undetected. The first direct sunlight of the day shone through the yellow kitchen curtains: the light seemed liquid enough to drink, if he could cup and contain it in his hands. One of the house-cats luxuriated in a square of the same light on the linoleum floor, its rapid purring filling up the room. Outside in the barnyard where sunlight fell thick on the dust, turning it into a golden powder at dawn, the white geese spread their clipped wings—it must be miserable, he sympathized, to yearn for a flight that surges so powerfully through one's body and yet be unable to do anything about it but execute a few foolish flops in the air. Some day he might write a poem about it, or try a painting. There must be something Shems-ed-din, author of _The Whirling Ecstasy_ , had said...

The milk was chalky in his throat, and cold—he could feel its path downward through his body; thinking of it, his body as this heavy organism that devours and excretes and hungers for more, made him a little queasy, and he momentarily wished he really were an ascetic in a cave or a monk in a mountaintop retreat; he left the unfinished glass in the sink and shut the screen door silently behind him.

In her dead grandmother's yellow-painted kitchen, the calm metallic voice on the short-wave radio repeated endless combinations of just a few numbers: " _Eins_ , _zwei_ , _eins_... _drei_... _zwei_ , _zwei_..." Maybe a woman, maybe a robot, she could never tell. Her grandfather got up every few minutes to knock his cane against the torn window screens, scaring the blackbirds out of the vegetable garden behind the house, then returned to his chair. The old man listened closely to the voice, as if receiving instructions, though he knew little of his wife's German. In a few minutes a musical program would begin, polkas and waltzes he and his wife had danced to back in her native Bavaria. He listened, back straight in a straight-back chair, as if this were the very voice of his wartime sweetheart. His granddaughter had poured him another cup of Postum and sat in the corner, angry and bored. Large, swollen-veined hands spread across the pages of his water-stained _Book of Mormon_ , turning pages, locating prophetic passages, searching for a clue to explain this day. He was losing his eyesight day to day, but his world was small, well-remembered, and he invented what he could not see. The girl scrubbed the oilcloth and Formica, glancing over at him hunched before the radio and his book every now and then, and was careful not to slam the screendoor behind her as she slipped out of the house.

He soars through blue air like wax-winged Icarus, like a meteor headed for the gold-glinting surface of the pond below. He could be falling for years, so slow does time pass in midflight, so far and wide is his transit, and he can hear the girl far above leaning over the cliff gasp at the perfection of his arc, his swift dizzying descent through space. Below him he can see the dark rocky bottom of the pond through clear green water; he can feel the hot rush of wind over his body, hear the wind in his ears, anticipate the cold water against his skin as his body cuts through the surface and all at once air, water, and his body are merged.

The last of the daybreak crickets trilled here and there in the damp grass like a string section tuning up, and the trees sheltering the farmhouse bent their branches before him, wanting, it seemed, to sweep him up into the hidden places within their boughs; they would toss him in the wind and rock him in their branches until he went soaring off with the swallows into the blue, blue sky. Ever since he could remember he had felt protected by these trees when he went running through the yard early in the morning (on his way to the school bus or just to get away from his brothers and sister), head thrown back to search through intertwined branches for bird's nests, mouth open wide to swallow leaf-filtered light, and always he found himself lost in the tangle of branches and spinning madly. He knew them all intimately, these old trees, and had loved them all his life—loved the roughness or smoothness of their bark, the many shades of gray and green within their twisting limbs, the smell of their leaves, and the feel of their roots under his bare feet. He had climbed most of them—some he could reach almost to the top— and from up so high his home was a mere doll's house, the surrounding farm a child's toy set. Swaying in the branches at the top of the oldest oak was the most exhilarating of all thrills, yet peaceful and lonesome, too—as if he were on a rocket-ship blasting toward the sun, leaving everything he had ever known behind forever. But now he was getting old himself; he no longer climbed trees, and today when the trees seemed to call to him he was running too fast to hear.

After leaving her grandfather to his memories and prophecies the girl took the alleyways into the heart of town, the mid-morning sun behind her, and her shadow rapidly shrinking on the ground. She stretched out her arms, embracing the heat, for she liked it hot, loved summers here. She had promised to help her aunt with the early-lunch crowd, but didn't really want to go, and didn't really want to do anything else, though she knew she must keep another, more important promise. She liked to play the detective (as she had as a child fascinated by paperback mysteries) and spy into houses; she dared even now to go right up to the house across the street, sneak through the azaleas and lilac bushes, and look through the kitchen screen. She watched a stout middle-aged woman, Mrs. Barnes, burn her hand as she lit the kitchen stove; the woman ran out to the old pump in the garden—because the water there would be colder. The girl crouched alongside the house and watched, fascinated by what would ordinarily be so trivial. The woman's husband was waiting immobile in the dining room, his hands flat on the table, waiting for the meal she had promised him. Overhead there came the high faint whine of a jet, like the faraway drone of a mosquito; through the open doors and windows of the tiny frame house poured the smell of sticky tar on the road and a squashed skunk a few days old now and under it all the wilted roses in the garden. At the pump the wife watched her palm turn white as the blister rose—she breathed deeply and lifted her skirt so the water would splash on her legs. The girl took in all this, making mental notes for some book she had no intention to write, making up, like her grandfather, what she could not really see.

Underwater, his body spins, twists, flips over, and he is headed again for the light and air. His heart and lungs are bursting; it is as if his body is being cracked in two and his soul is being set free, like yolk from an egg, and yet he has never felt so good, so whole. Up there is the light—he is headed for it, reaching for the sun, ready to dive into its reflection on the skin of the water as if into the heart of the sun itself.

He ran through the fields, feet ballasted with mud and already out of breath—his lungs were still ready to fail him—toward the horses standing asleep under a grove of willows near the dry creek bed at the far end of an overgrown cow-pasture. Between towering catalpas, with the morning mist still rising from the thistles and jimsonweed, the three animals took on a fantastic appearance: Pegasus, unicorn, centaur. They were as shy as deer sometimes, but today he wanted to come no closer, so as not to break the spell—white black white they stood, seemingly unaware of him, tails switching flies even in sleep. I am running away from home, he might have told them if they could understand, for that thought had just announced itself in his mind. And it meant nothing. He would run away for a day, no more, and he'd always be back by nightfall—by now his family knew not to depend on him, for chores or even a place at the dinner-table. He'd climb into bed when they were fast asleep, not having spoken to a soul all day or even most of the week, and he liked that. That was the bad thing about the hospital—all those people, all those questions. He was always wanting to run away from there, but that medicine sapped his strength and, worse, numbed his mind. It was good to be back home, but even better to run away like this, to pretend it would be forever, if only for a few hours. And he would see her soon, if she was going to keep her promise and run away with him, if only for a day.

The girl heard the gas station's transistor radio before she was able to see the station up ahead at the end of the leaf-shady alley: The radio was stuck between two broadcasts and couldn't make up its mind which was more important—the top twenty count-down or the call-in program from Chicago. She walked slowly, not wanting to get to what would be a crowded noontime cafe too soon, and she hummed along with the radio as she approached the station from the rear, between the overgrown hedges. Finished with his sandwich in its wax-paper wrapper, she watched the owner shift his weight in the seat of the old Buick he was working on; he gunned the engine and knocked a wrench against the dashboard, damning all and everything. His wife stood at the counter inside, helping a barefoot kid choose between candy bars A raggedy dog, lanky and awkward as a kangaroo, had followed the little boy in; it lifted a leg and pissed hard against the fresh-bait machine. The woman gave it a short sharp kick in the haunches. The girl was still wondering if she should go to the house after work as she had promised, if this would be their last chance to be really alone. He acted crazy sometimes, crazier than the medicine he was on could be blamed for, but she did love him, she guessed, even if he wasn't interested in anything but her mind, even if he might be funny that way or had simply renounced all flesh like a priest. Already she saw him naked, cross-legged before a candle, reading the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_ aloud to her as if it were the most normal thing on earth.

The realization, the revelation—he tries to explain it to the girl as she draws figures in the earth with a stick; the how and why and what of the universe—it had been inside him since his birth and not until this moment did he believe it and by nightfall or maybe sooner he would not believe it again. It was what all those books had been leading up to, he is certain—the divine revelation every true mystic talks about. She listens as she twirls her twig-stylus, and he knows she is the only one in the whole world who might understand—who must understand. Everything is in his sight; he is immortal and so is she, for they exist in realms beyond the ordinary, beyond mere thought and vulgar perception, and their love, as pure and unemotional as it is, is eternal because it is the love of gods for one another. He is young; he knows that he's been reading too much arcane philosophy and holy books he misunderstands, but it all seems so easy once you let yourself go, let the world quit making sense in the old way, and drink mystery in like water or sunlight, let yourself spin with the earth, and so forth, and so forth. When Shems-ed-din asked the Sheikh Auhad-ed-din what he was doing contemplating a basin of water... She stops him with an almost painful kiss on his forehead.

At the edge of town he paused at an abandoned railway crossing, under the umbrella of a giant poplar planted by some forgotten pioneers, and surveyed where he had come from, where he was going. The last day of June, he thought, stretched before him now like the empty fields behind him and the empty streets before him, the minutes and hours stored up with no effort on his part at all, at his service, waiting for him to act, to set into motion whatever chain of events would bring this day to its end.

On long summer days like these, days she knew would be her last here, she would walk around town in a kind of waking dream-state, as if she were a ghost come back to haunt a long-ago past. She was insubstantial here, transparent, she meant nothing, she never had, just that new girl in town here ten years now. No one would see her or care if she saw them even in their most private moments, or as private as you can get in such a small town. Nearing the edge of the business district she breathed in the thick, throat-choking air, watched snow fall from the cottonwoods, watched a blurred cat chase an invisible squirrel across a balding lawn, and came out from between the trees and garages into the full heat of the sun. In her uncle's barber shop she saw him sweeping the floor as she had a thousand times before, and it was no different this time, no more significant, and yet it seemed to her it ought to be sad: She wouldn't be around to sit there in one of the empty chairs and tease him and listen to his stories anymore. It was as if she were walking off the edge of the earth into the unknown. Now he was wiping off the mirrors which reflected trees, the school behind, more trees, and the blue-turning-white, nearly colorless sky. A radio on a high shelf was broadcasting the market reports from the next county, but it could scarcely be heard above the whir and rattle of the shop's air-conditioner. There would most likely be no more customers today, if for the rest of the week, yet her uncle sat alert now in his highly polished chair, not even reading the latest sports and fishing magazines, staring into his mirrors, waiting.

He is surfacing, breaking into white light, and knows that this power he has within him to stop and reassemble time will not last, though he must express what it means to her before the dam bursts and he is drowned again in ordinary life. She is up there, screaming, laughing—he cannot yet tell.

The town on the other side of the railroad tracks was barely a town anymore, since the interstate, a quarter-mile away, had sliced it in two, right down the middle like a surgical incision which had killed the whole. Half the people his parents' age had moved away closer to the county seat, abandoning their unprofitable farms to corporations; there were few youths here and many old people—old ladies hidden away among strawberry and rhubarb preserves in their root cellars and the wicker rockers in their fern-shadowed parlors, old men puttering in their vegetable gardens and arguing over cinnamon rolls in the cafe. Still, it was all he had ever known; he hadn't even been to the state capital, less than a hundred and fifty miles away. The hospital in the county seat was all the farther he'd ever go, he sometimes worried, though he dreamed of mystic places with ancient names: Samarkand, Tiahuanaco, Angkor Wat, Kashmir. Fragments of parchment, maps, diagrams, and illuminated pages reproduced from ancient holy books were vivid if confused in his mind, but here, now, in the boring real world he saw something else, less esoteric, and wasn't so interested. Where could he find his true spirit-nature here, among these cornfields and hog-yards? And yet, the distant rushing of cars and trucks did give him a feeling of expectancy, as if something really were about to happen behind the windows facing Main Street, though he knew half those windows were boarded up. The grain elevator was closed, so was one of the gas stations, and the Ben Franklin was having a going-out-of business sale. But he had to go on. He ran toward town, no one to see him but those strangers passing on the interstate, and reached it just as the church steeple struck eight.

Looking back at the barber shop and down the street of wide-porched, Depression-era bungalows between their rows of crimson maples, the girl thought what a picture this would make, if she could paint it well: one lone figure on a sad street of look-alike houses and trees, the sun slanting through the leaves just-so, a barber shop at the corner glowing in the reflection of light from all its mirrors: "Girl Leaving Home," perhaps, or "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Small-Town Street." As in de Chirico (her artist of the month) the girl could be just a shadow, rolling a hoop, and the houses could be flattened against a pale sky. She wished she had her sketchbook just to make a rough charcoal outline, but maybe tomorrow—no, it would be too late then; instead, she would just have to trust to memory, that most untrustworthy faculty of them all.

It has been inside him since his birth and not until today did he believe it, did he even know it. She listens as she digs in the dirt, and he knows for certain that she is the only person in the world who could understand. He describes a circle in the air: That's the world, he knows its secrets, he has known them forever. Things will go on being the same—except for her. She is already on that bus headed out to the Golden Land, she is already driving down an expressway with her long hair in the wind, like other college girls out there, she is already kissing other boys and telling them pretty lies.

The town cafe was open—inside (face pressed against the dusty plate-glass to see from daylight into fluorescence, like trying to look around a movie theater when you first enter) he could make out her aunt in waitress apron and name tag and a couple of farmers burnt the same rose-red as their old Ford pickups parked outside. He remembered looking into the cafe one morning much like this a hundred years ago and seeing that new girl at school—the tall one with skinny legs and glasses who had touched him on his shoulder one day, as if by accident, part of a secret plan. It was not so much what she had done, but when she had done it; at the end of a race between some of the boys during recess. When, because of his short breath and shorter legs, he had so miserably come in last. She had come up to him on her way to retrieve a red rubber four-square ball that had rolled across the blacktop: Seeing him sitting there, crumpled up and nearly crying under the trees, she had stopped, touched his shoulder once, gently, and run off to her new girlfriends again. This did not mean they loved one another. They were at that age then when boys love only boys and girls love only a few boys. Yet they had this between them, and he had not been able to look her in the eyes for months after that.

The girl circled twice around the town cemetery, on the small hill behind St. Bartholomew's, before deciding to go in. The weeds were high, only a few drooping day lilies sticking out among the stones, for the old cemetery wasn't as well-tended as it used to be. There were some relatives buried here, just a few vague memories of old people in hospital rooms smelling like breath mints or sleeping in comfortable-looking caskets inside the church—but not her parents, who were not even memories, only fantasies, stories told by her aunt when she was feeling sorry for herself, having to take care of this bothersome girl she had never asked for. The boy used to meet her here sometimes, to watch the winter sunset or wait for a thunderstorm to roll in over the hills, but she supposed they wouldn't be doing that kind of thing anymore, now they were official adults and had new lives to lead. She knew he resented her going away on scholarship, when he'd be left behind to a family who never understood him and maybe a few classes at the county college if he got a grant or loan. What could ever become of him and his wild notions? She walked among the headstones, looking for one she liked; it had a large round purple agate, like a marble or an eye, embedded in its face, and above, the inscription: "Don't Forget Me." A presumptuous thing for a person dead a century to ask, but she wouldn't mind such a plea over her own grave.

In time she will have her hand on other boys' shoulders, but that is fine; she needs a real boyfriend and they will all be dead soon enough, anyway—while life is bursting inside and outside of him at the rate of a thousand detonations a second and every second is eternal. Can't she seem him lit up so with life? She smiles, she draws in the dirt: a hand, a heart, an eye.

He remembered that morning and the girl he now loved in his own peculiar way, how she stood before the cash register back then, scratching a thick knee-scab and buying a pack of gum from her aunt, the old cranky waitress... When to his sudden horror she had turned and stared straight at him: a pug-nosed, goggle-eyed monster smooched up against the plate-glass window. He had run down the street until he realized how ridiculous he had been and how even more ridiculous he must look running away like that.

The trees opened up at this point and the freshly tarred street widened: Main Street, and the girl walked along the glaring sidewalk shielding her eyes, tar-smell and semi exhaust from the freeway in her nose and eyes. Her aunt would be angry that she was so late, dawdling again, probably off with that oddball, that boy who thinks he's going to be some kind of hippie guru. Farmers would lift their heads from their beer and tenderloins and stare at them having it out. She was glad to be getting away from her aunt, her mother's older sister, but would miss her uncle, miss visiting with him on endless empty afternoons. She would sit in one of the high barber chairs listening to his radio and his army fables and how he used to like to draw, too—somehow she must've caught the germ from him, sure enough. There were a couple of his old watercolors framed on the walls of his shop: scenes of bivouac life in the South Seas, and army buddies swimming naked in tropical pools. For her going-away present he'd bought her a dimestore box of "Venus" brand colored pencils and a set of cheap brushes, saying they might help keep her entertained while she waited for school to begin. Her aunt's present was more expensive—a pair of Keds to withstand the miles of walking she'd do looking for a job in San Francisco—but it meant less. As for her grandfather, he only understood that she was going far away, stepping over the edge of the earth, right into hell if she didn't watch out. He could pick up California on his short-wave, all right, and he'd be the first to hear about her if anything happened.

He dives ... But that was just the most infinitesimal pinpoint, the most insignificant dust mote in his mind: The whole of life had been explained to him, spread open like a map, but all he could tell her was what she already knew. He saw her heading west on a bus glowing against the night sky, he saw her racing a convertible with her scarf whipping behind her like a banner in the wind, he saw her kissing another boy's bare neck. It was all too wonderful!

Along the river which bisected the town width-wise (together with the highway forming a cross which was stamped over the town on road maps; though the town itself often did not exist on newer maps, the cross always did), he felt a sudden urge to fling himself into the water and drown—not because of any old, embarrassing desires or defeats, which he had already almost forgotten again—but because the notion of drowning had struck him as something cool and delicious to try, sleeping peacefully forever to end the day which had already grown so hot. Looking into the frothing yellow-gray water, he could imagine himself floating on his back, eyes shut in death so much more tranquil than sleep with all its memories, all its monsters, hair encircling his beatific face like a halo, body gone all wrinkly and white. (Or maybe if he got just close enough to drowning to glimpse the eternal... ) When he saw his face reflected rippling in the water he woke from the image with a start—no, he did not want to die for at least a few years: There were too many things he had not yet learned. What he wanted to know he could not guess; that was why he wanted so much to know.

She had come to the cattails at the edge of the river and stood there among the chirruping redwing blackbirds as a great blue heron dropped like a paratrooper from the sky and landed on a sandbar. When she and the boy had been younger, she recalled, they had both been avid birdwatchers—watching birds together had been their earliest ritual and first communion, and they kept identical little blue notebooks from the dimestore to keep their lists of birds in. Her list was always longer than his—because she made things up when she couldn't quite see them (she didn't like wearing her glasses all the time), he said—and she would have to admit, eventually, that she just might have mistaken a retail hawk for a great horned owl or an egret for an ibis or a redheaded woodpecker for an ivory-billed woodpecker, which was supposed to be extinct, after all. They used to sit on the muddy cottonwood-shaded banks of the river in the summer for hours, as he manned the binoculars and she copied prints from the Audubon guide. In time, he grew bored with birds and moved on to archeology (his obsessions were always quick and furious, burning themselves out in a matter of months, and she wondered how long before he gave up his search for the face of God, or whatever it was he was after). Conversely, she had stuck with drawing and painting, and now that's what she would do away at the institute; already she had some hopes of getting a summer job as an artist's assistant (if she were lucky) at the museum of natural history, where she'd heard of people who drew preserved specimens all day long for the scientists' textbooks... With a spearlike thrust of its beak, the heron seized a fish from the shallows and flapped off; meanwhile, a blackbird chased her from the vicinity of its nest, and she reluctantly headed toward lunch-hour at the cafe.

White stones dropped from the ledge high above the quarry turn blue in the water before they disappear; they nearly hit a few unwary turtles but never do. Soon the sun is at such an angle it is impossible to look into the water. So he leaves her to her sketches and dives into that blue, then silver coldness, and the world opens up to him _just like that_ and he knows all its mysteries and secrets. Or something like that—how could he put it into words? He knows the essence of things now, the inner light behind all the shadows, the clockwork ticking under the silence of the universe. What could he call something without a name, that contained all names and the meaning of all names and the meaning of the meaning of all names? To say that his soul was awakening was much too mundane, even she would know that. Once out of the water and back up to the ledge he tries his whirling dervish, can't stop until she pulls him down, and yet his brain is still whirling. That is how you get to see the face of God. She tells him he is acting like the time he'd drunk a whole bottle of wine on a hayrack ride just to prove to his stupid brothers that he could do it. Maybe she was a little afraid.

He liked spending these hot summer mornings at the library—a small granite building on the town square, always cool inside, with a rose-garden in front, a frieze of angels blowing trumpets above the doorway, and a rusty windowed dome which shed light on the reading room below. There were no bookshops in the county, only a newsstand at the county seat which sold paperbacks, so the library was his sole store of knowledge (forget the boring books they taught at the area high school). The librarians, like everyone else, thought of him as that sickly, weird kid in town, but they left him alone and ordered some books for him on interlibrary loan or even bought their own copies, and over the years the library had acquired an interestingly haphazard collection of books on religion and philosophy. Among the weighty tomes were tattered esoterica of the sort he liked—at present he was reading _The Whirling Ecstasy_ , an old book about dervishes in Turkey and Persia. Since he had had his card temporarily revoked for losing too many books (well, maybe they were in the closet or under his bed; he'd return them someday) he'd been content to read every day in an alcove between the stacks—besides, the library was quieter than home, only a few housewives coming in now and then for bestsellers and bumpy-covered romances. "Three signs distinguish the mystic," he read today, positioned so he was out of sight of the part-time librarian's inquisitive stare. "His heart is occupied with thought, his body with service, his eye with the presence of God... " Eventually, because he had already been up half the night reading one of those books under his bed, the book seemed to fall into him, or he fell into the book, and he was fast asleep, there in the quiet, empty library, this last morning in June, 1976.

The cafe had an electric beer-sign on the wall with a waterfall and river that flowed endlessly through a tranquil mountain panorama in a well-designed optical illusion, guaranteed to make any townsman or traveling salesmen feel parched at the sight. The farmers and farmhands were gathered here for lunch and they ate slowly today, perhaps because of the heat, without talking. There was only the ching-ching of the rusty ceiling fan and the low hum of the coolers and radio static from the back room. Her aunt was over in a corner behind the bar, reading last week's shopper between customers; in one hand the woman held a fly-swatter, and out of the corner of her eyes she waited for them to land on the bar and be executed. The name on her apron-front read "Genevieve", but everyone called her Ginny. She was reading about a drowning over at the state lake—a child of ten whose body was not found for three days. Soon she would move on to her _Enquirer_ and _Star_. The girl was frying chicken-fried steak on the grill, sweating and sick to death of her aunt's orders while she just stood there reading. Her aunt knew she had better things to do than this, on her last day in town, and she'd worked a double shift yesterday, for Christ's sake. The fan went ching-ching and the farmers drank their beer in silence and her aunt swatted flies and everything was just as it had been for every single day of her life, and the girl couldn't wait to throw down her apron for good and get the hell out of this goddamn nothing of a place.

The water below him as he dives is both gold and silver: silver where nearly imperceptible wind-rippled waves, catching the sun, fan out across the pond in a pattern like that of silk sheen, and golden where the surface tension is taut and smooth. But that is only the skin of the water—beneath, it is sky-blue in the shallows, green in the depths, and a deeper, mossier green in the mossy shadows, among the reeds and sunken boulders. And even within those demarcations of depth are greater varieties of hue and shade tinted by the interplay of water and rock—blue-green, green-gold, gold-blue, silver darkness, and blue light. One could search the waters of this deep quarry-pool forever, describing the infinite range of colors, but he is falling, falling, falling too fast...

Near where the river was choked with sandbars, beyond the town's fading business district, engulfed in trees and weeds, was a large abandoned mansion, once (he had been told) the property of the town's richest miner before the gypsum quarries had been played out sometime in the forties. No one wanted the house or its acre of land now; no one was even sure who owned it anymore. Three stories with plantation columns, balconies, and the vine-smothered remains of a verandah, it had gone more gray than white, with empty sockets of windows like the eyes of a skull—an imposing but ruined aristocrat in this region of modest boxy farmhouses and barns. Though he had been playing in its ruins half his life, the house had always left him feeling nostalgic for a time he had never known, a feeling which he had lately begun to enjoy and seek out. It seemed that as he approached he scattered ghost-children at play in the yard and a cold wind curled around his ankles—but that was just his over-indulged imagination, for all was hot and still. The massive front doors were boarded, but it was easy to enter from a window facing the verandah. Inside it was even warmer, harder to breathe with the dust and stale air. Something stirred upstairs, a floorboard shivered: must be raccoons or rats. It was so dark inside with the overgrown lilac bushes pressed up against the windows he was sorry he hadn't brought a flashlight, though his eyes were good and he often read long after sunset until his mother demanded he put on a light, he'd go blind. He mounted the decaying grand staircase, passed the haunted bedrooms on the second floor, and continued on toward the strange little slanted rooms above; he went silently, not wanting to waken any bats or spirits. When his eyes were level with the servants' quarters and he could see again in the midday gloom past the cobwebs and the fallen doorway, he saw them—her watchful, patient eyes.

Her aunt cursed and gave a fly a fierce swipe (missed) as the girl took off her apron, but she left anyway, out the door and into the searing heat and light as fast as she could, leaving her glowering aunt and that damn dark place behind. Free! though once she stood blinking in the middle of Main Street she wondered if she really should spend the rest of the day with the boy, meet him in the abandoned house and go biking, the way she'd promised, or spend one last day at home, going for the hundredth time through the few possessions she would take with her. Someone called, but she didn't look back, her feet carried her off toward the river, and she knew she couldn't go back now, only forward, only to him, whether she liked it or not. It was quarter to one; she was early, even so.

He is diving, soaring through space, looking down below at the entire vast cloud-mottled, blue-green spinning globe of the earth.

II

"It's dark in here," she said, meeting his eyes as he came up the stairs, "almost as dark as when we used to meet here at midnight. Good thing I'm not afraid of the dark. I thought of opening the shutters and putting up the blind, but I knew you wouldn't like that. I'll never be able to read in the dark like you." She realized she was talking too much, and at the same time realized how much there was to say before she left him behind in this town.

"Shh," he cautioned her, stepping over to a closet she couldn't see, where he took out something she also could not see. He lit the candle, stuck it on the floor with wax drippings, and sat next to her.

"So what is it we're doing?" she asked.

"We have to take off our clothes," he whispered.

"Oh."

"No, it's not because I'm going to try anything again, for Pete's sake. It's to bare our souls." He had already begun to strip—she'd seen him nearly naked many times at the quarry; he was not shy, even if she was usually the more daring one. If they had been "lovers," perhaps he might have been shy, but he never even seemed aware of his skinny white body. He had reduced himself to just his white undershorts before she had removed both her shoes, but stopped there, suddenly shy after all. His hips were narrow like hers; so were his shoulders—he was nearly androgynous, though—

"Go on," he said, laughing, too, affecting the voice of a leering old man. "I've seen plenty of girls naked." In books was all, he might have added, but did not.

"I think it's too late for us to begin any of that," she said with a cautious laugh, taking off her halter-top but leaving on her bra, staring into the candlelight, thinking if she kept her attention there, he might not notice how skinny and imperfect her body was, too. "Shouldn't you have some book with you? Read some gobbledygook from the dark ages?"

He sat cross-legged again before her, watching her with mild curiosity, certain now he was ready for the monastic life; the sight of her bared flesh did not arouse him at all. But she, too, stopped at her underwear, and he did not protest, after all. It was only because they were best friends that she was willing to do this with him—she tolerated almost anything, even loved this boy who would never touch her (though he had tried, once, because she had asked), never really be a boyfriend, this boy so frail and sickly he didn't seem to belong in this world, but perhaps among angels and other unearthly beings. "I'm ready," she said, making it clear she wasn't going to take anything else off. He saw she was pretty enough in the candlelight, a little boyish, small-breasted, long-legged—nothing different from when he'd seen her in a swimsuit, really.

"Quit staring," she said. "You're making me feel ridiculous."

"I'm not staring, only thinking, clearing my mind, like you should, too. Now listen, sit down again. And stare into the candlelight. Empty your mind." He frowned and furrowed his brow, to indicate how serious he was.

"My mind is always empty."

"Then empty it some more. Keep looking, keep looking. What do you see?"

"The candle, its flame."

"No, I mean you see me. And I see you. Now concentrate really hard. Pare everything down to your soul." She was always so difficult when he tried anything like this with her.

She wanted to say something else, but tried to do everything he said. He was dead serious, though this was obviously just another rite of his own invention, a mix of whatever he had picked up from those books in the library and under his bed. So she stared, saw him through the flame, saw the flame through him, as it were, and concentrated.

"Shh," he whispered, though she hadn't said anything.

She saw him through the flame, and the flame seemed to contain him, even to be him when she concentrated hard enough. She tried not to so much as blink. Whatever his intentions, she was feeling different, though maybe it was just dizzy.

His image in the flame spoke. "Now repeat after me: I am you and you are me."

"But—"

"I am you and you are me," he silenced her. She could be so... The candle-flame rose higher in the exhalation of his breath; their shadows quavered on the window-shade and across the sagging ceiling.

"I... I am you and you are me."

"I am you and you are me."

"I am you and you are me."

"I am you and you are me."

"I... I..." she stuttered and nearly blew out the candle with the laughter which tumbled out of her. He leapt up, furiously thrashing his arms about, and kicked the candle over; it rolled across the floor and sputtered out. "You're breaking the spell!" he cried. "It's supposed to be an incantation!"

She had suppressed her laughter and, glad to be in the dark again, stood and placed her arms on his shoulders—it felt odd, touching his naked flesh, when they had always been so chaste in their affections. For the first time since she had known him she wanted to kiss him, really kiss him, but knew that even if she did, it would mean nothing to him, if he even noticed it. "I'm sorry," she said into his ear. "We can try again."

He felt funny with her arms around him and backed away from her. "Oh, what's the use," he said, stepping into his frayed cut-offs.

"But it was working—I did feel something! That's why I had to laugh, don't you see? I really did sense ourselves merging somehow, looking into that candle, like we could never really be separated no matter how far apart we are."

"Really?" he said, searching her eyes in the dark, but she had turned away quickly, and as if for the first time he noticed her body. "I mean, really, was it like a communion of sorts? Like you felt my soul inside yours?" She turned away again when he followed her, tried to grasp her by the arm. "Really," he stated, a new edge in his voice, now that he was convinced she had just been trying to please him, to make him happy before she left. The girl was already dressed. "I'm going downstairs," he said, not looking back. She stood for a while in the dark—but it no longer seemed so dark, now that her eyes were so used to it and the sun had hit this side of the house. Going to the window, she pulled up the battered shade (half of which tore off in her hand) threw back the shutters, and squinted out into the glare of the world: the wild garden below, the river, the highway, and the tree-lined streets of the town beyond.

Back there in the town, he told her, he could see all she had seen that morning: her grandfather was drowsing over the teachings of the Angel Moroni, her uncle had fallen asleep over his magazines with the radio blaring, the little girls were all snoring in a tangle in the schoolyard, the dog from the gas station was sprawled out in the middle of the road, the afternoon drinkers had knocked themselves out at the tavern, the old couple lay next to each other on their bed trying to nap in this heat; they were all waiting for the prince to cut his way through the overgrown briars and find the princess. As for himself, he was awake; this power inside him was God-given and dangerous, and yet what could he do if he couldn't wake her with a kiss? If he forgot for one second, if he did not remain completely aware of who he was and what he felt, he would lose it and this world would end, wouldn't it?

The boy was stretched out on a mattress beside the girl in what might have once been the formal drawing room, now just another sun-drenched and dusty corner of the big, old house. It was too hot in the room now to sleep—or to touch, even if he had wanted to; they had tried that before, a couple years ago and fully clothed, and it had never worked out, though it had perhaps made them better friends. She had come down the stairs a few minutes after he left and found him lying on the ripped mattress, which some other kids must have dragged in for more illicit purposes—at night, the old house was used for all sorts of assignations among the youths in town, though no one ever came during the day but them. The girl was dangling an arm over the mattress now, drawing in the dust on the floor, like a person on a boat trailing fingers in the water: She had sketched a face, a heart, a hand. Her single long braid, which reached to her hips, defined the curve of her back, bare but for her bra strap, untanned, and covered with minuscule white hairs. He played her vertebrae like a keyboard, dancing fingers along the bone, and then they were both laughing, as if the imaginary music had tickled out between their toes, and he fell on her and bent his face upside down over her face and kissed the top of her sunny, warm forehead. "I am you and you are me," he said, laughing at his own pretensions.

At the quarry the girl looks at him, and looking at her puzzled face with its strawberry freckles across her nose and hair dappled with sunlight and shade, he sees himself—he sees himself in all things now, though it's impossible to say exactly how or why. Rather, it is as if the world is looking back at him, he is looking back at himself through the mirror of her eyes, and that only his own body is foreign now, not really part of him, yet that which necessarily contains him—or else he'd be all and nothing. Or could he really be, like she says, just plain out of his mind? Yes, that's what it was—he was out of his mind, his frigging mind, all or nothing.

They always used to meet like this, on hot summer days, sometimes, too, in the dark of the grape arbor behind her grandparents' house, where he always heard sad music in his head; it was where she would play her busted black guitar or sketch birds in her notebook at dusk, when he liked to sit beside her and read or take her picture with his plastic Diana camera. He remembered once reading from a book on white magic as a storm grew behind them—he had looked up to see her close her sketchbook, the white of her long arms made whiter by the pale June sunset, her long legs bruised with insect bites, and she had placed one cool palm on his head, as if to anoint him. The book he was reading dropped soundlessly to the grass as she took his wrist. Then the girl had wrapped her head in one of her grandmother's old lace rags, pressed one finger to her lips, and he silently followed her through the rain, across the yard, into the house, to her little room under the eaves.

In her room they had gazed out onto the churchyard below when the bell tolled above the rising storm—it would be a bad one, and the tolling bell meant they should go to the basement, but both of them wanted to see, really see a tornado this time. At the churchyard gate bravely foolish children banged spoons and pots and sang high laments without words. He sat at her knees then, back against her bed as she unraveled her lace knots and then her braid as one would strands of rope. He remembered how the house trembled, the roof and walls shook, how they dared one another to be the first to run for the basement. There were blue cornflowers that looked like her blue eyes falling all across the wallpaper of that room. There were sepia-tinted photographs of people from another century, in satin gowns and frock coats, leaning against plaster pillars in imaginary gardens on the wall. On her nightstand were the paper-thin china teacups, the tea-pot, the sugar-bowl which were hers from her recently dead grandmother. The girl left for a few minutes and brought in hot water; her grandfather was in the basement listening to his radio and wanted them to come, but she refused. As the window-panes rattled, the boy wondered aloud if they shouldn't go down, but didn't want to be the first to surrender in what had become a game of daring. Outside the windows the sky was so black and rain-lashed they couldn't see a thing but branches and leaves hurtling by. To calm him, the girl spoke then, as they drank their tea, of her grandmother and of the places her grandmother had visited as a little girl with bourgeois parents: India with its white domes; Japan's labyrinthine cities; an empty, treeless far west where the mountains were small beneath a cloudless sky; before returning home to the Black Forest of old Europe. Then the girl had put "Clair de Lune" on her record-player, wrapped herself like a fortune-teller in an oriental shawl even though it suddenly seemed hot in the room, covered her mouth with her hand for a wide, long yawn, and asked if his brothers really had shot up all the pigeons in their barn. He saw then that he had lost the unannounced game just because he hadn't pretended he wasn't frightened, and said, yes, they had, even though he had tried to stop them with the words of Francis of Assisi, and meanwhile the storm devoured the world, her house, this room, his very soul.

Despite the heat the girl was fast asleep on the mattress on the floor of the abandoned house across the river, near the woods, at the end of town; the boy was in the room across the entrance hall, playing a broken upright piano, something which had barely survived the ruin of the house: an ancient instrument with panels ripped open and skeletal harp exposed—he knew something of Debussy, not more than a page or two. Before he got sick he had just begun to take piano lessons at school, but had gotten nowhere. He repeated the fragment he knew over and over like a mantra, varying rhythm, tempo, volume. It sounded nothing like the composer had intended, for each untuned note was in a different key. Golden hornets droned at the windowpanes, ostinato against his melody. Honeysuckle and morning glory half-covered the windows and he had trouble seeing his hands—the high hot sun coming through the leaves was too bright and his vision was best at night, trained from years of reading books by candlelight while his brother slept unaware in the bed opposite. He was playing the music to calm himself, for suddenly he could not concentrate. A sharp little image like one of those hornets was buzzing in his brain: the girl's pink mouth opening slowly like a little purse, tongue pulling back behind the teeth to say this word, part of a phrase which had always been unspoken between them, this word she had spoken as she was falling asleep there on the mattress, in this heat, a word which filled him now with new fears and impossible possibilities: "Love... love... love... " Perhaps she had said it in her sleep, and he wished he hadn't heard, because they had been best friends for so long and tomorrow, as soon as her uncle drove her to the county seat to catch her bus, she would be gone and they would probably never be friends like this again, he would probably never have another friend like her again.

They rode their bikes along the gravel road that led across the hills to the quarry; the rows of corn and soybeans were white-dusted and brown-withered this season—it had been a long time between rains. The boy was wearing nothing but his cut-off denim shorts, not even his sneakers (he'd tied them around his neck), but the sun felt good on his back, the warm hand of a friend, after all those chilly air-conditioned weeks in the hospital. The fractured piano chords were still rattling icy and tight within his thin white chest—the notes were separating and spreading out, tingling down his arms and legs; he was filled with a sadness that was somehow right and soothing, and now her admission seemed long ago, flotsam from a shipwrecked dream. The girl had on jeans and one of her grandfather's antique collarless dress-shirts over her halter-top to protect her pale freckled skin from the sun; she was whistling what he'd been playing an hour before and stopping short on the passage where he had faltered upon the mute keys of that wrecked piano. She didn't realize that telling the boy she loved him had secretly upset him—hadn't they said as much before? The town they were leaving behind was oblivious to their absence and still, dazed, even stunned by the heat, doors shut, curtains drawn, televisions murmuring to empty rooms—for surely everyone was drowsing like the hundred lost years of "Sleeping Beauty." The boy wished that together they were leaving it all forever—flying far from this place, these people, this smothering summer. But she was the only one actually going away, to her school and a new life, leaving this unreal world lost in its own time behind.

Where the dirt roads became steeper and the oak groves thicker between parched fields, at the end of an overgrown path, they came to a small valley cut down the middle of a bank of high, wooded hills. This was the old gypsum quarry, and here among the gravel pits lay a silver-blue pond mirroring the empty sky. Sometimes kids went skinny-dipping here, or threw beer blasts in the surrounding woods, or raced their minibikes up and down the surrounding hills. "You know those ceremonial pools they have in Mexico?" the boy said to the girl as they walked their bikes between the trees, through the weeds, and up a trail along the edge of the pond. He had hardly stopped talking the entire trip; there was so much to say about his plan, now that he was feeling cheerier, to attain Nirvana or Samaras, whether it was through meditation, dervish-dancing, or chanting. She was amazed he had so much energy and could talk so loud and bike so much after his lung troubles. "They're as round and deep as this, except off in the jungle somewhere," he went on. "The Indians would cover a sacrificial victim with gold and throw him in to appease the gods." He was growing short of breath, at last, as they pushed their bikes closer to the spot overhanging the water where they liked to picnic and sunbathe on cooler days. "Don't you wish they'd done that in Iowa? This place has always been so goddamn boring, only a few burial mounds over there in the hills."

"Well, so what," she said, reaching the small rocky clearing at the top, where she threw her bike down and sat exhausted at the edge of the crumbling limestone cliff. "You're always thinking of the past, all those weird books. Damn it, I'm leaving tomorrow and it's like you're trying to ignore the whole thing." She knew he was trying to avoid any sappy sentimentality, though it was clear they did indeed love one another as only best friends and not lovers can. She just hoped he would acknowledge that much.

He leaned his bike carefully against a dead tree and walked over to the edge of the cliff, where he stared down into the sun-speckled water. He could imagine that was the glint of Aztec gold down there, even if he knew the pond only contained bluegill and snapping turtles. "Why do you think I had you come to the house?" he asked. "It was supposed to be symbolic, I guess, like a Zen initiation. It was supposed to be..." He stopped when his foot slipped and a pebble went hurtling off down the hillside, bounced off the rock wall, and splashed into the pond. "Don't think I won't miss you. I wish I were going off to a new city and a new state, too, that's all. You're lucky to be getting out of here."

"You know you love the land even if you can't stand the people, you're always telling me that."

"It's all right, for now. But even if I do take some classes at the stupid county college, what next? I just can't go back to working at the plant like my stupid brothers and half our classmates, making stupid bombs for the army all day..."

"I'll see you on vacations, whenever I can."

"Yeah, but it'll be different and you know it. You'll have other friends out west, probably boyfriends, too, and you won't need me so much." He gazed out over the pond, across the haze of hills and fields, into the shimmer of heat at the horizon. A cross on the church steeple in town shone silver through the distant muted blue-green, where sky meets treetops, but that was the only evidence of man; he thought it looked like even the Sioux or Fox had never been here. Then he noticed the white trail in the sky and realized the far-off buzzing in the air was not insects, but a jet, heading into the sun.

"You're right," she said, stretching out on a flat granite boulder and taking off her grandfather's dress-shirt. "It will be different, I can't deny that, I guess... What is this scene we're acting out, anyway?" She projected her voice out over the cliff as if she were addressing a crowded amphitheater. "Oh, why are we so, so goddamn wise beyond our years?" She made a melodramatic gesture with her arms and laughed.

He laughed, too, and kicked another pebble, then threw a larger rock, causing a couple of bullfrogs to bark and dive into the water. "I've got an idea," he said, starting to take off his cutoffs. He felt bolder now, and this time he took off everything, ready to swim. "Why don't you join me?" He executed a little leap and pirouette in the air at the edge of the cliff and turned back to her with a grin, rocking unsteadily on his heels.

"Wait!" she said, surprised to see him naked, afraid what he might do next, now that he was risking everything.

"Can't!" he cried, and, steadying himself first on an overhanging boulder, dived into thin air.

Already the afternoon was fading, and they had stayed talking in the leaf-green shadows of the trees at the quarry too long. Despite everything the boy could do, the day was running too fast away from him, when there was still so much to say and see. The girl was tired, sick from the sun, but wanted to hold him back from rushing on too fast, too. He was trying to get her to look at things differently now, since his dive, but she wasn't sure if he was kidding around, really inspired, or just plain insane—probably a combination of all three. It was her idea to get on their bikes and hurry back to get her grandfather's old Mercury. Despite their exhaustion they pedaled faster than before. On the long way back, at his signal, they stopped and jumped off their bikes to play an old game, because it might be the last time: The game consisted of getting lost in a cornfield and finding one another again by shouting across the jungle of dark, musty plants. He loved to dive through the thick, sharp-edged canopy of leaves and tassels, feeling the strength pushing up through the stalks and seeking the sun, the roots quickening into rich soil, new leaves unfurling, baby ears fattening on sunshine—it was all inside him now, there with the rest of the world. When he would catch up to her and seize her it was as if great sunlit chords were crashing and pounding from him to her, lightning jumping between their hands and suns exploding inside his skull: This is what it's like to become godlike, he tried to tell her, but only stumbled—what it is like to hear clocks ticking a thousand miles away and, as some wise man had put it, tremble when a dying blossom on the other side of the world detaches itself from its vine and is borne into space. He rushed against her body and ran over to another row while she caught her breath, before he tackled her from the opposite side. She did the same and soon overpowered, over-ran him, though she cried that he was crushing her ribs, bruising her arms. He raced on ahead, far away from her, down the corn-row, breathless but yee-hawing and thinking then that he was never, never going to die, she was never really leaving at all.

By the time they had ridden their bikes back into town and picked up the Mercury it was far into the lower, steamier depths of afternoon. There was a county fair somewhere nearby; she wanted to go get something to eat, maybe take in a freak show. He figured his family wouldn't miss him at the supper table. They drove with all the windows down and her eight-track tape deck and its cheap speakers vibrating the whole car with the aftershocks of electric guitars and drums. He was glad she was driving; he was still too deliriously high from his dive, and he liked the way the rock-and-roll music pumped through him, liked the wind whistling through the vents and the feeling of power and speed as he watched cornfields turn into a green and yellow blur. This was like being on some incredible drug, better than anything they'd given him in the hospital to ease the pain of a collapsed lung, except that his mind was perfectly clear. He knew the secret of life but couldn't express it after all. All this emotion was choked back in his throat, way down his esophagus. The girl was thinking about how to go about saying goodbye to her grandfather and aunt and uncle. She kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his shoulder, a bridge connecting them, but he knew now she could not know what he was feeling. Or maybe, he was thinking, she could at least feel the taut vibrations, the keen sorrow and longing just beneath this minute and this hour, this last day of June. It would be over soon, of course; the world would be shattered and she would be gone—but if, before then, they could come to an understanding, an exchange... Then again maybe what he had tapped into, he thought, was a frequency most people can only tune into in their dreams—that rise and fall of the tides and the heartbeat, the pulsation of stars and the rhythm of blood in his veins, the inner whisper turned up to a roar.

Another little graveyard of a town—the hot white dust from the gravel road blanketing everything green along the fence-posts, all the air-conditioners humming in unison, flies beating against the screens, and kids circling bikes on their front lawns—he felt and loved it all. The lonesome wheezing of carnival music hung over the town from the banks of the river to the blacktop two-lane, and in the retreating afternoon people were drawn like insects to the sputtering lights of the beat-up old rides; every year, it seemed to them, the county fair got more broken-down and miserable, the rusted girders of the machines more like the mismatched skeletons of primordial monsters. When people laughed and screamed amid the booths and trailers it made him all the more lonely despite his bliss, as if this were a movie he could watch but not enter. And still the secret beat in his breast. At one point, as they stood in line buying tickets, she turned to him with a frown and tried telling him to shut up, yes she did understand what he was trying to say, even if he thought she couldn't (in truth she knew she really couldn't understand everything he said, he was so inscrutable sometimes). He gave her a weak smile, like the smile a priest gives a late-comer, and took her hand, sticky from a snowcone. They got onto the Rounder, were strapped in next to each other, and he felt himself being lifted up into the groaning machinery, the screams of flywheels and pistons in their ears and the thrill of thunder trembling in the metal; he felt many things at once: the almost carnal force that tore at their bodies and clothes and the clean smell of electricity which seemed to sizzle right though his skull, her fingers bound to his, her open mouth and the scream he could not hear as they whirled with the earth.

Later, they lost themselves in the house of mirrors, laughed to find themselves again through the trick layers of glass. They pitched pennies for half an hour but weren't able to win a giant stuffed panda, only a charm bracelet they snapped in two and put in their pockets. They saw the snake woman, a muscular blonde, standing outside her tent, drinking a beer, her rubber snake-suit coiled over the ropes—and yet when they saw her next, within the dim tent, they could not speak—for, he thought, there is something more terrifying about an illusion that is obvious than a well-crafted one; the crude and vibrant paintings on the sideshow trailers (the Frog Baby, the Thing, the Missing Link), for instance, had always unnerved him. She was thinking it was sad, to have to work such a crummy job, and wondered what she'd really be doing for a job in the next few weeks—no way was she going to dress up like a snake. She turned to him in the semi-darkness: He looked flushed, wild in the eyes, sick in the heart. She knew then they better get going soon. The heat and the dizziness and the knowledge he held inside himself were all making him sick to the depths of his bowels; he had never passed out before but now it would be sweet relief if he did, if he could fall into the sawdust and pull her down beside him as he drowned on land.

As he dives, he sees the sky below him, the earth above, and feels that, yes, this is exactly what it's like to die; he'd felt it only once before, on the way to the emergency room when his lungs stopped sucking in and pumping out air...

The sun was skimming the horizon by the time they were back in the car, the wind in their ears and the music too loud again for talking. But he didn't want to talk anymore; words were no use. She stared straight ahead, wondering what it was about this boy that had always attracted her to him—him and all his crazy ways and crazy ideas. It was getting late, but he needed to drive this time to calm himself; the steady rumble of the wheels under their feet massaged the tightness within him. He wanted to drive to another state, another country, another planet. They passed anonymous little towns where torn fragments of radio music and speech whipped through the car windows, where the porch lights were going on one by one like fireflies in the Indian turquoise dusk, and heat lightning crackled on the horizon like the distant crashing of crockery. In the fast-approaching night the world was coming apart, dismembering vision from voice, shadow from artificial light; it crumbled around him like the rocking countryside during a nightmare earthquake—it wailed as it was torn asunder, but still the golden chalice he held inside himself did not break.

And what will she be seeing as he dives? he wonders. She sees this bolt, this flash, this rip of white silver in the afternoon sky as she leans over the cliff. But for her it lasts only a split second; she can't imagine that it is taking days for him to fall, here in the blue air, toward that sunspot of gold on the water. He hears miles above him her long, drawn-out gasp and then her frightened cry: his name, that name he held once in another life, another time, echoing across these hills and fields.

The ascent of a scale never quite reaching its home, held together in the treble register by tiny starlike notes that replaced themselves again and again: His sister was practicing the piano, that same tune they had suffered through all summer (heard from out windows at any hour of the day, rippling down the lawn under the trees, from one end of the barnyard to the other). And only today did he recognize the melody to be the eternal "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Those starry notes, twinkling. The piano's hollow pulsing poured into him as he entered the house, his mother standing there, hands on hips. Wanted to know where they'd been, had a cold supper waiting in the fridge. Everyone had been waiting hours to eat—it was Sunday, did they forget? He stared as if he had landed on another planet, surprised by strangers, battling gravity. The girl was to stay, so she had left his side to help make the table under his mother's directions: Sunday's tablecloth, Sunday's silverware, Sunday's dishes, Sunday's damned tradition. He stood back from the table, looking down at all this commonplace business as if he could comprehend none of it. These people, he thought for just a moment, I don't know who they are, they must be actors. No one would eat until the whole family had assembled; his mother followed the girl about the room, conducting her movements like a dance instructor, and for some reason he felt something furious rising in him—and that monotonous music was upsetting his formerly perfect equilibrium. The girl noticed nothing, was a little tired but glad to help, pretending to belong to a real family for just a little while. She obeyed a command and lifted the heavy stack of dishes from the pantry shelves. Suddenly he decided to stop her from doing everything his silly mother said just because she said it, and moved to take the dishes from her.

Blue, gold, silver: the colors of his dive, as he dives, is diving.

III

She had seized his arm in turn, but that did not stop what he had set in motion. When the dishes crashed, the world stopped, or seemed to, or at least did in his heart. The thread that bound everything together, to him, within him, atom to atom, molecule to molecule, had snapped. He had returned from some unknown place. The strange thing was he could not remember what he had known or seen. He was staring open-mouthed at the linoleum floor like a fool. They were his family's best dishes, and yet he felt no remorse. Tears of anger welled in the girl's eyes—why did he do that, ruin everything—or were they really tears of sadness? His mother was yelling, his sister screaming, the piano suddenly stilled. He noticed all at once that it was now night, the room was illuminated by ugly fluorescent light, a ceiling fan spun overhead, flies buzzed on some flypaper in the doorway, he could smell green tomatoes and potato salad and tar on the gravel outside; his mother looked like an old woman, his sister like a monster, and the girl—she was invisible, she had already gone away and disappeared.

After a tense supper and sitting in the parlor talking awkwardly with his family for an hour or so she rose to leave without warning, in that abrupt, haphazard style she had, saying she would fall asleep any minute, and she still had so much packing to do and her aunt would wonder where she was and her grandfather would be waiting up. She made hasty good-byes and he walked out in the yard with her to her car in the driveway. The yard was alive with insects and a sticky warmth had settled down on the countryside for the night. He could hear his parents' laughter and television music coming from the house, and upstairs one of his brothers was playing a radio. "Take me with you," he said into the driver's window as she started the ignition.

"Where at this hour?" She was no longer angry or sad; she was just tired, and wanted to go home.

"You could drop me off a mile or so down the road, over by the Baumann farm. I feel like walking."

"Then get in."

She drove slowly, waiting for him to say more, but for once he was quiet, unable to think of a thing. It was a starry night, and away from the lights of the town you could see into the sky for infinity. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment. "I'm nervous," she said.

"Yeah, so am I."

"You know, we can talk tomorrow, on the phone before I go, if you like." She had lit the cigarette but only fidgeted with it, never placed it in her mouth. "Your family's funny," she said.

"Yeah, I know."

"You're not like them."

"I know, I know."

"But then who are you like?"

He turned to her in the darkness, addressing her silhouette. "Listen, I think I'm back to normal now. I just felt pretty weird after that dive, I won't try to explain anymore. But it's all over now. I'll be OK. You can let me off here, by those woods. I want to say goodbye like this, now, in the dark." He wondered why he wasn't crying when he felt so much like crying.

The car came to a crunchy halt on the gravel road. She turned to him and addressed his own silhouette. "Go," she said. "I can't stand saying goodbye anymore. I'll write, I'll call, I'll remember you. Now, go!"

In the dark, it was impossible to tell if she was crying herself. Probably not. He got out. She turned away when he leaned in the window to kiss her on the forehead. I am dreaming all of this, she was thinking, and soon enough I'll be waking up in my bed—but first I have to drive myself a hundred thousand miles back home.

He looked back once as she drove away, the sedan's taillights receding in the dark distance like two bright red scrawls on black paper. The woods around him seemed very tall and menacing; he decided to stick to the road, cut across a cattle-guard, and take a path through the fields, along the edge of a creek, toward home. He would walk slowly, drink in the starry sky with his eyes, think this whole long day through. Soon it would be midnight...

And under a moonless sky, beyond the high, swaying embrace of the farmhouse trees, one yellow square was shining: his window, for his younger brother would sleep with the light on all night unless he was there in the bunk above. Could it really be that late, and would he be questioned in the morning about where he had run to after supper?

It was strange, the way cicadas would stop and then start singing all at once in the trees as he passed by, not a failed cue among the insects, as if a choirmaster were there to conduct them: How else could one account for such perfect unison? Their high tremor was like an electronic pulse, the very rhythm of the night, when all sounds merged and beat as one. Even his own heartbeat seemed to fall into time—as he lay on the roof of the family station wagon, staring into the depths of space and willing his soul to go there, go up there now, go as far and as quick as light from a star. The roof of the car was cool on his back. He did not even bother to brush away the mosquitoes. Soon sleep began to throb in and out of his temples: he breathed sleep deep into his lungs, and all the motion of the world became as one, too—the spinning earth dizzy on its axis, the imperceptible passing of the last day of June.

Everything is memory, everything: this room you are sitting in, this light you are reading under, the pattern of this broken story, these very words you are reading right now—there can be no future or present, there is only the past; it is around us constantly though we call it different things. "Today," you will say, or "right away," or "maybe next week:" as soon as anything is realized it becomes the past, was already on its way toward becoming the past as the thought formed in your mind. All we know is memory, all we touch, all we ever loved memories constantly crowding in on top of other memories. Memories get longer if more suspect as life grows shorter. Your eyes scan the room and a thousand memories rush in: the memory of that shade of wallpaper, the memory of that glass of water, the memory of the birdcall you just heard outside your window. It is impossible to comprehend the whole world except in terms of memory. Except for now, when he rises from the quarry, spraying water like molten silver in every direction, with this secret world whirling within his heart, the sun burning gold in his brain.
Edgell and Me

I first began to suspect that P. S. Edgell was still living among us, and had faked his own death in August 1977, when I saw a man matching the "late" author's appearance on a placid honeymooners' lake in the upper Adirondacks. Until then, I had held only a remote interest in the novelist, barely remembering what he looked like from the dust jacket of my freshman copy of _Rich and Strange_ (a book which I unfortunately found neither). Indeed, I would have thought nothing of the bald, mustached gentleman struggling ahead of us in his oversized rowboat if while approaching the dock he hadn't turned around to my new wife and me and said with a Prussian growl, "Would you mind kindly not splashing so?"

Emilia handed me her oar and said _sotto voce_ , "I could almost swear I've seen that man before."

This having piqued my interest, I gave the man, who was now fishing something out of the water with a jar, a longer look and started to say, "But... it can't possibly be... could it be that crazy old writer P. S. Edgell, he's been dead for—"

"Shh," Emilia commanded, "he'll hear you." The bald gentleman suddenly seemed to change his mind about docking and with renewed strength swiftly turned and pointed his boat toward a distant pine-forested island. Soon he was out of sight.

We were unable to follow because of previous plans and I (at least) did not see the man again during our happy stay at that mountain retreat, though I am now convinced he was indeed the celebrated bilingual author.

Upon my return home I visited the college library, read the available books (the plots of which, incidentally, seem not to have been made watertight) and, taking astute note of several clues hidden in them, came to the inevitable conclusion that P. S. Edgell, well-known for a schizophrenic existence straddling two nations and two occupations, was attempting to begin life anew on these shores, freed from the bothersome notoriety he had acquired during the course of the past forty years.

My next step was to place an ad in a prominent literary journal asking for any and all help in ascertaining if "Edgy," as even his most reverential fans sometimes call him, had been spotted by others in the North America, and if so, where was he living? What was he doing now? Was he happy to have walked away from fame and fortune? (I also took the precaution of placing an ad in several Floridian newspapers asking for help in organizing an entomology club, hoping to snare him unsuspecting if my first hunch that he was living the life of a retiree in Tampa or Tallahassee might be true. This is an insect-trap I am still perfecting.)

While waiting for replies, I composed a lengthy and delicately suggestive letter to his elderly widow in London. Though I was careful not to make any blatant assertions, I may have struck a nerve because none of these inquiries was answered. (You are, Frau Edgell, worried perhaps at being named accomplice?)

Response to my small notice in the prominent literary journal, though not overwhelming, was significant. Most of the wilder claims (he was ghostwriting biographies in Hollywood, or working as an embalmer in Des Moines) I simply discounted with a minimum of fact-checking, but several of the remaining testimonials were not so easy to disregard.

"Read _Mercy Strained_ ," a retired headmaster instructed, "it's right there between the lines. You don't even have to know there's a very significant acrostic in the last chapter to figure out that he had been planning to escape his old life for years. I am sure that I myself saw him standing in the back of a lecture hall at a British theater convention in 1982. When I left the podium to confront him he had already disappeared."

Though I have yet to identify said acrostic, I too have studied that otherwise unremarkable book closely and quite agree that all the business about premature burial and assumed names could only be self-referential. _Nota bene_ Edgell's edgy introduction to the American edition, in which he insists there was nothing autobiographical in his depiction of the English teachers in Heidelberg who temporarily dress their son as a brownshirt in order to avoid suspicion. Besides knowing full well that nothing sells like a swastika on a book-cover, he was just inviting future controversy over his allegiances, as well as his vow to "escape science's prisons through art." Metamorphosed into an American wanderer, he had indeed escaped. Another typical respondent had this to say: "For years I've told people that the author of all my favorite books wouldn't have died before completing _Noble Kin_. Therefore I was not in the least surprised when I saw him at a trailer park in Brownsville. He wore a scarab on a medallion and did not seem to mind that I recognized him. We chatted amiably for a good ten minutes; he complained about the current state of fiction and said he was stopping in Texas before going hunting [for beetles, I presume] in Mexico." One or two other "Edgy contacts" also believed the author was devoting his retirement to one long, hassle-free coleopteral expedition.

Just last week I received a twenty-page letter from a high school English teacher in Wyoming who claimed to "love everything he ever wrote, even his 'true-life' mystery _The Moor's Murders_." She had conducted her own close reading of his later works and concluded in mock-Edgellian style that he is currently "racing Grayhounds across the country" and "avoiding four-star hotels in favor of more discreet one-moon motels." Though, she went on, he sometimes gives his own name when pressured, in more playful moods he has been known to use such obvious (and corny) give-aways as Dr. Richard Strange or Mr. Samsa or an anagram or even the name of his biographer, that unreliable Ellman fellow. After publicizing some of her findings in a small literary magazine, she received a postcard with a dung beetle on it and a cryptic warning on the other side. At this point her letter becomes slightly less convincing.

My respondents all concur on at least three items: 1) That P. S. Edgell currently looks much the same as always, if a tad thinner and more "athletic," 2) He expresses great relief to have abandoned his destructive habits of too much writing and too little sleep, and 3) He is working on a book which will explain everything.

Why would he do "it" at the pinnacle of his fame? critics of my theory (such as those at a certain retrograde Department of Literature) have scoffed. As I have already mentioned, careful readers should not be surprised, because he had been planning such a ruse for years, planting signs and symbols throughout his many books—even on the book jackets!(A trail of false deaths and deceptions may be followed from the clumsy "murder" scene in _Damned Spots_ to the royal flight in _A Fool's Leer_ , which I detail in my work-in-progress.) The question one should be asking instead, my darling and all the rest who mocked me, is: Why did he take so long to do it?

Just to clear the decks I suppose I must address the matter of those wilder claims from lovers past or present or the love-children of these supposed liaisons. I cannot conjecture that even a man filled with as much lust for life as Edgell could have had the time then or now for so many affairs, but there _are_ those confessions which are more convincing than others. Of course, even a few of these seem to rely too heavily on material to be found in his novels. For instance, riffling through my index cards, I find the case of a librarian in Alexandria, Missouri who describes a lovemaking scene straight out of _By Any Other Name_ ; I would dismiss it altogether if she hadn't gone on to explain how her alleged Edgell jumped up in the middle of it all and demanded a revision (or is this you, clever Emilia, taking one last stab at me?). Others have sent me murky snapshots or an occasional herky-jerky home video, but until I get more cooperation from the literary authorities who've been contacted (after all, being a Milton scholar myself, this isn't really my field), these souvenirs remain as perplexing as radar soundings of the Loch Ness monster or Yeti spoor.

There exists in my files a photo-booth strip, sent to me from Reno, of a lovely blonde ten-year-old, and if one compares magnified photographs of Edgell as a shy sunny-haired lad at his Gymnasium one does become amazed at the disdainful smile both children share. The little girl has been sent to a foreign boarding school in hope of avoiding any adverse publicity, since, as her mother says, she wants no money, just acceptance from the supposed father, whom she tells me in a smudged and crumpled letter she met in the mid-nineteen-eighties while working at a motel night desk: "He had a beautiful accent."

And then there is the case of the infamous "lost" chapter from _Comedy of Heirs_ , described by one adamant Edgellite in Albany who at the present prefers to retain his word processor's anonymity, referring to himself only as "The Tumblebug." This manuscript, a fair copy heavily soiled with coffee-cup rings and crisscrossed with additions, deletions, and doodles, has (he says) been secretly forwarded to several German experts at a major university—where it is hoped they are treating it with mixed respect and reservations! My final judgment on the chapter—which the anonymous graduate student says was discovered among uncatalogued boxes donated by his "widow" to Don Edgell's beloved Oxford—will have to wait since I do not read German, although I trust this is not another prank of the sort which forced my early retirement from teaching. What little has been translated so far sounds like Edgell (being at least in part the king's last will and testament in the form of an elegy), but, I'm afraid to admit, it is poor even by Edgell's standards. However, I must concede that I am not a blind admirer, but an amateur, though inspired, theorist whose opinions may not mean a great deal yet and whose most iconoclastic criticism awaits consolidation and publication. If authenticated, the manuscript will certainly demand a high advance.

When reading a novel by Edgell (it has been noted more than once by my predecessors) one sometimes gets the feeling the author is inventing us, his readers, as much as his characters. I have had a somewhat similar sensation that Edgell knows I am out there, has been tracking me like a rare beetle for years, and if I were a more paranoiac sort I might accuse the author of planting for my discovery alone a few of the red herrings I've sniffed out in my research; at times I sometimes I ask myself if he might be pulling at my lower extremities from a great distance. For instance, that bit in _Slings and Arrows_ about the thriller-writer inventing an inept biographer just to make himself look more cunning is surely a road-sign that has been reversed by vandals. There is also enough in _Major For Minor_ to make me wonder if Edgell had already met a pretty undergraduate at one of her Elizabethan seminars and was making assignations even then to meet again years later in the Great North, but of course I realize I don't have the space here to elucidate all the strange parallels between his fiction and our facts, which I've outlined in my forthcoming book...)

Where was I then? You see how, like a table-tapper at a séance, he exerts his influence from the "afterlife": Sometimes in these somewhat convoluted sentences I almost seem to be parodying Edgell's own maddeningly elusive and allusive style, which is nothing less than what he was already doing in his latter-day fabulations. If you are to continue playing this sort of metaphysical hide-and-seek even now, Herr Edgell, how is my audience to differentiate your hand from mine, or my footprint from yours? This is serious scholarship, I remind you! It has cost me years of my life, subjected me to ridicule and abuse, and led to the unhappy dissolution of... well, never mind.

I may as well step onto the high-dive here to make a public challenge to Prof. Edgell if he is indeed out there with his ear to a glass pressed against this magazine (I've been told he still reads it): I promise not to breach your privacy or to bring up again any old political sympathies, but merely to provide you with a more viable conduit for presenting the history of your most enigmatic game of all to the awaiting world, without all the headaches and hang-ups of those tiresome agents and executors you've know in the past. Money need not exchange hands at this stage at all, though you can be assured we can hold out for the most, well, persuasive amounts. All transactions secret, of course, and conducted at the venue of your choice. You owe it to me, you know, but if you'd like something more old-fashioned—say, pistols at dawn—I will be glad to oblige. My number you'll find in the book.

#### Postscript to the Editors

This is only the beginning of the story. Now that I have all the time in the world, now that he has cost me my position and my happy home-life, I am working hard on organizing all my shoeboxes full of material into a cohesive whole which will prove once and for all to the world and the literary world-within-a-world in particular that renowned author and bug-collector P. S. Edgell is healthy as a derby-winner and could be hiding almost anywhere and (I have held my most shocking revelation until the end, for your eyes only) still writing under several assumed names—perhaps even a play on my own will be added someday. The prospect terrifies me....

