

# Dissemblings

Still More Short Stories

by

S. P. Elledge

Dissemblings by S. P. Elledge

By S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 S. P. Elledge

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for anyone I've forgotten

### Table of Contents

  1. Writing to Sell

  2. Cruel

  3. A Story for Young Moderns

  4. The Temptation of Cotton Matthias: Part I and Part II

  5. Hypatia Kentworth's Importation of Edmund Wellington to America

  6. Twist Twist

  7. Rourke and Andy

  8. The White Party

  9. Sand

  10. Arms Outstretched and Head Bowed

  11. In Veracruz

  12. Losses

  13. Unfinished Dance for Girl and Boy on a Porch

  14. Painters of Shadows

  15. Cicisbeo

  16. Hearken, Carlotta!

  17. Angel

  18. The Sixth of July

  19. Islands

  20. Once On an Afternoon

  21. In the Afterlife

Writing to Sell

" _The story that will sell is a story people like to read. Most people do not like to read about unpleasant subjects. Since they identify with the hero or heroine, they do not like to read stories in which those characters come to grief or end up in a state of bewilderment .... For example, a young man falls in love with his employer's daughter; the employer makes their marriage contingent on the young man's selling a large insurance policy to a miserly millionaire; the young man manages to sell the policy and he and the girl are united .... He might rescue the millionaire's grandchild from drowning. He might learn that the millionaire was a stamp collector and find a rare stamp for him. He might make a bet with the millionaire. Or the girl might solve the problem instead of the young man. There is no end to the possible variations..."_

The Consolidated-Webster Comprehensive Encyclopedic Writers' Guide, 21st edition

"There is no end to the possible variations," the young man repeated to himself as he entered the chrome-embellished sanctum of his employer—a man who we might here call "imposing," inevitably stout and undeniably balding (puffing the requisite fat cigar)–who motioned him to sit in an armchair several feet from a desk as broad as a billiards table. The young man, in this instance playing the "hero," sank into the prickly upholstery, making meek sounds in the back of his throat and feeling the cushion springs pressing against his delicate backside.

"Late yet again," said employer began at last from across the gleaming teak expanse of his desk, "I can guess that you have still not sold our millionaire that policy. I would think a person who expects to be my future son-in-law could think of _some_ way."

From the depths of his chair the aforementioned young man explained: "Well, I thought of saving his grandchild from drowning, but I couldn't get the little devil near water. And it seems that rare stamp I discovered for his collection is nothing but a Tuvan counterfeit. I did make a bet with him, though—on a squash match—and now I'm afraid I owe him a thousand dollars. It's a damn shame, sir—excuse my language—but I don't think I'll be able to marry your daughter after all, at least under your, dare I say, _rigorous_ contractual terms, and as long as this millionaire is so miserly."

A bureaucratic sigh from the employer as he stamped out his cigar in a malachite ashtray. "You do realize," he warned, "that you are in awful danger of ending this little romantic episode of yours in grief. And then where would we all be?"

"Yes, sir, I fully understand—I'd hate for us to become .... ahem, _unsympathetic_. Who would then be able to _identify_ with us? That's why, after long consideration on my part, I have decided that we should be somewhat unconventional under the circumstances and have your daughter try her luck with the millionaire. Surely someone so beautiful and yet so witty can think of a way to sell a policy to that old Silas."

The employer leaned back in his chair and sighed again, beating a bolero on the desktop with his fat, nicotine-yellowed fingertips. "This is of course an unusual proposition, but I'll call her in." He pressed the intercom button and asked to have his daughter sent in; she arrived at once, hands clasped before her and crocodile-hide briefcase under her arm. "Daughter, your fiancé here is in dire straits."

The girl, every corpuscle a heroine, glanced from older to younger man and said, "Yes, I know. We've been having quite a dramatic conflict so far. But even I had no inkling it would proceed as it has. I expect now you want me to find a, dare I say, _resolution_."

"If you don't," the young man said, rising from his seat, "we might lose whatever romantic impetus we had going for us. Do you want to end up disrupting time-honored societal sensibilities? Marriage is our only fitting resolution, but I've tried my best and failed." He reached for her hand, took both hands, and held them in his own. The girl did not respond any more than a manikin would.

Instead she confronted her father: "If it hadn't been for your impossible demands! As if I'm some princess in a fairy tale... Though as a matter of fact I'm one step ahead of the both of you. Today I went to see the millionaire and he agreed to buy a policy."

"Jubilation!" the employer exclaimed, rushing to embrace his daughter and future son-in-law. "The happy couple! Looks like the wedding's on."

The girl broke away from their stranglehold. "He agreed to buy a policy," she stated in a well-modulated purr of a voice, only very slightly reminiscent of the late Miss Bankhead, "on one condition, and on one condition only: that I become his mistress and bear him a child. He says it's probably the only way to rescue me from such a humdrum, predictable existence."

In unison, short deep gasps from the men, as the young one grew pale and the old one red in the face. "Predictable!" the employer bellowed, crushing his cigar into the desktop. "Do you realize you've completely ruined our chances for making a sale? Who's going to want to have anything to do with the exploits of a young woman so, so... _amoral_ and licentious that she'd do whatever filthy deeds an old lecher asks of her just to sell him a life insurance policy? My own daughter! What a horrid, unpleasant turn of events. I feel like I've been cast into the lowest sort of pulp novel."

"Personally, dear," the young man interrupted, having sufficiently regained a modicum of composure, "even though I think your father is terribly old-fashioned and wrong for acting so vehemently when, after all, those were _his_ demands that led us into this state of affairs, I am shocked in my own modest way that you would have such disregard for orthodoxy. Oh, illegitimate children and illicit sex do not bother me—in their proper context—but your flippant tone certainly does. Suddenly I envy those quiet, serious young men in other stories with their quiet, serious girlfriends and their conformities to more shall we say 'accepted' modes of storytelling."

"Too late for arguments and animosity," she said, lurching back against her father's desk like a caged beast and spreading her well-manicured nails before her. "You see how inappropriate metaphors—or is it similes?—have already begun creeping in, attended by a rather weary cynicism. Soon there will be allusions and poetic license and who knows what else." She slapped her briefcase onto the desk and withdrew several official-looking documents from its reptilian innards. "Here are the contracts, all signed and legally binding. I shall continue as the millionaire's mistress for the first five years or one novella's worth of our now imminent marriage, with an option for another five and subsequent novelization—our millionaire, of course, has full creative control, although I do have veto power on any moving picture deals. Also, I shall bear him an heir, and provided there are sequels, others as well. This first offspring, however, must out of artistic integrity be completely different from the ungrateful and unprintable ones he's already sired and will be the sole recipient of his vast fortunes and copyrights. In fact, if we were successful, this child has already been conceived, as of just about twelve twenty-seven today. Oh, yes! Besides, he is a very interesting man, and I quite like him. You know how he made all his money? By writing _stories_. In fact, he's been wondering all along as to just how he could best put us to use in his line of work, thought it might be amusing if instead of the same old things happening he'd—how did he put it?—'muck up' our plot a bit." Speech over, she placed hands on hips and gave her head a little toss, looking as statuesque and streamlined as the bonnet ornament of a vintage Silver Shadow.

"I should say we've been mucked around enough already," her father rejoined, annoyed by the authorial Anglicisms. "In my day heroes were heroes and heroines kept downstage left. Once something was inaugurated after a fashion you damned well expected it to abide by the party line. Self-conscious stylization and literary affectation to their own table in the kitchen, I say. Do you follow me? None of this bungling about with bohemian metafabulation. Well, our world is crumbling around us. The very rhythm of my speech has changed and I'm powerless as a pawn."

The young man had meanwhile assumed a sort of expressionist posture in the door frame, one hand at his waist and the other clutching at the transom. "I'm afraid," he said, or more accurately, declaimed, "marriage is out of the question under these conditions set by your millionaire author. And to come clean, I am in a way glad. From the very first paragraph you were saying and doing things that had me wondering if you truly cared if this relationship of ours was (if I may be so crass) marketable or not. Look at me—I've become as angular and contrived as a character out of _Caligari_ , and these Rumpelstiltskinizations of our wealthy writer are archaic to say the least. Besides, to be absolutely frank, you are not half so pretty as you are described." Now he had gone to the window and was staring many stories below at the traffic on the freeway streaming like aphids over rosebushes, wondering if the world would change at all if he jumped and thinking of that perfect day a year before when he had gone sailing alone on the river in a ripping little Cris-Craft and contemplating the fact that this was the first time he had been allowed even the hint of an interior monologue since he had met the girl so many months and pages ago. As he was meditating upon all this, the intercom emitted a lambish bleat; the girl answered it and told the personage in question to enter.

It was of course her lover, the millionaire, a seasoned but still remarkably dashing gentleman in a glossy grizzly-fur coat that fell to his argyled ankles—the man rapped his malacca cane on the desk to draw further attention to himself (as if it were needed), then cleared his throat with a suitably ursine growl. "Gads, but how splendid to see you all together," he announced, in an accent not truly English and not quite American, as if he were reading lines set before him on an easel. "Looking for all the world like a finely balanced still-life I'm about to throw wickedly off-kilter with just one little finger. Excuse me, but I _am_ known for creating scenes. Only this very evening after our dear lady left my most private chambers I was working on a story about a young man very much like _you_ with an employer almost _exactly_ like you and a clever beauty who truth to say is _you_ precisely," he explicated, pointing at the parties in turn with his theatrically handled cane. "Just when I was at a loss for material this slip of a 'girl' (as she always seems to be called) inspired in me a novel twist in the plot—what if the millionaire turned out to be one just like me and, furthermore, one in desperate need of selling a story to keep his reputation afloat? To continue that halfhearted metaphor, our girl threw me just the lifeline I needed. "There _is_ an end to all these impossible variations. The girl, you see, in return for which the millionaire buys a wholly unnecessary life insurance policy, will supply him with an idea that's sure to sell the damned thing, which is: to write a story about a millionaire who needs to sell a story in which the girl gives him the idea to sell the story in return for a policy, which is an idea for a story in which the girl—well, my head is simply swimming, too, but you've got the point, haven't you? Like two mirrors facing one another."

The girl's face had become suffused with something like iridescence, lit up with light seemingly cast through an unseen prismatic gel—maybe that's the one, up there in the rafters. "I think it's a perfectly marvelous solution!" she exclaimed before a writerly shadow flitted momentarily across her brow. "So long as... So long as we're not—well, considering this audience before me—so long as we're not considered _too_ progressive..."

"I believe you've left me in a state of bewilderment as well as anyone else left out there," her father said, stamping out his cigar for the third time before this story is ended. "All this self-referential posturing should be left to unknown European authors writing for unreadable literary journals. And these extraneous details! Why, for God's sake, _malachite_?" He saw that he had put out the cigar in his palm.

"And," the young man said with a touch of regret for those idyllic days on the river last spring with the cherry-blossoms along the shore in full bloom like a row of maidens in pink petticoats and the larks practicing their arias in the reeds and the sturdy masculine feel of an oar in his hands (idyllic days which there simply won't be time to reflect upon now), " _I am certain it will never sell_."
Cruel

Chang was an enormous, cantankerous, highly musical, wholly male Siamese cat, glossy blue-black in all his "points"—nose, ears, paws, tail—fading into a burnished chestnut color across the rest of his sinewy body, with sapphire-blue eyes I'd never seen before or since in any other animal or human; they were as jewel-like and unreal as those in the life-sized, painted statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Boniface's down the paved county road that curved close to one side of our farmhouse. Compared to the rest of the farm cats and kittens, who were invariably tabbies or calicoes and sometimes numbered as many as a dozen, he was as regal and serene as a Bengal tiger among cowering panthers. His origins were as mysterious as most of the cats who hadn't actually been born on the property: he might have been a stray whose people had never advertised for his return, or he might even have escaped from a pet shop or a breeder's, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of miles away. I must have been about six when he first appeared, strutting about and acting even then like the world-wise prodigal son back in the land of abundance. Whatever his birthright, he was well-respected by all our other pets, which included dogs of course and ponies and sometimes a kid goat or lamb and even the tame geese my mother cosseted like exotic birds—but they were every one outdoor animals who preferred the outdoors, while Chang had the rare privilege of coming and going as he liked in our old and large but generally untidy house. He wore no collar. Once in a while he deigned to allow me to brush him from the tip of his satin nose to the tip of his tail, which had a kink in it like a question mark and gave all his movements an especially inquisitive air. Chang often slept at my feet or, on cold nights, curled into my side. Sometimes he would leave bloodless velvety moles or beheaded grasshoppers at my bedroom door, like a king who must offer sacrifices to an even greater power.

Every now and then Chang would go off "tom-catting," as the farmhands called it, disappearing for days or even a week or so to roam the hills, probably in search of more distant female companionship or a battle with those females' erstwhile suitors (battles I am certain that because of his size he always won). Once, in the midst of a light spring rain and across a sweetly scented hay meadow, I had heard him gallantly singing—for his vocalizations could never be categorized as mere "yowls," as with other cats—and I imagined him serenading an attractive ginger-colored female lolling like the favorite of a harem in the white pine above him, as love-struck as the medieval troubadours beneath their ladies' balconies I'd read about in certain old schoolbooks. Over time he acquired a few scars and an elegant limp in his front left forepaw, but nevertheless he grew stronger with the years and even more rakish.

Often I wished I'd had Chang to follow me to school instead of Kaiser, our aging German shepherd who looked martial and intimidating but would roll on his back like a puppy even in front of the toughest bullies. The nuns would shoo him away from beneath the parochial school's windows, where he'd come to whimper for a biscuit, and by recess he would have already loped home, to sleep square in the middle of the muddy barnyard. It was of course only a matter of time before he was trampled to death by our dairy cows. But this is Chang's story, and when Chang wasn't off prowling the ravines or disciplining kittens in the empty horse-stalls, he would be sleeping, too, in the warm hayloft or, on summer days, on sunny boulders along the south-facing brook. As with the other cats, the plump mice in the barn kept him well-fed, and there were always table-scraps around our back-porch door even the dogs had missed. At night, when he stretched and stretched his whole almost serpentine body across the foot of my bed, I'd scratch his chin, press the palm of my hand across his wide Asian face, and rub his belly until he'd fall asleep with a deeply satisfied purr. As I encircled him under my blankets I'd think of the indignities I'd suffered that day in school and fall asleep, too, comforted by his presence and his very substantial warmth and weight.

Like Chang, I was outsized, but I had none of his grace or agility. I stood several inches taller than most boys my age, but I was skinny and wobbly and easily stumbled, no good at ball-games and too much of a stutterer to impress anyone when called to the front of the class to explain Galileo's quarrel with the pope or why we sometimes said Holy Ghost and sometimes Holy Spirit. Even the meekest girls would giggle when I approached the blackboard, and though I could do sums with a speed that more than satisfied the meanest nuns (the ones who taught mathematics), and though I could read almost as fast, I did not excel in or outside of the classroom. My parents were too busy with the farm, which was failing as so many were even in those days, to notice my troubles—and even if they could have, there would have been very little for them to do but go to Sister Agnes, the principal, and ask that I be held back a grade, which would have made me appear even more ridiculous among my shorter but more able-bodied schoolmates. I was also that rare commodity among Catholic families: an only child and probably, the nuns would believe, one who got too much coddling. And so I struggled on through the grades, more fearful of the schoolyard, actually, than the school: the schoolyard where I would be left on the sidelines during noon-hour games of four-square or basketball. Or where I'd hear even the mildest, most devout girls call me "string bean" and tease me into games of hopscotch or jump-rope, realms these girls ruled, where I would trip or be tripped. "He'll grow out of it," was my parents' catch-phrase and catch-all for the wisdom they could impart to me; they knew that if I continued along my awkward but unprotested path in life, I would inevitably become something like a well-paid bookkeeper or, if they were so blessed, a priest. Because I was so useless at all things requiring any physical strength, they left most of the chores to the two old farmhands, retired farmers themselves who lived down the road and came by to help with the milking or horse-shoeing or hay-mowing as often as they could.

School-years and holidays and summers came and went, in memory seemingly so quick to pass but of course endlessly slow while I endured them. We had many animals and many nearby relatives as well, and one cat was only one cat, even if he was as beautifully noticeable as a genuine seal-point Siamese. There is little else I could relate, even remember of Chang's life that stands out in my mind until I was nearly ten years of age, when my parents were actually the first to mention that they hadn't seen the big tom since the night of the early August hailstorm, which had already been two weeks before. Chastened by my forgetfulness—negligence probably being a venial sin—I slipped away as soon as supper was over and began searching our twenty-five acres, calling for Chang across the pastures, between the rows of sweet-corn, down by the brook and up to the pine-ridge, calling more loudly as I trotted down the gravel road and as far as the Munsons' farm; I backtracked and interrogated all the calicoes and tabbies in the barn, overturned bales in the hayloft, and looked in all the darkest stalls, the clean little milk-house, the wash-room, the tool-sheds, pump-house, woodshed, and tack-room. Chang was not in the abandoned outhouse with its Sears catalogue pages still pasted to the walls, and he was not in the half-collapsed out-buildings where we stored broken machinery, old furniture, and other junk. I had almost given up when I heard a faint strangled cry coming out of the disused chicken-coop, a corrugated tin-roofed building so low and fallen-in from recent storms that I had to get down on my hands and knees to make a passage through the ferns and Joe Pye weed and then the splintered timbers to reach the old brooding area, where I recalled images and sounds, from the farthest corners of my memories, of guinea fowl and Rhode Island reds competing for feed-corn scattered on the cracked cement floor. You could still smell the moldy corn and the poultry droppings. It was there in the forgotten coop-house, far under a low shelf where a half-empty sack of crushed gravel and a rusted incubator still sat, that I came across Chang.

At first, in the shadows and slanted light, he looked perfectly fine and I cajoled him for playing hide-and-seek like this. But he did not move, only meowed in a disdainful way, and I saw that he was stretched out here on the dirty cement because his left hind-leg was twisted outwards and had fresh wounds along its upper thigh. Even so, I still thought Chang must be basically all right, and I tried to move him, or to make him stand, but then I saw he could do neither, in fact was in pain when I touched any part of his hindquarters. He even hissed a little and folded back his ears in anger, something he had never done with me before—I who had always saved the choicest scraps when I could for him and who allowed him the lion's share of my bed when he wanted it. But then I soothed him with a head- and neck-rub and assured him that I would do whatever it was I could do to help him. I really had no idea that he was already dying.

I did know, however, that my parents would never pay for any doctoring; they went to the veterinarian rarely even for the livestock, and I'd seen many other pets die or be "put down" before; I would be the only one to cry at these events, but already, by the age of nine and several months, I had come to accept such deaths as inevitable and unremarkable. I'd seen dogs hit by cars and cats fall to their deaths from a barn roof or a tree limb. Once I'd watched my visiting grandfather drown an unwanted litter of kittens in a horse-trough. My parents' and their parents' attitude, I suppose, was cruel, but it was not unusual; they did love their animals, but as farmers love animals, with no time for pity or sentimentality or even much mercy, because if you allowed such time, life in the country would be all that much more harder to imagine, if not impossible to bear.

There, in that broken-down chicken coop, I caressed the kingly Chang and spoke words of tenderness to him. I did what I could do to clean his wounds with iodine I filched from the bathroom cabinet and I told him long stories, borrowed from the _Children's Arabian Nights_ , about his own romantic exploits and brave adventures. The iodine made him thrash his tail but he could not get up to run away. His formerly sleek fur was now matted and crusty in spots, however much I tried to brush it. I bathed him regularly with cotton rags despite the scratches I received in return and fanned him when the afternoon heat became oppressive and his surprisingly pink tongue hung from his mouth. Of none of this did I tell my parents: this would be the first of many secrets I would keep from them—some much worse secrets, but even at my young age I knew this was the type of behavior that I would pay in unforeseen ways for later. For now, I allowed my parents to believe Chang had simply disappeared the way he had simply appeared on the farm; other cats would soon be allowed in the house to chase any mice in the kitchen or basement; they might even ask a neighbor for a similar Siamese should one ever show up. My parents were as always very busy, but when they did notice my absence here and there I let them assume I was off somewhere reading my fairy tales or playing or simply dozing in the sun. They knew there were few other children nearby for me to play with and that even if there had been more, I would have avoided their mischief—their matches or chewing tobacco or suggestive comic books. I was, after all, a good boy. A boy who might become a priest.

Several times a day I brought Chang scraps of food, and I always kept a plastic jug of water and a bowl by his side. I still could not make him move, and he had taken to mewling in a most disheartening way almost constantly, but I pretended to myself that he was getting better and batted the horse-flies away from his wounds and his still crystalline-blue eyes. When he saw me enter the coop along the passage I had made through the weeds and timber, his tail would twitch and his eyes would narrow, but in some strange way this was his new way of greeting me—and he always gobbled the food I lay before him with the same vigor and delicacy he had always approached his dinner. And often as not he ended his meal with a roaring purr that only subsided as he drifted off into a new type of deeper, more troubled sleep.

The hot summer days went by and Chang seemed no better and no worse. I still maintained the belief that one morning soon he would rise strong and healthy with the sun and come pouncing onto my bed. Sometimes I awoke squeezing my pillow, thinking it was Chang I held in my arms. But I was as unsentimental as my parents and though I felt vaguely sad and a little angry, I did not feel the need to cry or even to pray to Jesus—who, I had been told well enough, did love animals but, it could be inferred, was obviously too busy caring for the hungry and sick humans of the world to be able to do much for one poor cat (who was probably, I knew even at that age, a Buddhist). I speculated instead on how he had been hurt—was it a duel to the death with a neighboring tomcat, one who had inevitably died under the conquering Chang's claws? (If so, I hoped the female in dispute appreciated the power of her allure!) Or was it some other animal—a fisher martin, perhaps, or even a coyote or bear cub—who had wounded and mangled Chang's hind leg? Had it been instead an old fur-trap he had just managed to escape from? A tumble down a slippery mountain crevice? Then again, he might have only caught and scraped the leg between the nail-studded beams of a storm-damaged shed before he limped here. Whatever had befallen him, day after day I came to him and sat by his side for hours. I still remember his breath, which grew more rancid and primitively feline by the day and, much worse, the smell from his shattered leg, already beginning to pustulate in the heat. I could not chase away the flies all day, and often when I came to him a quarter of Chang's body was covered with a glistening, writhing sheathe of blue-bottles and green-bottles; I scattered and squashed all I could, but as soon as my back was turned, I knew there would be more.

Through it all Chang's eyes remained vivid and wise as the sapphire-inset eyes of an immense far-eastern bronze Buddha, like one I'd seen in a junior encyclopedia, and he really seemed to listen when I brought him storybooks to read those long afternoons—both he and I would grow drowsy with the travels of Sinbad or Gulliver, and I imagined Chang as a sort of scimitar-wielding cat-king who one of those adventurers might meet in a far-off, magical land. Things might have continued like this for some time, as long as I could douse Chang with enough iodine or rubbing alcohol and ward off enough flies—but the end of August came and with it the first week of school. Once again I was the tallest in class, though not by as much as I had the previous spring, despite being ganglier and more prone to falling over my own feet than ever. I had always been a loner, but then again many country kids are loners; it was just that this year of school, fifth grade, I felt lonelier than ever when all the boys gathered between classes to compare baseball cards or the girls chattered on about who was the prettiest movie actress during lunch. Recess as usual was the worst, and this year Sister Agnes had sponsored a special initiative to get all children to be included in all games equally—divided by gender, of course. With the sun beating upon my head as I stood there on the blacktop, I would go into a kind of swoon as large red rubber balls and somewhat smaller orange basketballs shot past me, hardly aware of when I was called to block or guard or pass or whatever it was I was supposed to do. Truth was, I was thinking of Chang, wondering how fast I could run home down the gravel roads and then the county road to my house to bring him his morsels of tuna and fresh water and as always to fan away the flies.

That very first week I was somehow to blame for the fifth-grade boys whose homeroom was Sister Anastasia's losing at kick-ball to the fifth-grade boys whose homeroom was Sister Carmel's. I do remember it was over ninety degrees out, and I was wearing shoes I hadn't yet grown into, and the sweat had made my hair fall into my eyes: none of this was a proper excuse for the boys who surrounded me now in the side-yard, half in the shade of the locust trees and half in the blinding whiteness outside of that shade. The circle of boys grew tighter, and though I was taller than them all, I felt the sheer power of their boyish strength hemming me in, and watched with increasing alarm as the red kick-ball they bounced back and forth on all sides, passing it in this fashion from one to another, careened faster and harder from boy to boy—and then I was suddenly struck in the stomach by the ball with the full force of their fury; I dropped to my knees, and before I could beg or plead or anything they began spitting on the crown of my head, full in my face if they could aim low enough, and beat the rubber ball hard against my back. That didn't really hurt, though their silence frightened me more than anything. Not a word was said until the next-tallest boy from our homeroom, who was as stocky and strong as I was slender and brittle, hissed the worst word a boy of that age could call another boy of his age at that time, in that era, at our parish school: " _Girl!_ " It was a word calculated not to send the one who taunted to hell but the one who was taunted. Why? Because he was everything a boy should not be, he did everything a boy should not do, he had dishonored an entire homeroom. I held back the tears, demonstrating that my enemies hadn't yet fully conquered me, but my brave face proved nothing; they had already scattered like sparrows with one warning from the little silver whistle hanging with her rosary around Sister Carmel's waist. She pulled me up from the ground with a look that might have been pity or might have been contempt and told me to get back to class and stop my stuttering, there was nothing to be done about such piddling incidents.

As soon as I arrived back at the chicken coop that afternoon I repeated to Chang the whole story of my injustice, but he was not listening. Instead, he had now subsided into a steady low panting, and for the first time I noticed that the fur was coming off his back leg in small clumps, revealing raw pink flesh underneath that oozed with whitish-yellowish pus. His body, once as muscular as a man's, now seemed skeletal, like the mummified Egyptian cats I'd seen in an archeology book. No longer did I want to touch or caress him and I felt ashamed for that, that shame we all feel I suppose for doubting the touch upon a sick person's head, for a moment more concerned about our own health than theirs. For the first time, too, I felt that Chang didn't want me there at all, since he had removed himself to this out-of-the-way place to die and to die alone. His eyes, half-closed, had lost much of their life, and a milky film had at last covered the blue sapphires. He refused to drink any water and merely tasted the chicken leg I had stolen for him. More than anything else I felt furious, especially after my ignominious defeat on the playground earlier that afternoon, and so I was glad to leave him behind after a half-hour, behind to the strangling heat and the stench and the flies.

Within another day or two the maggots started crawling on him. Somehow I had never even anticipated them and I was out of iodine, which seemed to have been of no use, anyway. With a piece of broken pine-board I tried scraping the plump revolting things off him, but when I returned after a few hours there were more stirring in his flesh and Chang's low vocalizations were more strained and frightful than ever. I spent as much time as I could with him those late August afternoons, but my parents were now growing suspicious of my long absences from the house and barnyard and started to accuse me of ignoring the few chores they did provide me. Therefore I retreated to my duties and schoolwork and tried to put Chang out of my mind when I was away from him, but still I kept coming back. And still Chang refused to die.

It wasn't until this point, indeed, that I had even acknowledged to myself that he was truly dying. I'd been told before how animals prefer to go off to die alone, and I knew I was invading the sanctity of an animal's most sacred moments, but still I returned again and again to Chang's side, trying to eradicate the maggots and to ease his pain. To enter the broken-beamed chicken coop now was a harder task than ever, both because of the increasing reek of approaching death and the pitiful caterwauling of Chang, who now hardly seemed to notice me as I tried to force some water down his throat or cover his rear end with fresh wash-cloths (that would soon be kicked off). The days and the nights too were hotter now than they had been all year, and under the tin roof the old chicken coop was hotter than black granite boulders in the sun. That week in my febrile dreams Chang pressed his bleeding body against my side, and his purring was an ocean roar. I considered the nuns at school and their fierce faith in something unfathomable by me, so I resolved to try harder: like a night nurse I would come and go hour in and hour out, as long as my absence wasn't noticed—and still Chang refused to die.

Sundays I always went to St. Boniface's with my mother and grandmother while my father and grandfather puttered about, mending small things on the farm, and this one would be no exception. I could have feigned sickness, but I knew that to be one of the worst sort of sins of all. I could have pleaded that I had to tend to a dying friend, but I knew that would only bring derision or confusion. There was a stern look or two as I hesitated at the kitchen table, that was all. So I went off in the family car with the women, forced to sit between them on the sticky front seat of Grandmother's Rambler and breathe their Sunday perfume and pretend nothing was troubling me. My grandmother stuck to the old ways and wore her small lace veil, but my mother's head was bare and she only extinguished her cigarette just as she approached the holy-water font. It was the torrid end of summer and I wore shorts even to church, and during the long homily I studied how scratched and bruised my knees and legs were, how dirty my socks, how scuffed my sneakers. No wonder I seemed such a disappointment to my parents and grandparents. No wonder the pretty golden Jesus above the altar had no time for my woes.

After church there followed that immemorial hour or so at my grandparents' bungalow in town as we waited for the men to arrive back from the farm, when we would trade the more distinguished Rambler for my parents' second-hand Buick and return to the cows and horses and fields. As usual, my grandmother served homemade root beer (winters it would be hot chocolate), and I sat on the hard old horsehair sofa opposite the women in their cane rockers as they exchanged gossip about our neighbors and the general decline of the valley. I politely refused the sugar wafers and barely sipped the bitter root beer, infuriated inwardly by their inane chatter and the glorious sunshine and blue sky outside. "And when he does talk," I heard my mother saying across the miles I felt separated from this room and this situation, "he stutters worse than ever."

"He'll grow out of it," my grandmother said, crumbling a wafer between her dentures, continuing this illusion that I was nowhere nearby, "just like he'll grow out of those shoes. And they all have to learn to recite clear and loud in catechism this fall. Sister Mike always sees to that!" Sister Michael was the fat, gravel-voiced, bespectacled dragon I'd so often been warned of—and I immediately wanted to run from the room and back to Chang. Instead, I waited patient and silent for the men and the long drive back to the farm and tolerated having to rake a few stalls before I could return to my invalid, this secret sin that now felt more shameful and dishonorable than ever.

It was almost impossible now to stand the heat of the coop or the smell of infection and rotting flesh. Chang was barely able to open his eyes when he heard me scramble through the dried-up weeds and fallen beams to where he lay under the work-shelf. I saw that he had drunk none of the water but once again had kicked off most of the moist wash-cloth; the maggots were worse and small bright new flies now buzzed around us both. For one last time I considered going to my parents, to at least have Chang gently "put to sleep," the way I heard vets did to beloved pets, but I knew more than ever now that they would only tell me to leave this place and leave the cat to die in peace. I stroked Chang's head, closed his eyes against the heat, sprinkled a little more water over his body to cool him... At that moment I knew what it was I wanted to do. It would mean a bit of stealth on my part. If my mother was taking her usual Sunday after-church nap it would be easier than it might be otherwise to take the crucifix from the parlor wall, the Bible from the bookshelf below, and a clean white towel from the linen closet...

There is something in the Catholic religion called "extreme unction" which had always fascinated me, and I had witnessed it once or twice in a television movie and heard about it from relatives. I also knew that this crucifix was a special one handed down by my father's parents, who were dead: it had a cobalt-glass facing with the little bronze Jesus fixed to it in such a way that if you turned the figure a little door would spring open in the back, revealing two tiny pale yellow beeswax candles, like a baby's fingers, and two tiny bottles: one of holy water and one of what I supposed could be called holy oil. Many times I had surreptitiously handled the crucifix and longed to set the fancy little bottles on my dresser bureau, and many times my mother had told me that it came from a place far away called Bavaria and it was more precious than anything else in the house, even her own grandmother's wedding dress. She never explained if it had ever actually been used for extreme unction, the last rites, but I suspected anything this important must have been, and must have been blessed by the most important bishop in all of Bavaria, perhaps by the pope himself. So while my mother lay sleeping and snoring with the smell of her church perfume and cigarette smoke still clinging to her, I stole the cross, a linen tea-towel, and one or two other items from the house and returned to Chang, who managed more of a growl than a meow when he felt my presence near.

I had no idea what to do, so I twisted the little Jesus and popped open the clever door that concealed the candles and crystal-glass bottles. Matches I had from the kitchen drawer, and in the half-dark the quavering halo of candlelight on the work-shelf illuminated our chamber like that corner of St. Boniface's aglow with votive offerings. Even with Chang's smells all around us, the candles emitted a faint fragrance like a wasp's paper nest and like Castile soap, and I thought: this is what death smells like, then, not urine or rotting flesh. Unfortunately, the bottle for holy water was dried up, and the other one only contained a minimal amount of liquid that was congealed and golden like amber. It had no smell, or maybe it smelled a bit like castor oil. Though I knew nothing would now be official, I poured a little water from Chang's dish into the empty bottle and "blessed" it by saying the Our Father while doing so. (I wished I could say it in Latin like my grandmother.) Chang lay before me, panting heavily in the heat, his sides heaving and his leg looking like a hunk of discarded meat and bone. Not knowing where to turn, I opened the Bible to a random page and, bowing low under the candles, read a passage out loud: "And lo, Ezekiel saw the burning wheel..." As a random passage from any book, even the _TV Guide_ , might do, it seemed oddly appropriate with its talk of "dry bones," and I felt pleased with my performance as I shook a little of the congealed amber over the poor animal's shuddering body, set the bottle carefully down next to its mate, and genuflected like the best of altar boys in that unsteady light. The tea-towel I then placed over Chang like a shroud, while from under it he kicked a little and gave out a menacing grumble that was unfortunately not the death rattle. Still he did not die, and the exercise of this rite and the heat and the fetid odor in that low space had exhausted me, so I lay down on the dirty, cracked, dung-splattered cement and, the dying candles still ablaze in my eyes, fell into a sleep perhaps not as deep but certainly more hallucinogenic than I'd ever known—no illusions of imagery or sound, however, but of pure bodily sensation—a vivid pulsing orange heat so oppressive upon my body I felt I was the one who was buried, I was in the oven of the earth, I was smothered in honey and oil like an Egyptian mummy and left a thousand years for dead.

When I opened my eyes again the candles had melted away to nothing, and the atmosphere was infused with the darkly intense rose-pink and rose-yellow hues of dusk—and so I knew I must have missed supper and my parents were probably out combing the pastures and fields for me, waving flashlights already and calling across the dried-up corn-rows for help from the neighbors. No doubt they'd notice the missing crucifix, maybe the Bible, too, even the towel. What could they think I was doing? Where did they think I could have run away to? And why?

In the fading light I looked over to Chang's body under his "shroud," but it still wasn't quite just a body—for some small part of him was still alive, still breathing, in out in out, slow, slow. Some part of him was still the cat I had known and loved, though I knew I would never dare touch him again, never press water to his mouth or scratch his ears. By morning I knew without a doubt he would be dead. By morning I would have to begin the long unstoppable task of forgetting. Forgetting him as this dying animal and forgetting these forbidden times we had spent together over the past two weeks. Oh, Chang, Chang, Chang, how I loved you, King of Cats.

By morning Chang would be dead and I would go on living. There could be no worse punishment for me.

Once I had witnessed my father and my father's father take a badly deformed calf from its mother in the early hours of a dark February morning, lit by flashlights and a kerosene lamp where the electric light would not reach. Revealed in the flickering, moving light was bloody straw and a mucus-like substance smeared on their dungarees and rubber boots. Why I had been called from my bed to officiate this act I will never know. The kerosene, I do know, had a strange exciting smell I would henceforth always associate with calamity and chaos; the mother cow was kneeling in the filth, moaning like a man who has been crushed under the wheels of a wagon; but the calf with its poor twisted legs made no sound though its frozen breath filled the stall, and that was more awful. I remember the kerosene light rising up with an almost human intensity, like a fist of flame, and how my grandfather spat tobacco and seized a shovel from the wall of the barn nearest him. Even my father fell back in surprise when the strong old man, the old man who had once mined coal and toted crates of cabbage in the old country, brought the shovel down hard onto the dazed calf's slick wet head, brought it down hard with a crack and a smile on his grizzled old face and killed that calf instantly. It fell at its mother's legs, and its mother merely moved a little to one side and I realized she wasn't actually making any noise at all, perhaps never had, perhaps it had all been my imagination. Soon the two men were lighting cigarettes and laughing as they led the mother away and left the broken body of the calf where it lay. Somehow they must have forgotten about me. Maybe I was never there. Maybe this was only a story I'd heard told to me again and again in later years, for I was so young then.

Not long after, my father's father was dead, anyway, and so was my father's mother, and it seemed Chang had always been a part of our household and our lives. As I lay there on the floor of the abandoned chicken coop, with Chang's heavy body heaving and shifting by my side, I wondered if I now knew death any better than I had then. I wondered in that pink-and-yellow dusk if I had been the cruel one, to prolong a poor cat's death the way I had, if I shouldn't have just left him to die alone the way all animals are supposed to want to die. I'll never know which was worse or who was more cruel, what was more kind: the blow to the head of the calf my grandfather delivered or myself, alone in the rapidly descending darkness as my parents searched the fields, having called Chief, the successor to Kaiser the German shepherd, and the two old farmhands to help, searching and calling out the name I heard at last.

in memory of Cyril Osbert Jones
A Story for Young Moderns

A gloomy Sunday. The art museum. We go there with the children, all of them. The guards appear to be the only things on exhibit. We admire their new royal-blue suits, the gold braiding, the epaulets. They are extremely suspicious of the children—afraid of being defaced? Surely the brats would scrawl mustaches and goatees across their faces, but they (the many guards) are already sporting the classic Van Dyke, Fu Manchu, Dalí, Alfred Jarry, walrus, handlebar, and pencil-thin varieties.

The children are acting like monsters. Want to know what's happened to all the paintings (they are of course wrapped up and stored away during the latest occupation). Bloody little beasts, I say to you, not being in a paternal mood. (Who's to say a single one is mine, anyway?) Do not touch the guards, I tell them (the children) one by one.

Outside it is snowing. The city police have thrown themselves into the streets, body to body like biscuits upright in a tin, blocking the route of a proposed protest march. In the distance you can hear the protesters chanting—soon they are in the trees, throwing snowballs at one another. On closer inspection one sees that they are mere children, none over twelve years old. The headlines in the Sunday papers read: CITY FEARS MORE TERRORISM. ENEMIES PLANNING MORE SUBVERSIONS.

Your children are in fact actual monsters. We drive them home, send them off to the icy woods behind the house. The wolves, I have heard, have come down out of the mountains this year, lean with hunger. Imagining their howls of pleasure, I am driven by a mad desire to make love to you.

Belinda, I say, ravish me, and I shall ravish you. Make me feel like anyone but the humble but still frightfully arch art historian I am. Make me feel like Frederick Church (1823-98) of the Hudson River School as he stood before the yawning chasms of the Orinoco and painted his rainbow-crowned masterpiece, _Rainy Season in the Tropics_.

These are modern times, you say with a shake of your silver-gray Hapsburgian curls, and _we_ , they all say, live our lives in fragments. To make sense of anything is like piecing together tiny shards of Etruscan pottery and then trying to read the inscriptions of a forgotten language.

Always the philologist, I say. One fits one's metaphors and allusions to one's occupational framework. No wonder you are a celebrated professoress at our largest (though now sadly shuttered) university and no wonder I love you like money. And I simply don't care what the press says about your first three husbands.

But _I_ am, you say with a bit of a wheeze, merely a specialist in Sub-Neo-Platonics. You are at the window, shivering. The snow is still falling, always falling. But really did I ever really love you and all your monstrous children, _really_?

Many days later. At the movies. A documentary of the life of Marinetti, Italian futurist (1874-1935). The kiddies are enthralled. I am bored and restless and bite your shoulder playfully. This movie has been playing to packed theaters for months, the critics have raved, sequels are in the works, yet all it arouses in me is a great nostalgic hunger for your flesh.

Outside it is raining. I've left you all back at the Automatic Vaudeville, our oldest movie house. The city has strung colored lights and tinsel between the trees on either side of the main boulevard and the effect is dismal, the appearance of a festival that is no longer celebrated except by government officials in need of a holiday. I feel very forlorn and gaze upon the monumental statue of Renée Maladroit, French actress and Situationist theorist (1931-1969) in the city square. Graffiti has been scrawled across the base of the statue: NO GODS NO MASTERS.

Then I notice a rat dragging a child's torn red shoe into the gutter. The rat is bleeding as if it has just escaped a cat, and when I run after it, it drops the little shoe and disappears down a drain. The shoe, I see when I pick it up, is a very expensive designer slipper, and there is a bit of a torn cloth nestled in its mouth: a child's tiny ruffled sock. All at once I begin to cry. It is the seventh and last year of the plague.

A year or so later. After the last occupation. We are all somehow alive. Your children are all grown now and away at foreign colleges studying medicine and law and journalism. They are still bloody monsters and write solely to ask for funds, gold Krugerrands only please. You have borrowed against your inheritance like the tragic character in a ha'penny melodrama and yet you continue to send them more. They are all working for revolutionary causes and claim to need the cash for ammunition, though I suspect they are spending it on records, clothes, comic books, milkshakes.

Belinda, I am fond of saying to you, we are old now and no longer truly love one another and your children have reached the plurality of their majority and we live in a police state now the war is over. Don't you think it's time we took a rest?

This year we do. There is rioting in the south, hence we go there with our antiquated digital video equipment, hoping even so to catch something to sell to the nine-o-clock news. One must earn a living somehow. The train down is crowded with religious separatists fleeing the country. They are a very amusing lot; we all drink too much and all wind up sleeping with each other's wives or husbands. I think.

The woman I wake with is fat and smells of polyvinyl chloride and she is wearing the blue uniform of a museum guard. Aha, I say, fondling her epaulets: _thematic repetition_.

You wait until we are leaning over the Bridge of That Sinking Feeling into the Questionable Alibi Gorge to tell me that you are pregnant once again—this time with _my_ child. I wonder whether to kiss you, ignore you, or knock your body into the raging waters below. We go out dancing instead. I think I think.

A little while later. A Monday afternoon, terribly hot. Some palm-shadowed serai's honeymoon suite with no running water or clean towels. We have just finished reading Sir Thomas Mandeville's Jacobean play, "1623?!" to one another in a torrent of emotion. I have never seen you look quite this way, with your hair down, your makeup smudged with tears, your ears red as poppies. I think I think too much.

Outside we hear submachine-gun fire. Nothing to worry about: just the reactionaries fending off the post-reactionaries. There is also a children's choir practicing scales in a nearby church, one that had its roof torn off in some previous or concurrent war. It is a very melancholy but somehow anesthetic sound. They are singing "O Brave Souls of Canaan," an old American spiritual I should have learned at someone else's mammy's knee.

There is also a military parade somewhere—but, no, I think that was another day just like this one. The past can overlap in that way: sometimes, especially since the children left, I don't know where I am in time. Sometimes I don't know whose story I am telling. Maybe this is just senility's way to make things more interesting. Then again, we all repeat ourselves, right down to the dots on our semicolons.

Manuel, you whisper to me, half-asleep, let us go tomorrow to the exhibit of Renji-Moro tribal totems on the village green. It is perhaps the most romantic thing you have ever said to me. Call it animal magic, but we were made for one another after all.

An hour later. I have been called before the local magistrates, representatives of the Bilateral Commission; there is the snout of a rifle tickling between my shoulder blades. The jig is up. They want to know what I have done with the body. They want to know our secret bank account numbers. They want the blueprints for the laser-firing robotic antimissile carrier. They want to know what our beloved leader said to his mistress the night of the inauguration, the night before she died. They want to know just exactly how Egon Schiele, German artist (1888-1930) revolutionized the self-portrait.

_Wankers_. I will tell them nothing. Just then I see a very large black rat (or possibly an agouti) scampering across the straw in a corner of the disused cattle barn we are standing in. It is dragging—no, not a child's red shoe—but the heavy cassock of an East Anglian parish priest, of the sort used between the years 1919 and 1937 (I know, because I once wrote a graduate thesis footnoting this very fact). Here is my chance for a very cinematic escape.

A minute or two later. In a raging downpour. The last I remember you and I were lolling on a local greensward, kissing each other's nether regions, talking of Yahweh and Lilith and their wayward child called Man. In the distance we could hear the changing of the guards outside the queen's summer home. No, it was the drum and bugle corps of the county war veterans. No, it was a child singing in a tree as below him mollydancers cavorted, dressed as bullocks and beefeaters and giant flower-bedecked phalli. Yes, that was definitely the sound I heard as you sank your teeth into my earlobe and tore it clean off. Or seemed to.

And tonight, _chère amie_ , I said, we shall go dancing in the grottoes of the gods the way young childless lovers have always done. We were that happy.

One second later, and they have begun to drop the bombs, the Big Ones. They explode in the air like crimson poppy-flowers and we watch and applaud from our ziggurat—discovering there is a certain _recherché_ artistry in annihilation. As the early Dadaist Francis Pi—I begin to say when you clasp your palm over my mouth.

No, not again. Not at all. _Nein_! _Nyet_! Nothing doing. Nononononono. You are blathering, you are tearing your bobtails from their roots.

So, we choose to survive, like the new Adam and the new Eve. It's a changed world, and given half a chance it will become a better one. In time we shall carve our initials in the Parthenon. We shall host a popular daytime television series. We shall dabble in chromatism and _fin de siècle_ theosophism. We shall revive the good old-fashioned murder ballad. We shall run for office. We shall write the children daily. We shall become famous and arrange car-bombings, apartment ransackings, and wiretappings. In the end we shall of course sell out and agree to a movie adaptation for briefcase after briefcase of sweet sweet money. _On n'a rien pour rien_ , which of course means nothing is had for nothing, not even me.
The Temptation

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### The Reverend Cotton Matthias

_A._ _An Epistolary Monition_

And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts: but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands.

Isaiah VI.12

City of Boston, Royal Colony of Massachusetts Bay

Monday, May the Nineteenth, _anno Domini_ 1699

My Good and Christian Governor Obadiah J. L. Brice, Esq.:

May the Omnipotent One in all His power and mercy watch over and guide you, Goodwife Brice, and your kith, kin, and brethren. May you all be thrice blest with Health, Happiness, and Hearts warmed by the beneficence of Our Sweet Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord, _Deo favente_. But to you alone Kind Sir I forthwith shoot these heartsent arrows of adjuration, falling short perchance but wavering never.

However humbled, I place quivering quill to steady parchment with much Trepidation 'twixt mind and soul, those having weighed this matter between them and set the uneasy balance before my heart's mediation and judgment. As the recent recipient of your generous and magnanimous Hospitality, it may _en primus_ appear most ungrateful of me, in all obsequious Meekness of Spirit, to direct to your attention a not insignificant Matter which, daresay I word it so, _infests_ your otherwise superlative and Godly township, a Matter which materialized before these mine eyes whilst a sojourner in your beauteous region. Let me state First and Foremost that this Matter is a concern not unique to your fair city of Albany, Colony of New York, but is by reliable report increasingly rampant to Alarming Degree throughout these virgin provinces of Nova Albion. Nor is this a Matter which was by any means unforeseeable in its rise or occult in its origins, for it has been festering in the dark bleeding underbowels of this our New World for nigh on two centuries, and which I venture to add has reached truly Menacing proportions in latter years with unceasing demand for fresh shipments of flesh from the African Coasts, both Ivory and Gold. Being an educated man and Fellow of Harvard, a man of clearest conscience, an Upholder of the Law, a student of Philosophy and the Scientific Arts, and above all a Keeper of the True Faith, I regard as my grievous but divinely appointed duty to raise the scales from your eyes and permit you at last to view the grave Danger which steals ever closer to us like Satan's own shadow upon the Rock. You must understand, Governor Brice, there are hideous consequences at stake; Unless this secret Insurrection is suppressed—nay, wholly eradicated—suchlike may certainly swell in general Calamity until all Christian freemen are at the beck and call of the Lord of this World's iconoclastic whims. Need I remind you, Sir, of what transpired in Salem and Andover?

Thusly shall I relate to you how first I chanced to become unwary Witness to these Pagan Practices which have so rudely disrupted the former complacency of my Soul. For let it be contemplated that Evil is not an essence which baptized men such as we ourselves must actively seek out, but an all-encompassing Malaise of Individual and Society which afflicts the most passive participants of our Culture: economical, moral, and spiritual, in numberless ways. Ah, but shake the holy rood of Christ and watch the demons flee!

Now as of April the twelfth through seventeenth of this nine and ninetieth year of our Lord's seventeenth century I enjoyed, as was publicized with gladdest tidings by myself, several days of respite within the perimeter of your city as a house-guest of your Congregational pastor, the most Reverend Elijah S. Horne, D. D., who provided most graciously for my every comfort and arranged our, that is, yours and mine, mutual introduction after my sermon On the Importance of Chastity and Sobriety in Our Youth (and if the good and lettered Divine had never left on a lengthy pilgrimage abroad during my time spent in Albany—most dearly spent!—he would at this moment be receiving my stern instruction). You were so good as to extend your own Hospitalities; taking tea with your esteemed family was like a last draught of curative airs before I gasped on viler vapors; please inform your virtuous wife, so mild and respectful, that I will be sending her as promised a signed copy of that little prayer book of mine at the next post, and Psalters for all your comely daughters—were there six or seven? After our repast (compliments to your servant girl on her honeyed scones, something which in fear of gout I must admit I have long forbidden myself; an Hibernian, is she not, and converted?) you honored me with a coach ride through divers parts of town my eyes had not yet seen with this goodfellow flunky of yours (I am sorry you were unable to accompany us, and advise you to consult another physician) called Jenks or Jenkins, a man whom I received with the highest regard since you do entrust him to the administration of such and such important tax statutes; And yet I have no doubt that if Judgment Day were called by our Lord God tomorrow (in which case you would not be reading this missive!) this J. would have not a few lapses of character to answer for, as will be illustrated by the by. Well—we were in the mayoral litter, so to speak. The Supreme Creator had blessed us with an ineffably balmy and becalmed April afternoon, an afternoon of such purity and rarity in these oft-cloudy climes; the catkins and crocus had burst, and the good green things of God's Bounty were apparent and abundant—a mortal reflection of what we dare expect in that Paradise 'cross the Great Divide, and the roads of your exemplary jurisdiction were for the most part remarkably kempt and I should add well-graded. We, that is our driver and this man J. and I, traversed in jovial temperament past some of the finer manses with each their demesne of the first families of Albany, all looking freshly white-washed in the pellucid sunlight; we saw and remarked upon your busy marketplaces and merchantmen's shops (which I found to be wholesome, pleasing to the eye, and tolerably bereft of the Sons of David) and the lesser but verily most decorous abodes of your humbler populations; We rode past many appealing gardens floral, herbal, and vegetable; and numerous pastures and vineyards, lastly halting before your splendidly fashioned City Hall, which is of a majesty tempered by an honest symmetry that rivals what the Papists among their Roman basilicae have constructed as suitable architecture for the administration of their church-state (and which, I remind you, from quoin to spire have been built with the coppers of the downtrodden). Your tax officiator pressed upon me to review the interior of the courthouse, and though reluctant to risk being late again to sup with the Rev. Horne and his family (could I have already begun to feel the tainted breath of the Devil upon my neck's nape?) I consented to a cursory tour of the ingeniously ornamented Hall, which I was made to understand was the crowning achievement of your precedent's term in office. Oh, but had your late uncle— _requiescat in pace_ —observed what I did! but then I fancy the man had (and who knows if such profane knowledge did not hasten the proud soul's departure), though certain he should have, as it is commonly phrased, _nipped in the bud_ this wicked weed—well again, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_.

In stepping from the door of the coach to the verdant acreage which surrounds the Hall, I became aware of a Demonic Pulse in the air which beat now faster now slower and then faster again like the unholy Heart of a vast Leviathan. The doors of our coach having been shut fast, and the rattle of the horses' hooves sharp upon the cobblestones, I had not previously heard the murmur of this beast: which was composed of hundreds of cells, each cell of which was a man, I tell you, A Man. _Miserable vulgus!_ Turned, turned a-haste and run I should have then and there.

This young J. perceived or must have my apprehension, quick-witted gallant that he is! In surety I gazed 'pon him wildly, wondering if we should peradventure make swift to turn back or, courage come to me, brandish crosses and face the Enemy. (There was an itinerant clergyman in the Territory of Kentuck, who meeting eye-to-eye and without benefit of introduction a thousand Red Savages in a clearing of the forest, displayed in no preordained _auto-da-fè_ the simple bronzed Cross of Jesus Christ Our Own Lord around his neck and duly prevented what in all certainty would have been a horrendous massacre in an adjoining settlement. Pardon any suggestion that your bountiful protectorate is any but highly civilized, but whenever I am estranged from my beloved Boston-home, be it in what was but lately New Amsterdam or in Hartford or Providence, I become inexplicably suggestible and would not be taken aback if threefold a hundred Savages—those wretched remnants of a race seduced to the West by Satan—were concealed within the next root cellar!) Yet that curious man merely smiled his Sphynxian smile—cheeky fellow!—and bade me to dally longer and descry what he deemed a "fair amusing spectacle." Pray tell, governor, would any right-minded baptized child of God term a sight which caused me severe palpitations of the chambers of my heart and far less transitory consternation for the Predicament of modern deontology a "spectacle," as if it were a Punch and Judy dumbshow? Let us conjecture then his erudite presence at the Holocaust of Sodom and Gomorrah: I can with pristine clarity see this lackey of yours turning to an equally saucy companion and saying, "Bravo! Encore!"

Howbeit, at that moment I had no inkling of the perpetrator of such a Sound—only, as has been indicated, a slight presentiment of Evil—and so I allowed your man to lead me to the occidental side of that great Hall, which as you are aware looks out upon the city square proper, the slope affording a keen perspective of all that follows below. Before discoursing upon what was taking place down there—on the Day of Our Lord even!—let me mention that as I was circumambulating the Hall by way of the mazey foliage planted therearounds, the Sound I have beforehand cited grew louder and more intense (the zephyrs were so unkind as to carry the noise up the hillock toward us) until this crescendo assumed such a Cacophonous level that my very ears rang (and do so still today) and my verbose companion had to raise his voice to be heard. "They know it as the Pinkster Celebrations," quoth he, "though I confess not the slimmest idea what it means, rightly."

Pinkster! The name of course derives from the Romish _Pentecost_ , Pen'cost-er, white Whitsuntide and the season of regeneration being hard upon us.

Forgive this coxcomb p'raps his shortcomings in wit and exegetics, but pardon not what your underling tacitly excused. To return to that which presses me most:

Allow me to expatiate in the most composed manner I can now muster the Dreadful "Amusement" or "Celebration" ( _quantum nomen_!) which shook the greensward below, though doubtless mere human words can do scant justice, and the Shock I underwent whilst watching that ghastly mummery has yet diminished my powers of elucidation. (When I arrived for dinner—a changed, chastened man, aeons later it seems—at the rectory in a state of extreme nervous agitation, I found myself unable, mayhap unwilling, to speak at all of what I had just borne passing witness to, as if I had awaked from a Nightmare which could not be remembered, though the Succubus was felt still heavy against my breast. Goodwife Horne lay her cool palm 'cross my brow, fearful she of apoplexy as the root of such tribulation; daresay I they would have brought on the leeches had I not feigned a sudden fit of somnolence, thereby missing entirely the Reverend my host's departure.) Your Honor having been a resident of Albany for a goodly sum of years, I am confident in proposing (refute me, Sir!) an hypothesis that you yourself have been surveyor of these selfsame Fiendish Carousals, though of course being a man of Politics and like as not unduly influenced by landowners and your own selectmen, you may not have comprehended in full to what extent and implications, not to forget immediate ramifications of dangers, are inherent within these so-called festivities ycelpt "Pinkster."

The Albany city square is by my inexpert estimations not more than a crofter's hectare twice or tripled by half, doubly wide as its breadth (not square, then, but rectilinear), thereby accommodating in respectable circumstance—be it sermon or inauguration—some six-score or hundred and half again citizens and no more; Even so thrice or quadruple this number in inDecent, Ignominious Sport, tantamount to the aggregation in these distinctly concupiscent circumstances of said mob scene staged before your townfolks' eyes that halcyon afternoon thereupon the commons did frolic. Of this ruck and rubbage of humankind, the greater part were of Negritic ancestry, howbeit to be veracious there were quite a rabbling of Red Indians as well and an unhealthy smattering of the lowest European sorts (indentured servants, I would venture, and pariah Gypsie clans); the Observer hastens to add to this census the myriad of whimsical mutations which interbreeding among these subspecies produces: Ivory-skinned youths with ovine fleece ruddy as Reynard's, browned rapscallions with Oriental eyes and flaxen locks, rosaceous devils whose nature is that of the Turk and tongue that of the subSaharan Aborigine. Constituent of the Black-skinned population were representatives of each gender, every generation, all colleges of vice. ("Black" is a generalization which the author uses more allegorically than scientifically, for I have made some small amount of raciological and ethnographical study both at home and abroad and can conclude that the Negro Race is diversely composed, the complexion—not to mention stature, carriage, magnitude of intelligence, and cranial capacity—exhibiting a plethora of tribal types, epidermal tincture ranging across the chromatic spectrum of darker hues, from the atramentousness of India ink toward a livid indigo and farther across the painter's palette through umbers, siennas, sepias, and fulvous yellows until bronzes, brasses, even tarnished coppers and burnished golds are approached and surpassed. We may construe that these variations have resulted from hereditary disposition and societal temperament [the blackest, for instance, being most prone to ill humors and consequent habiliments of despair], diet, provenance, miscegenation, pagan and animistic belief, and quite likely inborn susceptibility to onanistic tendencies, inversion, and promiscuity: all of which of course affect or influence present and future generations of a Species. It would seem that the more rubicund or honey-hued examples, being closer in color and sensibility to the Sons of Japheth, are accordingly more vulnerable to Christianization. Whether or not their duskier kin are less prepared, then, for Salvation this theorist cannot say—here is an area of endeavour which demands more of the scholar's hours.) Now, the majority of these unseemly persons in the Square were beating, scraping, or rat-a-tatting sundry ancient and chthonic musical devices (though, Dear Jesus, to call that Racket "music" is favoring it with an outlandish compliment) and caterwauling Heathen babblings with an earsplitting Fervor and criminal disregard for all laws Aeolian, Harmonic, and Soothing. At one and the same time, most of these Infidels were dancing, dancing, dancing until one would have thought to drop. Strong, however, is the Power of Evil, and peradventure nearabout inexhaustible the receptacles of that Power. A sizeable assembly of the Nubians had, in their terpsichorean frenzy, doffed garments along with inhibitions, the women their petticoats and girdles and the men their blousons and breeches and linen some of them until they went Adam-naked as the little babes rousting in the dust at their feet like farrow piglets. Above all, it was the presence of these pitiable waifs, raised without benefit of Bible or Catechism and subject to these wild and wicked abuses, which stoked the flames of my impassioned sorrow the more. _A_ _Diabolicus illusionibus_ , _obsecro te_ , save these wretched starvelings! Tears quickened in my eyes but did not quench these wrathful fires, tears provoked in disgust by this Panorama of Pandemonium: liken to the most monstrous vision of Hell ever conceived of saint or artist, and amongst these revelers their scions emulating the elders, quaffing ale most foul and inhaling the smoke and jawing the snuff of noxious weeds—pabulum for the dance. A multiplicity of games were acted out within the riotous Square as well, inclusive of those our own progeny call "Thumb the Thimble" and "Penny-in-the-Poke," innocent diversions made immoral—ebullitions of the Original Sin—mature joining the immature in these frantic, lusty pursuits. We regarded, too, campfires burning here and there like the Lakes of Fire into which the false Army of Angels was ejected from Heaven, with hinds and kines roasting on spits, hogsheads of noisome port and jack cider, and feculent cauldrons of roots and greens (I could smell them where I stood) every bit as loathsome to the olfactory organ as the Drumming and Wailing was to the auditory. Graybeard and the but late-born, smooth-complected and wizened, woman and man, man and child, all as one cavorted, tossed the Devil's die, spun bones, divined the future from fowls' entrails, wrassled in the muck and traded fisticuffs, and transported by the grape and malt—proclaimed loudly their virility or vitality whilst slavering and groveling on the 'sward like mad dogs (peruse your Deuteronomy, Chapter Thirty-Two, for an insightful parallel). Some men, or beasts in manly form, had become so engrossed in this chaos that bands of them lolled drunkardly throughout the Common, making water in public, seizing each other's private members, and even (this is no exaggeration, gentle sir) engaged in congress by twos or threes or fours, and with the womenfolk and adolescents. (Oh, Sodom, oh!) These things I do not pronounce to be sensational (for I shame to mention half all), simply but to detail accurately, as did Genesis XIII, what I with my chaste eyes and unclouded mind unwillingly witnessed. I wiped my eyes, I smote my temples to remind myself these were God's creations, molded of but a darker clay than we; This, though I prayed otherwise, was no Illusion, no Delusion .... picture this Garden of Unearthly Delights, Governor! These Hellborn creatures were by their fearsome bacchanalian state so discombobulated throughout they believed it was happiness and, aye, made merry, made merry. Lo, but the Prince of Darkness and the Powers of the Air held sway over the entire revel, _profanum vulgus_. The first Roman Pliny described no worse of the bloodstained feasts of the Carthaginians nor Daniel of Belshazzar's momentous debacle, and howsoever my words might not match, they own as are horror-struck.

So transfixed was I by the Terrific Ribaldry and the attendant assault upon my senses that I know not how many God-given minutes followed one another before my waggish consort placed hand upon my shoulder and further expounded upon this blight upon God's sweet green Earth which should sooner occur somewhere afar in the caliginous depths of the barbaric antipodes as yet untouched by The Word than in the center of a large and God-fearing community of our Americas inhabited by subjects of His Majesty the King. "Upon the commencement of spring each year," this man J. spake with unabashed composure, "the slaveholders permit their property a few days in which to celebrate in their indigenous fashion the renewal of the planting season. Henceforth they will be toiling in the fields night and day until first frost, so the farmers deem it wise for them to purge their bodies of ill humours and excess spleen in good-natured games-playing before they take up once more the plough and sickle. Most of the slaves and some few hired servants join in, though the freedmen ofttimes spit upon this little sort of morris-dance and its harmless farrago of humankind—the proud converted upstarts!"

Harmless farrago? Good-natured games-playing! As if this were a milk-maiden's roundelay 'round a maypole! "The people of your city go so far as to sponsor this atrocity?" I queried, concealing not my censure.

"It is perhaps an indulgence, good Reverend Matthias," your mayorship's hobbledehoy boy smugly rejoined, scratching his peruke as though there be fleas, "but I have labored in this district near on seven years and the Pinkster Days have been going on at least threefold that long and nothing worse has befallen us than a few of the more exuberant negras giving up the ghost in excitement of the dance. Guard thy ankles, it is most distracting."

"Nothing worse!" I declaimed above the Din, failing to see why he grinned so like a tomfool tree-frog. "With these indecent saturnalia holding forth within your very city limits, where the most unsullied infant—one of your own daughters, my dear man—may look upon these unspeakable practices. I prithee, there are limits to tolerance—"

'Twas next the insolent rascal murmured something from the Book of Ecclesiastes which proved both irreverent and unnecessary and lit a blithe pipe in pretense of that being a Sabbath-Day picnic with clean white napkins and pretty hymns, a page torn from _Mr. Scudder's Christian Walk_ , down there. A few more words were exchanged, but of no consequence and resulting in our great exasperation.

During this mockery of a conversation, a tumultuous cry had arisen from the crowd, every voice male and female in unison, pleading in Heathen humility, in Pagan incoherence to their many-eyed and -armed gods. The heavens seemed to echo—or answer—with thunder. And at this moment I was seized with a thund'rous wrath myself, an overwhelming frustration, pitifully aware that I was but one Evangelical 'gainst a thousand times five screeching corybantians. (Recollect sir how Moses railed before the Golden Calf— _sic_ thirty-second chapter of Exodus: "He saw the calf and the dancing and his anger waxed hot.") Lord, I pleaded, how I wisht I had the Voice to rise above the drone of Beelzebub's fiddle and fife and gather them together in Sermon:

"Cast off your Idolatries, my children, Children of God! List ye to the Word of the Lord, who suffereth little children and the simplest slave-servant to come unto Him. Take ye His hand, for He leadeth you into valleys where the scythe it shall never reap nor the harrow ever furrow. Quench ye your thirst at His well, which never drieth; Sup ye at His board, which is never lacking; Clothe ye in His raiments of light and purity; Enter His house and sleep ye then in eternal peace. O Foul, O unclean—Cleanse yourselves—Let your colored blood run untainted! Stop your ears as Odysseus did before the Sirens of legend, and Silence the Drum, the Devil beating on his Manskin Drum!"

Here, I fear that only Christ God Himself has the Power to trip their feet and confuse the Dance. Alas for then—consider of it, dear Reader—the only Beat will be the gentle Beat of Bibles, the Beat of Hearts swollen with the Blood of the Lamb. Such a dream, though distant, is not infeasible if we act on the instant; one imagines each and every one of these innocent blasphemers converted or reconverted, Christened, Sanctified by the Holy Spirit, dunked in Holy Waters, kneeling in Our Church and partaking daily of the Goodness of God: redeemed, yes, in time, beyond all possibility of backsliding or recidivism.

Even as I dip my nib in ink I can reckon as if from across a great void the Rhythm of those discordant Drums, sounding and resounding from some iniquitous corner of this New Albion, Nova Europa (for did God not create the New as a last sanctuary from the diablerie of the Old? Is not this our ultimate opportunity to wrest the world from Satan and make this God's own haven on Earth? How, charitable patron, shall we build Jerusalem in America, then, if cities such as yours implicitly condone such Abandon?), Drums calling forth the sinner from his lair and the malcontent his metaphysical den called Iniquity and leading even the smallest tot into sordidness, immemorial the Tears and Temptation. Aye, it makes my Spirit weep with rancor to know what I have described and not invented (what I would give were it so!) flourishes in the sovereign ken of Heaven Most High. These peoples, or least their scattered congress, have known the fine chill air of Church on Sabbath Day, the Concord most sublime and supreme of the assembled fraternity, the Amity and Charity of their fellow Christians; They above all men have suffered the Agony of the Cross (those twilit ships scudding the Atlantic with their broken, battered, bruised cargo—the dying and the dead; worm and serpent after, in the black wake of blacker waters: I have seen all these in my visions and nightmares most fierce) and still, still .... In Bostonian meeting-halls, in Worcester churchyards and Dorchester schoolrooms and thereabouts our Charles and Mystic, where was founded by myself and sympathetic colleagues the Society of Negroes, these unfortunates have had revealed to them the One True Light which shines on men of all races, slave or slave-owner; albeit not twice a hundred leagues away still others persist in these unchristian Displays. Why, Jesus, my Heart cries out, _Why_?

Blame you then the slave-dealer who, in pietistic pretense to _pro bono Publico_ has administered a mass-baptism on his chattels as would cattlers brand their stock? Blame you then the King's own statesmen and the rest of their pomp who foster this commerce in unsaved souls and then quake in their bedchambers at night, dreading an uprising of the Black Savage quite as our forefathers feared the Red? Blame you then the preachers and teachers who overlook the immediate dangers, saying let us send missionaries to Araby or Sarawak or like unenlightened realm of Saracen and Barbary when the True Work ordained and prescribed to us is here on this our very own sod? Blame you then yourself and me—for we are all culpable for our long-lived Negligence.

Hear now of my Dream, nodding Governor Brice, one which roused me from slumber just tonight and inspired me to lay aside all Worry of offending thee and freshly take up plume and foolscap to write:

Above this cursed region, far above in the starry firmaments beyond the outer spheres, I saw millions over millions of Dark Souls soaring to Paradise on the backs of the Choristers of God. The Angelic vestments glimmered all a-silvery in the void, verily as if the brightest stars of the Zodiac had broken free of their affixed points and were cascading in steady argentine stream toward some more glorious, more brilliant nexus an epoch in time away. Like unto a joyous swarm of glittering bees ahum with praises to the Creator these Angels pealed out to them as the multitudes burst forth through the pearly gates into Immortality. I saw a great Black Heaven! No longer was there the Babel of unsophisticate tongues, but an exultation and exaltation in dulcet and mellifluous tones of the newfound splendor all about them. I saw each Ethiop in turn cowering before the imperial throne of God the Father, whose divine countenance could be compared only to the Sun's in magnitude and candescence; cast in His light these Souls were but tiny shadowy satellites revolving around His axis. His warmth and protection was omnipowerful, all-enveloping, His Mercy and Love—feeble human words—ineluctable in His far-reaching Perspective. The Lord embraced these hordes of slaves as Father to child, sundering their shackles and manacles and freeing them for all eternity in His Kingdom. And with one swift awesome gesture He skinned the ebony from their backs, exposing the polished Gold beneath. Presently they gathered 'round Him in all their blindingness, consumed each other by the light and fire of the Blessed State 'til they were indistinguishable, burning, blazing, whole: Until they were of one and the same immutable substance as God the Most Loving. Mortal eyes could gaze no more. I saw all this and was Pleased.

Hearken then to this my Divine Inspiration, of which I have hitherto told no one—as sign from Above that my work in this world has hardly begun, for righting the Sins and Ills previously, continuously made manifest and manifold is an endless task in this age of unprecedented depravity and decadence. (Armageddon, my Friend, is unquestionably approaching near, at rapid clip, with the Millennium incipient further reason to waste no time in vituperation about our moral mission.) Be known my wish, my prayer: I ask of you with utmost frankness and no little patience to ban these vernal and venal rites conducted annually within your jurisprudence, and take advancing measures to ensure no overt or clandestine rituals are substituted thereof for said feasts among the baser populaces adjunct your townspeople. Do this now, I beseech you, issue forth a proclamation and authorize a mayoral bull. But do not stop there. Warn your fellow mayors and legislative compatriots of these mounting dangers, call upon them to join us in our battle to make this a New World under One God; hasten them if they are reluctant, chide them if they are delinquent. But do not stop there! It is of dire import that you propose to every cleric whom you encounter the absolute necessity of chartering his own chapter of my Society of Negroes—I will all too gladly send the prerequisite materials for a nominal fee (and will admonish the peripatetic Rev. Horne post-haste his homecoming). As my parishioners will testify, this organization is the most effective means for the American Negro to receive spiritual education and edification, thus making him a responsible Godfearing Christian and quelling his preoccupation with Superstition and Magick. (I have devised my own course complete with colorful texts and rhyming prayers certain to appeal to the most pugnacious or brutish novitiate.) This is but the beginning, for new threats are compounded fortnightly; cults of sacrifice and scarification are liberally infiltrated and confused with the ignorant slave's concept of his master's religion—if he has any, _proh pudor_. (I have heard tales borne of the Indies and repeated by certain seafarers and Nantuck harpooners which would mortify you, impel you to just this side of Madness.) Not a day must be lost to us, for our time in this vale is short and the AntiChrist's reign will be long.

Pause in my thoughts for not a minute—and it seems to me at this witching hour of the night that the Devil's own music infiltrates my skull: Is there some presence, some entity, below this very window and casement pounding upon his Skin? Are the Fallen One and his ebon regiments parading upon the flagstones before this house? Is there a tabor, and that a panpipe? Observe, Governor, they are drawing nearer, calling your name, mine. Hold—caution, I say Caution! or a profane tempo will pervade these quiet streets, our feet will be betrayed by memory of a Maytime afternoon, they will kick forth in Dance with the rest, bond us dancing to Damnation.

There will be more to relate in future letters, much more, in regards to the habits and habitations, preferences and peculiarities of the Cameroon, the Mandingo, the Sudanese, Somalian, and Nigerian, _et cet_. (It has been my experience, _e.g_., that the elder females of the Negrillos (called Pygmies) are fondest most to hear of the sorrows of Job, feeling great empathy; and slaves who were raised in the forests are more subject to Glossolalia than others in captivity born—of this I can account only as they are closer to all the tongues of fowl and fauna, languages of which Adam and Orpheus elsewise interpreted), But those lessons will come in due course whereupon I hope you will inculcate the mistress Brice as well and in time your lovely heirlings. At this hour, 'spite my conviction, I daren't continue, for one's concentration is easily befuddled in the dead-end of night upon the edge of one's own bed, with weary hand and eye... These strange stupid beings, be they mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon (or some other mongrel permutation) for all their charm of innocence, know the mastery of trance over mind just as their brothers in the Carib Sea: suchlike Mischiefs have the power to work against and undo us .... I recall of a sudden a strapping young tawny-colored Negress squatting on the stones of that Infernal Square like a slit-eyed catamount. She scraped the jawbone of an ass against the granite—a shattering grate. Her hair was in many glossy braids upon her head like rows of new-sown corn; her maternal orbs were moreover bared, twin new moons as were, and as she thrust her fierce face back impudently her thick tongue slid and glistened along the cob of her yellowed teeth. Such a look of Rapturous Malevolence illumed her cat-eyes! and a Darkness flitted 'cross her visage like a Shadow stealing there and I could bear no more.

Soon creeps cock's-crow, Governor Brice, and I must stop.

A great maleficent viper is stirring within my guts, it would seem. Jarred, sickened, I gasp. As Jehoshaphat sayeth in I. Kings: "Goest thou into Battle with me?" Give me then your assurances; let us not pitch our tent toward the cities of the plain. We must strike down the great and terrible god Baal, must gird our loins, unsheathe our swords: Apocalypse is coming swift as the dawn of the new century. The candle has snuffed itself and I write this last as must Homer and Milton .... Consult the Book of Revelations. And oh kind Sir, muffle those drums! I can hear them ever. The Devil! Mute that Awful Noise before the candles are each and every one put out, before the Darkness is called forth from within us All!

_Res Miriblis et Memoranda_ ... _profanum_ ...

Thine, Governor, with sincerest respect and prayers,

The Reverend Cotton Matthias, B.S., D.D.
The Temptation

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### The Reverend Cotton Matthias

B. A Phantasy: Excerpts

# with debts to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," Esteemed Brother Cab Calloway,

# The Harlem Book of the Dead, and the "illiterate" author Paul Childs

**The Very Reverend's antediluvian millennial nightmare of the forgotten future** _:_

An American city, any Saturday night, circa A.D. 1933

Darkness .... mute death-deaf darkness but out of that the drums drum drum drumming in his head that thump and blast which hollows and scrapes the skull the heartbreak rhythm of dull ache to sharp pang to dull ache again the tempo and temper rising in his blood in his bones burning up his spine like a fuse this current of fire this spark bursting in his brain into brightness ablaze...

Brightness .... and he who was or is the Reverend Cotton Matthias of Boston, Royal Colony of Massachusetts Bay, is awake: Heavy dusk close as the sweating hands his own that shaded his eyes brightened into the false daylight of big city night the sulphurous glare of mercury lamps skids off rain-wet rain-slick pavement and the drums drumming this pulsing behind his eyes resonating through icy flesh down skullcap to the tips of his trembling fingers... He stoops stumbles stands his clerical robes heavy damp dripping clinging wig half-fallen and all around this dynamo hum of energy all the stupid vulgar gut-busting excitement the loudness the crowds the streetlights the street bands the streetwalkers the streetcars the car-horns the electrical fury of this truly new world everything phony as a movie don't confuse it with real life but here it is anyhow; he is here now and able to move think feel: alive! and able to walk away from this trash-strewn dead-end street—seeing everything, understanding nothing (this is what it is, he thinks, to be dead and feel alive: I have died in my sleep and so this must be Hell, for if it were Paradise or even Purgatory I would know now, I a Christian man, a learned man, a scholar and philosopher; I am out of darkness but I have sinned though I don't know how and now I must follow this drumming though I be damned, for the drums lead straight to Satan's throne) and a drunkard with no eyes no face under his hat falls into his arms saying 'scuse me bub have ya seen the palooka with the chin-scratch what owes me four bits (and demons will plague me like locusts!) and he shakes the incubus off his chest, vomits reels lurches up and down the street toward nothing he knows knew or can ever know in this nightmare...

This nightmare this big boozy brawling bedlam of a modern metropolis its violent laughter its tender hysteria: lights noises buildings up to heaven automobiles taxis trolleys buses too many people to count—fleeing shadows of skulls in top-hats specters in toques hyenas at table-side windows dressed to the nines shuffling into clubs in street duds on curbs pearl-pale and dusky faces faded into the dusk now bright in this light now dark again all shades of darkness yet their eyes seem all blackest black (How repellent my skin, he thinks; I am so pallid, so pale, I am so wan, sickly, why was I not aware of that before—am I ghostly, a ghost?) they crowd the bars crowd their cars to bursting bustling a hustle here a hassle there scalping tickets hawking the late edition PREZ SIGNS TREATY busking in doorways walking the beat shining shoes closing shop picking pockets cracking jokes acting sly looking fly lighting gutter-butt cigarettes eating drinking making merry making whoopee making some kind of love these people everywhere in twos threes fours laughing swearing coughing kissing spitting fucking people everywhere together but most of them alone having a rotten time having a ball having a headache having the time of their lives not a worry in the world but a world of worry—and either they don't see him (a plague of demons upon me in all manner of horrid guise!) or they choose to pass him by pass him up pass on pass on whatever wherever...

So and so and so on .... Walking following the distant drums following that crimson neon zero like an opened lipsticked mouth the O in HOT CLUB, sees a lighted doorway which must be the way to the Devil's Pleasure-dome opens those thundering cathedral-like doors enters...

A nightclub with night people and jazzing music (the drums! the drums!) jazz hot and cool and hot and jasmine sweet and sour and hot blasting the joint the tables dimly candled each table full up and so hot in here hot as hell the walls are sweating and the carpet is dizzy with saddles and bucks pumps and heels flesh against flesh cheek to cheek palm to palm braceleted arm to wristwatched arm the hazy heavy sedative of smoke from a hundred cigars and cigarillos roll-your-own or expensive import—the longer the ash the better the smoke crushed butts spilled gin eau de cologne _l'air du temps_ a little vanilla or a gardenia behind the ear pale pretty people from downtown here too from Hell's Ditch to Heaven's Gate and a glint of sequined chintz and glittered minks a brush and blush and slap and tickle of shopgirls turned showgirls and pretty boys with pretty eyes and the squeal of coquette tease of coquetry squawk of brass blaze of bronze silver and glass feathers boas bangles ajingle cocktail shakers martinis fake moonlight a saxophone refrain—the floorshow before him as he sits at a table in a corner in the back in the dark Panatelas and Havana sprigs alight one by one in the audience like stars coming out at night and the stagelit star of the show comes winking out as well—the singer—she a whore the pretty gals say to their fancy menfriends or least she dress like one you can't afford she paint her face she paint her toenails she's big as life and twice as nasty she belts the blues belts her rotgut whiskey straight-up at the side of the stage ( _when I drinks I feels so mean_ , the song drawls on) makes love to the piano and then the piano-player the saxophone feigns rape the trombone tries to beat him to it they fight it out in a long faked improv she swigs another shot in the light of the spot ( _when I drinks I feels so mean, why I's the meanest thang you ever done seen_ ) looking mean and cheated and sorry and the chorus line upstages her with the youth she never had never could have had the looks she's only dreamed of sister; the most esteemed Reverend groans remembering certain mysterious things about women...

Sees those big black bucks buck and wing cut the rug to shreds with their tight little mamas clinging so tight to their sugar daddies to keep from drowning in a sea of hooch: and whiskey baptized them praise Jesus they are blessed with the rye and the hops and the grape praise the Father we shall traipse into heaven sodden and joyous praise the Son black and white both we shall pass the chalice around praise the Holy Smoke and whiskey made them whole HALLELUJAH and they became one hi-de-hi-de-ho and saw the light and the light is a neon electric sign flashing out the Word and that word is DANCE dance DANCE over and over and they danced because when there is the Word there is the Act—the Act of Man and no god-damned god...

Let's go on up Jimmy's Place after the show this plump sassy bitch with blue lips says to her big bad beau with the little mustache and gray kid gloves 'cause man this baby's burning up inside—the answer is sweet cheroot smoke in the black rose of her left ear and blue lips pressed into the blue carnation buttonhole bruised lips plumbing his starched shirtfront tongue the wide wingspread of his detachable collar rising up his lily-white neck...

Mind if you don't mind the ash on a dandy's forty-dollar suit lipstick on the collar cost you plenty dollar and these geeks and freaks white-trash drunks and lowdown stinking skunks gambling backstage with the pimps and the uptown sharks and downtown barracudas trying on their coked-up choreens for size—cost you money honey for smiles a sigh and one finger two fingers three a hand up the thigh's all right when the price is high (all the holy men of God had their demon tempters and I mine and no wilderness to pray in, no lonely cell and hard cot) look at all the playboys croon gay boys spoon bad girls swoon matrons moon over the pianist who's an invert surely with a dozen rings on his fingers and those kisscurl ringlets in his hair and a mauve ascot apricot-yellow silk shirt kissy-poo lavender lips maroon eyes—a processed powdered high-yella princess screams throws a drink tears at her gown like she's on fire exposes the round blind jaundiced eye of a breast cries kicks cusses you slut you cunt crumples up into the chisel-toothed bouncer's arms—the late unlamented Reverend observes all this accepting his private hell his consciousness burned down to a small dull flame his heart an incandescent ember dying going out—smell of sweet sweat sweeter than perfume filling his head clouds and stings his eyes so he sees the singer through glistening tears when she starts up again _(bad ol' man messed my head bad ol' man wreckin' my bed_ ) scans the audience searching out his eyes as if she's the only one who can make him visible and whole but not holy and he burns burns burns puritan robes adhering to him like the Nemean hide this Christian bondage driving him mad bad ol' man can't rip these garments off and breathe he is suffocating impossible (for if I am dead, how can I die again?) gasping insufferable...

This singer fondling her song caressing her notes one by precious one is smiling just at him watching him with catlike eyes awaiting him yes yes yes she must—there she winks one eye the other blacked and blued from some mean ol' man licks her lips those great porcelain teeth runs a palm up the inside of her thigh invites him in twenty years it's been since he last took his wife took her with no passion no love begat a son heir to Harvard and the Protestant popedom of America fond of the clavichord and Songs of Solomon true to his friends and his diary but now his dear dutiful wife faithful chaste tightlipped frozen over she had been with her maker five years gone by (why oh why haven't I joined her?) and now this siren this brazen strumpet on the devil's own stage trumpets her lust bewitches him in the midst of blackamoor demons narrows her feline eyes flutters a bejeweled wrist lisps her lips and he truly he does truly remember certain glad things about women (a pained laugh a twist to the hips a wince a wiggle a mossy harbor as the bad poet said for his o'erladen vessel) certain strange elusive enticing things about women...

The singer she a whore and she a thousand a million years old life breathing through a perfumed corpse a painted torn and tainted powdered corseted mummy her baubles heavy on her elbows and the egret fronds of the Parisian turban wilted in this heat—she is a dancing dervishing slavegirl at the court of Agamemnon siren of some Coptic swain the Caliph's sinful songbird daughter moon-paled nightshade concubine at the palace of the Sun King the black jewel of the white god's harem and she is the drowsy dreaming current of a primordial ocean she is the Nile of ancient memories and he is the sands rippling beneath her she is the blood-stained Euphrates carrying him like a reed toward her darkest delta and she is the River Styx her song the spring boiling up from the polished surface of an ebon pool cascading into sunless caverns of the piss-poetic underworld _my man treats me bad_ she sings _treats me so doggone bad he's the meanest man I ever done had_ —her voice weakened now to a slow thick whisper the Vic when it's winding down older than herself this voice this wearied rasp of the eastern wind a tired wind sighing over deserts through palms and pines crying above mountains and forests snowfields and badlands and there are drums in that voice drums born of blood and fire from jungles and deserts drums beating it out beating it in since man was created of the same blood and fire—it is a song that began a million millennia ago in a Silurian sea or a dusty Chaldean vault or out of a thousand cheap hotel rooms and a thousand and one one-night stands in no-man's land and it has not finished yet it is the she-devil's own song he knows Satan is her bad bad man and she is Adam's Lilith tempting tempestuous holding forth her poisoned apple of not-so-original sin she is a jetskinned creature called Jazz with eyes of jade the bluesy diabolic ballad of jazz that slinks toward him and winds up his leg and scratches his back with long lacquered talons coo-cooing in his ears pant-panting down his neck hot sour sweet jasmine jazz taking his wilted stalk between her teeth quickening a moon-white bloom there amidst darkling desire electric kinetic frenetic jazz—come on babe jass me my body's on fire—but the fire like a coal the ember of his heart the cinders flying in his brain burns from within his eyes are upon her her eyes are upon him his eyes shut her out but he is rising the sound the song the drums in her voice rising rising rising and the song goes on...

The black songbird jangling her bangles above the tintinnabulation of highball glasses blows him a smoke-ring kiss—don't you treat me lousy like all the other muthas do—and how the longing overwhelms him and oh how he wants her his hands finding their way imagining they are hers his fingers tightening—but treat me nice and I be good to you—longing to belong to her to be part of her his hands her hands his hands and then he is sick craving cool air life everlasting life life life evermore or nevermore the peace of eternal silent dreamless depthless death beyond all this and right now: this comic cliché a gigolette's pinch a barmaid's sharp hard cry a penny-pitcher's winning whoop a clarinet shriek pitched to the narcotic night which he sinks into drowns in becomes part of (Lord, this is that Hecate's henbane in my veins, cold sweat on my brow, too—I will sin in the land of sinners, go fearless to my damnation, burn forevermore, and revel in my own whirling ashes) the carnal night which engulfs him possesses him then leaves him without breath or heartbeat or thought...

_Sunday morning_ :

Light .... the golden peal of light awakening among bells half-awake the drowsy dawn half-asleep the bells the great gilt Presbyterian Pentecostal Episcopalian Congregational Baptismal Eucharistic bells that stir the dead to life those dead that have never slept yet are asleep in dreams within this dream of a dreaming dreamworld—women weeping down stairwells long abandoned hallways the morning stars like tumbling coins rolling away and now car-horns honking screen doors slamming babies crying with taxi cab fanfare flash and flourish bright blaze and blare in the chastened dark gone now morning is here—and hear his heart has stopped its drumming at last his veins stilled their wild pulsations and of one thing he is certain: I am alive and not yet dead to this world not of my nor my dear God's making—he is confirmed by the sight of his own two hands, broad and white as bird-wings, but can't remember the terrors and pleasures lusts and insanity of the night before walking he is ever walking has been a thousand nights and days eternally walking past the same sad beauty parlors closed up and sadder barber shops boarded up the haunted all-night movie palaces bedsit sepulchers of the lost and lonely and nameless of the cursed living (and what is my name? I know but know what I know is not right) like himself—could it be this then is not Hell this dream in a dream limpid as limbo is murky and he walks fearless past the same faceless men with fedoras tipped down over where the eyes should be and the same hard girls with charcoal under their hardened eyes and the hard heartless faces of women gone hard through and through though they are yet girls—all these pawn shops pool halls dance halls laundromats automats taverns and strip joints emptied and exhausted after the night and the drunken Marines and two-bit whores sick again after-hours but the most lovely of all women with their white arms they've washed to the elbows crossed on the windowsills radios playing preachers and sermons organs and jingles across this wasteland of garages body shops and restaurants against the curdled awakening sky with flies upon the breakfast blue-plate specials and waitresses hung over with love and booze and whatever's going 'round while out the windows the clacking skeletons wrapped in rags still bleeding after being rolled in the night still cradling their non-redeemable dreams on the piss-stained sidewalk and on doorsteps and stoops fallen heroes outside sleeping taxis newsboys scrabbling the iceman napping in his van and up comes the yawning milk-truck along with the sun creeping into town after a twelve-hour binge toward all the blurry-eyed parking-lot attendants busboys fry-cooks dogwalkers whistling cops and streetcorner evangelists shouting Awake and Arise ye sinners! hearken to the Word unloose the shackles of Satan that have made you all slaves to sin and vice love thy neighbor and thy neighbor's wife love God as you would your mother and the president purge your unclean thoughts through the patented power of prayer praise God and cry out to be healed let the bells ring out 'cause they is miracles happening in all-night cafes and truckstops hallelujah the blind shall lead the lame and the lame the tax-collector why slap a new coat of pancake powder on your chassis dip a little motor oil on your mortal coil when you ain't got nothing but a cracked block when it's your soul needs a tune-up so put Jesus in your tank and cruise the holy highways of heaven right on past the devil's turnpike hi-de-hi-de-ho invite an angel to dinner a saint to lunch and a tip of the hat to the ladies pass of the hat to you gents... and all the rest you can easily imagine of this misery mystery and melancholy of another Sunday morning...

O city of churches city of light sweet land of love and libertines the architect seated at the right-hand of the Lord has made of you a new Jerusalem in this gray and promised nation and in this nation for every bar and brothel a church and steeple: collapsed before a rundown storefront church from within the sound of gospel truth—this is what he finds in the heart of the heart of the city where the boulevards are lined with beetle-black Bentleys sleek glossy Stutzes lean as greyhounds and Studebakers Fords and Lincolns coupes too and carriages sedans and sports cars. And there are neon electric crosses jazzed up crucifixes the sign of an all-American varsity-team Lord, His many names and symbols hanging before the little proper grimy brownstone churches the big loud clapboard churches the great grave granite churches and these advertisements for Jesus reflected in the hood of the preachers' brand new Caddy or Rolls—say the one with the silver cross for the hood ornament say the one with the white walls, say... and the radio antenna reaching to, beaming in heaven—so our lost soul goes in any one of these hundreds of churches in this city of churches (one must find somewhere the gateway to Paradise—I've lost the key but if must needs will force the lock) where he hears and sees not a sermon not a communion a mass nor a hymn-sing but a funeral not his own—the assembly is black-veiled white-gloved, the flowers black too and wreaths in the shape of dollar signs and there is a Dixieland jazzband playing delta dirges inside the organ and a dozen black angels in the choir's balcony—in his black robes he does not feel quite so out of place among these people who cover their eyes and mouths with lace and kerchiefs as if to hide their sympathies or lack thereof crying as much as necessary in respectful silence—the casket is open and brimming with shining Liberty dollars and Monopoly money the inside lined with rose-colored satin smothered by lilies and wilted roses smelling like a boudoir or a whorehouse and the young man inside looks more alive than the mourners with his rouged cheeks shiny lips accented eyelids a mohair suit with knife-sharp creases tailor-made never worn before must be sweating in this church's heat and checkered novelty tie and pomaded perfumed hair and hands folded across his chest the many rhinestones sparkling—is it the piano man he of the same girlish mouth and heavy eyelids he looks ready to sit up and roll the dice for if he is not the piano man then surely he is a gambler who met his smoky fate backstage with the butterfly thrust of a knife-blade—everything is well-polished well-lit for the cameras which flash one by one amongst the mourners like stars exploding in the heavens like fireballs on the Fourth amid the pearls and whispers rosewater and fancy-man toilet water ragged psalm books and bulging pocketbooks (recalling another church, whitewashed and spare as a spinster, another pulpit, the pew-boxes below like islands on a cold sea). Brother Jesus! the old yellow-eyeballed women whisper remembering other young men who on cool summer evenings long ago but not so very far away took their hands pressed them together quoted poetry or a parlor tune then a sigh and lips so close another sigh and promised to live forever.

Jesus! a young woman in a silk dress that clings to her thin arched back—a child's back—shouts yanking the pop beads from her elegant neck and (sister? lover? widow?) parting her veil to wipe the sweat or tears from her face—she lowers her eyes (someone else had those eyes he remembers and he thinks: they will tempt me even here) and watches the beads roll away from her among the just-shined patent leather and polished wingtips while the preacher it must be the preacher looking like a real lady's man in that suit so sharp it is the preacher he disengages from the crowd making a noise in the back of his throat and raising his hands to heaven above his head...

Bless this brother oh Father the preacher begins in a polite moneyed manner pretty false teeth clicking out the syllables like quarters clinking into the poor box striking a solemn but fearless pose for the menfolk sentimental gestures seen in motion picture shows for the lady-folk strikes his Bible cracks it quotes popular phrases the woman at the well Martha and Mary dem dry dem dry dem dry bones Ezekiel Elijah Isaiah—our lost dreamer watches this fellow man of the cloth with professional interest pleased with the decorum the studied equipoise erudition and elocution—but the preach is a sincerely insincere ungentle gentleman despite it all, that much is obvious though the women in their shop-window backless black crepe dresses look on moon-eyed as if the preacher were a slick-haired matinee idol, fanning themselves with cardboard cutouts bought in a Holy Roman supply shop of the Mother of God or is it the ex-sister-in-law of God who kneads serpents under her feet and mixes God's drinks while the men bow their Vaseline-anointed close-cropped heads and murmur lustier prayers of their own—may he have all the women and whiskey he can get his muthafuckin hands on the poor bastard wherever he is—jingling the jalopy keys in their big linty pockets (their faces aglow with the light from another world, he thinks, because they are good Godfearing people after all, they have accepted our Savior's invitation; the devil may roar on Saturday night, but he is subdued the next dawning—glorious day, _gloria deo_ , my work is not in vain, is not in vain, for assuredly this is my reward; this is not my personal hell despite all I have feared and dreamt) and the sweetfaced moony-eyed sweetie-pie of a preacher lowers his heavy Bible heavy as a lifetime of sin to the pulpit stand...

With that done a change comes over him as a hammy Hammond electric organ chord trembles even grumbles rises rises with the congregation while the golden-robed choir murmurs in the balcony and preacher claps hands ready begin—mourners throw down their hankies and the glorified sanctified deified preacher fists to his temples bellows the virtues of the Lord God Jesus Christ Our Savior exhorting his fellowman: Lift up your voices now children in spiritual tone and cry up mightily for salvation to come unto your soul and all souls and the gilded choir claps starts off slowly softly easy easy... time for the tears to dry in women's eyes, hymnals are searched though most know the song by heart: Going down to Babylon-land with my Bible in my hand—a girl-child throws up her arms the choir forces itself higher louder a jubilant jubilee this jubilation—gonna shout the Word onto the man gonna save his soul if I can—and the preacher half-preaches half-sings works up a holy sweat waves his meaty hands about white palms as big as saucers beseeches the choir beseeches Almighty God—the folks down in the pews join in shout and praise and whisper and holler the names of the Lord all the thousand certified names of the Lord and all the people sing so heaven can hear rattle them pearls jangle them jewels clap hands slap thighs stamp feet hallelujah—washing my feet in the Jordan Jordan Jordan River—and the corpse is the only one of them who doesn't see fit to join right in.

Brothers sisters babes in arms! preacherman shouts—I saw a great black heaven and it made me happy! so I cried out with joy unto Jesus hallelujah! and in this heaven no man went hungry no child went thirsty no woman watched her man march off to war and there was no sorrow or envy or greed and most of all no white man whipping our backs for Jesus is no man's nigger no more—this is my testament oh brothers oh sisters! hear you what I witnessed for I cry out in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation praise God! let us not hate let us not cheat our brother lie to our sister lay down with our neighbor's wife but go into heaven together! and give your hand to Baby Jesus I was in darkness but now I can see give your hand to Jesus Christ and sing with me now Help me Lord to find a better way Help me! oh dear sweet Lord!

And it is as if the drums had started again calling from out of the darkness this something not nameless because it never had a name and it is the same as what her song summoned forth making him crave and lust and yearn making him burn all the same the sweat the heat his heart and bloody his nails in his palms his fingernails into his arms and slap himself and fight the power of organ and choir and the stomping stamping mourners _Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!_ a bleary yellow-toothed old widow weary with tears and heavy with pearls pleads in her agony in the midst of the hymn fainting in several slow stages as in a film slowed-down at the edge of the altar leaning over the casket at her darling dead boy just about to drop into it when four Olympian gallants rush to her rescue, fight over her like suitors and the song goes on incessantly unceasingly Help me Lord find a way Help me Help me see the day Help me! and he is gasping running struggling to breathe again to live again out away from the makeshift church or almighty cathedral out the towering church-doors past the cars and waiting cabs and cabbies and the long low hearse with the skull-faced chauffeur at the wheel into the street falling against people falling falling toppling tumbling onto a streetcar although he has no idea what it is or where it is he is going except probably express to the center of this Tartarus—crawling to his seat crying bawling to watch the poolhalls dancehalls bingo halls pawnshops porn shops speakeasies saloons salons dives diners and beaneries rushing past him in a wild dirty dusty blur...

Sooted from the ash-heaps at the ragged ends of the neighborhood choking on the cinderblasted air burning corroding his lungs he knows without doubt this is Hell after all the Devil's chamberpot Judas's pisspot and you may as well give into temptation again if there is no hope of a haven above a salvation for sinners if you are already damned (these words his father drummed into him from a big black book: his omnipotent omniscient father who saw all, heard all, knew all—and punished me for forgetting what godliness is next to, who whacked my hands with a riding crop for things my hands had done or wanted to do, who once went out riding and came back with scratch-marks upon his face and neck, saying it was Satan himself he wrestled in the woods, though he smelled so sweet and sweaty—my father who all his years increased in power and might and furor rather than give an inch, nearly outliving me those final silent Sundays, the wife dead already and my son shivering at his desk, and the room so cold there were icicles on the hearth for not a fire will be built—those terrible silent Sundays and he sees his father now as some sort of enraged bouncer at heaven's gates, the meanest man he ever done seen) the streetcar jerks to a standstill at the end of the line where the world ends too he shambles off shaking palsied ambling through the filthy children and bloated drunks scattered in the vacant lots like cannibals after a feast of angel flesh housewives in hairnets and bandannas and curlers passing aspirins or bottles of beer or smokes between them across the stoops and porches and landings street-toughs in leather and grease reefers cupped in their palms against the wind graceful and serious and with the politely detached faces of ballet stars and loan sharks in their sharkskin suits and narcs and coppers and queens and junkies and hustlers and pimps and loonies the familiar roll-call of all the rag-ends and dead-ends and dustbins of the city and beautiful women of the tenements with nothing to do but paint their nails and make it look like the most important act in the world which it is on a crummy Sunday morning and he walks with his head down against the wind past all the windows open or broken with torn screens or cracked plate glass and past fallen fences and gates boarded-up desires chain-linked rage...

Then he's climbing narrow apartment stairs with the choir's song jammed in his head— _Help me Lord help me find a way out of darkness_ —passing open doorways with eyes staring not quite at him but at some space beyond nothing beyond despair and hunger into the sun away from these rats and roaches and goddamn rent-collecting slumlords and barrio ladies broken men staring at nothing but a blankness in the sky dropping into death without a sigh a prayer or blood-choked cry for they are already dead though they appear to breathe they listen to voices in the wallpaper and unseen radios or is it the buzz of flies Beelzebub in a water jar busted icebox beatup mattress beatdown bedsprings always a brat squalling somewhere and he climbs higher nearer the clotted gray clouds above through the cinders and ash up this Tower of Babel toward Lucifer's throne in the sky and on the roof is the slavegirl he'd hoped he would find here rayon skirt hitched high and nylon stockings slung low tits arched ass arced she tilts the pointed chin of her she-cat face slants her opalescent eyes purrs a throaty purr thinking him over while little halos of smoke go circling up into the storm-clouds from her fading cigarette she smells sad and musty like the basement of a long-empty house there are long white scars on her thin long arms like pagan runes on onyx skin but he can't leave her face so triangular so foreign and strange he stares into it as if into a polished black stone a chip of obsidian the original cracked aboriginal mirror seeking a reflection of some sort perhaps his own ashen face the color and age of which he's forgotten with everything else at this height dazed and dizzy and feeling so very strong she smiles at him at last not with promise or pleasure the first creature of this world to really truly see him...

On the next rooftop another radio rasps a voice obscured by windblown static cries out to God to be led out of darkness the girl whistles a Bluebird blues crooning with two slurring descending notes as the soot falls from the lowered clouds like black snow another voice interferes on the radio testifying the healing power of a patented medicine a singer resumes her broken song a moan a plea a saxophone refrain it's raining now and his two hands and his mouth are very dry verily most dry...

He succumbs surrenders wets his mouth with hers engulfs her in the folds of his coarse thick vestments now torn open—it's pouring now—presses her thick burning lips to his breast her black fingers tightening around his white throat and they step together toward the edge of the roof in the rain leaning against each other to avert the fall like a terrible crow him in his black robes looking as if he is about to fly away with this unnamed unknown girl at his bosom ready to fly through the rain beyond the rooftops over the streets far past the dead and dying and merely bruised of this woeful haunted place...

Hypatia Kentworth's Importation of

Edmund Wellington to America

Hypatia Kentworth:

My parents died and suddenly I was left with nothing to do. I went back to the piano, but Brahms could no longer calm me, Liszt no longer excite me. Slow, solitary games of lawn croquet would leave me drowsing among the wickets and topiary. I attempted crewel work, but my fingers were cramped and clumsy. A friend who had lived in the Chinese colonies introduced me to Mah-Jongg. We played for hours on a green baize table and I was eternally bored.

Other friends came back from Somaliland or Sierra Leone, carrying elephant-foot hassocks and ostrich-feather punkahs. Everyone of any means was "doing" Africa in those days. I watched the tourists step out of Cook's brochures, dark as their porters. Father himself had traveled central and western Africa. On many a sooty, crepuscular afternoon I had leafed through his photograph albums, in which men of all races were the same sepia tone. He had been studying entomology—the continent's insects had only just begun to pose for their family portraits—and so I vowed to finish his work.

But I could not pretend to be a scientist. Or even a Brownie-wielding lady journalist from the illustrateds. I decided, as many others had before me, to venture through the African colonies in the guise of a trader. I bought yards and yards of calico and gingham, and I signed up with a large and well-established London firm. Everything I needed was stuffed into sturdy portmanteaus and hump-backed trunks, including all my father's rather puzzling scientific equipment for collecting native specimens. Friends added treacle and crumpets and watercress sandwiches to my carpetbag at the wharf, to remind me of home, they said.

Edmund Wellington:

At first, I had wanted to be a painter (I still _so_ revere those neo-primitive Fauvists), but canvas rots so beastly quick in the rain-forest and northern light filtered through the canopy is highly unreliable. Besides that, few traders carried oils or camel-hair brushes or even the most popular hues of Winsor and Newton. They offered us little more than the same tired old calicoes and ginghams, until the whole tribe looked as indistinguishable as a Ziegfeld chorus line. (After the Americans taught us to read, I would steal their discarded newspapers and learned a lot for a child of "darkest Africa.")

Missionaries always come just on the heels of traders, and by the time I was twelve they had set up an outpost in our village. They were all grim and dour Kansans or Iowans, and for a long time we laughed at them as they hacked at lianas and draped mosquito netting wearing their heavy boiled-wool, until finally most of the tribe was converted and became grim and dour, too. I had been raised by great-aunts and uncles, and now they had an even bigger god with whom to threaten me, the boy who never felt he belonged among their clan wars and ghastly tradition-bound handicrafts.

A scarred and battered old spinet had been hauled from the Midwest to the new missionary school. At first afraid it might be an instrument of torture akin to some sort of sweatbox or Methodist confessional, grown up from the forest floor overnight, I eventually showed some interest in it, having long grown weary of our people's monotonous talking drums, kimbalas, and what-have-you. (Don't ask what were my first impressions of the _sound_ of that out-of-tune piano; it was as if I had plucked birdsong from the skies, I suppose, and only half as natural.) The missionaries, meaning kindness after all, eventually taught me to play a little, so I played hymns during Sunday school classes. That was all right, but it was no bloody Carnegie Hall.

Hypatia Kentworth:

Everyone took me for a missionary. I suppose it was my appearance—all in black with my hair cinched back tight, so tight my smile looked like a frown. But I looked with disdain upon missionaries of any stripe. They wanted all the "poor, humble" Africans to behave like children at catechism class. The idea was preposterous. The best way to save them, I told more than one Congo Christianizer, was with currency, not conversion. Excuse the alliteration, please.

As for my business ventures, I was marvelously successful. I traded for ivory and rubber, and I shipped simply boat-loads of the stuff back to the docks of London, asking to be sent yet more gingham and calico. Remarkable the efficiency of those trade routes and their captains and commercial travelers.

The very tang of the sub-Saharan air was oddly invigorating; the peoples I encountered were uninhibited and charming. Almost never hostile. Rare insects seemed to flutter onto my mounting boards and impale themselves there. The native cuisine was a bit on the gamey side, but had it been properly spiced, it would have made an Escoffier or Carême blush with jealousy. I swatted innumerable mosquitoes and drank endless cups of tea.

I set out to reach Gabon by way of the Ogooué River, which led through the Ogooué River, wild, almost impenetrable territory. All I asked for, though, was good thick Scotch tweed and a waterproof hat, and I was ready to take on the most neglected of footpaths. Whenever possible, my loyal guides and I went by canoe, of course. To pass the time we sang Gilbert and Sullivan, counted ibises, and played word games (difficult to do in three languages at once). We spent many a night at the edge of delightful swamps which brimmed with snags, mud, and leeches; and I listened in the darkness for all those lovely crocodiles shifting amongst the papyrus reeds.

One week we stayed at a village where the missionaries had recently been, judging from the number of carven crucifixes dangling over shirtwaists and shirtfronts, when once these people had been happy and naked as the very first peoples (which they were grandchildren of, after all). I presumed that the good Christians had moved on to trouble more peaceful natives with their horrid stories of revenge and martyrdom. That first night I was exhausted, and I went swiftly and gladly to my accommodations—a small hut of a widow who had passed away not a fortnight before. Her wizened hands were nailed to the door, as was the custom of those who kept the old ways. My sleep was, needless to say, ephemeral.

I awakened to what sounded like ghosts inside a pianoforte. At first I thought it was just a dream or wind in the palm fronds, but then I heard it again, with my eyes wide open, and the sound was unmistakable. Out the door I went, carrying along my box camera and flash apparatus in case this was some important ceremony about which I had regretfully not been informed.

The music was coming from a rustic chapel around the corner that the missionaries had surely built themselves. So that explained the music! I stopped for a moment outside the rough-hewn doors. Someone was playing "Jerusalem," but in a manner I had never heard in my long-gone church-going days. Parry's anthem was low and high at the same time, and the chord progressions were dark and pulsing; the effect was as hypnotic as a _vièle à roue_ 's rasping drone. I came closer and opened the door.

Edmund Wellington:

The missionaries left, rather in a hurry, to go pick up supplies on the west coast (they said). But they were never heard from again. One could only hope they were eaten by some of our less appreciative cousins. In their absence, I went over and over their mildewed hymnals, until I discovered that I could change things around in a style that sounded to me unique and less tiresome. Still, I felt confined and wanted to learn more. I even went so far as to insert palm-fronds between strings of that old upright, just for the buzzing effect: cicadas one could conduct like a string section. No one appreciated what I was doing, however, so I practiced at night, foot heavy on the damper, while the village slept. That was my salvation, back then in the jungle. That was what kept me happy to be alive, not someone's promise of a blood-stained god. All anyone else ever wanted to hear was "Bringing In The Sheaves," in plodding two-two time.

It was later than usual one evening, and I was doing whatever came naturally on the keyboard. I did not even know what to call what I was doing; it was just exciting and adventurous. It was like running into the bird-crazy forest at dawn with your eyes squeezed shut and a tingling rain coming down your back. Then the door opened and I shut down the piano lid right away, almost crushing my left fingers, because I thought it was the chief coming to complain that I was keeping him awake again.

I was wrong. It was a Caucasian lady I had not seen before. Someone not old but certainly long past her youth. Sharp beetle-like eyes, white-clenched lips and yellowing teeth. She stood in the doorway for a long time, looking at me in a curious way, and I did not know what to do. I thought she was a missionary; she looked as dour and grim as one. But somehow the unexpected sight of her thrilled me in some forbidden way, which I admit now as if to an over-inquisitive interlocutor that I would not come to terms with or even understand until much later.

Then she asked me, first in a dialect I did not quite understand and then in proper middle-class Midlands English, to play some more, because she said that she actually enjoyed it. I was delighted to please her. She was, I soon learned, a very well-mannered and well-humored lady, quite like one's maiden aunt who is the quickest to find the trinket in her holiday pudding. She made us both some Earl Grey and I played for her until the sun rose. "I am Miss Hypatia Kentworth," she told me at last, "and that's about all you should care to know, young man."

She then asked me my name, in that genuinely curious, almost pedagogical fashion she had. I told her that I had forgotten the name I was born with, but my Christian name was "Edmund." That was all. The missionaries had not gotten around to thinking of surnames yet. She suggested "Wellington," after the duke and prime minister whose monuments back in London she apparently found privately amusing. Or maybe it was for the boots. Never mind, "Wellington" sounded posh enough to me, so I accepted it. But, she said, smiling down into the black depths of her tea as I quaffed my fourth or fifth cup, you should be an _Earl_ , not a run-of-the-mill Duke, no matter their precedence!

That same morning, she went to the chief and bought me from the tribe for fifty yards of red and gold calico.

Hypatia Kentworth:

I took Mr. Edmund Wellington (whom I first and always called "The Earl," which was just our own personal joke in the beginning) back to England with me. He was, by far, the best specimen I had picked up in Africa!

Now, I must make it clear that I bought him only to extricate him from his village; he absolutely needed to get away in order to find an outlet for his music. He had no close living relatives. Life in the wilderness had been harsh and inhospitable to him and his innate talents. How I knew how it was to feel underappreciated! When my parents were dying—but that is another story... He had begged to return home with me. He longed to see London, especially Harrod's and the Crown Jewels, mistakenly assuming the latter would be on display next to ladies' wristwatches in the former. After I showed him around he was free to go, but for whatever reason he preferred to stay with me. (I might modestly suppose he liked having an audience as receptive as I was.) I promised to help his career in exchange for his becoming my butler, our last one having insensibly run off to die in the Boer War.

He was a very intelligent youth and an excellent butler. Such etiquette! Such _politesse_! I finished the education the missionaries had only half-heartedly begun and taught him how to write social correspondence as polished if not better than my own—and more importantly that one should only read and emulate writers one was amused by. No dreary Bible-battling Booths or Jehovah's Russellites for us! Thankfully, he lacked the newfound piety of his kinfolk. And he was extraordinarily witty. There was never a time he couldn't improvise a limerick to suit the occasion. (Sometimes just risqué enough to scare off unwanted visitors.) He unfailingly trounced me at Mah-Jongg, although he _would_ get carried away, and we were often a long time behind the Chesterfield or sifting through the hearth-ashes looking for the tiles he had upset.

I taught him all the piano I remembered. I taught him the classics. He fell madly in love with Chopin. I taught him music-hall numbers, Welsh dances, Hebridean lullabies. I taught him whatever sheet music I found in my piano bench. He had tremendous potential; he soon outgrew all I could teach him. Yet, he told me, he had still not quite found the music he heard in his heart. There was new music in America, I informed him. It was, I'd heard, something called, oddly enough, _jazz_. Maybe that was it.

Therefore we sailed to America. (Actually aboard a modern steamship—but does that sound half as poetic?) The books I had rather too hastily written on my African sojourns ( _Travels in Far West Africa_ and _Far West African Travels_ ) had become fairly popular there. I had been invited to give a series of lectures throughout the country, sponsored by my generous American publishers. Mr. Wellington and I found passage on the White Star Line, enthroned in cabins as large and ornate as royal courtrooms. He was extremely restless during the entire voyage; he could never just relax in his deck chair, but was always inventing dances and games on the promenade deck. Though we received some looks, I was well-known enough for my so-called "eccentricities" to elicit not condemnation, but admiration for my "charitable" work. I should say, _ho!_ Those weeks of sun and sea with "The Earl" almost always at my side were some of the happiest of my life. Our first stop would be New Orleans.

Edmund Wellington:

Above and beyond all, I felt I had found at last my real home in the United States of America. As de Toqueville himself would agree, things were brighter, louder, more optimistic there than in foggy, smug olde England. The clash of rhythms and chaotic harmony of mankind's latest awakening, drawn from a hundred ethnic persuasions, was my own, my very own, and I fell in love with the honest, simple people and their music.

In New Orleans I discovered jazz. It _was_ what I had been listening for all along. Here was the sound, the style I had been striving for since my days in Cameroon; now I had a chance to develop it among those who understood and could collaborate in this new liberation. Some of us were Negroid, some Caucasian, a few Indian Oriental or Occidental, most a mix of every hue and race, and our music was that rainbow of rioting colors one finds on the surface of a river in Monet or in the light shed upon one of Bonnard's bathers.

In the French Quarter, I strolled down a confetti-strewn Bourbon Street and conferred with Dixieland bandleaders who wore dashing candy-striped blazers and straw boaters. Later I would stumble into surprising _tête-à-têtes_ with blind bluesmen in East St. Louis and wandering gospel singers in Memphis. Dulcimer-strummers from darkest Appalachia, yodeling cowherds, minstrel troupes, balladeers, banjoists, fife and drum corps, hog-callers, auctioneers; cakewalks and barn-dances, quadrilles and polka-players and tap-dancers... It was all a splendid holiday—and the start of a new life once again.

I first began to compose during Miss Kentworth's first and only American lecture tour. She applauded the idea. The reams of music paper I went through and the ink I wasted! But I knew what I was trying to do now, and I left plenty of windows open to the breeze of this new thing humbly termed "improvisation." Miss Kentworth was genuinely fond of my work. She said it reminded her of Jean Sibelius, perhaps, in its passion. Or Sir Edward Elgar in its controlled compassion. She was a generous person, I must point out, I must remind you. The Atlantic crossing had certainly exhilarated her. She rented the finest Bechsteins and Baldwins for me to practice upon as we hopped our way from hotel to hotel.

While we were in that delicious phoenix of a city called Chicago, she suggested that I play a selection of my compositions in a talent show at a place called, somewhat disingenuously, a "nightclub." Incongruously dressed in my best formal evening wear (improbably making me look like a genuine earl to the Americans), I played my ambitious tone-poem "Ochre and Ivory Fantasy" and the little jazz study I called "Africanesque." I played with a casual exuberance and the audience unanimously chose me as the winner. Jolly good thing, that! Miss Kentworth was ecstatic. She urged me to assemble my own orchestra immediately.

Naturally I did so, after auditioning dozens of musicians from across the land and choosing only the finest. Soon I learned the nuances in timbre betwixt a saxophone and a trombone, a cornet and a trumpet. I wanted a _special_ sound in my musical arrangements, a sound that could not be described in words painted by the best poet, a sound which would gratify the most debauched ear. Eventually the ensemble coalesced and matured as a living thing might. The nation was hungry for this new music and glad to pay well for it. In time we made many shellac recordings for the Orpheus label and then the Vocalion label, Regal Zonophone in the British Isles. Mere fodder for the Victrola, for we were best live and not limited by four minutes-thirty seconds. We played dance halls and debutante cotillions and firemen's balls. The public seemed to like what they heard, and soon we were booked solid for months at the Cotton Club in Harlem, on the island of Manhattan in New York City.

Hypatia Kentworth:

The Cotton Club was a wonderful thing for the Earl and for Wellington's Orchestra, but I saw it as the beginning of the end of our relationship. My lecture tour had come to a quiet close, and I rested in my sea-green suite of rooms at the New York Astoria, preparing my next book (to be titled _Traveling Even Farther Westward in Africa_ ) while he charted arrangements at the club.

When he came to the hotel early in the morning, after a long night of performing, he was too tired even for breakfast. He slept in a room opposite mine. Other people, revelers all, were tugging at my pretty new lace cuffs in either direction, to join them in quick bottles of claret or rush to gallery openings featuring the currently most daring artists. (My sentiments with Mr. Shaw.) I saw less and less of my Earl, and found myself missing his butling—indeed, just him—more and more.

I thought often of our halcyon days back in Mayfair. I remembered demonstrating new figures on the piano for him. I remembered the cadenzas swelling with furor, then falling into sweet languor. His long dark fingers would caress the ivory keys in return, and I considered committing wild, desirous acts. Only now, while he was away, did I confess to myself that I had thought such unlikely, such absurd things.

Ah, but what grace his shadowy body had! Have you seen one of the Douanier Rousseau's paintings of a midnight-black panther reclining among emerald leaves? The shimmer of its fur and the untameable fire in its eyes? Afraid it might pounce right out of the frame? Once I shook my Earl's hand in conceding defeat after a fatiguing game of badminton, and I had been tempted to run my fingers up his well-tailored sleeve in utter abandon.

The maid would poke her way into the room each afternoon, polishing the fireplace andirons for the hundredth time and taking away the crumpled pieces of paper overflowing the dustbins. She never failed to ask if I were progressing well on my book, and I always assured her that of course I was. The truth was, my mind was on Mr. Wellington. Those days, I heard him more often on the wireless than I got to see him. When his recordings were played, I would very likely leave my book for hours.

I thought again of those times he had serenaded me on the piano with melodies he seemed to snatch from some secret breeze. You know that old saying about "charming the very birds out of the skies," don't you? I might as well have been a clay pigeon. To paraphrase Shakespeare, which I seldom dare to do: "Oh happy keys, to bear the touch of Wellington!"

I looked at myself in my hotel bedchamber's ormolu-encrusted mirror. I was no longer even remotely young. My eyes were small and sunken; my skin was cracked and dessicated on my cheeks and forehead. And, oh, my neck! Besides all that, tropic Helios in his might had committed cruel deceits on what were once smooth, unblemished hands. For whatever reason I still wore my hair drawn severely back. I did look for all the world like a missionary, misplaced in the city, perhaps, and reflecting upon things that were far from holy.

He was, as I have suggested, sleeping right across the hall. I could enter his room and close the door behind me, gently gently, and soundlessly drop my dressing gown to the floor. My Edmund my Earl!A man had never touched me before. What would his reaction be?

Edmund Wellington:

I missed Hypatia Kentworth after she went back to England. My orchestra had already gone on tour to California, taking the new bullet-fast Zephyr, so I was unable to see her off. I had told her I would be back in a fortnight or so, but she left in such an unexplained hurry from the Astoria, without notice, that I feared I had somehow done or said something untoward.

Sometimes I would be playing late at night in a smoky speakeasy, and a pale woman in a pilgrim's frock and an unusual hat would walk through the lobby in back of the audience, and I would think it was she. But it never was; it was always a stranger's face under those feathers and fichu.

They told me I was famous now, and even the least astute critics regularly called me such awkward things as "The Presiding Earl in the Ministry of Jazz." To my fans, I was just Eddie or "Earl." Our records sold quite a lot, I confess, and I was said to be both an "innovator" and an "influence," whatever those words really mean when it comes to something as intangible as this sublime gift from the gods called Music. Miss Kentworth in her understated way had always said what I was doing was a "brilliant lark," and it was that, but it was more, as well. It was the Africa in me and yet not quite African at all. In the end, I guess I had become just another American.

I tried writing Miss Kentworth, and though she had taught me to write a letter as well as an equerry to the queen, my words and sentiments addressed to her were as fumbling and bumptious as a schoolboy's. That special tenderness I had in my heart for her failed to come out on paper—though I suppose it fared better in my adagios. Be that as it may, it was too late for a formal proposal. She would have turned me down, or worse yet, pretended never to have recognized such effrontery at all. In all events, she failed to correspond, although I assumed she received my overseas posts as surely as she received my little exclamations of joy courtesy Wells and Fargo. Perhaps I had been too brash, after all.

I sometimes wondered what she would have done if I had ever suddenly turned to embrace and kiss her. I must confess that such feelings do sometimes run through an inexperienced young man's mind. However, it would not have been prudent, I concede, for a lady, especially one in a vastly superior position in society, to permit such advances.

Nevertheless she continued to inspire me. I wrote "Congolese Lament" and "Diminuendo in a Blue Mood" especially for her, hoping only that she might hear them some day on the radio and understand. But we were living in separate worlds by then, even, it seemed, in separate centuries; we had been apart too long. Worst of all, we had I suppose kept our real feelings for each other unspoken and untried... Then again, maybe it was only pity she felt for me.

Yet, even after she died searching for rare specimens of coptera among the Bantu and Pedi tribesmen in the Transvaal, I would sometimes look up from my piano and expect to see her standing there, smiling down at my splayed hands, as she had so often done. I might pause for a moment, as if waiting for the darkness to speak my name, and go back to choosing chords in that same careful manner she had once chosen which millipedes to pin to her mounting boards.
Twist Twist

A Fictional History

INTRO

_1957_ :At a press conference called at his Palm Beach mansion, Little Richard slips one million dollars' worth of diamonds from his fingers and flings them into his piano-shaped swimming pool, renouncing rock and roll, "the Devil's music," forever.

_1958_ :The teenage son of the mayor of Kalamazoo, Michigan, described as "on the varsity, a good Christian boy with a newspaper delivery route and a steady girlfriend," attempts self-immolation by holding a Flippo lighter to his heavily Vitalis-coated ducktail, reportedly because of parental objection to his obsession with "Negro rhythm music."

_1959_ :A respected "sexologist" at Johns Hopkins publishes a 400-page treatise claiming sixty-five percent of adolescent females who lose their virginity before the age of consent do so while listening to popular "beat-driven" music on automobile radios.

_1960_ :Fresh from the army, Elvis Presley begins using strings on his latest ballads—and he's shipped the schmaltz all the way to Blue Hawaii (next stop Vegas?). Eee-yuck! Even his biggest fans agree each of his latest movies is worse than the last. Gone are the "Jailhouse Rock" sneer, the cool-cat clothes, the Elvis-the-pelvis hip action. The D.A. has slowly transmogrified into a shiny shellacked helmet. The King, former disciples say, has bartered his rockabilly soul for the devil's pink Caddy and gospel respectability.

A _Saturday Evening Post_ op ed writer states: "Big Band music is definitely making a comeback."

Time to dig that "death of rock/long live rock" litany once again, guys and gals: Chuck Berry in jail/Jerry Lee Lewis in jail/Alan Freed heading for jail/Gene Vincent dying in England/Buddy Holly dead/The Big Bopper dead/Richie Valens dead/Eddie Cochran dead/Rock 'n' roll A.W.O.L. R.I.P. o.u.t. d.o.a. k.o.'d dead dead dead dead. Pat Boone and Patti Page making zillions.

ONE

It's nineteen-hundred sixty-one. Zoom! Into a new decade and a new attitude. This punk named Chubby Checker comes out of nowheresville with a megahit called "Do The Twist." It goes gold. Platinum. Double-platinum. He's a star. A superstar. A sensation. Rock 'n' roll is born again and Chubby's there to baptize it. Hallelujah! Now turn the record over...

The flipside ain't so hot. Nobody really comes out of nowhere—ya gotta have roots, baby. If you wanna sing the blues you gotta pay the dues. C. C. used to be E. E.—Ernest Evans by name, a poor black butcher-boy from South Philly who found he could carry a tune, dance a little, ham it up a lot. So he thumbs a ride to NYC, talks his way into a studio, tosses off a version of an old Hank Ballard tune just for laughs. But someone sniffs a marketing phenom, someone else probably pays the payola piper, and we're off. Back in the former Mr. Evans's hometown, Dick Clark— _the_ Dick Clark—rechristens him (a twist on Fats Domino, get it?) on "American Bandstand" and the kid gets a chance to synch his single; of course, he has to demonstrate a few simple easy you-can-do-this-at-home steps, too. Millions of kids are watching, holding their breath for a miracle, kind of like what they see and maybe even what they hear. And that's how a dance craze gets born.

A dance craze! Just what this brave new cold war world has been waiting for—no one can dance and worry about The Bomb at the same time, so forget your atom-angst, come on outta that bomb shelter and onto the dancefloor. St. Vitus may have started the first dance craze, babycakes, but that was in the days before the little record with the great big hole. If we're all going to go crazy or even bite the Big One we might as well do it dancing. Hail hail good ol' rock 'n' roll. (At least as long as we can make some quick and easy bucks.) Everyone off your feet and feel that big big beat. Here comes the twister and it's gonna blow y'all away.

Come on baby, let's twist! yelps Chubby. And it goes like this...

TWO

Surprise, surprise, surprise, there's a New Frontier out there beyond the Nylon Curtain, comrades. HQ is the Peppermint Lounge, West 45th in Times Square, and it's the hot-hot spot where the in crowd hangs out. Meet and greet, treat and cheat, it's all-reet Pete. All it took was a Cholly Knickerbocker item about Roger Vadim and Ursula Andress (aka Arsula Undress, she of the titillating flix) dancing a cute new thing there called The Twist, and the Affluent Society had suddenly found its watering hole. (Slumming it in a seedy little dive is just _sooo_ sixties, dahlink.) Soon the glitterati have usurped the old regime, beleathered and bequiffed bikeboys and their beehived old ladies, who wait mournfully outside in the rain on their Harleys and Vespas. The management, friends of Mr. Clark, have been quick to hire a "twist band" by the name of Joey Dee and the Starlighters. (Last week they were known as a "doo-wop" band, but, hey, who's keeping score?) Joey's equally quick to cut "The Peppermint Twist," a prompt trillion-seller. Get set for the jet set, ladies and germs.

_Le haut monde_ goes gaga in its gogo boots. Now the older generation has caught on, Twist is _It_ , and the Peppermint is the absolute omphalos (did someone say armpit?) of the rock-it sock-it universe. Just can't get enough of that sophisticated boom-boom. It's been long overdue. The press is watching, sleepless as Argus in the city that never sleeps, and soon the eyes of its ten-thousand cameras are blinking, their flashbulbs flashing like strobe lights within the glorified jook joint. The 'Mint is the scene, toots, the place to be seen. Grab your coat, grab your hat. Heard they got bouncers from Hell, mean as Cerberus. And they don't let no one in who's not a Face.

A few of these faces include: Margot Fonteyn. Cassius Clay. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Jean Cocteau. Adlai Stevenson. Diana Vreeland. Phil Spector. Noel Coward. Baby Jane Holzer. Carol Channing. Princess Grace. Merle Oberon. Jean-Luc Godard. Sal Mineo. Marguerite Duras. They all twist. Twist for the cameras, love!

Yeah, they're all there: poets politicos producers priests actors actresses agents artists moguls magnates millionaires billionaires kazillionaires starlets stars superstars harlots nymphets faunlets divorcees habitués couturiers coifferiers hawks chickens tricks johns jakes rogues rakes socialists modernists pansexualists expressionists communists perverts inverts introverts extroverts—all converts to the new dance-floor religion.

Sidney Sheldon seen at... Liz and Dick popped into... Buckminster Fuller quoted at... Bill Buckley and Christine Keeler, while dancing at...

Some people, on the other hand (or should we say foot), just won't twist. Greta Garbo won't. Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs won't. Andy Warhol won't. He sits at a crowded table in a crowded corner and watches. Just watches. Edie Sedgewick, down from Harvard, sits with him, but won't twist, either—yet. Some people don't even show, conspicuous by their absence: Simone Signoret. Marlon Brando. Kookie Byrnes. Lee Radziwill. Jane and Peter Fonda. Joan Sutherland. Nina Simone.

Reports a breathless _New Yorker_ scribe: "Hit Peppermint close to midnight, in blue mood. Inside found pink pandemonium. Dance-floor packed, pilled-up, and poppin'. Was battered by wild swinging of hips and elbows. Propositioned by both guys and dolls. Tried to get out. Impossible!"

Talk of the town is Norman Mailer's planning a book—a _serious_ book—on the twist take-over. Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee both want to incorporate twist scenes into their new plays. Jet-lagged after a red-eye express from Bev Hills, Jacqueline Susann says she's working on a screenplay with "tons of twisting" in it. And Bloomsbury-cum-talkshow philosopher Bertrand Russell says (right on "The Garry Moore Show") that he's come up with something called "twististentialism."

Well, we could go on name-droppin', window-shoppin', finger-poppin', and party-hoppin' forever but, like _wow_...

To twist or not to twist is not the question. You either twist or you don't: twist is the measure of man. And either you know how or you haven't tried, it's that easy. Twist is more than dance; like Zen, it's a state of mind. As Marshall McLuhan pontificates, twist is a very cool medium in a very hot world.

You can twist at your desk, twist in the subway, twist in the shower, twist while making love. That's what the songs are really saying. Twist is whatever you make of it. Twist can be anything or nothing, a Lieber-Stoller b-side or a Mitch Miller arrangement or a streetcorner jam, as long as it's got twist sentiments. A Cage sonata can twist, a Motherwell abstract can twist, a Mary Quant miniskirt can twist, a twist can untwist itself. Ultimately twist is about itself: _meta-twist_ if you like.

Like many great dance melodies of the past, from the black bottom to the wah-watusi, the seminal "(Do) The Twist" refers to one thing at the same time as inherently being that one thing. Twist doesn't mean, twist _is_. Its subliminal instruction: to act, not think, do instead of being undone. Pre-postmodern estheticians and pop-art sociologists alike are going nuts analyzing twist in the pages of _The Saturday Review_ and _Commonweal_ and _The Nation_. Come on baby, let's twist indeed, _indeed_.

_Newsweek_ and _Time_ and _Life_ and _Look_ pounce upon the Peppermint and its pretty people as they do upon all things eventually, unsure at first if this is just another passing fad or if it really is the second fall of Rome, the end of the world as we know it. The dance that's impossible to describe is described again and again— _Time_ says: "The upper body sways forward and backward and the hips and shoulders twist erotically, while the arms thrust in, out, up and down with the pistonlike motions of a baffled birdkeeper fighting off a flock of amorous flamingos."

"It goes like this," Chubby explains to reporters and, at a loss for words, gyrates on the spot. "Heck, it's just another dumb ol' dance..."

A minimal media survey of the twist: Socialites do a slick benefit twist across the even slicker pages of _Mademoiselle_. Social whirl columns report debonair young debs and heirs twisting the light fantastic at poolside patio parties and country club cotillions. During the making of _Cleopatra_ in the Mideast extras twist in a reconstructed Coliseum. The popular afternoon youth program "Where The Action Is" features underwater twisting. The twist is credited for a bullish stock market, or so sayeth _The Wall Street Journal_. Nichols and May have this routine about a boss and his secretary and the twist. In every newspaper one sees satellite photos of twisting from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon. They do it barefoot, in flats, pumps, and heels; in furs and blue jeans. Twist is so high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it, so wide you can't get around it. If they levied a twist tax, we'd all be skint, buddy-boy. Like really, we're twisting ourselves to death!

Negroes are suddenly fashionable. Being Negro is even more fashionable, having one as a friend outtathisworld. Certainly you can't have a party without at least one or two. After all—class, listen up—their rhythm and blues is just another word for twist, the desegregated sound of the younger generation's integrated Tomorrowland, where twisting will be bussed into the best of neighborhoods. (Never mind the ghettos; they're coming down next month.) And speaking of black fashion, the little black dress has made yet another return, ladies: This time it's simply _the_ number to twist and turn in. The teenarama dancearama-lama-ding-dong crowd, following their elders' lead, is dressing up to dance to their made-to-order music. No more of that off-the-rack roughneck boho beatnik stuff—put on a tie, polish your shoes—for the torch has been passed to a new dance-crowd. Today's teens say excuse me if they bump into you at the local twist-track—you could be their home ec teacher or Uncle Stanley. The rock and sock-hop generation has never been less rebellious—so all the major weeklies, with a chorus of relieved sighs, are telling us.

Questions most asked about the twist:

1) Will the twist tone my tummy, tuck in my tush? Certainly. It's doctor-approved. The best therapy, mental and physical, around. Just don't overdo it—"twisted discs" are as popular as tennis elbow or golfers' wrist or writers' cramp. Begin gently, twist for short periods, then rest. Gradually increase time you twist. Guaranteed to improve appearance, reduce tension, win friends and influence people—and be FUN!

2) But exactly _how_ do I twist? Pretend you've just taken a shower and you're drying your backside with a towel. Suddenly you're twisting!

3) What if everyone else is still doing the cha-cha-cha? So-so-so be the first on your block. You won't have to twist their wrists—they'll be doing it next, you bet.

4) Won't I look silly? _Puh-leez!_

  5. Will the twist save the world? Imagine this: someone gives a war and no one shows up—because they're all busy twisting. That's the way our postwar baby booms.

While Joey Dee is touring to support his hits, Chubby subs at the 'Mint. The Big Apple is juicy and polished just for him, and he's ready to peel it to the core. Happy Rockefeller wants his advice on her twist style, tables are reserved for the Maharaja and Maharani of Baroda, Suzy people abound, Nancy Rudolph people abound, and Hollywood has at last sent out advance scouts. The Arthur Murrays are given free twist lessons and go on to give (but not for free, of course) their own, spreading the twist contagion further out into the suburbs, exurbs, and beyond. Some Joe named "Killer" is there nightly. Even the waitresses are twisting.

Who's that totally wigged-out bird tuh-wisting with Terry-Thomas? Who's that famous Anglo-American writer with the nutso nympho at his hip? Who's that ex-bandleader from Havana reeling through the service entrance? Who's that babe coming out of the little boys' room? Isn't that you-know-who cutting in on waddyacallim? And is that—no, it can't be, it just can't be...

Sometimes Chubby has to lock himself into his tiny dressing room just to get the space to think. He still can't get over it—whenever he passes a butcher shop in the depths of Hell's Kitchen he can taste the blood in his mouth. With shades and street clothes on, he looks like any other scared dumb lost lonesome ghetto kid. He's only twenty-one. Something about catching the reflection of his face in Woolworth's windows at rush hour scares the bejeezus out of him.

There is always the question of a follow-up. Chubby, or should we say Chubby's record company, plays it safe with the release of "Let's Twist Again." Like we did last summer, like we'll do for the rest of our lives, will we, won't we? Of course it's a super-duper monster killer smash: part of the ploy of rearranging a chord or two from the last hit but avoiding tinkering with that almighty tempo. Let's twist again and again and again... (Hey, I'm getting dizzy—how do you stop this thing?) It takes Chubby's breath away to watch that bullet being fired up the charts, as if it's headed right for his heart.

At the Peppermint Lounge, one record begins before the other record ends. Sometimes the house deejay does speed and plays two records at once or scratches them rhythmically for effect, rapping over the top of the mix like a Kingston toaster, and the crowd goes bonkers, bananas, out of its mind. Men throw off their shoes as if they're on fire. Women tear off their blouses. The beat goes on. And on. And the beat goes on.

THREE

In the beginning there was the beat. What would a twist tune be without that big big boss beat? Certainly not twist. Those techno-tribal drumbeats drum that big bam-boom, and a jackhammer bass drops down, riveting the dancers to the dancefloor. Next a sax leaps in like a jungle animal pouncing from a tree, chased by staccato rhythm guitar while a cowbell catches its breathless pace. Vox or Farfisa riffs twist and vine around this primeval beat machine. The singer, if there's room for one, gets down about love and sex and endless partying. The beat commands but there's room for freedom of expression—we ain't got no time for that fascist groove thang. Sax equals sex and it bites into the break, ripping it to shreds. Bass drum drives the message home and the band gets hotter and faster, as if fed through a blender: stir mix blend beat whip puree right on up through juice. Turn the beat around, turn it upside down, got to hear per-per-percussion. It's a wonder really intense twist music doesn't cause an atom-age meltdown in the recording studio. It moves, it grooves, it purrs and it growls. It's a rush and it's a high that lets you down with a sweet kick in the crotch. Man oh man, you can feel it deep in the marrow of your rockin' bones. Like to mess your mind forevermore. Like to just up and die. When the record ends, it's as if the whole goddamn world has ended and you want more more more. How d'ya like it?

Out there in radioland they'll always and ever be playing the records Chubby has inspired, though it's a rare station that plays the really pure uncut stuff. Stuff like the Mar-Keys or Mar-Vees or King Coleman or Prince Boscoe or Spaz Jenks or D. D. Flatt. Stuff you just wouldn't find in your sweet little old streetcorner mom-and-pop record store and stuff that wouldn't get played anywhere outside the sort of firetraps mom and pop would be afraid to set foot in. But never mind, there's enough of the adulterated going 'round to fix everyone. With all the new, cheap, portable Japanese radios, everywhere you go you'll be hearing transistorized twist, and in the most unlikely places. The stations are loud and fast and racy, trying to be louder, faster, racier than anyone else. And what was merely r-and-r or r-and-b before is patently twist now—the records come on all souped-up, remade/remodeled, chopped and channeled and completely overhauled with a new groove job; twisting the dial is like listening in on a musical drag race down the main strip of the airwaves. The jocks outdo themselves to win fans and influence ratings. Competing stations proclaim Nonstop Twist, Twenty-Four-Hour Twisting, All-Day All-Nite Twisteramas. A wild platter-patter man in Frisco named Jack the Knife locks himself inside his booth and plays "Twistin' Postman" over and over for eighteen hours until his fiancée promises to take him back. In a nationwide poll, "(Let's Do) The Twist" is ranked second-greatest pop song of all time by thirty-nine major metropolitan radio stations, only topped by "Love Me Tender" (there is some question of stuffed ballots). Every sloppy jalopy in Hitsville USA has a radio and every radio is blasting out The Sound of Now; every gum-popping teenybopper has a plug in her ear and a snap in her fingers and twitching hips that don't need no hula hoop.

The music itself remains the same old/new thing. It can be watered down, scrubbed up, washed out, but it's really got to knock 'em cold flat out with that beat if it's going anywhere but the cutout bins of history. As with any craze there are fifty strike-outs for every hit. Meanwhile everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Twistmania sets the recording industry bubbling and glowing like a Wurlitzer jukebox. The Cashbox and Billboard charts runneth over with dance records, and despite past failures twist casualties are still capable of bouncing right back up there like stuntmen in a musical shoot-out (like we said, you're Number One with a bullet, Chubs babe).

Chuck Berry, out of bondage, cuts a signature twist track. So does good ol' Jerry Lee. As does—you had to ask—Pat Boone, that modern minstrel man in metaphorical blackface. And there are more where those came from: Little Eva, Little Anthony, Little Ricky Nelson, Little Stevie Wonder, a virtual Lilliput of recording talent. Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Bland, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Pickett, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans as well. And don't forget the Dipsy Cups, the Marvylettes, the Saffrons, the Chantelles, the Shivelles, the La-Di-Das or the Sha-La-Las or the Shoo-Be-Doos: Girl groups are as big on twist toons as they are on badmouthin' chicks and sweet-talkin' guys. Synthetica and the Dacrons, Saccharina and the Sugarees, Alarma and the Sirens, Fatima and the Furies, Lamia and the Medusas, Hilda and the Valkyries (or names to that effect), we know them all—and we could play "The Name Game" fee-fie-fo-fanna fo-eva but it's still the same old song with a different melody. Not to pass by the most monumental of all songs churned out by these girleens: "I'll Never Twist Again" by nice bad girls the Shangri-La's, all about mixed-up teens whose parents just don't understand why they have to twist—until (sound of screeching brakes) it's too late, baby, it's too late.

I'm goin' shoppin' finger-finger poppin' for the latest sounds around: "Twist Away" by Sam and Dave, "Time to Twist" by Paul and Paula, "Twist It To Me" by Troy and Trudy, "Let's Do It (Let's Twist)" by The Righteous Bros., "Twistin' With Myself" by The Everly Bros., "Twistin' Fool" by the Walker Bros., "Sherry Won't Twist" by The Four Seasons, "Who'll Twist With Me Now?" by The Five Freshmen, "Mister Twister" by the Three Fellas, etc. etc. etc. Even the Big El P. issues his Twist Statement from Diamondhead Mount: "Twist-a-Hula Baby." (What, no loaves or fishes?) Following Joey Dee's lead, the songs change color and flavors like Baskin-Robbins varieties. There's "The Julep Twist," "Red Rock Twist," "Honey Twist," "Lemon Twist," "Sugar Twistin'," "Blue Blue Twist," "Tutti-Frutti Twist," ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Hot twist for cool nights, cool twist for hot nights. Double-time twisting for two-timing jerks and real real smoochy smooth slow low-down twisting for young lovers. So many artists never to be heard from again, so many one-hit _wunderkinder_ —but we all knew that—and shouldn't every falling star shine for just a moment in eternity? We pause, bow our heads, and the twist list goes on and on. It looks like it's never going to stop. Stop? It ain't even started!

In the meantime, Chubby's on the boob toob, in the rags and mags, in the racks and on the stacks, in every disco, casino, and bistro, ruling the AM and FM from am to pm. He's bought a lot of flashy sharkskin suits and expensive but cheap-looking jewelry. The Golden Boy has a gold-plated Eldorado Coupe de Ville and yet his eyes are always on the rear-view mirror. Is he afraid something might be catching up on him? Allegorically speaking, Little Richard's pool has been dredged and now Chubby's wearing his rings, though everyone knows they were only rhinestones from the start. Fame isn't everything, as the host of any late-night talk show will tell you from behind his desk, but Chubby is having one hell of a time. (Meanwhile, the Right Reverend R. Penniman, swayed once more by Sex and Satan, practices triplets on his piano at midnight.)

Not everything's perfect, sure. There are even a couple counterfeit Chubbies out there—a certain Chunky Chess and a certain Dumpy Dominos; they present twist simulacrums to palefaced crowds for whom one black shouter is pretty much the same as any black shouter. The lawsuits and countersuits fly. It even begins to seem like the Elvis thing all over again when Ed Sullivan's censors at first refuse to broadcast Chubby below the waist. Even at its zenith the twist is never quite Sunday-School, never quite wholesome—that may be why it's so popular in the first place. Half a twist, however, is no twist at all. Fans—irate fans who write angry letters to marketing-conscious sponsors—are outraged. Chubby comes back the next week to do full-frontal twisting. Viewers are appeased, the gods are pleased, we rest in peace—for a moment.

So what's Mr. Checker really like? Okay, to tell the truth, he's temperamental. Once he hired a string section and fired it five minutes before the curtain. He must have sweet potato pie after every concert or else—or else. He must have complete silence when he's practicing a new step. When angry he throws vases, lamps, books, shoes, even an occasional booking agent. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is to disturb Mr. Checker in his dressing room when the door is closed.

He's modest. He blames it all on luck. (Note the use of "blames," not "credits.") Says it's a twist of fate. He's not musically inclined, not really. He admits he's not much of a singer but a great wailer; he can't read music or play an instrument. (Well, he does fiddle around some on the accordion.) He used to shirk his piano lessons to go play stickball in the alley. Occasionally he strays from his rhythms, like a poor lyricist or a lover distracted by a creak in the bed. He never would have made it, he insists, without the help of Mr. Richard Clark.

He's charitable. He once gave his manager a pair of baby-blue vicuña socks with a matching Ferrari. When his secretary complained about her crowded apartment, he bought her a house. He donates funds from his concerts now and then to an orphans' home. We're all orphans someday, he has told more than one newsman.

And for his mother he's erecting a mansion outside of Philadelphia that will out-Graceland Graceland, a sort of pseudo-quasi-gothic-Hollywooden-nouveau-Italianate-modernist mélange he's dubbed "Twist Towers." He's buying up the entire Sears Roebuck catalog to fill the house. The pool will be in the shape of his profile. Flocks of black peacocks (if he can find them) will strut the grounds.

He's a great guy. He's got loads of friends, ones from way back in junior high. When they need money he gives it to them, and they keep him company. Outsiders refer to them as "CC's SS." He's been known to descend on a pool hall at four in the morning and pay the owner to stay open for him and his pals. He'll take over the soundbooth in any club he might find himself in and spin records he likes. But he likes to be alone; his preferred companion is a television, and he owns twelve of them. His favorite shows include "The Outer Limits," "My Favorite Martian," "McHale's Navy," "The Real McCoys," "What's My Line?", "Queen For A Day," "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," "The Perry Como Show," and "The Huntley-Brinkley Report."

He's ambitious. He's sensitive. He writes poetry—"mushy stuff about girls, mostly." Someday he hopes to direct and star in the story of his life.He'd write a book if he had the time. He still wants to learn to play the piano.

And he's still single, girls. Rumors that he's about to become engaged to Dee-Dee Sharp just aren't true. There's no one special—yet. Vicious gossip about leading a very young and impressionable Lesley Gore to a Memphis motel room is hotly denied by both parties. "We're just friends!" she'll cry if she wants to. Then who was it in this Twist Tryst? Could it be that wacko blonde seen dancing with Chubby at a twist marathon?

He's devoted to his mother. He neither smokes nor drinks. He's an earnest Baptist, sang in the church choir. He has black hair and brown eyes. He stands five-foot, eight inches tall; twisting, he's a little shorter. He can't remember the last book he read, though he thought _Peyton Place_ ( _Reader's Digest_ condensed version) was a "lollapalooza." He has no one favorite performer, but his favorite group is without a doubt the Platters. His favorite song, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Favorite dish, sweet potato pie. Favorite colors, pink and yellow. His greatest wish is for peace on earth.

Candy Johnson, the koo-koo chick who's featured in a score of beach-party movies (she's the chesty blonde who knocks the boys off their surfboards with her wild shimmy and can't seem to keep her bikini top on when photogs are about) is frank: "The twist is sexual," she tells an _English Vogue_ correspondent. "And you can do it by yourself. It's like... well, you know.

"When I'm up there in front of a crowd, the music drives me ape. You better lock me up! Sometimes I feel like tearing off my—it's a real—what's the word?— _exhibitionist_ dance. Like, wow, all you have to do is look at the guys to see why.

"But I don't think it's like dirty or anything. Actually, it's just good clean fun. Makes you wanna move and shake all over. It drives me ape!"

Like the little girl in the fairy tale who puts on a pair of magic red shoes, the nation can't stop dancing. One dance leads to another, but they're all basically the twist at heart, meant to be danced to twist music: The Grind. The Shake. The Squirm. The Wiggle. Hully-Gully. Willy-Nilly. Flim-Flam. Floy-Joy. Hucklebuck. Philly Skate. Harlem Shuffle. Detroit Duckwalk. Denver Boot. Pivot. Axle. Piston. Flywheel. Nobody could make these things up.

And that's not all. More and more exotic, esoteric, and eccentric dances are spawned, many of them introduced by Candy Johnson and her dancemates on the new television show "Shindig" or by the with-it kidsters of "Hullabaloo" or "Hootenanny" or "In-Teen-City" or that grand old institution, "American Bandstand." The jerk, frug, swim, hitch-hike, mess-around, one-way, fool, dip, slip, zowie, powie, and likewise all glow brightly and burn out quickly in the constellations of dance. A whole menagerie of animal dances as well: monkey, snake, wasp, kangaroo, platypus, cheetah, chickenback, catwalk, mongooser, you name it, it's a dance. Several celebrities, living and dead, introduce eponymous dances or existing dances are named for them—including the John Wayne, the Prince Philip, the Adolf, the Pope, the Lenny (Bruce), the Jackie (Gleason), and the Charlie (Chaplin). It's truly a Land of a Thousand Dances.

"It's insane!" Dick Clark exclaims. There are more entries than ever in the annual Bandstand Dance Contest.

Like dandelions after a spring rain, discotheques are sprouting up all over the place, on both coasts and in that netherland between, inspired by the success (i.e. media coverage) of the Peppermint Lounge. With every twist hit, it seems, there is a new disco. They're given kicky, kooky, kinky kaleidoscopic names: Kandy Kane Klub, Wilde's Place, Dance-ola, Neon Zebra, VV's, Monsieur Magoo's, Zang Tuum Tuum, Le Carousel, Cattmandoo, Crazie Dazie, The Hippening, Wowie Kazowie, Boogaloo, Shazam!, The Inferno...

In El Lay, the Whiskey A Go-Go (named for a seminal Parisian dance outpost) is an instant success: fire code regulations are broken nightly by the twisting hordes. All the bigshots in the biz show up; the couple that walks in is rarely the same couple that walks out. It's like a happening every night of the year—proto-psychedelic slideshows, girls in silver lamé micros jerking in glass booths above the crowds, stereophonic quadrasonic megasonic speakers in every nook and cranny, mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors so you can dance with yourself in case your partner cuts out on you or O.D.'s before the dawn's early light. In the show-your-V.I.P.-card-please backrooms more deals and contracts are sealed and broken in an hour than in a day on Wall Street; there are also a few couches available for last-minute casting decisions.

On the reverse coast, Ondine's and New Jimmy's attract a deliriously diverse set in Madhattan—one is likely to see mobsters squirming with models, bunnies bopping with brokers, fey debutantes wriggling with gay dilettantes. Party party party is the anthem of both establishment and anti-establishment. Regine throws open her doors in Paris, Rome, London, and New York, and the ambiance of her cosmopolitan parlors is tense and aristocratic, the atmosphere as rarefied as the heights of Machu Picchu.

Certainly the most lavish club of them all is Shepheard's in New York New York, run by Dick Burton's ex. Jeweled sphinxes and Sheik of Araby desert tents are ubiquitous, and the decorators, with their eye for detail, have even included authentic Sahara sand on the floors (impossible to twist on!). Yearly dues are as exorbitant as the decor. Legend has it enough lines of cocaine are cut each week in the gilded bathrooms that if placed end to end they would reach to the original Shepheard's in Egypt and back again. If the place burned down on any random weeknight, it is said, the world would wake up with its leaders in a game of musical chairs to fill the empty seats of power.

Perhaps most fabulous of clubs to consider is the supposed existence of a discotheque in the vicinity of Park and Lexington so exclusive that only a select handful of people knows its name. Like one of those Yalie secret societies, it has rules and privileges unimagined by common man—and they choose you, not vice-versa. The dues and drinks could easily break a Rockefeller. Despite persistent whisperings, its actuality remains apocryphal. Chubby has allegedly been there, but is vowed to stay mum. All he'll reportedly say is, "Man, they'd pay other people to twist for them!"

Meanwhile, the Peppermint Lounge still reigns supreme over all other discotheques, though it is hardly posh and always asphyxiating. Call it nostalgia of mud or what you will, but the grimier and more worn-down it gets the more it seems to grow in popularity. The Met holds a birthday party for Leonard Bernstein there and the Starlighters play twist versions of the classics. _Harper's_ and _Queen_ get into vicious snits when their correspondents can't find tables. _Town and Country_ has the graciousness to accept that particular inconvenience along with death and taxes. The visiting Brezhnev cracks a typically Slavic, typically untranslatable joke about the place. Judy's lovely daughter Liza has her coming-out party there. Dino di Laurentis has another heart attack there. J. D. Salinger is reportedly spotted there—or is it Tom Pynchon? Rip "That's not Rock" Torn vows to marry Eartha "C'est Si Bon" Kitt there. Let me tell ya 'bout a place, _suavecito_ Sam Cooke sings, somewhere up New York way, where the people are so gay, twisting the night away.

_Le Twist Internationale_ : From country to country, twisting spreads faster than shipboard scurvy. The twist conquers Europe more efficiently than Napoleon or Julius Caesar. Chubby Checker is voted Best Male Vocalist of the Year in Bulgaria, of all places. The British press warns of an imminent "Twistkrieg." They're twisting in the Alps and the Alsace, from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. Common Market shoppers know twisting in every language. In German, it's " _Der Liszt Tvist_." In French, " _Le Twist-Twist_." Spanish, " _El Twistero_." Even behind the rusting Iron Curtain, bootleg copies of " _Ya, Da Twist!_ " exchange hands on the black market, and Radio Free America broadcasts the latest dance music—one imagines a makeshift disco in farthest Tartary. It's the United Nations of Twist!

African adolescents are hearing twist songs and inventing juju, zouk, and hi-life, good times social music for affluent Kenyan party professionals and jivesters and hipsters in the Voltaic Republic. Jamaican juveniles are tuning in twist and jazz from N.O. and Miami, inspired to create bluebeat and ska. Pan-American youths mix twist and bossa nova and older indigenous styles at Carnival to produce a tasty _salsa picante_ of rhythm and voodoo blues. And deep in the heart of Harlem or Watts, primal funk begins to evolve within the twist gene pool.

The twist, as Chubby tells Reuters and the rest of the overseas reporters, is just a fad. Still, it's much more than that to its disciples across the world, for to them Twist is The Word. The Answer. "But what's the question?" Chubby wonders high above the world on his private satellite, beaming down twist upon the nations. "Did I ever know the question, did someone ask me a question, did someone..." Oh, never mind, _vive le twist_!

Meet Mr. Smooth. Hair slicked back (a little dab'll do ya), eau de Cologned to the max, lizard-skin shoes shined, collar starched, gold on his cuffs, lapels, pinkies, caps. _Whatdyasay toots_ to that million-dollar smile. They do tell how he never finishes a drink or a cigarette or a love affair. Here he is, taking the veep's daughter's hand at Il Mio. There he is giving the Gettys private twist lessons at their Newport manse (they're forced to use the foyer, the only place without carpeting). Isn't that him out on the parquet, amidst the social hippists and _arriviste artistes_ at The Scene, dancing with two— _three_ babes? There he is on Jean Seberg's hip in a village bistro, choosing choons on the chookbox. And here he is at last—Killer Joe Piro! Dance instructor extraordinaire! Entrepreneur! Connoisseur!

The Killer is 45 but he lives life at 78. When the dance craze hit he knew where to point his Thom McAn "Twister" (Registered Trademark) shoes—in the direction of all those rich and famous but unlearned in the Art of Twist. Like it is, man—one day you pachanga at the Palladium, the next you gotta go twisting in the streets. So they write you up in the rotos, hype you up in the headlines, churn out witty little ditties about you, shower you with moolah, crown you a god in the pop pantheon. You've got fifty-two tuxes in your closet and half as many radios—"to stay in touch, y'know."

Everyone wants to know Killer Joe and Killer Joe seems to know everyone. A very simpatico buddy of Chubby's. Lots of close contacts in the world of high finance, if you know what I mean. Hey, but who's keeping score? There are contracts waiting in the wings, checks in the mail, chicks to keep stringing along like baubles on a bracelet. With his ultra-smooth demeanor, he attracts countless bored executives who'd like to throw their after-tax profits around a little, as well as all those moneyed matrons in pursuit of a few thrills away from the mister. Is he Valentino reborn in the Age of Twist? Or just another real cool jerk on the make? He's everyone's gigolo and no one's lover, as a song surely must go **.** Candy Johnson meets him over Jack Paar's desk while the Chub's off on a world tour. They hit it right off: He teaches her something called the Madison (Avenue or Dolly isn't clear) and she shows him her mashed potato. It's va-va-vavoom time, he must be thinking, this gal's got some horsepower. Not bad, she must be thinking, for such an old-timer. She could use a lift back to her hotel. Well, the wife's away, why not? Sure, she could stand a nightcap. Or two. You know, he always wanted to be a ballet dancer but you can't get away with moves like that back in Little Italy. You know, she like still loves all the old dances, too. Touch dances, close dances, cheek-to-cheek, toe-to-toe...

Suddenly Candy's a part of the Killer's troupe of nightclub dancers and they make the merry go-rounds. They're invited to take part in a royal command performance at Albert Hall ("Who's he?" she wondered at first) before the gawky young Prince of Wales, who tells mumsie afterwards that that blonde was smashing. Hot gossip about a royal romance is certainly not discouraged by Candy or her manager. Besides, the Chubby thing was going nowhere. She knows a girl's got to make waves somehow in this weird-wayout-wild-worried-wicked-wisedup-wounddown-wornout world. Like, dig?

Ah, Candy, more about Candy, just for the fellas out there. To quote from the press release for "Boys! Boys! Boys!" (her first starring role in a Roger Corman quickie, the sequel to "Girls! Girls! Girls!"): "She looks good, dresses good, lives, eats, drinks, cries, dances, makes love good. She's been there already. Knows the long crawl. With eyes that see through, know more, look longer. Unafraid to toss off a burnt-out thing with a casual so-long babe, and get." (Or was that some other chick, some other liner notes by Stan Cornyn?)

Only a few weeks back she had been telling friends, "Chub and I would get married, if it weren't for... you know." But then she had said the same thing a few nanoseconds ago about Steve McQueen.

Typically, Hollywood is hesitant to get its feet wet, but makes the biggest splash of all once it dives in. Twist movies are all the rage, and to meet the demand they're hastily assembled like the Bride of Frankenstein from all sorts of mismatched parts. Plots are stolen from third-rate movies that stole them from second-rate movies. Directors quite often think they are directing something far different from what they are actually directing. Frequently one director is called in to replace the work of a director who has been called in to replace the work of another director. Dance sequences and musical numbers are grafted onto films that began as mysteries or thrillers. Soundtracks are cluttered with songs coming from unseen, impossible orchestras. Talent is dredged from the very bottom of the La Brea pits. If the singer can act, make him a star. If the actor can sing, double your pleasure double your fun triple your money back. If the actor can't sing, dub, dub, dub. All's fair in love and war and this crazy thing called the movies. So don't be afraid—it's only the Twist...

American International Pictures, the leading arbiters of teen taste (see _Muscle Pajama Beach Bingo Party_ and/or _The Wild Beach Blanket Angels_ or double-featured titles to that effect), manages to incorporate a twist scene on the average of every fifteen minutes in their most popular product. Frankie and Annette twist in the sand (impossible) to surf music howling like a tsunami. Way-out cycle gang-leader Rat Fink (not Big Daddy's Ratfink) delivers a real knocks-you-cold double-whammy twist right between the eyes. Candy invents the topless twist in _Malibu M-M-Madness_ (like many of life's best moments, it ends up on the cutting-room floor). Older, aging, ancient stars—Buster Keaton, Elsa Lanchester, Vincent Price, and Gloria Swanson, to name a few—cameo in these pix and twist shamelessly with the mocking teens for all future generations to laugh at.

Even the major studios and stars cannot remain untwisticized. United Artists discovery Sandra Dee leaves home in pursuit of the perfect twist. Tammy twists in the bayous. Hayley Mills twists oh-so-chastely in Disney hits. Gidget goes to Rome and twists at a party straight out of _La Dolce Vita_ in a _Last Year at Marienbad_ setting. Marcello Mastroianni and Brigitte Bardot take their twist _al dente_. Jerry Lewis and Tina Louise play nutty twister and bonkers sister. Doris Day and Rock Hudson twist in "Pillow Patter" and they look ridic. Kim Novak dies for the twist. Jayne Mansfield commits the ultimate twist. In Tinsel Town, one must remember, it is never possible to reach too high or stoop too low, and Twist, after all, is the great common denominator. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, usually at each other's throat, are seen at each other's side, twisting between Papa Hemingway and Bill Faulkner in Beverly Hills or on Sunset Strip. Gidget herself (real name Franzie before Moondoggie rechristened her) was named after Franz Kafka (her movie daddy-o was a German lit prof): therein lies a moral or warning of some sort.

The youth market, too young to patronize most dance-bars, files into matinées and dances in the aisles. Up on the big cinemascope Panavision Vistacolor screen the custom-made twist flix shine: _Twist All Night!, Twist Crazy!,_ _Twistin'!_ , _Bring On The Twist!,_ and other exclamatory titles, as well as mutant movies such as _Return of the Twist Monster_ , _I Was A Teenage Twistomaniac_ , _I Twisted With A Zombie_ , and other Hammer of London fright delights. Even documentary and concert films such as _Twistory_ and _The T.W.I.S.T. Show_ are eagerly consumed and digested like jumbo boxes of Jujy Fruit. Only teens could sit through most of this twist tripe, but anything acquires a certain charm if seen, say, in a Left Bank movie-house where, via synch-sound, the all-American adolescents acquire an amusing gallic argot.

"Twisting lays down a groove that smooths the kinks right outta your spine. It's great for the modern person. You come into a club all wore out from a busy day and the twist sets your ol' mind at ease. It sets you free, man...

"Until the twist got the planet dancing, we was in sorry shape. Now we all feel better, you bet. Even the prez twists, I seen a picture...Man, it just feels good. What's wrong with that?"

So goes Chubby Checker's manitwisto at the end of the movie _Can't Stop The Twist_ , in which he is called upon to defend our inalienable right to twist, right in front of Concerned Preachers and Puzzled Teachers. This is Chubby's first movie role, and the screen hacks have labored long and hard to mimic Chubby's noble black eloquence—as things go, Chubby has been arduously trained by his drama therapist to enunciate and elucidate, and the ludicrous result is akin to what you might get if Othello had been raised in the deep South. For some reason, though, the critics are much too busy appraising the latest Hitchcock to take notice.

Chubby appears in four more features ( _Twist Around The Clock_ , _Twist Crazy_ , _Twist Weekend_ , and _Twisted!_ ), plummeting from a starring role in the first to a mere face in a concert scene in the last. After that, he has trouble getting onto a soundtrack. No amount of editing or trick shots can disguise acting that bad. "Be yourself! Be yourself!" the directors all cry, and that, The Big C must fear, is the impossible command, the ultimate horror. Film is as bad as the mirror in "Snow White:" it tells more than you want to know.

At a gala New Year's Eve party (is there any other sort in showbiz?) at the Peppermint, Chubby declares 1962 the Year of the Twist, as if it were chronologically and horoscopically placed between the Year of the Rooster and the Year of the Dragon. "Now, everybody twist!" he exhorts the partiers (not listening anyway) as confetti blizzards down upon him and he leaps from the stage, Joey ready to replace him. The no-longer so-Chubby has lost forty pounds in the last few months twisting his heart out and his soles away in a publicity tour, and he growls above the din to a _Tiger Beat_ editor that he never felt better in his life.

He's grown a sly little mustachio (a la Little Richard) and wears a tailor-made pink and yellow-pinstriped "Peppermint" suit (prototype of the soon-to-be-unveiled Checker line of menswear). No pun intended, but Chubby's in the pink, too. Punched-up pinks, not the limp, pastel pinks of the fifties, but bold, daring, hot pinks, shocking pinks are very big, very twist. Although a teetotaler, Chubby has sampled the pink champagne here tonight—and likes it, likes his newfound confidence in walking up to a pretty young thing and asking d'ya wanna dance? Yes, she does.

At the same time, across town, a rival party is underway at the notorious Elsa Maxwell's. The twist music is loud and the mood is intense. Truman and Gore have locked themselves in the bathroom and you can hear them screaming between records. Porfirio and Odile Rubirosa should not, at the moment, be thought of as Porfirio _and_ Odile Rubirosa. Elsa has just received the dreaded news that they are completely out of ice, and she is about to kill the messenger. Meanwhile, couples of any sex are twisting promiscuously in corners. An over-the-top queen by the name of Ondi or Ondile (one of Andy Frankenstein's monsters, no doubt) is passing about poppers and bennies, the trendy new habit-formers, mother's little helpers. He's wearing a miter and looks like the pope bestowing communion wafers. Someone—is it Dina Merrill or Dino Martin?—suggests crashing the 'Mint (no one's minding it) and word spreads fast. Elsa is mortified by the subsequent exodus. Walter Winchell must not know!

Back at you-know-where, Zsa Zsa, who's just fled yet another nude beach scandal, this time in Mauritius, is twisting very close to Chubby. A few delicate eyebrows are raised. All the white women wonder...

The Twist King is called back onstage by Joey Dee (no relation to Sandra) to cut a huge multi-tiered peppermint-striped cake as the twelve hours toll. Just as he slices the knife through the frosting, three miniature French poodles dyed a bright pink burst all aquiver from the cake and run yelping through the crowd. Joey simultaneously breaks into a raucous jam and the mob writhes accordingly on the dancefloor, each body a single cell in an enormous, twitching, twisting creature. Chubby grins tipsily for the cameras, shakes hands, twists in place, grabs at Candy's breasts, and waves unceasingly. Killer Joe, up from Atlantic City or Vegas or Tahoe or some such place of movie deals and roulette wheels, gives him a regular Italian hug and kiss on each cheek. Chubby is crying. It's 1962. _My God, it's 19-frigging-62._ Is it because he knows it can't last, or is he afraid that it will? He's just a kid from South Philly, and it's 1962. _1962!_

FOUR

His movie career at a standstill, Chubby turns from celluloid back to vinyl. He's also back on stage with a vengeance **.** The limelight's brighter than klieg lights any day **,** anyway **,** anyhow. And, in a further effort to prove his versatility, he records a long-player of standards from Nat King Cole to Cole Porter. This attempt to please the moms and dads out there sinks without a sound, but a worse failure is his dive into strictly Caucasian waters with something called "Surfin' Jerk." Daunted, he reluctantly slips into his old shoes as world's dance instructor with lessons in how to limbo. How low can he go? It's Belafonte in the banana boat all over again, but twistaholics lap it up. Wham-O Toy Manufacturers, makers of the Wrist-Twist Frisbee, promptly introduces a limbo kit complete with poles, crossbars, and other calypso accouterments.

So the limbo keeps the limos rolling on. Chubby hits the niteclub circuit from Reno to Rio teaching limbo to the masses. He has everything a man could want but the time to appreciate it all. A book of his poems and doodles is due out any day now. He spends a lot of money developing new talent, including a groovy girlchik who does an act with nothing but whipped cream and sparklers, a sort of comic professor and his chalkboard, and a longhaired vaudeville singer _avec_ ukulele who's been known as "The Human Canary" at certain Coney Island tent-shows. But the Chub man is most proud of a middle-aged Jewish housewife, tone-deaf but with lots of chutzpah, who sings warped Muzakian versions of the pop top forty. His accountants insist the moment is right to invest heavily in synthetic fabrics and American-made armaments. Always best to plan ahead.

The walls of the Checker penthouse (the one he never sees, being the proverbial poor rich man) are lined with his gold records. After the endless parties someone or other's always throwing for him but from which he must always excuse himself early, one or two of the records are invariably missing. He doesn't mind. They're only old Fabian records spray-painted gold.

He's already invested heavily, monetarily and spiritually, in twist merchandising. The fan mags and fan clubs, twist Bibles and twist fraternities, watch Chubby's every move and encourage a constant demand for more and more personalized items. Twist buttons, badges, pendants, lockets, lighters, lunch boxes, thermos jugs, mugs, glasses, sunglasses, T-shirts, ties, tie clips, cufflinks, pens, shoes, ash trays, rings, lampshades, shower curtains, bath mats, playing cards, beach towels, pj's, nylons, nighties, and, oh yes, boxer shorts and panties. Every tie-in begets a tie-in begets a tie-in: the records, movies, radio programs, books, personal appearances, tee-vee shows he hosts and guests. All this funky junk branded with the double "C" and colored pink and yellow—pink for the Peppermint, yellow for his record label. It's as if the universe woke up pink and yellow from some infectious disease. His pink and yellow Aston Martin, the kind of sportscar Double-Oh-Seven drives, is famous. So are his outrageous, oversized clothes: that line of sportswear in guess what colors is selling like mad, the gearest gear around, albeit toned down a bit for Mr. and Miss Average Consumer. And pilgrims are lining up to tour that finally completed pink and yellow monstrosity outside his hometown, where his ailing mother stays on the third floor, watching her son on television, the closest she gets to him these days.

Market-research analysts and sales projection experts hound him. How do you like this one, Chub ol' pal? This was made for you. Get a load of this. If you want we can expand this idea into a concept and take it from there. Look, we can make you a trillionaire. How's this grab ya? Listen baby we love ya you're an artist shaddup and listen.

Out shopping for some Sominex one day in a supermarket opposite his hotel (with all that jazz you need an artificial sandman once in a while) he passes a shelf full of Twistaroni, a brand new and improved product from Franco-American; there's a tiny twisting Chubby cartooned on every label. Whose scathingly brilliant idea was that? Suddenly he feels a need for something a lot more potent than any nonprescription drug.

In May of '62 Chubby Checker entertains with a fifteen-piece band and three back-up singers at a luncheon in the new Rose Garden. Washington society goes ape. Lady Bird deigns to give him a whirl and can't hide her pleasure. Senator Everett Dirksen asks Citizen Checker to autograph a napkin—for his granddaughter, honest. That Potomac matriarch, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, banters eagerly with the star and attempts a geriatric twist. Much more poised is Jackie the K, who wears short white gloves, a Coco Chanel daydream, discreet pearls, indiscreet heels, and her trademark pillbox. Members of the congressional wives' smart set are dressed in less distinctive variations on the theme. The president, total Brooks Brothers, presents Chubby with a plaque; it commemorates something or other Chubby has done for the campaign against teenage drinking/driving. Photos for AP and UPI. A beaming Chubby. "Thank you, Mr. President," is all he'll say. Polite applause: the soft owl-wing flapping of gloved hands. The senators' wives are all aflutter. They ask Mr. C to do "Cuban Crisis Twist" one more time.

Unexpectedly, JFK leads CC off to the oval office for a secret meeting which lasts exactly seven minutes. What has been said between the two men is never—will never be—revealed. Though much later pseudo-psychic The Great Criswell (he of the platinum toupee and Edward D. Wood movie entourage) says he knows and if everyone else did, too, it would change the course of human destiny.

The Great Chub picks up Bobby "Volare" Rydell at the corner of Cameo and Parkway (they're old friends who go back a million years) and they cut an elpee together. Titled _Chubby_ _& Bobby Sing Bobby & Chubby!!,_ it includes renditions of them doing each other's hits, as well as impersonating singers as diverse as Mario Lanza and Johnny Ray. "To my knowledge," the liner notes note, "never before have two such bosom buddies traveled individually to such great fame and still remained close friends. It's a real credit to both these fine boys that in spite of the huge success they've enjoyed they remain two normal very nice, well-adjusted young men. They're the Lewis and Martin of Twist!"

Candy Johnson is back with a vengeance—having stormed off Killer Joe's tour when "things got too hot and heavy"—and she contributes handclaps and a few oo-la-la's on the album sessions. Bobby likes her shimmy-shammy (she's taken to wearing flapper-style minis with lots of fringes that accentuate every wriggle). Candy likes his perfect pomp—and circumstances are ripe for some awopbopalopbamboom. Chubby remains oblivious to this sort of gossip column filler. The little Peyton Place gets more complex: the Killer's back in town and he's telling his wife he wants to go like _splitsky_ for this broad he's got on the side. The paparazzi are having a field day keeping up with randy Candy and her various far-flung flings. She keeps the guys twisted around her slender fingers until it's just the right moment for a few well-timed bubbles to burst.

And you can find out just how it all happens by reading Candy's kiss-and-tell-all autobio, _Luvlife_ , which she has ghostwritten for her by a hungry young Tom Wolfe in an effort to revitalize her stale (if not to say stagnated) career. In breathless, gushy, scratch-your-eyes-out prose (serialized in _Men's Argosy_ ) she reveals her days of extravagance with the high panjandrum of twist and her too-impetuous-to-play-it-safe downfall. Yet if you try to dig up a little extra dirt from Candy herself at a mobbed discotheque, she'll waggle away and cry, "I just wanna dance!"

Quite a different story from Candy's is told in Chubby's consequent authorized bio, _Born To Twist_ : He tells his Boswell that he hardly knows the young lady, danced with her a few times at the clubs, introduced her to Bobby, that was all. Then why isn't he talking to Bobby anymore? Because Bobby wanted to revive the polka and he just knew it was the wrong career move at the wrong time. You see, it all depends on which of those checkout-lane tabloids you believe. (For some unfathomable reason, the Checker book, reflecting a decidedly un-checkered career, is remaindered in a matter of weeks—while Candy's goes on to top bestseller lists and acquires a movie option. Even the unauthorized _Chubby Checker's Sweet Potato Pie Diet Book_ does better. Them's the breaks.)

Our hero escapes the hoopla by embarking on a round-the-world tour even though he is very very tired and his mother has recently received her ticket into the life beyond: a small obit ("Mother of Twist Star Dies") in _The New York Times_. If this is Tuesday Chubby knows it must be Belgium, though all the countries tend to blur into one another when the hotel rooms are as indistinguishable as one twist hit from another. Breaking away from his hangers-on early one morning in Tokyo, he goes for a long walk, unrecognizable in Kool-Rays and Jughead beanie. The tour is only halfway over and already he wants to call it quits, feeling ill on sushi and weak in the knees from overtwisting. He strolls past a block of glass-fronted shops reflecting the rising sun and multiplying his haggard face, skull-like with the dark glasses. In the window of a toy store in the neon depths of the Ginza he spies a row of vinyl blow-up Chubby Checkers, a twist Militia. "How much the Jackie Wilson dolls?" he innocently asks the shopgirl.

Singapore is sweltering, hotter than the deepest depths of South Philly ever were. But there's no ice, no ice cubes or crushed ice or even ice cream anywhere in the entire country. Chubby has a breakdown of sorts. He collapses on his Hilton royal suite's queen-sized bed and asks, barely audibly, for a copy of _Variety_. Or at least _Ebony_. His gofers scout for hours, but there doesn't appear to be a single copy of any American entertainment magazine anywhere within thirty miles of Singapore. He throws a tantrum, volleys promotional 45's at the chambermaids like a discus thrower, clogs the toilet with tour programs, and sets about trashing the room in true Charles Foster Kane style. A delivery boy on a bicycle in the alley below is knocked senseless by a flying reproduction of Picasso's "Juggler." It's Chubby's blue period, too. He stays in his room for days on end, withdrawn into his shell, his self-made hell. The doors are bolted. The windows locked. The screaming manager out in the hall is ignored. Room service has to be left outside the door as if for a crazy cousin in the attic. Chubby watches ghosts and faint test patterns on the television set, there mysteriously being no working stations in the entire country. The empty hissing screen hypnotizes him and, benumbed, he wanders lost as a fugitive through his _True Detective_ and _Startling Detective_ and _Master Detective_ magazines once again. He calls Bond Street in London and invests heavily in a company whose chief product, unbeknownst to him, is napalm. The phone-bill to places like Palm Beach and Coco Beach exceeds the four-figure mark. He loses another twenty pounds. One midnight he kicks out the television screen, revealing only much later to a confidante that he did it because he had seen something much too horrible for words rising up out of the static.

When he comes out of the room he is a changed man. Like Presley before him (the once-and-future king in exile since the twist regime's bloodless coup) he begins calling all male representatives of the international press corps "sir" and all females "miss" or "ma'am." I've made a commitment to Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, he tells the interviewers. I only wish my mama would have lived to see the day. He stops short of doing a Little Richard and denouncing the devil's music for once and all, but he does visit Pope Paul at the Vatican while finishing up the tour in Rome; headlines across the globe proclaim POPE TWISTS. Immediately he jets back home for a three-week hiatus with his mother's sister at a religious retreat in the Black Hills near a town called Bethlehem. Candy's pleadings are left unanswered on his answering machine. Chubby is solid, serene, even a little severe now, saying less and less. Has he been to the mountaintop and back or is her merely burnt out?

Despite knowing herself that she can't carry a tune farther than the next room, Candy Johnson makes her recording debut with a tune Chubby penned in a rare moment alone, "You Didn't Love Me (Till I Learned How To Twist)." And though there were some very heavy scenes between Candy and her producers during the sessions, the single (backed with "Grind Your B-Hind") is eventually released on an independent label, WamBam Records. Two nonmusical factors help make the song something of a novelty hit: Candy's "Girl in the Invisible Bikini" pose on the (swiftly recalled) pic sleeve and schoolyard talk that the very sensuous sighs and whispers heard beneath the bass and drums in the break is an actual recording of Candy—let us clear our throats as we move from schoolyard to locker-room—giving pleasure to herself, with a microphone, no less. "Well," says Candy to bigmouth Oriana Fallacci, who tells the world, "I did sing it all alone in the studio with all the lights off while thinking of Jean-Paul Belmondo." Did she have anything on? The tape-recorder, silly. The song is banned from the airwaves and sells more copies than ever.

But the inevitable Backbeat Backlash has already set in. Parochial schools are the first to prohibit twisting in the gym—"too stimulating." Prep and boarding schools follow with curfews and condemnations—"bad taste." Lastly, the blackboard jungle of public schools (where there are still button-down dress codes and locker raids) bows to PTA pressure and cancels Friday night twist hops—"inspires poor study habits." A citizens' group acronymed MAD (for Mothers Against Delinquency) wages a cleanup campaign for American decency and the very same senators' wives who once cheered Chubby at the White House organize committees and threaten to slap "FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY" labels across new album jackets. All of the groups seek to purify the airwaves and drive twisting back into the slums and ghettos from whence it arose. There's an exposé in _Life_ magazine about The Seamy Underworld of Discotheques with all you need to know about drug abuse in the restrooms, "sextortion" in the disk-jockey's booth, porno rings, and go-go gals who moonlight as call girls. Unshockable America is shocked.

The rest of the planet pretends to be shocked as well. President Nassar forbids Egyptians to twist. President Sukarno of Indonesia has people who are witnessed twisting arrested and even shot on sight. The dictators of several small Latin American countries initiate twist torture—the only twisting you'll do there will be in a vise. At a soccer stadium in Brasilia, the city of the future, more than seven-hundred fans at a Starlighters concert are seriously trampled, beaten up, raped, or worse when the gate runs out of tickets. Twist is officially to blame. In England, scruffy teds, leathered rockers, and the very earliest mods skirmish on the beaches at Brighton to the violent beat of twist and roll. Polite society outraged. Four-hundred arrested. Prime Minister considering martial state. Read all about it: a series of clubland slashings in London's East End is termed the Twist Murders by hysterical Fleet Street dailies. In France, twisting suffers the worst ignominy of them all—it's simply deemed outré to practice it in public. Back in the good ol' USA, four high-schoolers are crushed underfoot during a confused mass departure from a Teen Twist revue in Akron. They give their lives for rock and roll and the columnists have been given their most damning evidence yet. Art Buchwald testifies modern music is all a commie plot; Jack Anderson merely pleads for a return to misses in chiffon singing in swing time. The city of San Antonio passes an ordinance banning "beat music with suggestive lyrics" from its concert halls and bandshells. They might as well post a sign outside town, a lone city hall dissenter says **,** saying "No Twisting Allowed." So someone does.

It's as if it were 1957 all over again, when the last wave of anti-rock, anti-youth sentiment swept across the land. MAD has done its job well. Itinerant lecturers pop up all over your Rand McNally to face the nation's Kiwanis, Shriners, Moose, Elks, Eagles, Masons, De Molay, Rotary, and Knights of Columbus members, warning parents about the savage jungle music out there just waiting to hypnotize and have its way with their offspring. Listening to it—even worse, _twisting_ to it—will lead to teenage pregnancy, reefer madness, and homosexuality. Performing before the Young Achievers of America convention in Tamla, Georgia, Steve Allen parodies a typical teen hit by bouncing his backside against a piano keyboard. At a dinner held in his honor at the Hawkeye Hotel in Shoquoquon, Iowa, Dr. Sigmund Spaeth (noted musicologist) informs the Chamber of Commerce that "twisting is a degenerate symptom of an age that thinks it's smart to be illiterate. It's a reversion to barbarism." There are reports that the House Un-American Activities Commission may be revived to investigate Twist's subversive powers among young government workers. From podiums and pulpits, before mikes and camera crews, the dance is declared to be luring impressionable youth into all of the above-mentioned atrocities, as well as violent crime (the dramatic upswing in high school vandalism over the last two years is given as evidence by MAD and PTA members). Not to mention that it stunts your growth and curves your spine.

"It's not a dance and it has become dirty. Not because it has to do with sex. Everything does. Not because it's vulgar. Real vulgarity is divine, darling. But when people break their backs to act vulgar, it's disgusting." So states _danseur_ Geoffrey Holder right across the centerfold from Chubby Checker in the pages of _Jet_. For the first time other entertainers and critics, perhaps fearful that they'll be labeled twist-subversives themselves, are daring to malign the twist even more vehemently than anyone else.

There is a noteworthy admonition in Pat Boone's manual of tips for teens, _Twixt Twelve and Twenty_ : "You future beauty queens and B.M.O.C.'s out there should realize that there's twisting, there's _twisting_ , and then there's TWISTING. Unless you're looking for trouble with a capital T as in Twist, you better steer clear in high gear from this unhealthy, unappetizing, immoral 'dance.' I've seen too many members of the pet set flunk out of life because of uncontrollable urges unleashed during this sort of primitive unchristian activity."

On their all-new all-color ABC network series, the King Family, a Mormon clan as multitudinous as the hordes of locusts which once attacked their beloved Salt Lake City, presents a moving musical tribute to "The Square:" "An outmoded, overworked guy who isn't afraid to believe in God. And admit it. In public. Who doesn't twist or frug or shimmy, because he wants to set a good example. For his children. And for the 'hipper' members of his generation who'll look the other way when the dancing turns to drinking. And the drinking turns to drugs." Over on "The Andy Williams Show," another clean-cut mob of Mormons, the oh-so-cute little Osmond Brothers, walks off the stage when requested to twist in a comedy skit.

From the pages of _Seventeen_ comes a Winnetka girl's meek plea for tolerance and understanding: "It's all so unfair! Many of my friends are treated like JD's instead of the JA's they really are if they perform this sort of 'disruptive' behavior on the dance-floor. Wasn't the Charleston once considered 'disreputable'? The Jitterbug? At school you can even get detention for doing it. I know of one honor student who was grounded a whole month for doing it with her steady in the family's rec room. Is this a free country or the USSR? You can't stop the twist!"

"It's about time we admitted just how lewd and lascivious this particular terpsichorean malady is," former twist supporter André Kostelanetz says to Dave Garroway and the chimp on "The Today Show."

"Of course I wouldn't twist in my act," Joey Heatherton tells Joey Bishop and then Joe Franklin on their respective talk shows. "Even I wouldn't do that."

Bob Hope quips, "If they turned off the music they'd all be arrested."

"Big bands are coming back!" heralds _The Saturday Evening Post_.

Candy's scandal, which sparked this whole conflagration to begin with, invites reinterpretation of other records. It's hard to deny many of them _are_ sexual—Twist _is_ Sex, after all, and many of them could be deemed outright scandalous (if taken from their natural environment, a steamy dance-bar, and placed out of context in Ozzie and Harriet's living room). Many singers of twist ditties exhort their partners to "get down," "get it up, "get real low now," "get real high baby," and so forth. Sometimes the primal screams are telltale enough. A song by the Twilighters turns out to conceal the lavender-tinged tale of a young man's night out with a very gay gang. If you search far enough you'll come across records of bondage twist, S&M twist, even kiddie porn twist: But few of these were ever really hits and not even the deejays at the clubs have really listened to the lyric content. There are doubtless more than a few _double entendres_ in the underground smash, "Horizontal Twisting." James Brown really may have gone too far on his long-playing vinyl debut, recorded live at the Apollo before folks who know what "puttin' the rag on my twistin' sister" and similar phrases might really mean. Even our squeaky clean progenitor of twist gets the once-over: In the seminal "(Let's Do) The Twist" there may be moral flaws—is that Chubby singing "come on little miss" or "come up little bitch?" Well now, that is the way to get yourself blacklisted in places like Saratoga Falls or Sarasota Springs or Cedar Falls or Cedar Rapids or Rapid City. It doesn't help when your taste in women (young, not too heavy on the brains, and unforgivably blond) has become a little too well-known among the gossip-fed public. _Supposed_ taste, we should add. An ancient arrest for statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old white girl (charges dropped) is allegedly unearthed and circulated between the lines of a national syndicate's columns. This unspoken controversy and all the rampant miscegenation going on around in showbiz circles arouses the KKK to such an ire that they fuel a bonfire in Selma, Alabama, with "race records" and assorted paraphernalia. (Running out of records early on, they resort to Gene Pitney and Roy Orbison albums, in the mistaken belief that both singers are probably black, too. )

The Reverend Richard Pennimen prays for us dancing sinners. With Bible and Lowry organ, Elvis begs our forgiveness. Carl Perkins is born again, this time with an evangelical guitar in his hand. Jerry Lee Lewis, out on bail from yet another narcotics charge, marries his jailbait cousin and cuts an inspirational album before the year is out. Across the ocean blue, Billy Fury (or is it Marty Wilde?) suddenly becomes a monk. We won't even mention Cliff Richard. And Billy Graham has assured Pat and Dick Nixon that it is not too late for their daughter Tricia to repent. Perhaps then the nation will be theirs.

"The twist is a manifestation of the Age of Anxiety," assures a _Times Book Review_ twist apologist, "an outcry of the anguish, angst, and anger of the 1960's, a sorry effort to assuage the tensions which, if suppressed or sublimated, could warp and destroy."

The writer is countered and castigated by a letter to the editor in the very next issue: "Excuses, excuses! The twist and other trance-dances of its ilk are sick, sick, sick. What will people need next to be properly stimulated—the sound of amplifier feedback and mind-altering chemicals? Even more insane, more anar-chic antisocial behavior? Mindless music, mindless sex .... 'Free love' is far too costly .... We'll be lucky if we get out of this decade alive."

At last the predictable (if symbolic) happens: During a taping of "The Lloyd Thaxton Show" in Chicago to promote his new chain of fried chicken restaurants (Chubby's Chicken, soon to be bought out by a venerable southern colonel) the singer seizes his chest, staggers, and sinks to his knees as the record he was miming along with gleefully continues to play. In a moment Lloyd guesses this ain't no gag—at a subsequent press conference Chubby claims the incident was due only to "mental exhaustion" from his rigorous touring schedule, but insiders spread darker rumors. One of them whispers to someone else who repeats to someone else and so on (like the party game of "telephone," the story getting vaguer and wilder as it is passed on) how, before he went under, Chubby had caught a glimpse of himself in the control booth, all twelve video images in slightly different shades and from slightly different angles, and was momentarily bewildered: Was that really him or another shelf display? Which was the product and which the real Ernest Evans? Who _is_ Chubby Checker? Was he God's marketing concept—or Satan's? Enough with the analyzing! someone at the end of the gossip line finally says, no one ever experienced a personality crisis doing the twist, and how many painkillers was he on?

A relapse sends Chubby back for an extended hospital stay. "The docs say he's got a heart murmur," Candy melodramatically swears to a waiting-room audience including Killer Joe and Bobby Rydell. "And he's asking for trouble if he ever twists again."

CODA

Like a great big bright party balloon, the fad bursts without warning and completely. It's as if everyone woke up one morning thinking in unison, "Hey, it's all over." Twist is over. Twist won't sell. Twist is out, man. The polish has lost its sheen, too many feet wearing the dance-floor. That pretty pink paint is peeling. Twist is dead. Kaput. Endsville.

The world's feet are just plain weary. From eggheads to blockheads, we're all tired of that controversy known as the twist. The dance records slide off the charts like eggs off Teflon. _Splat_. No more.

Naturally, no one really expected it to last, nothing ever does except maybe Frank Sinatra—but that's half the fun of it, grabbing it while you can. Of course it didn't really end overnight; the craze had been rotting from within for a long time, it just took a while for everyone to admit "Twist stinks." Something else, a new sound is in the air. For a long time a lot of people had been doing a lot of pretending. Even Chubby. He pretended to fail to understand why his latest greatest weren't that at all. He fires his backup band, hires a new one, fires that one, and so on. His last few albums—"For Twisters Only," "Twistophrenia," "Twistophilia"—desperate as they are, and on the rebound from limbo, fail to be gilt by the Midas touch of a million sales; has he lost _his_ touch? anyone would wonder if anyone cared. What's too bad is the records are getting better, more skillful, more mature. But that kind of consummation isn't for mass consumption. Certainly not for rock and roll. This kind of rock shouldn't be so highly polished; it should be left in the rough.

Chubby watches the concert and movie lines shortening, the records losing whatever momentum they had, the clubs folding, the whole crazy scene closing up like a withered flower. The protruding, thrusting bottom of the twist market has—well, bottomed out. Who wants yesterday's papers? Nobody loves you when you're down and out. Once the world revolved around him like a solid gold 45. Now he's on the sidelines, under the bleachers, behind the plate-glass, outside looking in. More bookings are canceled than contracted. The only faces left at West 45th in Times Square are those of down-and-drowning, fading, former celebs, and a few out-of-it tourists. Soon the original biker crowd is back, and they're not listening to dance records but swamp-rock oldies. By wintertime the place which once played host to the world's elite locks its doors for good, unnoticed and unmourned. Blink blink blink the lights are going out all over the world. Are we going to be left in darkness? All at once it's 1963.

All at once it's 1963 and for a few months the world or at least its p. r. men grieve after all for the death of the greatest hype ever dreamed up in America, Land of a Thousand Hypes. The music mega-conglomerates are slowly going though withdrawal; records will likely never sell in such quantities again. All sorts of fads and fancies are vainly instigated or revived in an industry-wide endeavor to once again fan the flames of hysteria: bunnyhops, foxtrots, cakewalks. Mambos, sambas, tangos, rhumbas. Boys' choirs. All-girl orchestras. Experimentation with theremins and computer music. Hillbilly fiddlers and Appalachian jugbands. Skiffle groups that play adaptations of Wagner. "Singing" animals. Quasi-oriental ballads—what might be called country and eastern. One passing vogue encompasses laments sung by soulful coeds who lose their boyfriends (and hence all hope for the future) in cycle or hotrod crashes. She knows he's in heaven so she's got to be good so she can meet her baby when she leaves this world. Teary-eyed young frat rats mourn their untrue lovers who, worse than losing their lives, lose their virginity to other dirty young rats. Pure pop heartbreak. I'm gonna shed not just 96 but 9,999 tears over you.

Perhaps what we had all been searching for was that transcendental twist, the twist which would bring us closer to communion with the true nature of our being. Aboriginal man danced and still dances to see God face-to-face. Dervishes in the Middle East invented the twist thousands of years ago to induce a divine daze. Holy rock-and-rollers dance to merge spirit with flesh. Sunday paper theologists saw the twist as evidence of the universal desire for salvation, not just a good-time Saturday night. Heavy heady stuff, and deep as the Marianas Trench. Sermon over.

In his own way, in his own good time, Chubby Checker seems to find a sort of contentment, a more blissed-out state of being, if you will. A modest brownstone has replaced the penthouse (the estate outside Philly is up for sale or subdivision), another bubble-brained blonde appears to have replaced Candy (if there ever was a Candy), and days of r&r (that's rest and relaxation, not rock and roll) have made up for all those torrid, frenzied nights. There is really nothing to complain about. He's been lucky. The Vietnamese fuse has been ignited and Carnaby Street has proclaimed synthetics the material for the swinging sixties, so his investments will see him through. Yet he is as restless as a caged tiger, or better put, one of those frantic girls in the wire cages at the Whiskey. Too many of his friends have gone back to their gas stations and pizza parlors. Joey Dee claims he's going to have to sell Barcaloungers for his new father-in-law if something else doesn't pop up soon. Chubby's own life, he sometimes thinks, has outlasted his lifetime contract. Someone up there has pressed the "reject" button before the record had a chance to finish.

Killer Joe is teaching children's dance classes somewhere in the boring-most boroughs. (Like it is, man—you begin the beguine in Brooklyn and end it in the Bronx.) Bobby Rydell was last seen heading for Calcutta wearing beads, his pompadour shaved clean off. Candy Johnson is starring in blue movies off in the gray deserts of Nevada. That's the way the tough cookie crumbles.

"It was an era of frivolity and senselessness," writes the deadly serious yet anonymous author of _Twist Chronicles_ off in some dank Berkeley study. "People danced too much, drank too much, smoked too much, talked far too much. The twist seems to have anesthetized both young and old against the apocalyptic strife of the world outside. Why worry about racing poverty or the arms race or race relations when there's a new twist record to go out and buy? The twist drove people to new insanities and irrationalities. It seemed to trigger usually repressed instincts, subliminally activated disorders. Take the case of one man who shot his wife when she said she was too tired to twist any more or the teenage elopers who twisted themselves to death in an overcrowded roadhouse. And these are just isolated examples. It is amidst the aftermath of this moral corruption that I must relate my admittedly jaded story. For you see, I too once twisted..."

And then again maybe what everyone was waiting for was one of those winsome if wistful big-eyed relics of an ancient and simpler age which was only yesterday, the so-called "answer record." The kind of musical statement that said "Teach Me To Twist, Mr. Checker" when Chubby asked "Can't You Twist?" Or the kind of happy ending in which Lesley Gore amended her anecdote about Johnny running off with Judy in an epilogue that sent Judy into tears and Johnny back on the right track. Where "Earth Angel" meets "Teen Angel." When "My Guy" meets "My Girl." My boyfriend's back and he hit me and it felt like a kiss. If we can blame it on the bossa nova, we can surely tattle on the twist. Only _this_ time we want an answer record that really explains things, that solves the mystery of twist, and hence, life. We want someone to tell us what it all meant, where we're all going, and why. Q: _Was_ Twist the Answer? A: Who cares? Keep repeating: It's only a dance, it's only a dance, it's only a dance...

So here we are late of a dark and dreary November evening in '63, not long after a pajama party at Chubby's place has begun to fizzle, after the ice in the glasses has all melted and the haphazard stew of Chubby's business friends and his starlet girlfriend's theater friends has thinned to a bored bouillabaisse. Not much is going on. Someone of dubious sex and even more dubious morals is frisking a homely young British model (who says her name is Lesley Hornsby) against the fridge. Two bearded beats and a female folkie are droning on about banning the bomb, as if anyone still believes in politics. Igor Cassini (God knows where he came from) is having the damnedest time trying to convince a charming young hustler that he is not Oleg Cassini and doesn't even understand fashion. A voice testifies that she'd be willing to take on anyone in a rubber wetsuit, but it hardly causes a ripple. Another voice wonders aloud if Perle Mesta's might be a better place to go; she's in town and she's got Bobby and Joan not the Kennedys but the protest singers over tonight. Elsewhere someone is holding the hand of a someone who is holding a gleaming little syringe. The scene is like Fellini on downers, and Chubby knows it.

He snaps off Pet Clark singing on the radio about what to do when you're alone and lonely and unseals a spanking new import release from some far-out limey moptops. That skinny little English model brought it as a gift. Chubby frowns at the sleeve. Winks at a girl. Slaps the record on the hi-fi, boosts the bass all the way up. Wowee kazowee! They're doing "Twist and Shout"! Kind of a throwback, but he can dig it, he can dig it. "Can you dig it?" he shouts to the room. Despite the volume, no one is listening, no one cares. The starlet girlfriend—she's a dead ringer for Frank's daughter Nancy—yawns and shuffles out of her pajama blouse.

Chubby is in a corner, twisting alone. His eyes closed, mouth open, hips going like a cocktail shaker. Working up a sweat in his silk Dior bathrobe. So what if no one else is dancing or paying any attention. The music's outtasight. Who needs them? Who needs her? Take them all, take the world, the whole madmadmadmadmadmadmad world. Yeah, stop the world 'cause I'm getting off. Is that my little ol' heart murmuring sweet nothings to me? Stings a little, don't it? Ah, who cares. I just wanna dance. Man, these cats are dynamite. Yeah yeah yeah. Dig it—don't need no one else to twist but yourself. Yeah oh yeah man! 'Cause you can do it all by yourself.

1980/1982/1984
Rourke and Andy

Rourke Richards had just read an article in one of his mother's _National Enquirers_ about Madonna. It seemed that while she was shopping happily free of bodyguards in New York City, someone somewhere had recognized her despite the wig and dark glasses and shouted out her identity to passersby. Immediately there was a pursuit through several department stores and boutiques: The mob chasing her grew into the dozens, with a good number of photographers at the forefront (well, this was New York). Madonna ran into the Trump Tower, and seeing an open elevator, made for it. To her horror, several of the photographers managed to make it into the elevator, too, before the doors closed. Cowering in a corner, with cameras flashing around her, Madonna had begun to scream and plead to be left alone. Eventually she got out on the top floor and sought refuge with an armed security guard, who first demanded snaps of himself with his favorite singer. _The Enquirer_ did not reveal how she got out of that situation.

The story (he did not doubt its veracity) had left Rourke breathless. To be so famous it was a curse, some sort of sacred disease! What must have Madonna felt, caged in that elevator, whimpering before the cameras? Under the throb of terror must rush that adrenaline thrill known only to humans— _fame_ , which assures you that you are real, you are important, you do exist for a reason. For when the pictures had all been taken and developed and published and hung on walls, she too must venerate the miraculous icon she had become, she herself must wonder what a mystery as powerful as any religion's this thing called fame can be.

Rourke did not consider himself so important or gifted or instilled with a special purpose in life; in fact, he often pondered if he had ever really existed at all (many people acted as if he did not). Certainly, being almost twenty years old and unemployed and unknown to the world in Flint Bluff, Missouri, was next to being nothing. How would he achieve fame—that is, recognition of his worth and existence—for himself? Perhaps, in the words of his chosen mentor, Andy Warhol, he would be "famous for being famous." Fame transubstantiated the insignificant into the significant. Just read any movie star's bio: fame absolves all sins. Fame is a blessing even if it is a curse. Anyway, if he had been in Madonna's shoes, he would have turned it all to his advantage, made it all a big publicity stunt. Just to promote himself, if nothing else. To advertise to the world: Behold Rourke Richards! A swell kid—a regular saint, who deserves your love and respect!

Love and respect he got very little of in Flint Bluff, so he had been considering for quite a while going to New York City to meet Mr. Warhol, who might be able to give him a few pointers. Of course he couldn't expect the artist to pay much attention at first, but after he had shown the slides he'd made of his Warhol-influenced paintings and had demonstrated what a loyal, devoted fan he was, well then maybe just maybe he would be accepted into the Warhol entourage and they could do a movie together or some art or just go to the clubs.

The very word "entourage" fascinated Rourke, because you never heard it except in connection with the rich and famous. A friend of his mother's had won a trip to New York several years ago, and sidetracked there in the Guggenheim (which she thought was "real nuts") she had seen Jackie O passing through the galleries with her own entourage; with just the slightest tilt of her chin, Jackie had summoned the entire group over to her side to examine more closely the surface of a certain Rauschenberg. With another nod, they resumed a more respectful distance. Rourke had often wondered what it must be like to have that sort of power over people's lives. The royalty of old had of course known it, and probably the holy men.

No one remotely royal or famous had ever even passed through Flint Bluff, though every year at the county fair Jayne Mansfield's "death car" was exhibited by a local entrepreneur. No one had ever questioned the authenticity of the smashed-up vehicle, though Rourke eventually read in _The Enquirer_ that there used to be several such cars exhibited around the country. But the people of Flint Bluff were such morons, he had long ago decided, they'd believe anything. Except maybe (as many teens feel) that he would show them all .... show them all _something_ , someday.

All his life he had felt like an outsider in this place, an actor who had been sent with the wrong script into the wrong studio, or an alien who had been jettisoned by mistake from the mother ship, to land here an amnesiac in the midst of nowhere. At the very least growing up with his mother in Flint Bluff was like being caught in a time-warp. People were years, decades behind the rest of the country in every way, and what's more, they didn't even care. It was like a dirty, run-down version of a small town from an old late movie rerun so many times viewers had dreamed the place into reality.

Rourke and his mother lived above what used to be a little mom-and-pop grocery store in a dingy neighborhood; Quik Trips and 7-11's had forced most of the family-run convenience stores out of business, and the place had been transformed into a video-game parlor which did a faltering business with the local teens. The neighbors complained about the noise and cars and fights, but Rourke liked the intergalactic warfare and cosmic explosions which vibrated up through the floor; it was as if the ugly old apartment were careening through space and time, though when you looked out the windows all you saw were ragged moonlit cottonwoods and teenagers smoking and dealing and drinking in the vacant lot opposite, and you felt like the time-space continuum was disjointed. His mother would habitually disrupt his cosmic mood by coming home late from waitressing at the pancake house, muttering about the broken beer bottles on the sidewalk and the bad tips.

"Sweet Mary and Jesus," she would say, firing up a cigarette and going for the last beer in the fridge. They were Catholic, and they went to a tiny German-Irish church in this Methodist town. Despite not believing in its precepts and principles, really, Rourke liked church; it was a real scene, a kind of theater. Andy Warhol was Catholic, so it was cool. The paintings of saints on the walls were magnetic—saints were the first pop stars. People in other countries and times would fix their portraits to the wall just like Vanna White or Vanessa Williams pin-ups: Saints, like those known not for what they did but for who they were, could incite passion and perform miracles at a distance. That made Jesus the original Warholvian ultrastar, Rourke thought—famous for fifteen minutes in his own time and place but with amazingly long-lived drawing power elsewhere. The old stations of the cross engravings lining the church were like stills from a funky 1960s underground movie mixing pop spectacle and mysticism. Maybe even Kenneth Anger or something like "Flaming Creatures" (he could only imagine all these things he'd never seen). Rourke had read, but likewise not seen, a lot of popular history, and he tended, in his late teens, to see everything both too close up and too far away.

Everyone in town had always assumed Rourke was "queer" or a "retard" at best. And they had always let him know it, though over the years he had built up a shaky resistance and they had developed a kind of grudging acceptance. Rourke simply didn't care what the morons around him thought, from the bullies who kneed him to the teachers who asked him probing questions about his relationship with his widowed mother (his father had died a long time ago in Vietnam). By his teen years Flint Bluff and its citizens existed as only a sort of tacky facade in Rourke's mind; reality lay out there—beyond the movies and TV, in New York New York, among Andy Warhol and his circle. Rourke subscribed to or stole from beauty parlors whatever New York style and art or fashion monthlies he found out about; he was consequently always abreast of the latest trends, trends Flint Bluff would only come to know through the most diluted and outdated of means: sit-coms or top-forty videos.

In the end, everything came down to Andy Warhol. The man, as he saw it, had virtually created the world Rourke lived in; for all intents and purposes Warhol was godlike, or the god of his own invented universe. Warhol had picked up on the trends before they were trends and transformed them into art, which was divine and mysterious and all-powerful. Rourke, however, was a little unsure as to what Warhol the living painter really meant by the mid-1980s. A distant father-figure, patron of the young (like Basquiat or Bowery) perhaps. Rourke was instead far more obsessed with the Warhol Sixties, the crazy happening sparkly-glittery Factory days, and his greatest regret was that he hadn't even been born by the time the best of the decade was over. The Sixties, it seemed to Rourke, were the last years the world was truly alive and "swinging" and "with-it" (to use phrases that now sounded more than ridiculous). Everything had changed with that radical feminist lesbian's unsteady bullet (and yet God lived, God was still in the news; Andy had even been on "The Love Boat" a few years back). Nothing was magic now; the Age of Aquarius had tarnished into the Age of Redundancy. Youthquakers were middle-aged. Everything had been done, and done much better, by '68, and there was little point in doing it again. Rourke was galled that he had been conceived at the same time Andy was forming the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and all his mother remembered was that Flint Bluff didn't have a shopping mall yet and gas was cheaper. Why hadn't she and his father been taking part in all the love-ins and be-ins and sit-ins? His own mother had her artists and memories mixed up and actually thought Andy Warhol had died a few years back.

Rourke's bedroom had over his adolescent years become a shrine to Popism, the Silver Sixties. He had covered the walls with aluminum foil and spray-painted the furniture silver and hung up all over his charcoals of Baby Jane Holzer, Holly Woodlawn, Ultra Violet, Tiger Morse, Candy Darling, et al. (when he had first shown them to his mother, she had presumed most of them were Playboy bunny types and felt a little more comforted). Rourke had also photocopied pictures of Andy and papered the ceiling with his image: At night Rourke would wish Andy pleasant dreams (wherever the latest party was) before falling asleep. For a long time the Velvet Underground was the only group he would listen to and they were playing any hour of the day. Lately he had begun listening to more latter-day Nico and The Smiths, who he liked because they put Warhol superstars on their picture sleeves and the singer sang, "I'd rather be famous than righteous or holy any day." His mother had not dared to enter his domain in years; she assumed he was on drugs like most kids and didn't want to know any more.

Rourke also tried his best to look and dress the part: He raided rummage sales for turtlenecks and black jeans and added medallions and moccasins (post-beatnik but pre-hippie) and wore at all times either the famous Warhol Wayfarers or the Lou Reed wrap-arounds. When he needed to, he wore his thick black horn-rims—"nerd glasses," the other kids would call them, though Rourke knew James Dean had worn a similar pair and Andy venerated the dead boy-actor. He would have dyed his hair silver, too (as Andy had done to his wig so people would both remark the dye and not the wig and comment on how young he looked for his age) had he been able to find the right shade in Flint Bluff. He did affect the Warhol wedge—short but still shaggy—and the trademarked blank stare (hours of practice before the mirror), though it wasn't Andy he was trying to look like, exactly, but one of Andy's gang, circa 1966. Maybe a Billy Name or a Gerard Malanga. At least he had none of the cutesy blow-dried pseudo-preppiness or heavy-metal lankiness the rest of the kids in Flint Bluff preferred; the girls in town actually kept their hair in a style even Farrah Fawcett had abandoned years ago.

In school Rourke was what is classically known as a "loner;" he had had no friends to speak of since junior high (when he had begun pasting his locker with _Interview_ ads), and he did not eat his lunches in the cafeteria with the rest of the classes (in fact, he did not eat anything much at all—it was cool to look a little strung-out, pallidly emaciated like a '60s Antonioni model). The only way he avoided being beaten up in school the way other oddballs were was because of his artistic talent. He had always been a very good artist, and classmates considered anyone with that much talent somehow charmed if not dangerous and kept their distance. By his senior year in high school, though, Rourke had begun to grow tired of his realistic sketches of Warhol protégés and began doing multiple silk-screens: He did Nintendo computer game graphics and _People_ magazine covers and giant multi-colored portraits of popular personalities like Mr. T and Prince and Joan Collins. His teachers did not know what to make of such excesses, but gave him A's for enthusiasm alone. Rourke would have indubitably received an art scholarship if his school had had one, but they just had sports scholarships and Rourke detested athletes and athletics. Because Rourke's mother was so poor, he was unable to attend the state college where people assumed he would go—college funding of any kind was scarce these days, and he had not been an exceptional student beyond art classes. (He often doubted, however, that it would be art which would make him famous, but something else, something within himself he had not yet tapped.)

Alone in his room, Rourke dreamed of his glorious future. He was not concerned about practical details, just exciting ideas. He wanted to get to New York as soon after graduation as possible. Flint Bluff was boring him out of his mind. All his free time he spent locked in his room, reading, drawing, listening to records. And pretending the town didn't exist. He ate, slept, and dreamt New York, New York, New York. His conception of the city was based entirely upon his magazines and dated accounts of the pop art years he found in the few library books available. Since Rourke seldom watched TV or read newspapers, he didn't have much of an idea of what New York City looked like beyond his stylized concept of it. For all he knew, there were no poor nor plain nor ordinary, only the rich and fashionable and extraordinary.

No matter how much he wanted to flee Missouri, he simply didn't have the money after graduation to move yet, so he gave in to his mother's wishes and got a job renting videocassettes at the downtown movie theater while he settled in for a while at the area community college, which had extended him a loan. The college was nothing more than a continuation of high school and the theater depressed him (though he did love movies, those giant pop faces on a giant screen). He considered it ironic to be renting movies at a movie theater so people wouldn't have to actually go in and watch a movie together, in a group, which they did less and less of anymore. Despite an art teacher at the college who had actually heard of Andy Warhol (though he was a little befuddled and wondered why Rourke couldn't do fruit-bowl still-lifes) Rourke did not make good grades at the college; by his third semester he dropped out and began working extra hours at the theater to save money for his long-planned-for but secret escape to New York.

In whatever spare hours he could find, he worked on a new series of acrylics mixing the celebrities of today with the Factory celebs of the Sixties: Madonna strapping Joe Dellasandro into bondage, Laurie Anderson riding in a monorail with Paul Morrissey, Michael Jackson on prom night with Jackie Curtis and chaperone Viva. The eras and icons and ideas had become inextricably intertwined in Rourke's mind, and somewhere the Seventies—his childhood of dumb-dumb TV and disco—had become lost. Yet when Rourke painted he felt sanctified, untouchable by loneliness or sorrow, and was always let down when he looked out his bedroom window and saw the same cottonwoods, the same kids leaning on their motorcycles in the moonlight.

Rourke quietly painted and quietly saved money into the following winter when the movie theater, the last real one in town, folded, a victim of the mall omniplex, cable TV, satellite dishes, and VCRs. Rourke had only managed to save not quite $400, not much, but far more money than he or his mother usually saw, so he considered it more than enough to take on New York, as long as he saved by hitch-hiking there and not eating once he arrived. He didn't tell his mother what he was up to, however. She wouldn't understand any more than her friend had understood the Guggenheim. Instead, he told her he was taking a bus to St. Louis to check out the art museum. He stuffed a backpack with his slides and some clothes and saw her off at the station, wondering if he would ever see her again. She held her curious son's hand and told him to be on guard against strangers in the big city.

From St. Louis he walked to the freeway and began to hitch rides. It was February but unusually warm and it felt good to be free and outside, far away from Flint Bluff. His first ride, with a trucker who talked nonstop about the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones for some reason, was a good lengthy one which took him all the way to the edge of Pennsylvania, but after that it was not so easy and a little scarier. The pocketknife he carried for protection—just in case—felt very small in his hand. Once he stood (or sat) freezing along the highway all night long before in the first light of day a farmer offered him a ride in the back of his pickup. Rourke shivered the rest of the way across Pennsylvania and was let off at a truck stop not far from the New Jersey state line. He wondered if he should call his mother; she must be wondering why he hadn't come back from St. Louis yet. But he didn't want to inform her of his new life from a lousy truckstop—he wanted to make that call from an elegant loft or the backroom at a glitzy studio party. For the first time since he had left he felt the inklings of despair but was determined to keep going despite how tired he was. He washed up in the truckstop bathroom and eventually met a carload of noisy Iraqis who gave him a ride into Brooklyn, which fascinated him (the carload, not Brooklyn, which was a yawn) not only because of the ear-splitting Arabic pop music they played but because he had never seen Arabs up close in real life before.

In Brooklyn he acquired a map and took a frightening subway ride into Manhattan, which he knew was the only part of New York City that counts. He emerged somewhere in the vicinity of Times Square. Suddenly the thought struck him: What do I do next? In the back of his mind he always knew his full intention was to meet Mr. Warhol, who, upon recognition of a kindred spirit, would immediately offer him shelter and money and a sort of assistant-to-an-assistant position. He realized now what a naive notion that might be, but he had already come this far and a pre-determined momentum—call it fate if you like—was carrying him along on swift wings, down streets and through doorways and up escalators and so on. This free-flight he was on allowed no second thoughts, no misgivings. There was no listing in the phone book for "Warhol, Andy," but he was not surprised—he had already copied the _Interview_ magazine headquarters address down on a slip of paper folded neatly inside his wallet. He expertly hailed a taxi (one thing he had learned well from the movies) and asked to be taken there, a bit disappointed to find his taxi driver not of the usual colorful movie sort and sorry but unsurprised to find the fare to be almost twenty dollars with tip by the time he was let off in front of the building on East Thirty-Second.

The sleekly dressed people at _Interview_ were kind but firm: Mr. Warhol was not about; no, they did not know when he might be in; no, he was very seldom in; no, what business did he have with Mr. Warhol? Rourke was adamant about seeing the artist, said he was expected (feeling very grubby and a little silly to be carrying his battered backpack), said he knew the artist well and there must have been an appointment mix-up. The pretty receptionist was unbelieving, but she did take down his name—though what was his number? Did he at least have a hotel to contact?

Rourke was already on his way back down the elevator. He was not too let down, after all. Surely there would be other, more casual opportunities. New York did not terrify him in the least; it was everything and more than he had expected, if a little less glamorous. He was blind to the poverty and ugliness—what did not interest him or was not novel did not hold his attention. But he must watch his money; he saw now that the $320 he had left would not last him long. If he did not meet Mr. Andy Warhol soon, he might die of starvation.

The first thing he did was start hitting the museums and art galleries; it was logical that an artist might be discovered appraising his past works in such places. Over the next week he went to most of them and liked the MOMA best; they had the most Warhols on display at that time, including a brand new work on loan from a collector in Italy—a giant silk screen double-portrait of Christ, one of the Christs inverted. Rourke had never seen Warhol approach his Catholic roots in this direct a fashion, and the picture filled him with an intense and stormy longing—for fame? He couldn't quite say, but it actually physically made him hurt deep within his abdomen. Maybe it was because he had been eating so little. He didn't take much notice of any other paintings, however; his eyes were always on the people around him. But he did not see anyone who looked remotely important or famous.

By nightfall of his first day in New York he had managed to find a Y in Hell's Kitchen, where he had heard from the taxi driver that rooms were as cheap as he was going to find. They were, but they were also dirty and crowded. They smelled of depravity and depression; Rourke sank into a cot and was suddenly weeping: He had been in New York a whole day and still not even begun to become famous. Instead, he just felt stupid. A bigger moron than anyone back in Flint Bluff. When he closed his stinging eyes he saw the twin Christs, and they were vibrant with angry color.

The next day Rourke set out to discover Manhattan on foot. He went to all the famous department stores (at least it was free to look) and ate at an old automat for the first time in his life and saw many sights he had only seen in the movies. He saw millions of people but no Andy Warhol. Again he returned to the Y bitterly disillusioned, but somehow feeling a little braver and stronger and freer. A boy in the bunk above was playing a guitar and from below it sounded like an orchestra and Rourke tapped at the bed frame in time.

And so a week passed: Rourke ate very little to save money for his room at the Y and he spent his days in a kind of Warhol daze, imagining every time he saw a shaggy gray head across the street or up the block it would be the artist. But it never was, and the man or woman he had run up to would give Rourke a blank stare— _his_ blank stare—as if Rourke were not even there. He began to wonder again if he really were. He felt like a bad invention in a bad scenario. Maybe he had died in the night in Hell's Kitchen, he conjectured, maybe he had passed away before the Mao prints at the Whitney and this was his own personal hell: to be searching fruitlessly for Andy Warhol on the streets of Manhattan forever.

One night when the guitar-playing had driven a rhythm into his skull which forced him out onto the street searching for something harder, fiercer, he went to a little no-name rock club in Soho, and despite always feeling radical in his clothes and hair and glasses in Flint Bluff, he suddenly felt as cliché and suburban and dull as a Ken doll. Business was slow and the whole place had the feeling of being decidedly passé (they actually played years-old stuff from the likes of Sigue-Sigue Sputnik and The Cult) but Rourke still felt very much upstaged by the clientele: white men in dreadlocks, black women with crewcuts, androgynous creatures in black leather snoods and toreador pants, couples dressed up to resemble birds of paradise or certain armored tropical beetles. Staring down from a balcony into a stroboscopic pit filled with dancers beneath a giant video screen, Rourke did a double-take: it was Andy and Edie! Later, at the bar, he met them. They were both just a little older than Rourke, in impeccable period costume: Edie in a silver micro-mini and Andy in a silver vinyl jacket that looked like aluminum. It was a concept thing, they explained to Rourke. They both really dug the Sixties, the Factory, the whole "psychotronic" scene. They were performance artists from City College. At least they wanted to be performance artists. No gigs yet. He was also a minimalist composer and she did scratch video. Tonight they were Andy and Edie. Tomorrow they might be Steve and Eydie or Jack and Jackie K. Andy and Edie were also theorists—Andy was a mirror, they said, that's what that Velvets song was about; he reflected whatever he saw before him, without comment—his gaze was the gaze of the looking glass that only speaks the purest truth, like the one in "Sleeping Beauty." It was, Edie emphasized, his very Catholic sense of guilt: look but don't touch .... and so forth .... They talked on and on and with the flashing lights and distorted music and beer Rourke felt like he was falling down a long, long, sequin-bespangled hole— _Rourke In Wonderland_. Then he felt a hand on his knee. And, from the opposite side, another hand on his other knee. At least that's what it felt like—though things seemed to be doubling, as if his sensations were pressed to a mirror, and he couldn't be quite sure where he was and where he wasn't.

Next he was walking down an alley with Andy and Edie, their arms around his shoulders and waist. They had been doing some type of drug he couldn't name or recognize. They wanted him to come back to their loft. In his tight black jeans, they said, he looked just like one of Warhol's movie hustlers; he could be Paul America—or, hey, Rourke Missouri. Edie seized his crotch. I just like to watch, Andy said, falling back and laughing. And then Rourke knew he must be running, or flying, and crying, too, and he was calling to a hundred taxis in a hundred deserted alleyways, lost in the night and at the edge of the world.

A silver-gray eminence haunted his next few sleepless hours, watching, just watching him as he wandered Manhattan. Rourke was being theatrical with himself and his imagination. The couple from the club had been a divine warning, he was sure: He felt like a blind disciple who was just beginning to open his eyes. And then he closed his eyes on a park bench somewhere (Washington Square?) and he slept.

The next afternoon, hateful, desperate, pink-eyed, in a mad stupor, he found himself outside the _Interview_ _Magazine_ headquarters once more and took a ghost-ride up the elevator, alone, with no photographers, but with a mission (he wondered if this was how Valerie Solanis had felt that day in 1968). He approached the receptionist as steadily as he could. It was a different one this time, but she was just as kind and just as firm: Mr. Warhol was not in; if he left his name and reason for wishing to speak to Mr. Warhol, then Mr. Warhol would try to get back to him at a later date.

Rourke was in tears by this time and suddenly he showered his slides across the receptionist's desk and his whole life story blurted forth: growing up miserable and poor in Flint Bluff, his striving to be a famous _someone_ , school and the kids who called him names, his mother's misunderstandings, his art. Coming to New York, his searching the streets for days on end while his money dwindled away. Fake Andy and Fake Edie in the alley and how they had made him feel like a corner hustler, and running half the way to the Y in the morning rain. And he wasn't even twenty yet. The receptionist, who was a gigantically tall and very beautiful Asian woman with a half-shaven scalp, listened professionally, patiently as a psychologist, as if this happened every day in the offices of _Interview_ (and for all Rourke knew, it did). She took a deep breath, as if she were about to jump into deep water. Then she leaned close to him, breathing something expensive into his face, and stared him straight in the eyes and told the absolute truth: Mr. Warhol was in the hospital at this very moment undergoing some minor surgery, which would mean weeks of recuperation and, besides, it was simply not possible for him to meet with everyone who had a desire, no matter how fervent, to meet him; he was the busiest man in the world, honest to God.

Honest to God. Rourke could no longer hear her speaking, could no longer even see her big wide lipsticked mouth with its billboard-perfect teeth. He rushed from the building, with no one following him, ran out into the streets, with no one calling his name, and without a single photographer in pursuit jumped a filthy subway to the ferries at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. There, he boarded a boat to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was his intention to go to the top of her crown and throw himself off. At the very least it would be a spectacular suicide, symbolic in a way, and his name would be in the papers yet. He got seasick on the short way over, never having been on the ocean before, and once on the island kneeled down like a patriot returned to his native land after many years and vomited at the base of the monument.

When he got to the top he saw that glass came between himself and his desire to undo himself and was greatly relieved. He left the island with renewed strength, the power to rail against the gods, a blasphemer, a heretic: He remembered reading how an avant-garde biker had shot a stack of Andy's Marilyns through their foreheads, and he imagined himself finishing what that crazy Solanis had left incomplete, of aiming, this time correctly, not for the head, but for the weakest of human organs—the heart.

Fame, it occurred to Rourke, is a sacrament. Fame is a sacrament. A sacrament.

On the subway back north, a Pakistani or Indian was huddled over a loud radio in a picnic cooler like a snake-charmer before his cobra's basket: late-breaking news. People naturally tensed, as if a snake were indeed about to strike. When Rourke heard the report from the hospital, of how the artist had unexpectedly left in the middle of the party, as it were, it was as if he were watching a scene in a movie in which the people around him were the actors; he couldn't really react himself. The gallbladder—how ridiculous! But people, even famous people (perhaps famous people especially) die in ridiculous ways. It seemed like it had all happened long ago, that he had actually been there to aim and pull the trigger, and at this late date it really made no difference at all what happened or how it had happened or if he felt anything. His future, however, was suddenly clear.

He would collect his belongings at the Y and call his mother from the phone in the hall. She would be greatly relieved and wire him enough money to take a bus home. He'd find other work in Flint Bluff. He'd learn to wear normal clothes and get a decent haircut. People would quit staring at him as he became less and less himself and more and more... Well, he could be a good actor if he wanted to, and anything was possible now.

With all that in mind, he returned to the MOMA, to the beautiful double Christ he loved best. There seemed to be an impenetrable aura around himself now; he could almost see it glowing, reflecting the colors of the silk screen. Christ gazed at him with sweet mercy. Rourke Richards felt the serenity of a saint as he approached the canvas. It was miraculous, exhilarating! The guards seized him before he had done too much damage with his pocketknife. Everyone knows the rest of the story; it was in all the papers.

The White Party

We all, I might dare suppose, hate "true" stories that begin with the narrator swearing on a conjured Bible and end with our own oaths of quite a different sort. Neither do I, for one, put much stock in narratives which detail an encounter or series of encounters with a glamorous or enigmatic stranger who reveals something fantastic and ultimately tragic about him or herself, all for the moral benefit of the enraptured, or more often, simply encaptured audience. Least of all do I like stories which begin with a disclaimer, such as this one, stating merely **:** What I tell you is the truth, as it was told to me, and I leave it to you to decide. How very banal!

I met the Countess Montague, Phoebe Fotheringale, when I was in the Wyndham Islands, east of the Lusiads in the Sargasso Sea, on an art-hunting expedition exactly twenty-five years ago this December. (Now, I suppose that if this were the nineteenth century, I would have to replace names, dates, and addresses with a few picturesque asterisks and dashes, but any story which begins "I met the Countess So-and-So" these days better have as many hard facts to back it up as possible.) The ocean off my hotel was said to be as warm as bathwater, which was most seductive since icy winter had already leapt onto the back of New York that month and couldn't be shaken free; I wish then I could say that I was on vacation, that I was collecting artwork for my own home, that I had bottomless hours to pour for myself, but, alas, none of the above is true. I was not long out of art school, a stupid young thing, really, and a spoiled brat besides, for Daddy could be relied upon to get me out of tight spots, but I had been hired by a well-known art dealer to be one of his many representatives, at least in regards to buying and selling what was then still known with some certainty as "modern" art. More precisely, I had come to Asphodel, in the Wyndhams, to buy the last Kovalev.

At that time, all the known Kovalevs had been accounted for in museums and private collections, so it had come as quite a surprise to my firm when a gallery in the Caribbean cabled saying it was handling the transference of an interesting late-period Kovalev. The painting could not be let on commission; the seller insisted on cash on the nail or the offer would be withdrawn. Since the gallery had always been upfront and honest in the past, or as upfront and honest as anyone in that business is, and the private party was said to have been a patron of Kovalev, I was flown down to check matters out. Had my employer seriously considered this not to be a ruse, I surely wouldn't have been sent; but since there seemed to be something merely curious going on, I did go, instead of one of my seniors.

Oh, dear, I realize what you're thinking already—another one of those kinds of stories: hoaxes, soiled underpinnings, tainted money, mysterious countesses, etc. Indeed, if the painting were at the true heart of my story it might be another one of those things, but in each retelling of my tale the painting grows less and less important—though, yes, that is it over the mantelpiece (excuse me if I assume the authorial conceit of your presence, right here beside me on this hard settee and much too impatient to be going), and no, no one else ever believes it's the real thing but myself, either.

Furthermore, I have no desire to part with it. I'll destroy it, toss it right in that fire, before I reduce myself to doing that. With that painting, who knows, I might have saved a woman's soul, maybe even mine.

It is a portrait of a baron I never knew—I know, I know, throwing too much royalty in spoils the stew—but it _is_ a baron, and she was a countess, and this is or was the art world of quite some time ago, darling, before investment capitalists or whatever they call themselves took over. In those days, collecting still had a tinge of the effete and eccentric, and what better way to occupy the wasted hours of a demoted aristocracy? At that time I was really little more than an adjunct servant, or worse, a procurer for debauched expatriates.

I do not even like the portrait, or Kovalev in particular. He was one of those _fin-de-siecle_ painters who did not find fame until the early twentieth, rather Viennese despite his Odessan pedigree, a type which I never could quite stomach. Too ornate, too much _double-entendre_ decadence without actually being the real thing. The real thing we've only lately come to know.

You're right about the mouth—it is rather weak, but who is to say the bad baron didn't in fact have such a facial flaw? That viperous green, that cloying pink, the frou-frou flourishes on the wallpaper behind him, none of this I find in the least delightful or lovely. Still, like all of us, Kovalev had his bad days, his whole incredibly stinking rotten years, and so I forgive him all that, too. The Countess did, so did Baron Himmel, so why not someone as terribly merciful as myself? Merciful, yes—my friends ought to start up a fund for a goddamn shrine.

The Baron Himmel himself, not his portrait, is forgotten now to all but a few haunters of second-hand occult bookstores, some rarefied art historians, and a smattering of disaffected Rosicrucian or Blavatskian theologians, I would assume. Actually to say "forgotten" is to imply he was once known to a general public, which is patently not true. He began on the fringes, he lived on the fringes, he died guess where. I have seen a few of his lithographs, latter-day Beardsleyisms after the example of Austin Osman Spare—bare-breasted demonesses rising from candle-smoke; pseudo-Moorish arabesques; the minimum requirement of pentacles, mandalas, and disguised ithyphallicism. I find them mildly interesting, but inelegant. Vaguely sinister, undoubtedly erotic, they are of that uncertain genre of cheap-paper portfolios, valued only by collectors of the arcane, in which the "artistic" and the pornographic intermingle in a pea-soup fog where you and I would never care to meet.

At the time I met the Countess Montague I did not know even this, however. Himmel to me was a figure halfway on the continuum between Crowley and Gurdjieff, with perhaps bits of Steiner or Reich in him. He was an artist and a poet and a mystic; he had done some things either terribly good or terribly bad, I wasn't quite sure (neither, for that matter, was the Countess), and he had been acquainted, if only briefly, with Kovalev at the infamous Cabaret Voltaire in his Zurich days. Kovalev must have disliked this dilettante. You might guess as much from the portrait; compared to Kovalev's deep psychological analysis of most of his sitters, this one is decidedly superficial. Having never met the Baron, I can't say why for sure; perhaps he was a superficial man, though the Countess used other words, more or less obscene, to describe him.

"Do you know that self-portrait by Beckmann?" she asked me over lapsang souchong that one and only afternoon I spent with her. "It gives you a much better idea of the Baron than this painting. On the surface, the Baron was implacable, yet I think he had an inner softness, like a custard creme, however much the bastard froze over when you met him. Maybe that is what so attracted people to his cult. He dared you to penetrate him... Appearances are everything, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That is why I court illusion, why I may be Bauhaus on the outside, but baroque within. The Baron Himmel was a bit like that, too, existing behind lacquered screens with the censers smoking, but I must confess that I didn't really know him; I only met him twice."

It is this well-remembered afternoon, so thrillingly long, so tediously short, where the clew of my yarn (a harmless pun, dear) begins to unwind from the mazy mind of Phoebe Fotheringale Brauner Petrovich Montague—one of the Philadelphia Main Line Fotheringales, thrice married and twice divorced, then a widow looking much younger than she should have dared to. Only because I was so very young at the time did I think she was old, though fifty was indeed older in those days than it is now (or so I can state now I am looking from the opposite brink of the half-century fault-line myself). Her late husband, the Count Montague, had left her with three houses, a tidy fortune, and few bad memories. Being from a decaying dynasty herself, she had naturally enough run through her millions, already lost two of the houses, and at that time was reduced to selling her Kovalevs, one by one, just to meet expenses. She, too, had known Kovalev in the celebrated "old days," but that is beyond the periphery of this story, and she had no taste for modern art at all except for the works of her former tennis double and bridge partner (but _not_ , she declared, and I believed her, bedmate). Previously, to avoid too much speculation, she had departed with her Kovalevs through a series of very secretive connections, which is why, she explained, I had not heard of her before. But this last painting, she conceded, was a more difficult sell than the others, and so she had "gone public." "Though I admit," she told me, "we all burn with a desire to turn our most private secrets public. What is more human than humiliation?"

She smiled at me with large, sparkling, gorgeously false teeth, a poor fit for such a rich woman, I thought. We were sitting in her ocean-side salon, amongst Edwardian palms and protesting rattan furniture. The excessively blue Atlantic faced us, ornamented with the emerald choker of the archipelago, and I had made up my mind then never to leave this room or the Countess's side. Behind us lay the library, with its coffered ceiling, walls paneled in Spanish leather, a medieval fireplace large enough to live in, and tiers of the Count's collection of old atlases. The villa's other rooms were similarly appointed. I mention all this because from the outside the building looked spare and straight-edged, cramped down away from the cliffside in a thicket of banana trees as though afraid if it got too near the edge it would hurl itself over. She and the Count had argued over architects, Phoebe said, and in the end only the house was the loser.

As soon as I met her I liked the Countess, perhaps just because I was relieved to find she was American and knew of my family, but mostly because of her plain-brown-wrapper appearance and manners. She looked like the wife of a president, as we knew president's wives at the time, well kept up, trimmed and pruned, but as direct and forthright as the simple shift, with its precisionist lines and cool color scheme, which she wore that day. What am I saying, wife of a president? She looked like one of my mother's least snooty friends, the one all the others at the golf club would like to say something against but couldn't think quite what.

Isn't it odd that sometimes we end up taking after complete strangers more than we do our own parents? I feel in my incipient dotage that I have become quite a bit like Phoebe Fotheringale was then, on some overcast days almost as if she inhabits my own body as an actress inhabits a role, while my mother I have reduced to a chest of faded photographs there in the corner, a chest exactly the size of a baby's coffin. Maybe it is because along with that portrait I truly have inherited Phoebe Fotheringale's sins. In fact, I often—well, to coax my story along as she did, a cigarette, a drink, and memories...

"Naturally you will think it's a fake," Phoebe said as I unwrapped the velvet from about the framed painting she had retrieved from the safe in the back of her disused wine cellar. "You will remark upon its poor handling of texture, the hurried brushstrokes, the ungainly management of form, all so unlike Kovalev in his prime. A good amateur approximation of the post-expressionist's fervent skills, but no more. Kovalev would never have had his sitter directly facing the camera, as it were, and certainly not with two such crudely shaped hands, like clusters of wax grapes, nestled there upon the lap. I could go on, but you see I understand..."

For a moment I was quite shaken. Everything she said was true, those were the exact phrases I would have chosen, and I wondered why I had been called here deep into this tax exiles' Caribbean to look at a mediocre imitation. Why, too, was I being led on like this by this brittle "woman of a certain age" unless she were trying to draw me into some duplicitous scheme of her own making? I was too young then ever to trust anyone.

But she went on as I took out my magnifying glass, stethoscope, and scalpel. I hadn't yet really examined the painting as a painting; I didn't really see the glowering figure in rumpled tuxedo and turban, with half-burnt cigar, before me on the canvas. Phoebe Fotheringale watched me from a little distance, half-amused, smoking, too, as she spoke to me: "But haven't you noticed yet that there is no signature? I believe that proves my point, just as it was once proved to me."

I searched the canvas like a map but could not find Kovalev's characteristic autograph, usually boldly there toward the lower left-hand corner like the capital of a territory. Phoebe might have been laughing somewhere off in her cloud of smoke, or that might have been my imagination.

"I didn't ask the dealer to send you to my home just to play games with you, child. Let me say just once more: This is a genuine Kovalev, if a bad one, I know; I've owned twenty-three of them in my time. This is the last I acquired and the last I will part with, not because it is my favorite—certainly not, because it reminds me of something horrid in my past, a repulsive episode that returns to me often in my nightmares—no, not my favorite, but because I know that despite its authenticity it will fetch the least money and then no serious curator would touch it... You see there it was never signed, which _does_ prove it is the real thing. What right-minded forger would fail to falsify a signature, and wouldn't a great artist like Kovalev in fact refuse to sign a work he considered beneath him, a portrait done of a man who the artist, by the aborted end of the sittings, held in utmost contempt? Myself as well, I might add."

I knew, alas, that my firm was most conservative and did not exist to honor the dreams of aging beauties. In any event, I could not risk taking on for them such a work of questionable value, no matter how low the price. Phoebe seemed to understand.

"I had expected as much," she said. "I knew this would be a difficult sale, especially since I have such a reputation for being a liar and a hysteric. What, they didn't tell you at customs? You didn't read it in the brochures? Phoebe Fotheringale will tell you she is responsible for the deaths of several men, my best friends will tell you, and a couple might have even been her husbands. However, now that we have the painting before us, I hope you don't mind if I tell you one of my famous stories. A short one, you needn't worry. I assure you it is the closest I can ever get to telling the truth."

As stated at the beginning, I have a distaste for such testimonials, but since my hostess appeared so anxious, and I had come such a long way, and I had the entire afternoon before me, and I was indeed more than half-curious, I agreed to listen.

"Pardon me, but since you are a woman, too, and about the same age I was at the time when it all happened, I feel I am able to tell you. I feel an empathy toward you I can't really explain, as if we shared the same rare blood-type or something else far too personal, as if you are my world's witness at last. Maybe I have hid myself away too long. Perhaps when I am done you will look at this painting in a different light. If not, life is no worse than I have always thought!"

Because a sultry breeze had come up and the daily downpour threatened to be just two minutes behind schedule, we retired into the library, where we settled on moleskin-covered divans with high backs like outspread eagles' wings. There were no servants about, but the Countess was swift with a swizzle stick, and she quickly brought us unidentified cocktails and her own especially imported cigarettes. Then she arranged herself between several beaded leather pillows, looking too like the most favored wife in the seraglio, and began her account of how she had acquired the painting.

"It was not long after the Count's death, when I had returned here from our place in the Orkneys—Roger always liked islands—and suddenly I found myself happy just to be alone. After all, three marriages in seven years does age one so, especially if they were all for love, not money. Oh, yes, and I still had lots of money, then; I'd been collecting Kovalevs for quite some time, ever since he was an unknown before the war and my 'artistic' older brother had introduced me to him one summer in Paris. This was all well before Kovalev was concocting his own laudanum and the world began to fall apart.

"Are you comfortable? Good. You'll find these cigarettes the very mildest; I never smoke any others... As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, in those days, after the wars were finally over, the neighboring island to this one, Cosima, hosted a colony of middle-European émigrés, if you could call them that, they were all so filthy rich, the war years were just an extended holiday to them, and I had my share of funerals, I mean _parties_ , to attend. One of my oldest friends from Philly, who knew I was mad for Kovalev, told me at one such party that I must meet someone else she had just met who also collected the artist. Little did I know it would turn out to be Baron Himmel! I didn't know if I should run away from there—or run away with him. My late husband had spoken of him, only once, in not so very nice a way. They had met each other years before among the Dadaists in Switzerland, and Roger had for a short while revolved in the whirligig outer limits of the Baron's circle. As a failed Oxonian Roger had known some defrocked members of the Golden Dawn—never mind, you're too innocent to know about that—and by that time those debauched lords and dandies had been reduced from Illuminati to drinking buddies. 'A vile man,' Roger had said of Baron Himmel. 'He must be in commerce with Beelzebub himself,' and that was the last I had heard.

"But my Pennsylvanian friend said much the opposite. Perhaps the vile man had reformed, or had never been vile at all, for now he was regularly conducting seances and playing guru to the lonely wives, widows, and single ladies of the island, where he was given very high marks for his astuteness. My friend said he had arranged marriages, induced fertility, rejuvenated spirits, and other sorts of innocuous things therapists do for us nowadays. When I questioned her further, she said no, she didn't know exactly where he came from, but she did know he had traveled widely, and out of these travels had culled several books, none of them, unfortunately, any longer in print. One was the self-confessed diary of a drug fiend, that was true, but she blamed it on his extreme youth at the time of its writing. More recently, he had invented a whole new system of spiritualism patterned after ancient Tantric belief, but she had no idea what that meant. His was a very tight-knit group, and she hadn't yet been able to infiltrate it. The women who flocked around him seemed very serene, she said, but also a bit aloof, and anyway, she was just briefly visiting the island herself.

"This talk naturally aroused my interest, and so I asked our host, a Lithuanian munitions-maker, to introduce us. I will spare you the details; the Baron looked much as he does in oils, minus the turban, and only slightly less life-like. He was bald as a lie and shorter than my first husband's temper. He put out a burning kiss on my wrist, spoke in an accent it might be easier to locate in the movies than on a map, and seemed elated to meet someone whom it was understood collected Kovalevs. As for himself, he was 'getting out' of Kovalev—I was to find out later why—and was eager to interest me in buying a portrait of himself, which he insisted was very good. I can't say if I liked the Baron at first or not; years of loathing have colored my first impression, but at the time I must have been sufficiently charmed, for I said I would take the first opportunity to see it. Then the topic of conversation turned to me. I could tell he was trying to diagnose my marital state. Remembering what my late husband had said, I was cautious, even if Roger was always a poor judge of character. At first we danced around the subject, as he questioned me in a frankly intimate manner about my romantic history, and I found myself telling him things I wouldn't even tell my mirror. When it appeared he had drawn as much information from me as required, he withdrew his needles and asked if I would be so kind as to join a few of his 'ladies,' as he called them, at his residence the next week, on March the twenty-first. When I hesitated, he insisted, so I complied, if I could then view the painting. 'Of course,' he said, 'but we discuss business later.' I must have been out of my head on too many gin fizzes, because I remember leaning down and kissing this stranger on his shiny forehead (could he have grown shorter during our conversation?) at our farewell. Everyone in Cosima knows where I live,' he said then, 'just ask anyone, you'll find it. Oh, yes, and be certain to wear white, all white, it's a party with a theme.'

"The morning before the evening the party was to take place, I remember waking late with a terrible headache, which was connected dot by dot to a terrible toothache. I've always had a great fondness for sweets, you see, and my teeth have taken the toll. Poor conduct in a lady of breeding, wouldn't you say? For weeks I'd been ignoring a persistent sharp pain in a lower molar, and I realized at breakfast that I would have to consult my island dentist at once. Well, fact was I had no island dentist, so I had to scrounge around for one, and when I found him, he was away, and then I had to go hunt him down, and then he had rum on his breath, rum-stains down his tie, and it turned out all his equipment was from the Babylonian epoch, and since I am such a fraidy-cat when it comes to torture of the corporeal variety he had to administer a dangerous amount of ether—the good old-fashioned sort—while he drilled away. I must have been under for hours, and when I came to he was gone and my purse had been rifled, but at least my mouth was numb and it wasn't raining for a change. So I tottered out of there, had the chauffeur rush me home as if our dear little Crosley were an ambulance, bathed, restored my face as one would an old master, changed into a suitable ivory-silk ensemble—I would never wear white again—and got to the docks just in time to catch the last boat to Cosima (I would have to charter a boat back, or stay at the inn). It turned out my taxi driver, not a native but a refugee, a Jewish stowaway from a cruiser, did not know how to reach the Himmel estate, and neither did anyone we met on the street, and I ended up having to go to the police station and ask where Baron Himmel lived. The officers in their snappy blue uniform shorts looked at this ghostly white lady in her winding sheet for a long minute, there was a certain amount of whispering, and finally a detective drew a map for my driver. By this time, I knew I would be arriving well past the fashionable mark and courting rudeness, but off we went.

"Dusk was already dying, and what I was able to make of the Himmel estate looked more like a Pompeian ruin through the blue-black nightmare trees. I could see what looked like columns, a portico that led to the crashing sea, and a sort of overgrown temple perched on the cliffside, but not much more in the headlamps' glare. I should have thought it odd that I heard no sounds and saw no lights, but I braced myself in my anesthetic state and ascended the marble porch stairs toward a pair of immense black doors. Dear girl, I think I shall always remember those black doors and the way they made no sound at all when, not even thinking to ring, I opened them. The doors parted like weightless wings beneath my fingers, and at once I was within an immense candle-lit hall with a black-skinned, half-naked butler before me. Or was it two? My vision had trouble focusing from darkness so quickly into the quivering light. The butler or butlers gave me nodding appraisal, and I was ushered down a long, soundless, thickly carpeted corridor, toward somewhat brighter light, whence emanated both an odd, cicada-like drone and a smell of sandalwood intermingled with something sweeter and denser. At the doorway the Nubians paused and I peered in, my eyes blinking and my mouth slowly beginning to waken from its artificial slumber.

"Would you care for another cigarette? But look—I must refill your drink! Here, you can have mine, I haven't touched it, I never drink despite what some people say. No? Shall I really go on? Aren't I boring you? All right, then...

"The room, as I was about to say, looked to be a sort of miniature amphitheater, domed above, circled by stone benches, its floor scattered with Persian rugs, its walls draped with melancholy tapestries, the whole lit by flickering sconces... and so forth, with not quite a stage at one end, but a large dais, beset with incense-burners like a pagan altar. A scarlet and gold Tibetan dragon breathed curly clouds, not fire, from its banner above and behind. This was the party: Seated on the benches were about a dozen women in white, not all of them thin or pretty, more like a flock of geese than swans, but every one so sedate, so becalmed you might have thought it was vespers at the cathedral. Before them on the swirling floor were trays towered with rose-white grapes, pearly caviar, and sculpted cakes like marble capitals, flanked by ice buckets crowded with greenish bottles of champagne, but none of these appeared to have been touched. Perhaps they were just for effect. Perhaps the party had just reached a lull, as all parties eventually must. Perhaps I was only dreaming. Several of the Baron's coterie of lady-friends had their eyes closed or half-closed and slowly rocked to the hypnotic sound of the drone. An Alma-Tadema scene. That drone, I saw, came from an exotic nacre-inlaid instrument beside the dais, something like a fancy lute which had been stretched at one end and compressed at the other, played upon by a girlish Indian boy in striped satin pantaloons and one of those funny little short bellboy's jackets with gold braid. And there, with his fingers dangling in the boy's jet-black hair, was Baron Himmel himself, upon an upholstered seat-cushion, legs crossed lotus-wise, and eyes narrowed at me. I thought of a caterpillar on a mushroom. No one else noticed me as I took a place as far from the dais as possible, but the Baron, who was clad in a white linen rajah's costume, complete with white rajah's turban—not the sultanic kind in the painting—the Baron followed my every movement. It appeared I had interrupted a speech, but he did not seem angry. Instead, he smiled, clapped his hands as if to break the spell, and immediately one of the houseboys who was naked but for a silver lamé diaper, if you must know, brought the Baron a large round tray with three goblets upon it. He then descended from the dais, which was more of a task than you might think because he was so very short, and strode up to me, carrying the heavy salver with its glasses before him and laid it at my feet like Judith with the head of Holofernes. I thanked him and took a goblet, which I sipped suspiciously. It tasted of pomegranate and Chartreuse. He dashed his off in one fell swoop and commenced to kiss not my hand or wrist, but something like my elbow. 'Countess,' he said in that accent which completed his theatrical stance, 'so glad you came.' I remember thinking then that he did not exactly seem a fake, but rather a poor copy of an original, or as if he were the bad character an actor plays, not the actor playing badly himself. Do I make sense? It is so hard to explain him, but he did have this powerful aura; it was gold-green, I think, concentrated mostly in his eyes...

"Yet, it was that very instance when I first realized the Baron must be a morphine addict, or a hashish-eater, or a laughing-gas-inhaler, for I saw those eyes, years later, in the halls of an asylum where I once had a rather extended visit. Does that surprise you? Well, you know nothing about me, do you? You have no idea what self-inflicted torments I have undergone for decades because of that wicked baron's pretty white party... Pardon my melodrama; I don't mean to sound like a heroine out of Poe or Baudelaire. Besides, I am still alive, or pretend to be... To return to my story: The Baron took another goblet and led me without speaking from the room and down a porphyry-walled passageway which gradually narrowed—or maybe it was only my growing claustrophobia—and after several twists and turns, swimming through the twilit mire as if down the esophagus of an enormous stone snake, we came to another open door. There like newlyweds we paused at the threshold, and the Baron asked me: 'Please to tell, Countess Phoebe, what do you think of my white party?'

" 'Sir, I haven't been here very long,' I said with some hesitation, 'so I can't really begin to say, though there is a flavor of my old sorority days, when we girls hung about the laundry room smoking illicit cigarettes... But what must the men of the island think of your little gatherings?'

" 'Men, they don't think, at least not the cowards fleeing dictators and bad marriages you'll find here.'

" 'And the white theme,' I added, 'it was all the rage on the continent a few seasons back.' You don't think I was being too arch? But I was beginning to like nothing about the Baron Himmel, even if I was in his thrall. Why, I asked myself then, as I still do now, did I come to this party of strangers?

" 'Ah, yes, but my purposes are entirely different,' the Baron said. 'Think of Stonehenge, those glorious druids, the equinox, the first ray of light at Thebes making the granite pharaoh sing...'

"I sighed, thinking about my tooth, how late it was already getting to be, how that taxi might or might not be waiting for me outside when I made my escape, and about which method would be used to sacrifice me; the Baron obviously wanted more from me than my money. But he gestured, and so I entered the room.

"At first I thought the room must be lit with gas-lamps within ruby-glass globes, but it was only candlelight upon the blood-red draperies and crimson wallpaper, worked all over with a veinlike pattern which gave the impression of entering one chamber of a vast heart. Here it was hot, while the rest of the house had been marble-cool, and if I had pressed my ear to a wall, I might have heard a muffled throbbing.

"This was Baron Himmel's art gallery. The walls were hung with no more than twenty works of art, all prime examples of Tchelitchev, Styrsky, Dominguez, Kassaroff, Schiele, and their ilk—half-remembered artists whose morbid hysteria I could never abide; I have always been solely a Kovalev aficionado, and find even Balthus objectionable. Some of the etchings must have been the Baron's own work, but they were undistinguished, or, to put it more accurately, indistinguishable from the rest. I, however, made the expected miaows of approval, and followed this ridiculous 'wicked' baron deeper into the room. There on the farthest wall, in the recess of a small oriel window—the Baron need not have pointed, for I saw it at once—was his own Kovalev. From a distance its accuracy is much more pronounced. I approached the painting slowly, the Baron close on, still trying to divide etherized illusion from lucid consciousness. Things seemed to come and go of their own accord within my field of vision, as if my desensitizing jaw were influencing what my eyes saw. I had not broached my drink but once or twice. He had already consumed his second.

"At that time the dyspeptic colors of the canvas were even more stomach-churning to me than they are now, and initially, like the Baron himself, I found the painting appalling. 'It is not, I fear, my best likeness,' my host said with a Slavic sigh, 'but then it was never finished. If it had, I believe Kovalev would have changed nearly everything about it. But we quarreled. It may have had something to do with his wife'—here he gave me what I am sorry to classify as a smirk—'and so he went away, tossing this to the back of his atelier. You see it is unsigned, so I know you might think it worthless.' As an expert, you know that it is not strictly true, but in an odd way I realized it would be one of the his bargaining points. 'It came to me as a gift from his widow,' the Baron explained, 'who is unfortunately no longer on speaking terms with me or anyone else—only Kovalev himself, whom she regularly taps tables with at her Theosophists' meetings.' The smirk had rehabilitated itself into a blander sort of smile, but Baron Himmel did not seem to notice how he was repelling me. 'But why do you want to sell it, then, if you think it cannot fetch a good price?' I asked him, squinting to examine the portrait more carefully. I did not like the way the Baron, because of his stature, had a habit of breathing not too far above the small of my back.

"He went on: 'Ever since Kovalev passed from this earthly realm last year I have felt pursued by whatever spirits linger in his art. As one of his patrons, you must understand why I believe every one of his paintings is haunted, or perhaps more accurately, imbued with his own personal atavistic animism.' He gave me another sort of look, I suppose I gave him a look, we gave each other looks. In the exchange, I felt myself becoming devalued.

" 'Vassily had a terrible temper!' he exclaimed. 'You did not know this? Your husband the count never had to defend your—your honor from his insane jealousy?'

"I explained that Kovalev did not know my third husband, that my own acquaintance with the artist was years before.

" 'Then you cannot know or understand entirely why I want to sell this painting at such a low price, just to rid myself of it at last,' he said, and mentioned a sum twice as much as I would have guessed, and still far more than what I ask of you now, so many years of appreciation later. I said then that I would have to think about it and moved away. He gave a distraught cry and seized my elbow. 'But as bad as it is, it is worth ten times as much!' he huffed, and I daresay like Rumpelstiltskin himself he stamped his foot. Oh, he was a vain little tyrant. Why else would he still display a painting of himself by a man he feared?

" 'Well, be that as it may, I must think about it,' I said again, perhaps too quickly, and he sighed, looking at me with those world-weary east-European eyes. Kovalev did capture that quite effectively, didn't he? 'Forgive me,' I said, 'but I always drive a hard bargain, I'm an American. Maybe later we can negotiate—' With that, he brightened and hurried me from the room, suddenly twice as serene as he had been before, if it is possible to be quick and serene at once, and I got no more than another quick glimpse of those surrealist dreamscapes and pseudo-symbolist heartbreaks before we were both of us back in the Baron's little stadium.

"The women and girls there hadn't moved since we left, if only to shift in their seats to become more pictorially languid, and the food and wine still looked unplundered. They might have been whispering something among themselves; it was hard to hear in that room. The boy on his misshapen oud or theorbo was droning away even louder than before, the muscular servants had their backs against the tapestries of that tomblike room, and I noticed to my surprise that a tentacle of a hookah was draped over Baron Himmel's throne-cushion, and something in its glass reservoir was bubbling or smoking—or am I piling on the orientalia too thick? I should learn to trim my tales of so much fat, forgive me, forgive my mixed drinks and metaphors.

"To resume: We entered the theater, but no one turned to us until the Baron, after clambering back up onto his dais, clapped once to summon the tallest servant. He whispered something into the young man's ear, and the palace guard, or harem eunuch, or temple slave disappeared behind a tapestry and returned a moment later bearing a long, intricately carved sandalwood box with jewels set into its lid. I had already regained my seat in the corner next to an obese older woman who gave me the barest glance—did I note a trace of contempt, or was it only peevish annoyance that I had gone off alone with her avatar?—and we turned to watch what was happening on the dais. I was having trouble seeing, as well as hearing. Mind you, I continued to observe things in an anesthetized daze, though my mouth was starting to throb, and it was all as foreign and strange-seeming to me as if I were watching through murky glass an aquarium full of mermaids and manatees.

"The tall servant bowed to his master and presented the box to him. Baron Himmel held it across his crossed knees and, with childish glee upon his face, opened it as if it were a candy box. From where I was, I could not see inside, but he was already holding aloft a long platinum-silver object which glinted in the light of the sconces. I forced my eyes to concentrate and saw what appeared to be an object like a large silver-plated insecticide gun, with a chased receptacle and serpent-shaped handle. He handed this back to the servant, who in turn handed it to an overdressed, over-made-up woman who sat directly before his low throne. The Baron removed several more of these instruments, seven in total, which were distributed to various women—perhaps they were higher sorts of acolytes—along the benches. Thankfully, I was not requested to take up one.

"Mingling among his devotees in white, the Baron then gave a small speech, of which I caught only half, and half again which memory obfuscates, but which contained lines something like this: 'This rite we celebrate, my lovely Elysians, is old as time everlasting, practiced from the Indus Valley to the banks of the Tigris. In the days of Zarathustra or Zoroaster thousands prostrated themselves before the priests of the sun to welcome the new year, and when the light of the sun struck their bodies, they were driven to unforeseen levels of ecstasy. Though the original recipes have been lost, I use a close approximation, given me by a holy man of my acquaintance in Nepal; it is composed of crushed flowers and cactus beetles, as well as a few items you wouldn't find at the island commissary, ladies—an elixir most powerful, but which I am certain you will find most aromatic. A few of my faithful know just what it is to expect, but my novices, especially chosen by me to attend tonight's festivities, will soon enough learn. It is indeed a great deal of fun! We must now welcome Ra-Apollo, praise his many names, soak in the life-giving blood of his rays..." And more such magick rhetoric! When he finished talking, he motioned to the boy at his feet, who set aside his banjo and struck a little golden gong, and the Baron took up his own syringe, if I am correct in calling it that. He aimed straight at me. There was some giggling. As I was near the back of the room, however, and difficult to target, the syringe's ammunition struck a fair-haired young girl to my side. I screamed, or I should have, because she fell over, blood all down the front of her white toga-like gown, but when she rose immediately, laughing with blue eyes rolled back, I saw it was not blood at all, but a scarlet liquid which ran down her breast. Instead of being upset that her gown was ruined, the girl pealed with laughter like little chariot bells, I can still remember—and soon the whole room was laughing with her as the women aimed their oversized atomizers and splattered one another with this red, syrupy substance. I laughed, too, I know not whether because it was such a comic scene, or the hysteria was catching. For a few moments, despite my queasy footing, I avoided the carnage and watched as the women gleefully shot away like boys with water-pistols in a vicious game of cops and robbers. Then I was struck myself, full in the face, and I realized what the frenzy was all about: The elixir seemed to penetrate my pores as it ran down my neck and shoulders, seeping into my décolletage and past, tickling me like a thousand fingers, and I began to laugh uncontrollably, as well, partly due to the feathery sensation beneath my clothes, partly because I suddenly felt euphoric, mad for life, insipidly happy to be among these beautiful creatures around me, like a flock of swans, a giddy flock of swans, indeed..."

At this point my hostess took a long lingering swallow of her tonic, as if to compose herself, and rose from her seat. She stood before me, a breeze from the Sargasso Sea wending its way in from the parlor as if in pursuit of us, and paced before the gothic fireplace (a preposterous affectation, I might add—that fireplace in this clime). A fresh enthusiasm animated her, and I saw she was reliving the whole puzzling slapstick scene in her mind. She did not look at me as she spoke the rest.

"This went on for ages and ages, I suppose," she continued, "with the little Baron in the midst of us, watching us—I never saw such a ludicrous sight, though everything struck me as ludicrous in that room—yet he was still immaculate, as were that Bedouin boy and the loinclothed servants, who kept their distance. I don't know how they avoided being stained, since they moved so slowly as if they all were drugged, which of course they had to have been. And though it must be impossible, the Baron seemed to be choreographing all our actions, like a mad stage-manager directing one of the more improbable ensemble scenes from the first third of Dante's Comedy. The former tableau was now in chaos, bacchantes wailing all about me, for the effect of the elixir was changing. The women were tearing off their clothing—slips and stockings and girdles and chemises whirled in the air—and soon I found out why, for the tickling sensation became more irritating than pleasant, and suddenly I could not breathe; I felt my lungs collapsing and, just as if I had been literally set on fire, I could feel the flames spread down my torso and limbs. I wanted to escape that room and fling myself into the ocean, but the doors were all locked, there were no doors, the doors had never existed. I fell against the tapestries, bringing one down upon me, and saw that the rest of the women had descended into deeper circles of hell—perhaps it was the ether, after all, that was to save me in the end, for it had numbed my body just enough so I was aware of what was going on, even if I was helpless to stop myself.

"I witnessed what might at first glance look like utter devastation, a study for the massacre at Chios or the rape of the Sabines, or some other overwhelming battle-scene darkened by the varnish of time, but all this was fresh, was real, was happening before my blurred eyes: women shrieking like banshees, tearing at their own skin as well as each other, naked girls smeared with blood, or what looked like blood, goblets smashed and food scattered, and a strange man in their midst goading them on to perform further depravities and humiliations upon themselves. Depravities, did I say? I have not yet begun!

"At once, like an undertow gathering speed beneath the waves, a different mood came over the room—frenzy had turned to violence, and violence to lust. The women rolled on the floor and licked at each other like dogs, and the Baron stripped his lute-player, whipped his back with a riding crop. I remember at one point he sealed his vile lips upon mine, and I let him, I enjoyed it, God, I begged for more... Next he called his servant-boys into the center of the room, and the women turned on them like wild beasts. I know, I witnessed, I was one of them. You're thinking, 'Surely you must have escaped, surely you found a door-handle and pushed it, you ran for your life.' But I repeat: I was one of them. I kissed the Baron, I streaked his linen red. So did all the rest. Only the numbed center of my pain, a calm in the whirlpool's vortex of my consciousness, pulled me from that room, through the secret door under the tapestry where I had watched the boy enter, carrying the wooden box—but all that was later. I was there, I pounced upon those virile ephebes, too—we pulled them onto us, and they crushed us beneath their bodies; I felt immense agony, ungodly passion, and then we, that insane baron included, tore at their throats...

"Did I? Did I, really? I have asked myself that innumerable times over the years. Did I really totally lose my senses, forget this well-bred, well-fed Episcopalian soul I've nurtured all my life in the hope of attaining at least a glimpse of heaven, did I lose my senses so completely that I would act with the fury of a Greek chorus and consume flesh in the most abhorrent sense of the word? I have tortured myself, asking these things. Only by assuring myself each time that it was the result of a maniacal corrupter, at worst a fantasy I had suppressed so long it leapt fully formed from my imagination, have I managed to control myself, though so often I teeter on the precipice I have needed the close attention of doctors and therapists, too many to count—but there goes all my money; I've been milked and bilked for endless decades. I know you think I'm a poor, sick, crazy old woman, but I tell you as I totter here that if you had been in my position, at that horrid party, you might take pity on my delusions. But that, that—" she accused the portrait, propped as it was against the enormous grate— "is no delusion, it is my proof that Baron Himmel once walked upon this earth as did Lucifer himself."

Despite the Countess's anguished words and delivery, I could tell there was some not insignificant part of her which was enjoying itself. In her life, this had become The Story, her own legend, as it were, which explained everything, and I imagine she must indeed have told it to numberless psychiatrists and analysts, as well as anyone she managed to trap within her lonely house for long enough. Even so, I believe, like most fables, especially the most unbelievable ones, it has its basis in fact. I once saw a Mogul painting in the Fogg at Harvard depicting what is or was in India called a "Holi" festival, complete with the blood-syringes Phoebe Montague had mentioned, and she might have seen it, too, or had it described to her, though that painting was chaste and quaint and her story, perhaps because it had been implanted there by a small-time faith-healer who knew how to lead astray pretty women and widows with money, had become all that was loathsome and tragic in her life. I did pity the Countess Montague, I wanted to tell her that, but she was not done.

"After that," she said, settling next to me now on the sinking divan, "I lost my appetite and my teeth bothered me no end. One by one I had them out, as if to keep myself from eating ever again, and I admit I looked forward with joy to the moment when I would enter my ethereal trance—a sort of waiting-room to the bliss of a soul freed from the body, wouldn't you agree?—where for a few minutes, perhaps an hour or more, I would be able to forget. But there came a day when they were all gone, my teeth, and I woke up with these horrid dentures in my mouth and I cried. I am too weak-stomached for alcohol or pills, I guess **,** and so I'm resigned now to this walking death, maintaining a body I've lost all interest in, forcing myself through every day if only because it is one step closer to the grave..."

I turned to her, with, I imagine, a very disbelieving look in my eyes. She did not appear a figure of tragedy, in her crisp dress and carefully swept hair, and she did not really fool me, at least then. Lately, staring each day into the half-finished baron's eyes above the mantel opposite my bed (for where else would one put one's very own Kovalev?) I have come to doubt my resistance, then, that afternoon, but I must go on...

"If all these strange things did happen, or even if you only imagined them," I said to the Countess, "why then did you buy the portrait? Wouldn't it be the last thing you'd want?"

"Indeed, indeed! But I did not buy it—it forced itself upon me, as the Baron had once done, after he died, or rather, was murdered; but that is another tale, child, and we haven't all day; and my 'short' story has gone on as long as the Bayeux Tapestry. Indeed, indeed, he had the gall to will his portrait to me, so how could I get rid of the damned thing? I was a collector, even the foremost collector, and he was dead, so I couldn't just send it back. And then I knew it would be a difficult sell, unsigned and unfinished, so I just put it away, stored it in an attic or broom-closet somewhere, and tried to forget about it. Forget! That man, that monster! That messiah, I might add, because enough of his female followers thought so, so many that it was determined he must be martyred—but as I said, I won't go into all that..."

"Did you never go back there?" I hesitated. "I mean, surely, you might have talked to a few of the women afterward and found out just what had happened .... how far you had—you had all gone. And you couldn't blame yourself; it was he who drugged you, or whatever, and he must have had a hard time keeping servants, at that."

"I admit, after our mutual episode I shunned the women on that miserable little island. Besides, even though I speak all my ex-husbands' languages, I did not speak theirs. And on an island which is very poor but for its exile community, who is to notice when a few village boys run away and are not heard from each year? The Baron was brought down soon after by his own people before scandal ever did... After that night, I wanted to get away, and I went away for a very long time, I traveled, I stayed at friends'—country estates, guest suites, the odd sanatorium or two, an itinerary more tiring than restful—I tried to forget... But still I came back here, because this is the house I loved the best, the one we, the Count and I, built together. Where my paintings were all but one hung. I came back here and I disappeared from the rest of the world... And so I stay, until the world disappears from me."

There are moments in one's life—and I realize this has been said many times, in more graceful ways—when one must play at "Imitation of Christ" as one would charades and take a fellow soul's burdens up to become your own. Spare this saint her shrine, though; I don't really believe bartering sins for cash is correct atonement, and I don't trust in redemption except the kind one gets for old, used cans and bottles. However, Countess Montague saw her body as a vessel for sin, even imagined sin, which is the most painful kind, and I saw it was my duty as an art lover, at least, to uncork that vessel, as it were, and let out what had been fermenting there so long. Perhaps she had only loved the Baron a short while, and consequent hate had spoiled her years. "I want to buy your painting," I said at last, taking up my handbag and dipping a blind hand in for my Hermès suede-back checkbook.

She was too startled to act startled. "Won't your company require some further proof of veracity?" she said, quite steadily, as if she had rehearsed those words.

"It's not for the firm," I answered her. "They'll be satisfied to confirm it's all a mistake... No, the painting is for me." I knew Father would cover the check, would come through for his favorite daughter if I made up a good enough story. He could sell my racehorse if he liked. You see, the Countess is not the only one who is skilled at invention. And so I took the painting with me, and so there it is, just within sight of my bed, and so there we are. That is my story of how I got my own Kovalev—now do you believe me?
Sand

A bench, a cot, a window, a chest: her room will be all she needs or wants, though everything here could be hers if she likes. The room will be white-washed and cool, shaded by date-palms in the courtyard outside. She is going to like the room, for it seems to be an answer of sorts; it says: yes, sleep please, forget. The village will be all shadows and light, no colors, just the white of adobe buildings and the black shadows they cast. Sometimes the shadows might turn into people, sitting together in the sun in their dark robes, working looms and abacuses. There is no name she could give this place, nothing she would remember from a book to describe and explain it. When she has the energy, which won't be often, she'll put on the plain muslin dress they have provided her and walk through the village, down the narrow alleys between high whitewashed walls, to the edge of the desert, where the hot dazzle of the sand meets her and it is just as impossible to go further as it would be if the sand were ocean instead. She might sometimes stand gazing into the distance a long time, like one who waits for something or someone without knowing why. After trying to make out whatever mirages hover on the horizon she'll return to her room, to the wooden bowl of rice and the cup of clear cold well water.

At the age of five you try to pluck a wren from the sky and tumble down the steps of St. Peter's; when you come to on the cool grass behind the rectory, surrounded by family and children and nuns, you look up into the hovering face of a playmate and say through tears, "But you're an angel!" No one understands what you meant, not even yourself. They hush you and carry you to the car. When the next afternoon the boy drowns at the lake, your parents ask you questions, but you don't remember anything about your fall or what you said. You feel you're somehow to blame for the boy's death—and the still tender bump on the back of your head is a reminder of something worse, though you can't say what. Only much later in the middle of a sleepless night does the somehow scary thought come to you that on that day your life had just begun, its grains of sand jarred then into their trickle down from the top of the hourglass to the bottom, like your mother's egg-timer. You pray as always to Jesus on the wall, but you wonder for the first time if he can really hear you, if he can understand any more than all the others.

I was told in catechism class to think of my soul as a sheet. At birth the sheet would be white and clean, save for a blood-black smear of Original Sin in its very center. As one grew older and learned to sin that spot would widen and stain a larger and larger area of that sheet wound around my heart of hearts. I had been baptized with blessed oil and rosewater, my mother made me take baths twice a week, I washed my face and hands three times a day, but I could never scrub out that inky fingerprint representing that time I hit my oldest sister, or the gray stains illustrating my girlish greed, or that large black splotch acquired when I let the boy have me that night after the folk music concert. And who knows what shapes, what forms the premonitions I would wake to after hammer-attacks to my brain would leave on the sheet? Wasn't this curse of mine, however unwanted and puzzling, somehow evil? Something inside me wanted to hate Jesus for making me the way I was, and that hatred ripped right through the sheet. But my soul was no sheet, no shroud. By the time I finished school I had come to think of it instead as a black, flapping, birdlike thing tethered to my back. Sometimes it squawked more loudly than other times. Sometimes I wanted more than anything to be freed of it, to cut it loose.

They must have found me wandering through the desert, she will tell herself when she is well enough to think, for I must have been out of my mind and near to death, and then they carried me back to their village to this little room. When she can walk again, when they have fed and cared for her enough, she will try to remember her past, but the past will seem to have been driven from her like evil spirits, leaving her empty but purified. The villagers will not speak her language when they do speak to her at all, and they do not stop her from doing what she likes. There will be no books to read and no one to talk to, but she won't be unhappy. She will wonder sometimes if this place is some sort of afterlife, though everything is too still and unchanging for any heaven she has ever imagined. Anything could be possible, though, and she'll begin to think that in one sense at least she has certainly died, because she has died from whatever world she knew before. Here, in this place, she will own nothing, not a history, nor a home, not even a name.

When the headaches come to you, which is not often, you grow fevered and irritable, though in the midst of the shattering pain or the ensuing insomnia a clear blue patch of lucidity breaks through, a moment's interim when wholly foreign thoughts come drifting along like skywriting spelling out the future. These visions are not usually profound; they are mere keyhole-views into time, shards of dreams that instruct or promise. You may have the sudden, irrational, overwhelming desire to call up a friend and ask if a pet bird has flown away (it has) or you may make an unexpected pronouncement to a coworker that he should watch out for a telegram that evening (it comes). You are not able to stop yourself from saying such things, but fortunately as soon as you do the throbbing at the base of your skull ceases and it is as if you had just woken from a long and deep slumber. Sometimes you wonder if this power has mistakenly been invested in you; if you were a saint, perhaps, you might be able to transform it into something miraculous. Instead, you are a troubled girl and then a cynical woman who has a hard time believing in anything, not even in these spells that come and go quickly and violently as thunderstorms, and most of all you have always wanted to be anyone at all in the world but yourself.

On the wall of the bedroom which I shared with two of my older sisters, a framed portrait of Christ looked down on us and wept delicate inky tears. My mother, who was a sensible product of a parochial education, had hung the print there, I suppose, for our spiritual protection. Christ's brow was bloody from the crown of thorns and his hands dripped traceries of blood where the nails had been driven and down his wrists. He was depicted parting his vestments in a Superman gesture, ripping open his chest to reveal his sacred heart. When I was very young, this picture terrified me, not so much because it was horrible but because I thought Christ _was_ watching me, following my every motion in the room. Maybe my mother had hung it there in an attempt to scare my strange talent out of me, though later I realized she knew less about my "attacks" than I had once supposed. She did know, however, that I was the one who told her first about my father's death, before the phone call, before she herself felt faint, knowing that something indeed had happened. But because I had said such an awful thing I was slapped across the face and sent to my room, to face that picture on the wall. The powers and motives of the divine were vague to me: both God and Satan were elements of darkness. If I wet the bed, would Christ bring his bloody hand down to strike me? So I said my prayers, I climbed the many steps to St. Peter's every Sunday with my family, I murmured grace at the dinner table, I would do anything to appease the darkness. A priest once had dinner with my family. I had never been close to a man of the cloth before—my family always sat in the back of the church, in case the babies cried. All the time the priest was eating I watched his hands. There were no nail holes or stigmata, he did not change the table water into wine, he did not even sense the evil brooding within me; he was a fake.

Each day the blind woman, the oldest and fattest woman in the village, will bring her rice and water; she never has an appetite for anything more. She will seldom leave her room. Some days she will not even get out of bed. At night she will lie there, watching the moon as it rises above the desert, reaching for its white facets in her sleep as if hoping to pin it to her breast like a brooch. And so sleep and waking will for a long time be difficult to tell apart, but she will have no strength to rise and walk and confront the sun. This will not disturb her; she will feel she is saving up energy for when the time is right to leave here, when she must walk across burning sands back to her own world, wherever and whatever it had been.

Over the years the frequency of the headaches lessens to the point where you rarely have more than one or two a year and then your oblique predictions are feebler than ever: "That dog has skulls in his eyes." "The next train through town is carrying a bad storm with its coal." No one takes much notice of these statements' urgency or accuracy, for there are no discernible patterns. You forget about your spells as soon as they are over and only very seldom must you rub away that vestige of an ache in the temples and the back of your neck. Maybe it is because you are concentrating on other things: boys, then men, school, then work, the future. Occasionally, however, you find yourself imagining a place where you have never been: an ancient, treeless place which has gradually come to take on a substance of its own outside the world you know but not really just inside your mind; you see it sometimes in daydreams, sometimes in flashes like a nighttime landscape lit by greenish heat lightning. You do not know what it means. Perhaps that is it—the sand sifting through your head means nothing, as everything must in this world of people and places and things, and therefore what you may have invented or that which may have been revealed only to you promises escape.

There were seven children in my family: three boys and four girls. I was the last girl and the sixth child. As only children can do we hated each other with fury and contempt. My older sisters were jealous of me because they thought I was my father's favorite; my brothers ignored me as only boys can. I was called a selfish girl; I wanted everything; I wanted to own the moon and stars, I wanted to marry my father and move to another house in another town with him, I wanted to lock my mother in a box and only bring her out when I wanted breakfast. I wanted to kill my brothers and sisters, and they wanted to kill me. Myself I called Rebecca; they called me Becky. They all stayed in the city where we were born; I moved far away. Once I had loved my father more than any of them. He was a traveling salesman who traveled all across the country and I thought his mission in life seemed to be the most important one I had ever heard of. My father took me for a walk in the park one day when I was seven. He was a big man with big, soft hands who could take hold of my wrists and spin me until the world was a picture puzzle with all the colored pieces mixed up and falling around me. When I fell off the swing he hugged me so tight he seemed to be squeezing the tears out of me. He perched me on the slides and the memorial war guns overlooking the river and took my picture. I kept that picture for many years, not just because I was in it, but because it was me as seen by my father: looking at the photograph, I was looking through his eyes. My father died in a fiery car wreck somewhere in Arizona not long after that walk in the park, an accident I was told that I had seen, though it was impossible for me to have seen, and once again I could not remember how I knew, and once again I thought I was being blamed. Pray to Jesus and Mary, my mother would say—but I didn't want them, I wanted my father. He has gone across a great desert like the one the three wise kings rode across, I would tell myself, and he will return to his princess, me, one day.

She will be in the village many weeks before first becoming aware of the presence of another stranger like herself. It seems she knew he would be coming, and then that he had already come, before she sees him for certain—sitting in a palm-grove near a fountain, hands folded across his chest, head bowed and eyes closed. She will wonder if he is another mad person the villagers had found wandering in the wastelands, perhaps a survivor from some sort of accident; something about him—the mustache or his gray suit—reminds her of someone she knew or saw once, a long time ago, in that other life she can't remember. She will watch him from one of the village's adobe towers, not really surprised at all to see him. By the time she descends the stairs and crosses the village to find him he will have disappeared, and there will be no way to ask where he has been taken (for she has the distinct idea he is being held captive). She goes back to her spare room then, and for the first time since she has come here she will realize how endlessly the long empty days stretch out before her, a chain that might never be broken unless something unforeseen happens.

At the age of thirty you again suffer a fall, this time on the icy sidewalk in front of the factory where you work. Between the first faint and the deep lasting faint which comes an hour later and will not lift for days you manage to speak to the friend who has rushed up to help you: "Please go home," you tell her, the words coming from your lips as if you are being controlled by an unseen ventriloquist. "Your house is on fire." But she misunderstands, helps to carry you back into the factory, places cold wet rags over your burning forehead. That same day a mad ex-lover breaks into your friend's house and shoots her husband. Once again you feel somehow responsible and your friend avoids you when you have recovered, as if you are dangerous, as if you spread misfortune. Why do I have to suffer twice? you wonder, for these disasters—where have I failed? When you collapse into unconsciousness a few weeks later it is almost with a sense of relief. There is that place you can go to, hot and barren, far across forests and oceans, where the wind stings your eyes with sand and it is like a blessing.

I remembered only one other thing about my father all through my childhood: how once he had cut himself badly with a long knife while slicing a watermelon, and how the sight of all that blood terrified me, worse than any blood Jesus might shed, worse than any human could bear. I felt the pain for him, sucked my fingers and cried, wanted to climb onto my father's lap and never leave. My mother did not understand; she never did. She smoked one cigarette after another and was able to fill my lungs with that blue smoke from a great distance, as if the earth were always smoldering around her. If she came to see me in the middle of the night because I was sick, I could follow her movement down the hall by the glow of her cigarette, and if I wanted to find her in the daytime I just sought a trail of smoke. When we were told of Mother Mary in catechism class, I imagined her holding the infant Jesus in one hand as she lit a cigarette with the other. Later, much later, I was told by my mother and grandmother both that I would burn in hell like my father because I no longer went to church. That doesn't matter, I said, I don't believe in hell. The truth was, I didn't want to, for sometimes I did imagine hell, and it wasn't a place of eternal flames and suffering, but a darkness, a bottomless well from which you could glimpse the light of heaven at the top, but could never reach that faint glimmer, that tease of a promise. It was easier to say it all did not exist, not even heaven. Stories about good children who went to heaven I despised; they had still died young, and I like all children expected or hoped to live forever. So then I knew I must be indeed be bad, to desire such impossibilities. I was never good enough for my mother, anyway, never as perfect as my older sisters. The "spells" I experienced, infrequent as they were, made me different, odd. People avoided me. My sisters dated nice boys, they did not use foul language, they got good marks in school. If I was so smart the way my counselors said I really was, then why did I cause so much trouble? I was the bad seed of my family. Only poison flowers grow from bad seeds. I should pray to God for forgiveness, I was often told. Oh, if my mother had only known about the boy and the baby which I could not bring myself to give birth to and the vacuum that sucked up the tiny fist of flesh—then it would have been her that I would have been praying to for forgiveness. But she would not know, and I would marry as soon as I could and leave town and work in a factory where no one knew me or about my unwanted gift, and I would make friends who knew nothing about me, either, and I would spit in the eye of Jesus Christ himself if that's what it took to be left alone.

In the next few weeks she will begin to see the stranger now and then, but always at a distance, always out of reach. Once it will seem he does catch sight of her from the opposite end of an alley—but as he is raising a hand (a signal?) a drove of goats and their herdsmen come between her and the newcomer; by the time they pass he will have gone again. Days on end she will search for him throughout the village, but the shadows never reveal his gaunt figure, and the light never shines on his tired face wherever she looks. It begins to seem these people do not want her to meet him, at least not yet, though she is never sure of their intentions. Are they keeping her as a prisoner, too, instead of merely as a guest? Why haven't they contacted the world she knew once and told those who knew her she has been found? Maybe the villagers are just as trapped in this place as she is, she will begin to wonder. They must be keeping their newest refugee locked away, underground in a cellar, or in a tower room, though she is never able to find the right street, the right door. She will see him only once more—being led like an invalid between the arms of two robed figures toward the village gates. If he is dying or being led to his death, she will not be able to tell. She'll want to run after him, to talk to him at last, but the marketplace will be too crowded; she will not be able to catch up. Later, looking out from the balcony of her room, she will think she sees what might be a man's lone dark figure out in the middle of the white desert, dragging himself slowly along belly to the sand like a tortoise—but by then it is too dark to see clearly. Illusion or not, she comes to realize she has lost the man and her chance to speak to him. It will be as if a rope has slipped from her hands and swift wind and waves have carried such a promise far from her.

You are placed in a hospital room while in a comatose state; the site of the old concussion, it appears, had been struck with some force and a sort of blood clot, a hematoma, has formed: you are not given long to live. You have no sense of time passing, but it does—how much, you don't know. When at last you do come to it is not without some surprise to your doctors, who promptly consign you to a battery of unpleasant tests—brain-scans, exploratory surgery, and other difficult procedures. Perhaps it is the drugs, but you spend the weeks in an almost euphoric state. Nurses seem to descend from the heavens to console you; they walk on clouds and place cool silver thermometers under your tongue and give you big delicious fruits to eat. Food has never tasted better, the colors surrounding you have never looked brighter—as if your previous life had been a fuzzy dream; the very texture of the hospital sheets is a delight to read with fingertips and skin. Despite all the comforts you eventually express a wish to leave what can only be a transient paradise—life outside now seems full of possibilities you had not envisioned before. You tell yourself you'll move from your little apartment in your little town, travel on the settlement money provided by the factory, meet new people, read exciting books, discover the world you once ran from. Even with a shaven scalp and a bandage plastered to the back of your head you have never felt happier and more anxious to do what you have always wanted. The doctors must set you free now, before the annihilating sand covers you once again.

Before my first communion, when I was to taste that sour wine and press the starchy wafer against the roof of my mouth for the first time, I was led to the two-sided confessional in a candle-lit chapel of the church. It was like being locked in a dark closet, and it smelled like the old-lady mouth mints my grandmother would puff in my face. The sliding screen facing the priest's chamber hid him from my sight, but I could feel his presence in there, smell the lavender soap on his skin and the oil in his hair, and the fact that he was invisible made it all the worse. From the opposite side I could hear another girl from my catechism class revealing the innermost torments of her heart: she had lied, kicked the cat, called her brothers names. Though I hummed, stamped my feet, plugged my ears, I could still hear her. Even in the confessional I was committing a sin by eavesdropping. How could I tell the priest of the time my brother and I had shown each other everything or when I stole lunch money to buy candy or, much worse, how I would go into fainting fits and say things that would inexplicably turn out to be somehow right or true—when a classmate was listening on the other side? When the priest slid back his screen, I stammered and cried, and he prescribed four Acts of Contrition. Six years later, when I was fourteen, a boy from my block, two years older, drove us after a school band concert in his parents' car to the black star-glittering lake outside town. We parked and he began to deliver instructions which I didn't want to follow but was afraid not to. The seats folded down flat; we left the air-conditioning on because it was so hot. He told me he loved me, but I could not think of anything equally convincing to say. That didn't seem to bother him—he took me and when it was over admitted he didn't love me, but that didn't really matter because it wasn't such a terrible thing to do, after all. I hadn't felt much, but was relieved to know he didn't love me, because I didn't want to marry him, I didn't want to bear his children, I didn't want to set up life in a crowded house with him. If we held no love for each other, there was possibly no obligation, no regret. He drove me back home in silence. I almost felt happy. But when I saw my lighted front porch, I began to feel the first pangs of guilt, which would press upon me like stones the way they used to kill witches and keep me from doing what I had done again for years.

The villagers will show her how to do simple tasks, such as mashing dates into a pulp; this is added to a mixture which is then fermented into a bittersweet wine. They use only large flat stones and a wooden trough to collect the juice. Her teachers will be polite, but she will find it hard to understand them, and sometimes they resort to swatting her hands. Soon she will be mashing dates or picking dates half the day, her fingers callusing and blackening, and she will not really mind the toil or the heat at all—though they never force her to work, she comes to realize this is what they expect of her, this is what she owes them. They will sit and watch her from a distance, working their abacuses and looms, talking among themselves as if they know her secrets even if she does not. Perhaps there would be no consequences if she were to refuse to work, but there will be no reason to discover if this is true or not. This menial work becomes something to occupy her barren days—the repetition is soothing, the simplicity a relief from troubled thoughts. This will be her life, a replacement for that other life she can no longer remember. This village will become hers, and hers, too will be these strange dark people—this family without names, whose faces are interchangeable, who accept her merely because she has arrived in their midst to pay a penance for she knows not what. Months, years will pass. And so she will grow old.

When it appears that your health has improved remarkably despite the clot and lesion and there is no point in detaining you for further testings, just as the right forms are being signed and you have already consulted a travel agent, lightning strikes again, deep within your cerebellum, and you lapse into another gray and monotonous sleep. You are aware of voices hovering around you like distant insects, but the auditory sensations do not coincide with what you see or think you see passing before that movie screen in your head: formless apparitions, nearly transparent beings that exist solely as fluctuations in the surrounding color field, which you register more as outlines described by heat or cold than by substance. Everyone is always asking you the same questions, but you cannot answer because you do not understand; it is a foreign tongue these shapeless specters dancing in the void speak. Fever and chills come to you with the heaviness of strong men, men who prostrate your body and do not allow you to rise. You feel yourself falling as if into soft sand, sinking into death perhaps, unable even to thrash your limbs and cry.

Soon after my night at the lake I went through a period of extreme devoutness. I thought if I prayed enough I might be able to ward off the impurity of boys and stave off the headaches which still came now and then. I began to go to church several times a week, I lit votive candles for all my dead relatives, I even began to think of the possibility of taking the veil. The Bible I carried with me everywhere had belonged to my father, though I never did actually read much of it. My mother noticed the change in me, and although she didn't praise me, she quit criticizing me. My brothers and sisters snickered as if they thought I was being foolish. No one knew, however, why I suddenly appeared so holy or of the guilt and pain I was trying to assuage through prayer. Sometimes I think I simply wanted to punish myself. Why should I be happy when there was so much to be sad about? If only my family would stone me! The city fathers as well as the church fathers try and sentence me! Sometimes I would scratch into my own flesh, leaving welts on my arms hideous as heroin tracks, but the flesh of others still swayed me. And so my body began to long for new boyfriends, I admitted to myself that I felt no calling, and I saw that I was getting nowhere... It was ironic then that my own husband did not believe in God. I had never known anyone who would admit to this. He listened carefully when I told him how, although I did not go to church anymore or believe what they had told me there, I still believed in and feared God. Then he told me I was stupid for fearing something that did not exist. In the war, he said, when you heard the choppers whirling over your head you knew it wasn't God you had to fear, but your fellow man. He had gone into the jungles a trained Methodist and come out a confirmed atheist. I loved him, he loved me, but the marriage didn't last long. We began to accuse each other of things neither of us really believed but said anyway. When words failed him he used his fists, not much at first, but enough later to make me want out fast. I went into marriage a fallen-away Catholic and came out a martyr. I had put up with so much because I had been told that marriage was a sacred thing, and the door swung only one way: In. I was a fool. When my marriage ended in failure I felt my whole life was a failure, too. Somewhere I had gone wrong, and I went back to church to see if renewed faith would make me stronger. I reiterated my sins over and over at confession until I was not stronger, but weaker from guilt and frustration. Still, I persevered—someday, I thought, if I prayed enough or revealed enough of my wicked little thoughts to the priest behind his sliding screen the weight would be lifted from my back and I would be freed from these earthly sorrows. But nothing was enough. My life became more and more complicated, though I wanted only to have utter simplicity. So I sold or gave away most of my possessions and went to live in yet another dirty factory town in an apartment building surrounded by the parking lots of factories, a desert of asphalt. I went to work in one of the factories, doing the same thing over and over again until I sometimes felt in my mind my hands making the repeated motions long after the whistle had blown, and I knew the machines I worked with better than most of the people I met in the cafeteria. Gradually I drowned out my fears of damnation and suffering and headaches with the whine and grind of the oily, smoking machines, until I was numbed into a kind of submission, or so I often thought, standing ready to collapse from boredom at my station. There was nothing to care about, nothing to love in this world, and I accepted what life had given me. I let men who smelled like the machines have me. Once I thought something was there inside me, growing bigger, and I was prepared to cut through the tethers of my soul with a razor blade, but I didn't have the courage once I had run the bathwater. Instead I became sick, so sick I would have lost the child if there had been a child, if there had been a father. When I gathered the strength at last I got into my car and went speeding down the freeway; it was early morning, cold, with the sun just coming up. Then I felt a shadow as if from the wing of a very large bird pass over me and I had to pull over, wait until I quit shaking. I knew then that it would not be much longer, that the sand was falling fast.

Eventually she will no longer even try to remember that other life she once thought she had had in another world, the much more complex world she had so often wanted to leave behind somewhere on the farthest side of the desert. Her skin will have browned almost as dark as the villagers', and though she never will learn to speak their language or even know their names she will be able to understand them when they talk—not the words but their intent, their emotional weight. The idea of crossing the blazing sands no longer will come to mind; desert sand seems to fill her head, smoothing away the pain she had once known, obliterating any lingering traces of another life.

In time they wheel you from the hospital room you no longer perceive, down fluorescent hallways and past ghosts who seem to recognize you, and into what might be the low-ceilinged chamber of a vehicle like the ambulance which had delivered you to the hospital weeks before. When you begin to come out of your trance you understand that you are being taken to another place, to a specialist in a distant city perhaps, and that it is all right now to go back to sleep and remain there, for your body will have to be carried on other transports for many miles now. Somewhere far away they will cut that black part out of you that was a torment and a terror. When you eventually awake, you sense, things will be different at last, life will be full of wonders again.

Death was once explained to me by my mother, months before I went to my first catechism class. From what I understood, we someday all go to a place a long way away where everything will be cheerful as a kiddie cartoon, though no one will ever be allowed to go home. It would be like entering a flock of angels who are all part of a great hungry body that would swallow me up. I'd become one with an infinite number of souls. I did not believe her, it was scary and ridiculous. No, I protested—you're lying—we all live forever, don't we? Things don't die. People don't die. I didn't want to leave home. I loved everything, everybody—until I learned the ways of the world. And then sometimes, especially when the pain in my forehead was worst, I think I did want to die a little, at least to find out what it was like, and other times, merely to escape. What would it mean, I thought, to pass from life, which is filled with darknesses, into a darkness vaster and darker than all that which had come before? So I waited in bed every night for the fire to sweep over me; even in daylight, as if swimming, I anticipated the wave that would pick me up and carry me away forever. I stood in the wind on a high hill and longed to go soaring into infinity like a kite. Later I would hold my breath on the freeway, trying to break the sound barrier, counting the cars I left behind me in a blaze of color: one two three... Death was taking an exit, accelerating on a ramp, merging into traffic somewhere, I was certain of it. I counted the cars, almost wanting one of them to take my life away, take it to somewhere that would be, if not better, at least different. But it did not happen. The other car would swerve momentarily into my lane and I'd be left with a thumping heart and white knuckles. Once when I had narrowly missed an oncoming semi I found a church off the freeway—it wasn't even Catholic—went inside, knelt, and prayed to that Great Something I longed more than ever to believe in right then but could not... In the middle of the prayer I realized I did not even know what I was praying for.

And then one day the stranger will return, the pale-skinned man with the mustache, from back across the desert perhaps, and this time looking far older, white-haired and stooped. Has that much time passed? she will ask herself, watching from a tower window. There are no mirrors, she has only a basin of water in which to see her reflected face waver and disappear, and she will not be able to tell if she has aged so, as well. The old man: she will observe him for a long time, afraid to run to him; he wanders the streets below, tapping before himself with a cane, being turned away from one door after another. It begins to appear the old man is searching for someone—and then she will know it must be herself he is looking for, and she will at last rush into the streets, find him again by the fountain, asleep in the cool of the rippling shade as if he had never left the spot since the first time she had seen him there. She will see then that there are hideous scars across his face, and blood on his hands, as if he has been the victim of tortures or a terrible accident. Should she even wake him? When he opens his eyes and speaks excitedly to her, taking her hands in his, she will not be able to understand his language, even though it was once hers as well—but it has been too long since she last spoke it; she will not know for sure what he is trying to tell her. He will look upon her with blind, wild fright, as one would look at a loved one who has strangely slipped into insanity, and will lead her to the edge of the village, pointing repeatedly into the distance.

Here, now, you think—as you are lifted up into the noise and bright lights of what seems to be a great howling machine—you will tell yourself a story now all about yourself as you fall again into sleep. It is just as true as any story, and means more than life itself. It is a simple and short story, which is the best kind. There is a room in this story and in it you find happiness. There are people who treat you kindly. There is even a man who loves you, but from afar. Everything comes true in dreams, these stories we tell ourselves. Everything happens in them at once. Everything finds its own peace. Everything lasts forever, in a story. Now, now you must fall asleep at last, for a very long time, and tell yourself this story.

So. That was how I left this world. Not by my own hand or a car on the freeway or in a swift current or on high winds or in a house on fire. But by something altogether different, something I have yet to understand, something from above, possibly, in the air—in heaven? No, there is no heaven, no hell, no limbo, those silly tales for children. Perhaps I simply said goodbye in my sleep. Waved once and disappeared. If so, the doctors were kind. This, though, is not what I expected. This room with four white walls is not where I had once thought I'd be taken. But it is all right. I am treated well. Everyone is kind. This, I understand, is what is meant by destiny. This is my house. This my cot, my chair, my window. These quiet streets are mine to walk down, alone. This endless colorless featureless sand is mine to gaze out over with wonder. And at night—see? That is my moon reflected in my water basin: my only jewel, my only possession that bone-white moon.

Her eyes will be blinded by the glare of sun on the white glassy sand, but she suddenly realizes what he is asking her to do. She will have to cross the sand, and do it now. He had been telling her she was free to go, had always been free to go, and all she has to do now is walk. Though the sand will burn her naked feet and the sun beat down mercilessly upon her head, she knows this must be just the beginning, that out there beyond the blue blur of the horizon, between sky and sand, there lies, if not the answer, the question to be asked which will save her life.
Arms Outstretched And Head Bowed

Now, in the pallid glow of a solitary lamp—yes, even now that you are long gone and these rooms no longer sound with your murmurs and your laughter—a maddening image projects itself from my fevered brain into the darkness beyond this window: a shadow shifting among darker shadows, a moth with its wings spread hovering against the pane in the night like bloodless hands held together and trembling. Of course it is nothing, but I was sure for a moment that it was your profile in the grayness, that those were your cold white hands. When I raise my eyes again from this ink stained palimpsest, it is because I think I hear a crepitation of leaves in the garden below, but it cannot be you; it is the coming storm or a cat, it is nothing—and the hands have glided away. Often after midnight, in bed, my heart halts a second between beats and I awake—there is no one bending over me after all. Yet in the pier-glass I see a flush in the hollow of my neck, as if, if... Through the window I see a thin, twisted figure hurrying out of the rain—the flickering silhouette of a bare black branch, magnified by a streetlight, reaching out from the tree and pulled in again by the wind. And still I grip the casement, my forehead against the chill glass, and count the hours until dawn. In the windowpane, in this sallow light, I can see myself and see through myself—out into the winter trees—at one and the same time; I must not stare too long or my own reflection will darken and disappear, and with that will come the feeling of slipping soundless, mistakenly into an abyss. Of this sensation I tried to tell you often enough: how when you looked long into me I felt myself carried into the matrix of a maelstrom too swift to battle, how it was as if your hands had seized tight my ankles, pulling me under. I wanted to plunge a dagger through your heart then, to kill you before you killed me—if only I had the courage—no, the _strength_ empowered by hate or fear. To do such then would have been a blunder even so, for dead, drowned it makes little difference; we are haunted more so by the living, and they may be the worst kind of phantoms and the wickedest.

I was always too self conscious, my parents used to say, I had grown up afraid of my own shadow's thoughts; I was always listening for the rustles of an unseen audience—perhaps I was only looking over my shoulder for that darkling twin who had been stillborn at my birth. Even then this thing called "the world" eluded me, and so I invented more appropriate, more interesting substitutes. I admit now that I am ridiculous. Just listen to the overwrought elaboration of my words! They could not be mine alone, could they? I have read too much, lost myself in too many past lives that were never lived, too many dead words that live forever. Even as a pampered, bookish child my imagination was always fragile, ready to explode—the subtlest suggestion could be like nitroglycerin in my veins. You understood this well and administered the dosage expertly; you would one day come to read me those macabre tales (the language of which I began to emulate even in my speech), draw a sigh from the depths of your chair, and watch me shudder at the sound of a turning page.

How we met, when we met I can no longer envision; my memories are as scattered and superimposed with later impressions as these pages; answers have always evaded me and I am as lost among the pentimento of names and faces of men as I am among the books of my disheveled library. I do perhaps recall a workday crowd and a rapid but firm touch upon my elbow as if to offer confirmation to your fingertips that I am corporeal, this poor soul you had probably already stalked for days (exactly how long I would not dare to venture, we came to acknowledge each other so gradually). When I turned I saw no one whose eyes guiltily met mine—maybe I saw through you, for you had that ability some persons have to become transparent—but still there lingered that tingling warmth about my elbow, the pinkened aftermath of two strong fingers. One winter's twilight, or a series of several twilights (the cumulative memory more defined than any single occasion) I saw you quicken your pace on the street as you headed toward me and then, as if a more compelling thought had suddenly come to you, you reversed your direction to enter some vast public building, inviting me to follow, possibly—though if I did you would have left by the time I arrived, and there I would stand bewildered among the secretaries and clerks.

These occurrences took place over a period of many months (and though infrequent they caused me no little confusion and mounting anticipation of that time when I would actually confront you) and it was still longer before I slowly, slowly became aware of a presence outside my windows that had been coming and going like a shadow that is now here, now gone on a clouded day. Sometimes it seems as if half my life was spent in unconscious pursuit of you, or rather your pursuit of me, as though when we did first stand face to face (the time and circumstances I still cannot retrieve from remembrance) it was the summation of a long and secret mission. It was likely years before I was able to speak to you, before I allowed you within my doors to become your willing, will less victim—your dear loved one. But my sense of time contracts and expands by chance these days; I do not know if it has been years or mere days that I have labored over this grand apologia to you and my unknown executors. I do not even know any longer if I can believe my own painfully affected words. (Do you lay claim to them, too?)

What was it in your face that told me you were my irreversible destiny, my savior and my nemesis (the attributes shifting with the pull of our humors and passions)? So cruel and strained your face was—black, black hair and white skin that seemed never to have seen the sun, a face I might have been familiar with all my life. And what was it in your eyes that arrested mine—frozen blue eyes rimmed with red—what moved and shone there? I remember now how you intercepted me as I approached the glass revolving door of my bank, catching a glimpse of my reflection rippling across the multiple panes, superimposed on one level and then another by your face as you entered the door from the other side—for one horrible moment then we turned together in our glass frame; it seemed you were laughing softly to yourself just as the door expelled you and you rapidly descended the exterior stairs to the subway, never looking back—though I did, until you were out of sight. By then I knew that I knew you well. That night I dreamed of your face; it kissed me on the mouth, branding my lips with cold fire. The vestiges of that dream did not, however, resurface until much later.

So we watched one another, aware and unaware by turn. You were there night after night under my windows, breathing low, huddled in the shrubbery, or pacing in and out of the street lamp's beam, head bowed under a broad old-fashioned black hat (a missionary's hat, fancy that!), but hands twitching here and there at a button or crease or hem, so very white: listening, learning my ways, marking my every move. In the daylight it seemed as if you were nothing but a specter from my dreams of the night before, but there you would be again that evening, body pressed against the wall adjacent my garden and sometimes humming a tuneless little melody like a fly trapped in a bottle. Who could I call for help? Who could understand such a slow insidious invasion? Already you were stealing my life away and somehow calling forth a terrible love between us. What could I do? We needed one another.

Some time later you were sitting over there in that very chair, or another chair, or in the parlor, or the library, night after night after night, staring at me across the chessboard with fiercely beautiful eyes. In time, our hands met across the table as we played—your icy fingertips touching my fingertips, the touch become a press. The next time, when I did not pull my fingers away as if burnt, you lay your hand over my palm and it was as if your entire body lay over mine—then you left; I did not see you for days and though relieved I began to tremble from within as an addict does for his certain poison. Slowly, however, I became aware that you had not left; in deepest sleep I felt another presence in the room and tried to wake to ascertain if it were true, but could not. Something seemed to weigh against me in my dreams, to be consuming the very air I breathed. It was of course you, I discovered one night when a lightning storm had kept me on the edge of sleep: you stood in the doorway, watching me in bed, terrible eyes fixed on mine. Nothing was said. What could I do? You seemed able to slip through keyholes, to walk through walls.

Each night you visited me thus, each night you came closer—until you knelt in tears at my bedside, breathing your sour breath into my face until just before sunrise when you would leave as quietly as you had come. Sometimes, as I was falling asleep, you would bend over and kiss me on the neck (teeth and tongue against my skin), then on the mouth—and then, vanish.

In the meantime you had moved into my house for good—for you owned nothing and spent days somewhere off alone—and there was not an evening I could pass without you. If I went out, you went out; if I walked this way—say, through the public gardens or down the esplanade—you would follow, a few paces behind.

Somehow, you avoided what few colleagues or neighbors called upon me; they never knew of your existence although the whole time we took tea together or played chess I could feel your eyes upon me from behind a door or your breath close upon my ears.

Once a friend stood up unexpectedly to go fetch a book left in the adjoining room—I was positive you were in there and so I tried to detain her, but she came and went and saw no one. When she was gone you came out of the room; it had no other exit, yet you had not been seen.

Certainly, we did need each other, for we hated everything: this wretched modern world, our own selves—and yet had to live for something, these books, great composers, chess and tea, our love. How did I come to know of your secret abhorrences? For one thing, you hated mirrors, broke every one in the house.

Just as well. Mirrors for me were instruments of torture, though I was morbidly fascinated by my own face and its eventual degeneration through time, because of time. This obsession is a vice worse than vanity; I used to seek out mirrors and reflections to give myself a start, just as a reader will turn the pages of a ghost story at night when there is no one else at home. Watching one's own face closely, for long periods of time, can be the most hideous confrontation of life, as I once told you: Here is what I am, this is what I look like, this is me! It is repulsive, yet with sustained practice come revelations. Today, for instance, I noticed that my eyes are no longer the happy blue of childhood, but turning a glaucous gray. Now that you have gone I have replaced the mirrors; I have several in every room and hardly a minute goes by that I do not give myself a small prick, a shock, by casting a quick glance at myself: a little like the way one pinches oneself to remain awake late upon a dismal night. Look upon me now, then—I remain awake, watchful, restless.

When you had made yourself a permanent guest in my house I systematically revealed all there was of me, all my secrets, eccentricities, and most anguished childhood memories (that mutilated doll, agony in the confessional, pretended genius), perhaps in one last attempt to subvert your imminent domination (I no longer know what I mean in my hated heart of hearts), a plea to the mercy you lacked. You saw me pale before closets hanging with lifeless clothes. You drew a cold bath for me on moonless nights. You played Paganini exquisitely. You went with me to tilt all the pictures in the upstairs hallway to the east. And you learned well how I could stare at objects until they disappeared. (It is not especially difficult to accomplish: first the object goes gray and then black, becomes its shadow, then fades like the Cheshire cat, and there is nothing left, nothing more to it. This comes only with deep concentration. There is no practical value, but it is my only talent.) I mention this to you again because lately when I stare into my new looking glass my face fades away; this frightens me because it is spontaneous, compulsive, and I have no control over it. If you were here again you could smash these mirrors for me, because I have neither power nor courage.

We lived for uncountable, endless days as two souls married in revulsion and fed by cannibalistic lust. (These words I use! I would be tempted to throw up my hands if these pages were another's.) Such of the people I knew and worked with noted my eventual degeneration: my loss of color, my nervousness, listlessness. They recommended doctors and other specialists, but I did not heed them, I wanted only this strange love which had invaded my life. I did not care if I lived or died; perhaps I was already dead. This blood flowing through me was tainted—I knew I had become another person from the one I once was.

Days were agony—to sit at my desk and deal with those faces before me!—at nightfall I would have rushed into your arms if you had allowed that. Instead, we sat in our separate armchairs, smoking or reading, not touching and rarely looking at one another, though if I were ever to leave the room your gaze went with me. Yet in bed you would now come naked and white and lie beside me: that hard, narrow bed where we were pressed close and nearly immobile. Sometimes you held your hand in my hair and licked with rough tongue the back of my neck. I slept like one drugged, dreamed empty dreams, and awoke feeling dazed and drained. Downstairs I would find traces of the night before—the overturned goblet, the ashes in the grate, scattered violin scores, a pawn amongst the coals—and I would close the curtains against the sunlight that stung my eyes and caused tears to flow needlessly.

Unspeakable love, ineradicable sin! My vision of hell was no wider than my parlor, no colder than our bed. I was drowning, and you were the one who held me under. The disease you had spread to me was the contamination of a loveless unloving soul, the asphyxiation of a fleshly villainy. These words I use belong to those of a chronicler of another, darker century, one known for its soot and steam: it could be that I am no longer telling my own tale but transcribing the ravings of a long dead poet or madman (you again?), my pen acting as the planchette that glides on unerringly spelling out ever more maniacal words. Somewhere at some time after you began your vigils and visitations I stepped back into the unlit corners and someone else took control of my actions, my words, my life. (The medium in the shadows lives a vicarious, entropic existence. These pages hold the characters of a merciless master.) The mind wanders, eyes flit back and forth between window and mirror, fingers tap out the rhythms of an unheard scherzo...

At my club and at my bureau I was no longer welcome (I would not miss the bookkeepers hunched over their desks, the dreary typists flicking ashes into wastebaskets, the sad faced solicitors who came and went with their bulging folders), and now I would spend my days seeking out the empty, abandoned parts of town, the docks and alleys where I saw other figures like myself staring into the river or sleeping in ruined buildings. Perhaps these solitary beings were only reflections of myself, seen from a distance—I had come to develop the annoying habit of disassociating from myself without intent, so it was as if I viewed my body walking down there below, head bowed and hands in pockets, from a pigeon's perch on a warehouse roof. I lost all interest in finding employment. It wasn't immediately necessary, since I had money in the bank and the estate my parents had left me—I could live this way for an indeterminate number of years if I had to or chose to. If I did speak to another person when half heartedly inquiring after a job, that person would fade before my eyes and I would float from some point several feet above myself, watching my thin fingers twisting at a ring or my feet shuffling under a desk. This would not do—I would walk out in the middle of the conversation and go sit by the river, watching the barges wend their way among the bleak winter islands. If I had gone instead to drink in silence in a saloon until I'd knocked myself out of my head I might have been able to arrest my decaying condition, to cast all thoughts of you from my mind and leave the place with someone else who would take me in and comfort me with brute force—that tattooed merchant marine, that whore with a limp.

You would follow me to the bridge on clear nights, a few yards behind, watching me as I watched stars in the black sky and stars in the black water. Did you think I might dive after those constellations? Sometimes I think I would have done even that if you had asked. Maybe you would jump in to rescue me—maybe again you would not. I could have put you to the test then and there. It is disturbing that you loved me first, came to me against my wishes, and now I was entirely dependent upon you—for exactly what I could not, cannot say.

The last of my friends no longer called upon me at home; it could be they were unsettled by your presence in the house even if they never saw you. Their absence did not bother me, for I needed no one but you; other people's voices buzzed in my ears like insects; I withered under their touch, and if I saw a familiar face on the street I would quickly cross to the other side or dash into a shop. Anything was better than having to think up evasive replies to the same old boring inquisitions. Another reason to search out winding routes through slums and factory districts, where I could stretch among refuse, close my eyes, and forget everything. A creeping oblivion was shadowing me, I realized too late; days were spent in an opium like haze and indistinguishable one from the other except that each was just a little dimmer, more exhausting, than the one before. You, during these same months, appeared to be growing stronger, ruddier in the face and warmer to the touch: Of course you were feeding on me, drawing out whatever vitality I had left, drawing out into your horrid bloating body—a parasite I could not pluck from my skin because it had buried itself too deep. I was sick and I was near death. Food had lost all its appeal; I grew ever thinner and did not notice or care.

You had acquired a laugh: a hollow, humorless laugh like the grating of metal against metal; yes, there was a hard, steely quality to it, and your laugh was always directed toward me. Not when I lay beside you, but when you stood in another corner or another room—I knew you were always laughing at me. You spoke to me now as you had not done before. Your harangues were the blitherings of a lunatic: the fraternity of hate and love, the degradation of the human spirit, the pitiless vengeance of a fire breathing God, and so on and so forth you echoed the words I had once taught you. After a while we no longer slept together; you almost never kissed me or touched me except in spells of violent, silent passion; you had the bed to yourself, for I could no longer sleep save a few minutes a day, usually in the late afternoon, and I turned away when you bent to kiss my throat (you did not protest, but dug your nails into my wrist before leaving me). I often was nauseated, retching and moaning for hours at a time; nowhere could I find comfort in a couch or chair: I imagine you could have heard me moving furniture about in the rooms downstairs at night, or walking up and down the steps again and again to aggravate my fatigue and bring on sleep.

It was during this period of my decline that your actions became all the more preposterous. I had not the strength to stop you—if I had really wanted to stop you. You took to mimicking me, mocking my every accent and mannerism to perfection, wearing my clothes and fixing your hair and gait to copy mine exactly—I recognized then that there had always been a marked similarity between us which you now enhanced by some means I could not quite comprehend, and if someone had not known me very well before, he or she might have mistaken you for me, if it were not for that maleficent twitch in your eyes which is sometimes exhibited in birds of prey. Impersonating me so, you would go out at night to commit who knows what sort of monstrosities in my name. Thankfully, no one who knew me met you, or you would surely have been exposed (and then the whole sordid story would have to be told, to my great alarm and shame). It could very well be that you did nothing more than indulge in lesser vices among addicts and procurers (though I constantly feared graver crimes—thievery, brutality, even murder); it was not until after your disappearance that I discovered how you had depleted the larger portion of my life savings. What could I do, what could I do? A recurring question in this history of despair. Alas, I did nothing (it was this apathy you had instilled in me), did nothing more than prop my head on pillows and try to smother the fire in the pit of my bowels with rancid liqueurs. You might return to me again before dawn, your shoes—my shoes—muddied, shirtfront often as not bloodied, sleeves torn, eyes still staring rapt into another world I was not privy to. Then you would plant your mouth against my throat and burn into me. No more could I take—I fell into a blue gray stupor which usually lasted the rest of the daylight hours. Anagrams: live, evil, vile.

At last I did something very stupid—though for a long while I painted many fulsome lies, both for my attendants and myself. It could be that I considered what exactly it was or how I did it unimportant in the light of greater sins; besides, I did not fully remember then or want to. Suffice to say that they found me where I had made a last, desperate gesture of defiance (not in an alleyway or a lost, distant borough, as one might have supposed), and I was taken to a ward with waxed floors and paintings of trees (summer, winter, spring, fall) on the four walls and there I stayed for a long, long time—against my wishes, I was going to say, but I had no wishes by then, no hopes, dreams, or desires. I would have preferred death. But what could I do? Even if they had strapped me down and force fed me I would not have struggled: this was my fate and I accepted it quietly, did not even mind when they carried in my suppers cold upon a tray.

I began these pages then, trying to parse what had happened—at first blaming my unnatural childhood, or my inability to disguise myself in a banal existence, or my abnormal lack of ambition—but I always came back to you. I wanted my sentences plain and simple, to ring with truth; when I looked down at them, however, I could make out a shape lurking beneath my ornate scrawl, and, throwing down this journal in disgust or horror, I realized who was, even from a distance, guiding my hand.

During my internment the dailies were brought to me as regularly as my meals; a stack of them had accumulated under the bed before I could bring myself to look at them, and then I scanned each column for news of mayhem and murder. First I did not know why I should be so interested in calamity at such a time, and later I knew it was because I was wondering where you were, what you were doing in my name, if I would be to blame... At last something frigid split in my brain and I recalled that fatal afternoon of my stupid mistake and feared that in one of those papers I would find its cool journalistic reflection, read with clouding eyes the official report...

We had not argued the night before, but you had said much with few words—your brow seemed to draw sparks, and something about the sudden stillness in the house the next morning was intolerable—so that some last remaining fragment of a desire to live welled up in me that morning and I felt that if I did not take drastic measures immediately, it would be you who walked away from my grave and not otherwise. I searched for you endlessly in those neighborhoods of hell I imagined you must have retreated to, and I drank my way from one rotten wharfside tavern to the next, questioning mirrors and constantly looking over my shoulder. The winter afternoon grew dark early; grotesque figures jostled me all around like visions in a painting of the final damnation, and tiny whining hornets seemed to fill my head—only drunken fury could release them.

How could I have guessed that you were right beside me all along, laughing at my elbow, poking my ribs, pouring me doubles? Then you were gone again—a black swathed form retreating into trees huddling at the far end of the esplanade. I ran after. There was a kitchen knife I had concealed in my overcoat. Before you could turn I struck neatly through the ribs, heard the hollow thud and the moan of expelled air from the lungs—an almost pleased expression of surprise upon your lips—and watched in speechless fascination as the mask dropped, your face changed... into that of a stranger.

I walked away slowly, carefully, as if from an accident I had witnessed, not caused; I threw the knife into the river (though I never heard it splash); I hid the blood stained coat in the bushes and went on to the end of the pier, where I tried to strangle my grinning, idiotic reflection in the black water. There I nearly succeeded and there they found me.

But I came to understand why you did not come to visit me here—for you had been watching from the shadows, you had seen and fled. You knew other moments together would come, but not soon, not perhaps in this world. You would succeed in doing that at which I had so foolishly failed, for what was your life without me, as well? I would be to blame—for not one death, but two. Still .... perhaps the stranger had not died; perhaps there had been no stranger in black at all. My eyes would fall from the headlines and notice other articles as well, and it was not long before I received what I took to be your farewell message: news of a corpse dredged from the river, description matching your own in the few details given, though the body was not identified and no other circumstances were given. All right, so perhaps I was deluding myself—but a body that has been underwater for some time does becomes unrecognizable, except to the pathologist, that is—I saw no reason to pursue the matter further, even if I could have. Was it you? I put the matter to rest by picturing your desperate actions when I had vanished without explanation, for in the end (if it were the end) I knew you could not survive without me. Our sins had bound us together, and apart we could know no future. How could it have been otherwise?

I was released; I returned to the house my parents had bequeathed to me and the meager remains of my savings. Gradually I regained some strength, although I feel I will not have to face too many more hopeless mornings. I seldom go out of doors. Yet, today a former friend wrote to say she had seen me walking along the esplanade just after sunset some days before. Of course, it was nigh on eventide and the friend did think it odd, in that darkling light, to see me, or seem to see me, in "such a state," but nevertheless...

Nevertheless, I think my friend was mistaken. Many people walk along the river early or late on mild nights, many people could be mistaken for me; there is nothing exceptional about my appearance. If you were not the suicide I read about, then you were another.

Still, is it you who I await each night, knowing full well you can never return? Why do I stay up at this desk, unable once more to sleep, watching my face reflected in the glass fade in and out of the night? My mind entertains its depraved little fancies: You have risen from the earth, I have dreamed the life back into you—and you are scratching at my door, the clay of the grave still under your fingernails. It is your clattering laugh I hear in the storm clouds, it is your foul breath that wafts on the breeze. This is your kiss on my nape, not a raindrop; these are your many eyes: the stars; your mouth, your teeth, your tongue—everywhere. You are waiting for me at the center of the whirlpool. This spinning earth is slipping down the depthless black throat of the sky. I will go stand in the mounting thunderstorm, leaving my desk and throwing down my book, this wretched confession (these are your words after all, not mine!), to stand there and wait under the street lamp's faint flickering fire until dawn—again. In the windows of this empty, make believe house, I imagine I see reflected there, against the darkness within, your figure standing once more before me and filling the room, the entire house, head bowed low and arms outstretched, inviting an embrace as lasting as death's.
In Veracruz

Far away and some time ago, in Veracruz, in a hotel in Veracruz, at a table in the hotel restaurant, Madeline sat idly stirring her coffee. The coffee was too strong, the way they made it here, and she was not really reading the guidebook open before her, not really listening to the shrill American pop music coming over a radio somewhere, and not really wanting to leave, for there was nothing better to do at this hour, nowhere she could go and feel safe. Veracruz is deep into the great blue curve of the Gulf of Mexico; the hotel was large and clean and modern, and its many windows faced the sea, but Madeline did not find any of this interesting or satisfying—she did not feel like a tourist because she had not come as a tourist, and the hotel was somehow sad. Half of its rooms were empty now that it was almost spring up north, and she had the impression that for some reason the rooms had never been occupied, might never be occupied. Mexico was filled with poverty and strife, she had been told, but from what she had seen of it so far it was filled only with ghosts and clean, modern decay. And the man in the corner was staring at her again.

He was the only other person besides the waiter in the restaurant at this late hour: achingly young, copper-brown skin, bearded or nearly so, with that half-accusing, half-pleading look in the eyes she had come to recognize in so many of the people here (she imagined the Spanish had first met that look in the eyes of the Aztecs). Madeline had seen the youth before; he seemed to be a fixture of the hotel, always in the restaurant when she was or cleaning ashtrays, watering plastic plants in the lobby when she walked through, and yet there was something about him that told her he was no more a part of this place, really, than she was. He couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, and though he had said and done nothing—and in fact seemed to be shy—she sat far enough away to avoid him, yet not so far as to be thought purposefully avoiding him. He had caught her eye as usual when she came in, and for a moment she felt she was being appraised as women will be, though when she looked back she saw that he was facing the opposite window: It was a common enough feeling here, that feeling of being watched, so she had let it pass. The baby-faced young waiter had been most attentive if a little bored with her; he was asking her now if she would like dessert, some fruit perhaps? Instead she opted for the check, noting how the waiter seemed more relieved than annoyed, and without thinking she glanced again at the corner. With a tiny, sly gesture the other young man tilted his water glass toward her or seemed to; as soon as he had done so she wondered if he had really meant to gain her attention. She swiftly turned back to the last of her coffee and began counting out her change.

"Why must all you men stare?" she wanted to ask the waiter, who swiftly scooped up her change. "Why stare at me?" After all, it is easier to be blunt when you do not usually speak the language, when you are a long way from home. But the waiter was a mere boy, with girlish slimness and his first mustache—what could he possibly have told her even if she were to be so daring?

Madeline had done all that she had been told to do: gone from office to office, receptionist to receptionist, bribe to bribe to fix the deal, sever her past. The money wasn't hers, so she didn't care how fast it went. Up north it might have been easier, in some ways, but stickier and even slower, even more expensive. She remembered the last lawyer—a woman in a lopsided wig and a mannish suit who mentioned her parents and a party ten years ago before giving her a sheaf of papers to sign; the woman had then asked for the money in American twenties. It shouldn't have all been so roundabout in this day and age, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, but it was, and that was that—Madeline had handed over the money with a sense of relief rather than annoyance and gone back to her room to sleep away the afternoon. It was late March, almost April, and the forsythia would be blooming on Menominee in Old Town; she had left behind all the promise of a pleasant spring by the lake only days before. Here the winds already blew hot and humid—enough to make one forgive even a long Chicago winter. She was gulping down tranquilizers like candy, but couldn't even consider taking an earlier flight back north this soon. To avoid a complete collapse, she had taken the semester off—she didn't want to face anyone at all just yet, didn't want to have to undergo being questioned like a criminal and then sleep alone on her parents' sofa.

The Veracruz Madeline explored was different from the Mexico she had expected; everything seemed to be new, but with ominous hints of cruelty and barbarism: high spiked fences surrounding neighborhoods and houses, massive stone walls with broken bottles cemented along their tops like rows of fangs, guard dogs snarling behind gates. She wondered what was being blocked from her view—mansions or slums? Armed policemen and sometimes soldiers in berets paced the sidewalks like clockwork figures. Security guards stared at her through the chain-link. Alarms were constantly going off in closed buildings, sirens screamed in the distance every hour of the day, and searchlights swept the streets all night. She sometimes felt she was in the middle of an apocalyptic movie that had lost its director and its script. But she supposed midnight in the Loop—with its deserted streets and thundering El—would be just as frightening, just as lonely to a stranger.

Her second day in Mexico she had taken a sleek new sight-seeing bus to the outskirts of the city, into the countryside. Everything there was withered and brown after a long dry season, even the farmers and their cattle, except for higher up in the jagged hills, where she could see ribbons of green on the horizon, promising cool rain, merciful clouds. The bus had driven toward what appeared to be rain forest, past thatched Mayan huts with Fanta signs on their walls and women bent under firewood, but it did not seem to get any closer to the green, only higher up, and the altitude gave her a headache. They stopped for lunch in a village, but having no appetite she walked down a dirt road while the other passengers ate. Naked children ran from her as through they had never seen a white woman. She almost laughed, to think of herself as a figure of fright, when she couldn't scare a soul in even the most convincing Halloween costume. Still, the idea of escape to some place like this that she'd never heard of appealed to Madeline. Here she could be truly free, she supposed. A different person. If her things had not been back at the hotel, if indeed there had been a place to stay, she might never have returned to the city—but the bus took her back down there, anyway, coasting wildly to sea level. There were a few cheery pink tranquilizers left in the bottom of her purse, and she took two.

When the weather turned even hotter the next day, Madeline unpacked her one-piece and a paperback and walked across the boulevard below her hotel windows to the beach. In times past the ocean had always felt somehow dangerous to her, as if scaly horrors were waiting just beyond the breakers to swallow her up. In California everyone she knew had pools. Now it was too hot to bother even if the whole ocean were infested with sharks. She had seen only a few other foreigners like herself on the beach; the natives seemed to avoid the area except as a place to tryst at night. Soon she knew why. The water was unusually cold, as if a current were coming straight down from the North Atlantic, and the waves slammed her with the force of a team of strong men to the ocean bed if she went out too far. A high tide was coming in, and it left in its wake not pretty shells but ugly creatures, little monsters open-mouthed, screaming for air. Colorless clouds overtook the sky and soon the beach was deserted. Madeline sat shivering on her towel, feeling too fat again, too vulnerable. It had begun to rain before she got back to her room, all goose bumps and angry at everything and nothing in particular.

After supper at the hotel, after she had tipped the waiter and left the restaurant, as she was passing through the unwelcoming lobby with its harsh greenish light and unforgiving chairs, Madeline saw a troupe of Germans from a tourist bus parade past the hotel marquee, all of them merry and singing, like a hunting party out to bag a jolly time. She had seen their bus earlier; they were still wearing their sombreros and shaking maracas, and they would have looked ridiculous anywhere outside a circus, but their laughter and smiles were infectious. Waving back at them, Madeline decided she would not go back to her room just yet—to hell with feeling safe. She heard a trolley approaching, right on cue, so she took it, and it swept her like a high wind toward the heart of the city. The trolley-car was dirty, and empty beer bottles rolled at her feet. Everyone on it seemed to be staring at her, her American clothes, her American face. Someone whistled. She was already used to it: Cross the border, a friend had warned her, and any blonde turns into Marilyn Monroe. A large greasy-looking cockroach ran up the wall beside her seat; her first impulse was to scream (which she didn't), her second to take another tranquilizer (which she did). Her prescription was running out faster than she had hoped, but she had sworn not to have it refilled, even if she could have managed to do so in this country. But here was the city; it flashed and blared around her, waiting for her to descend into it—why did she have the continual feeling she was being forced upon a stage before an audience, that something was waiting to happen? If so, the sooner the better.

The trolley let her off in the middle of a carnival which overflowed a city square; she did not recognize this district from her guidebook or taxi rides, but the lights and the colorfully dressed people invited her to join in, forget her fears for a while. Madeline did not see the Germans anywhere—perhaps they had donned cheap masks and hats with the rest of the crowd; she was soon caught up in a group of skeleton children and hurried past the sideshows, the rides, the food stands. Loud American rock music thumped from speakers all around her. The blinking lights and swooping arms of the rides made her a little dizzy and a little nervous to be here, alone, who knows how far from the hotel. She remembered how Paul (sizing someone up in a bar this very moment, she presumed) had always called her a coward who hid behind her parents' money. _Screw him_ , she thought, boarding a machine that looked like a huge black spider. She braced herself. The burly young operator took a few pesos from her, shoved her back into a metal cage, and slammed a steel bar down across her lap. The carriage jerked forward and up. Below her a teenager wearing a tricorn hat and tight yellow slacks smacked his lips and hooted—at her? The long arms of the spider began to revolve faster and higher, as if spinning a gigantic web in the night sky.

Madeline's hands gripped the steel bar until she could taste the sweat and iron and her nails cut into her palms. She could not manage to close her eyes, though a voice inside her told her it would be better that way. Everything was glowing, electric, pulsating like mechanical drums. It was almost sexual, this force rushing against her skin, pounding through her heart. Her mind and body separated for an instance, and she thought this must be what dying is like, when your soul flies from earth with such speed you forget where you came from or who you were.

When she tried to look down and back, it was the same as looking into the eye of a hurricane. The stars, the white lights strung across the tents, the carriages behind and in front of her, the blurred faces looking up, the teenager in yellow slacks, all swirling around her and seemingly multiplied or made new with each revolution, made her want to scream and scream. But when the machine came to a stop she discovered she wasn't making a sound; her mouth was not even open. She stepped out of the carriage. Nothing had stopped spinning: She was sick, maybe, but she was not a coward.

With her palm clamped so tightly over her mouth that she couldn't breathe, Madeline lurched through the masked crowd and another group of children in ghoulish costumes. The whole square smelled of fish; she must have noticed that when she first left the trolley, and now it was worse than ever. For a minute she leaned panting against a streetlight, nausea surging upward: Looking back at the square and all its whirling colors and lights was like looking at the shifting glass beads inside a kaleidoscope. She felt violated, even a little like a woman raped, but was glad she had gone on that stupid ride—she could almost laugh at herself; as a girl she had never been able to stomach more than the Ferris wheel. She took another tranquilizer from her pocket, swallowed it dry, told herself to relax, it had only been a silly children's ride. She was in Veracruz. This was only Mexico. She could be back at O'Hare in a few hours if she wanted. She could fly a million miles from here if she wanted.

"Excuse me, please, may I help? You are in need of a doctor?" A man's voice; he had an accent, but his English seemed to be adequate. His hand touched her shoulder. Madeline opened her eyes, squinting to see through the sodium glare of the streetlight. It was the young man from the restaurant, the one who sat silently in his corner, the one who sometimes stared, sometimes ignored her. He had a very wide white smile, but then so many of these people did. What could he want?

She turned with more violence than she had intended, staring open-mouthed at him, shaking her head.

"Are you all right?" he said, obviously embarrassed. He wore an old-fashioned blue seersucker suit, the sort her father might have worn when she was a little girl, and it was a size or two too large for him; up close she saw that it was clean but shiny at the elbows and knees.

"Yes," Madeline said at last as she hurried away, slipping in and out of the crowd. He did not follow her. Had she over-reacted? she wondered. No—he had probably been after her for some time. She was an easy target: a woman, alone, American, blonde. You cross the border and... Vulgar boys in tight yellow slacks smack their lips at you. Even though she knew she was no longer that young, that pretty, and she had gained too much weight this year. And now it was late, there were no trolleys in sight; until she found a taxi she would have to walk down the best-lit streets, perhaps all the way back to the hotel if she could find it.

But most of the streetlights were out or broken, and the apartment windows along the way were dark or boarded up. All the shops were closed; only the neon signs of a few scattered cantinas were lit up, though within their windows they, too, were silent and empty. The whole district was deserted, as if a great storm were about to strike the gulf. Everyone was probably at the carnival. Madeline walked quickly, checking every doorway or parked car for hidden thieves or rapists. She felt eyes all around her in the dark, watching, but saw no one, heard no one. It occurred to her, not for the first or last time, that she hadn't been away from home, alone, in years. She quickened her pace.

Then, as if on the crest of a silent upheaval of the earth, a seawall suddenly rose before her. She sighed with relief. Beyond it she could make out the beach, the ocean, and a few distant blinking ships or stars. The broad boulevard running alongside the waterfront was well-lit and busy with traffic. With so much space and movement around her once more she was able to breathe, relax. Her white hotel was just up the beach, she knew; she would be back in her room in a quarter of an hour. A breeze from the east, sultry enough to have blown all the way from Africa, lifted her hair; it was still cooler here than in the middle of the city, and the lulling sound of surf made her think of sleep and the peace it brings. The ocean was at low tide, the water dark and softly rumbling—not the sunny Gulf of travel brochures, but a pirate's ocean, a shipwreck ocean. Like so much about Veracruz, it seemed mysteriously sad. This must have once been meant to be a great city, but some sort of melancholy inherent in the conquistadors had held it back, stifled its potential glories. The modern had replaced the ancient at a great cost. The city made Madeline long somehow for unnameable things she had never had, or had lost in her journey to these lonely streets, this lonesome beach.

A few couples beyond the seawall, on the sand, walked closely together or wrestled nearly naked at the edge of the water. No one cared what you did in public here. Some people thought it romantic. She thought: I am 37 and alone again and I have never been able to believe in such abandon. What if she were to rip off her clothes and run into the gulf? Would Paul have admired her daring or faulted her rashness?

She had last seen him in early January when he had followed her from California. In Chicago, this year's snows had drifted across Michigan Avenue. From her parents' Gold Coast apartment she had heard the wolves howling in Lincoln Park. Great icy waves broke on the shores of Lake Michigan—one false step along the rocks and you might be swept away. I'm not letting you go, Paul had said.

Someone was a few paces behind her, breathing steadily, slowly. Should she turn to face whoever it was? Wasn't it safe enough here, with these couples so nearby, all the traffic, her hotel just up the street? She turned. It was the youth from the restaurant again; she recognized the seersucker suit before she saw his face. She wanted to yell to him to leave her alone, but the cry caught in her throat; she swallowed and spoke, forgetting her college Spanish: "What _do_ you want?"

He grinned the instant she turned to him, rubbing his neck beneath the collar of his suit. He was after all very young. "I am sorry," he said in his good-enough English, "to bother. Very sorry. I will go if you insist, but..."

She wanted to say, "Yes, go, leave me alone. Quit following me," but nothing came out. She guessed the young man had more to say.

"You are American? Maybe Canadian?" he said. "You and I, we visit the same places tonight. I see you come and go from Hotel San Miguel, often. I am on my way now. May I es—escort?"

"You've been watching me," she said in English, eyes narrowing, but trying to smile. "Why have you been watching me, following me?"

"My name is Leopoldo Poso y Nanzo. Leo, people can call me. You should not be frighten. I do not have a gun, see?" He laughed, a genuine laugh; his teeth were not perfect, not all white. "What is your name, please?"

"Maybe I should call the police," she said with a little laugh, backing away. From where? Tell them what?

He glanced behind and around, and said more quickly, more quietly, "No, no _policia_ , if you please. Not so good, that."

"You've been watching me, following me, from the hotel to here," Madeline stated, starting to back away while keeping an eye on him.

"It seems what it is not. It is not you needs help, but I."

"You? I suppose you do want money. Look, I haven't got more than a few pesos on me, I swear." She found herself cornered against a stairwell built into the seawall, and though he had been keeping pace with her, he allowed her enough room now to run if she wanted. "So why don't you find something more productive to do?" she said, louder this time, sensing the absurd pedantry of her words. "I can't help you, I'm sorry, and I don't need a chaperon. American women do fine on their own."

He sat on the seawall beside her, rubbed his forehead, shook his head, looked into her eyes with his brown, wide-set, pleading eyes. Still somewhat becalmed from her last pill—otherwise, quite possibly, she might have run—Madeline examined him while he tried in several different ways to convince her ("It is dark, not safe, they know me here..."): He was not a handsome man, with that unfinished beard and crooked teeth, but there was something naively appealing about him, like a child desperate for approval. He really couldn't have been more than nineteen. A boy. And shorter than herself, skinny. Small enough to knock down if she had to—but even that idea seemed ridiculous, hitting this boy. "Five minutes," he begged, "five minutes talking, but not here, if you please. At Hotel San Miguel?"

"You must be—" she started to say, but then for some reason she recalled a handful of old snapshots, as if they were falling through the air around her—of a blue-tiled pool, of a laughing man, a dog, a flowering tree—and the letter enclosed with them: _Even so I won't forget,_ the letter said, _I won't let it all get blown away_... Screw him. She took a risk a long time ago with Paul, when he had nothing but was much more dangerous; she could take a risk with this boy. Madeline had closed her eyes for a moment in thought; a moment later she opened them—the boy was still there; she hadn't really expected him to disappear. "Yes, Leo, the hotel, my suite, why not," she said. "But will it be safe?"

His eyes widened, he clapped his hand on his chest as if he were killing a slow fly and smiled again. "I did not mean your room," he said. "But since you want, yes. For you, it will be safe, yes? Let open the door as you like. There are many maids. They know me. My cousin, he is hotel assistant manager. He would not let anything bad happen in his hotel, he tell you. That hotel, it is his life."

"I actually meant safe for you. I can take care of myself. I'm not afraid. Just startled. But you act like someone's following you. We're not in a spy movie, don't be—"

"It is possible, possible. You now know what Mexico is like, yes? That is why I do not want talking here. We go?"

For a minute or two she stared out toward the gulf, toward those ships or stars, with the breeze blowing back her hair. She knew what her father or mother would have done; they were used to signing large checks to lost-looking people pushing lost causes, anything to assuage their upper-class liberal guilt. In the sixties...

The boy was waiting patiently, nowhere else to go.

"Okay," she said, almost in a whisper; it took a second or two for her approval to register on him. That wide white smile again.

"I'm not afraid of you, Leo. I'm bigger than you."

At that he laughed and showed her the way. Suddenly, watching his skinny narrow-shouldered body before her, Madeline realized why she was doing this. It was the same as going on that carnival ride. But it wasn't really taking much of a chance at all; she knew she would be in control. There was nothing anyone could do now to hurt her. Fire proves the clay, she had been told.

Several of the hotel employees saw them enter together, and though she was sure they were all aware and soon the hotel would be seething with gossip, no one seemed to give them a second glance. On the way down the beach to the hotel Leo had explained how his cousin who had come here years ago let him sleep in a spare storage room in exchange for working in the kitchen; the manager didn't know the real story and everyone else looked the other way, it was all a matter of survival. It was Mexico.

Madeline had a suite, a sizable one; she was spending a lot of money and didn't care. The door to the bedroom was shut. The sitting room was formal and anonymous, air-conditioned cool, with silk roses in a vase, as if to emphasize nothing bad could ever happen here. There was a painting of a mariachi band on the wall, a cliché she still hadn't witnessed come to life. She had bought sodas and ice from the machines in the corridor. They sat with their plastic tumblers in opposite straight-backed chairs, like two people at a tea; the extra tranquilizers had managed to relax her, but Leo was fidgeting in a peculiar way—though he kept his body rigid and taut, he was constantly plucking at the seams of his suit and the hairs of his beard, as if he were trying bit by bit to pull himself apart. Because he spoke so rapidly and with enough of an accent to slur his words, and mentioned so many names and places she was not familiar with, she eventually lost track of the details, and the generalities were not much clearer.

He had begun by claiming he was not Mexican, but from a country to the south which he would not name, as if revealing even that would be too much, though it was certainly somewhere in Central America. She needn't know the exact place—not because he did not trust her, he assured her, but because she need not feel implicated by knowing too many specifics. The conditions in his country, he told her, were not good. The government was in a state of confusion. He was from a family of teachers and intellectuals, a good family, not rich but not poor. His father had taught political science at the university. Changes came; their lives were now in turmoil. His father had been killed in a fire-bombing—no one claimed responsibility, but he knew it was the government, they did not like what his father had been teaching. Leo himself had gone to be a graduate student at a university far from his hometown. He was studying English literature; his best subject had always been English. He loved Henry James and Edith Wharton—writers she knew? He had wanted nothing to do with politics, but after his father's death he had joined marches in the capital city. Bombs had been thrown—not by his people, he insisted, though they had been blamed: Two police officers had died and now the government was after him. He had had to flee the country. Eventually he had made it to his cousin in Veracruz, but even Veracruz was not safe; the Mexicans had just signed certain treaties and he would be a hunted man here as well. He would be twenty-four in two weeks.

Madeline listened to the young man, not wanting to believe him, not wanting to believe such things could happen, or that she should have to take sides. It was all too much a part of the real world, and on vacation—if you could call this a vacation—nothing should be real. Who was to say whose side was right? The leaders of the country called themselves democrats; they called the rebels communists. The rebels called themselves socialists; they called the leaders totalitarians. Maybe he was a criminal, maybe he was a martyr-in-progress. Anyone could be right in this game, everyone could be wrong.

"But the government is to blame, it has always to blame!" Leo exclaimed, twisting a button so hard on his suit Madeline was afraid he'd tear it off. "They killed my father, they would kill me!" She could easily picture him at the forefront of a militant student mob, anarchist banners and angry fists raised around him. Madeline jumped when he clapped his hands again. "Please, I know you must think I am dangerous—"

"Dangerous? Only too wound-up... and sad, like everything here. I wonder why Americans think of you people as so sunny, so happy—"

" 'You people'? We are all the same people, we have all the same struggles."

"You have read too much Marx. And I am not a political person, I leave that to my parents. I teach art to overprivileged high schoolers and I'm not an artist, either. Tell me, what do you want from me?"

"I must have asylum, I must cross the border. The United States is a free country. But so far away it is..."

"What do you want from me? Money, I suppose?"

"A loan, that is all. A loan, yes? To pay for the papers, the visas, the, the... all that it takes..."

"You mean for the bribes. I've had my own experiences, you see. But once you are in America what will you do? You won't be legal, they'll find you out, they'll send you back."

"To my death."

She looked at him, this boy: his shoulders trembling, his fingers pulling at his jacket hem, his thin knees tapping against each other in his threadbare suit. He could almost be crying, though he was not. Without thinking she reached out, placed a tentative hand on his knees, stopped his quaking. He looked at her surprised but compliant. She came to him, bowed over him, almost wanted to smooth the top of his hair as she would with a child. He sank into his seat, frightened but immobile. "Why are you... ?" he said, arms stiff at his sides. For the first time in her life she realized what it was to wield such power, and then she too stiffened.

"I can't help you," she said, straightening herself. "No one can really help you. The world is in too much of a mess."

"You have no money?"

"Oh, I have enough money, but it won't help you, you know, it never helped me, and the Mexicans will only betray you." She didn't know why she was saying this; it might not be true at all; she only wanted him to believe her for now, to stay within her power.

He sighed, the bitterest sigh she had ever heard, and it could not have been worse if it had been a scream. "Do you want me to go?" he said finally, looking up.

Madeline had sat down again, leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes. She had never been poor and she was used to giving money to causes when asked, to name-brand charities who handed it over to anonymous people in anonymous places. Her parents had always done the same, they had all left the church or the dinner feeling somehow uplifted and a little more moral than they had before. They were wealthy but called themselves progressive; when it was fashionable a few years ago they had given large contributions to many radical causes. Those earnest, confused people knocking at their front door, like lost children... Madeline used to joke about the bombs engraved with their family name. But to give money directly, when it seemed so unlikely to really help him, when for all she knew it might pay for drugs or guns...

She opened her eyes and took a swallow from her glass; her vision had suddenly cleared. "How much do you want?" she asked, very steadily, as if she were asking the doctor what now had to be fixed inside her.

"How much do you want to give me?"

It was incredibly blatant of him, but she went on, moved her chess-piece. She wanted to be honest, to quit being this fake, this American who could have anything she pleased. "I have something close to six hundred dollars left in cash there in one of my suitcases. United States dollars, I mean. What I had to do here, what it cost, was not quite so much as we had expected, but it was, well, relatively quick. My parents insisted, they're old-fashioned. It was only because they hated him even more than I do."

"Then you are married?" He searched her hands for a ring.

"I don't know why I should tell you anything about myself, but then you told me your life story. Let's just say he made things difficult and my parents wanted the easy way out. They know Mexico, they know certain lawyers here. Like I said, they're old-fashioned."

"I see, old-fashioned."

"No, you don't—in most ways they aren't, but I'm their only daughter... Never mind. Is three-hundred enough? Three-fifty? I'm not being generous, all Americans are rich, aren't they? Take it, please, they said to spend it all. I've got my ticket home."

For some reason he frowned, as if he were sorry that it had been so easy, that his boyish charms hadn't been put to more of a test. He rubbed his forehead, stood up when she did, waited by the bedroom door with a soda bottle under his arm. She came out with an envelope. He did not put out his hand or offer to take the envelope, as if he were suddenly embarrassed for having asked the firing squad to please not shoot. "Don't look so suspicious. It's real money. I don't know anything about politics, I don't want to, and I don't know if half of what you've told me is true, but I want you to have the money. It's not mine, really, it was given to me, and believe it or not, I don't want it." She tucked the envelope into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. That should make her feel better, to be rid of her parents' blood money, to be done with all that. Back home it would be an interesting story to tell: How Madeline rescued a drowning man.

Yet when he had gone Madeline sat on the bed wondering why a cold wave seemed to wash over her, the way she used to feel when she had placed her envelope in the church offertory and left aware of more guilt rotting in her soul than when she had first come in. Of course no one had been saved, not Leo, least of all herself.

For several days Madeline did not eat breakfast or lunch again at the San Miguel; she did not want to risk running into Leo—what could she have said to him? Could she really have been expected to buy his life, even if such a thing were possible? She resolved not to think of the student's future, and to occupy herself with other, more trivial things—she went back to the guidebook's botanical gardens and museums and parks and returned late to the hotel, after supper in other restaurants. Sometimes she sat in a cafe across the street, reading the local newspapers as best she could, wondering if she might see Leo walk past the plate-glass windows, but he did not. She was not afraid to run into him—otherwise she would have moved to another hotel—but she did prefer to observe him unnoticed if at all.

For several nights she caught only snatches of sleep, so she refused sleep, sat up reading Spanish-language celebrity magazines and watching Spanish television, but she could not stop thinking. Of course, she told herself, it wasn't Leo, but Paul who was interfering between herself and sleep. Trying to imagine Paul in his new apartment out west was impossible, however, was like taking a character out of one play and putting him into another. Their marriage seemed distant in many ways now, especially in this country, as if it had been something that had happened to two other people and his infidelities had been another man's entirely. He had made it so difficult, had refused to yield a millimeter, had tried to take all her inheritance if he could get it. Well, it was over; even the baby they had once planned on having was no longer off alone, crying somewhere in her dreams, crying to be born. "I never want to be a mother," she had told her own mother the very day she left Chicago to break the ties which Paul refused to let go.

There came an evening when Madeline could no longer keep herself from entering the San Miguel's restaurant for supper. She would be bold, she had decided; she even hoped to speak to Leo. He sat in his far corner, eagerly cleaning the plates left by the other customers, which his cousin the assistant manager apparently allowed him to do. Madeline wondered how he was able to survive at all, how much longer he would hold out for the promise of escape. Was the money already gone? Had it been sent to some corrupt official or had it been stolen from the rolled-up sock in his secret room? Nothing in his expression held an answer. She sat at her customary table, too, but he studiously avoided looking at her; he no longer seemed to be looking at or for much of anything.

"Do you know that man in the corner?" she finally asked the headwaiter, who, for lack of other customers, had tonight condescended to serving a single woman. She doubted if the waiter were a friend of Leo's; Leo had not seemed fond of Mexicans.

"Has he bothered you, miss?" the waiter said, leaning closer like a conspirator.

"No, no, I just feel sorry for him, I guess." She didn't care what the headwaiter might think; she was a stranger, too.

"Yes, I know him," the waiter said with a frown, smoothing his white shirtfront. "If I was manager, I would tell him leave. But..."

"But?"

The waiter nodded at Leo, who was eating low over his plate like a wary dog. "Ah, he bothers customers. He is not one of us. But our manager, he is soft-heart. He!" The headwaiter grimaced and strode away.

Madeline watched Leo eating in his corner. She wanted to do something more for him now, just because the headwaiter did not like him, but what? She had only credit cards and traveler's checks and a few American twenties on her now, and even if she were to give him those they would probably not be enough. She wanted to be able to tell him: "I don't owe you anything more. You must leave me alone," but he hadn't asked for anything more, there was nothing more to do for him.

Her last few days in Veracruz were mostly uneventful. She rode the trolleys through pleasant neighborhoods, avoiding the slums which her guidebooks steered her around, and spent hours shopping for gifts for her friends, not herself. Not much of what she found, however, was appropriate; everything here would seem garish back in Chicago or even California, so she often came back to the hotel empty-handed. She was not getting the rest she had needed for so long. Sometimes she tried to picture the house in San Diego, but the pictures would still not come into focus and develop within her mind, and so she could still not quite believe it all was real, that it was empty now and everything in it was gone. Even Chicago seemed imaginary, the way things can when you are away for too long, and it was as if she had been living out of that hotel suite for years. But she did not care. She was through with life and living as she had known it; now Madeline wanted to know only the surface of things, never to dive in too deep and face the unknown, but to be a tourist by profession and intent.

She went again to the beach when it got too hot even for museums, braved the water, swam against the incoming tide with more fury than strength, swam for a long time. She exhausted herself and returned to her room shivering and feverish at the same time. She searched for a tranquilizer, tore apart her suitcases. They were all gone.

For three days she lay in bed, seldom sleeping, her forehead burning and her body shivering as if she had just stepped out of the blizzards of Chicago. "Maybe it's only _la turista_ , but I think I must have been getting addicted," she managed to scrawl on a postcard to her mother. "This is some sort of delayed withdrawal, I suppose. Why did the doctors do this to me?" The hotel bedroom took on the hushed, expectant air of a hospital room, a room where she had been left to die, alone but not bleeding. Whatever she tried to eat off the room service tray would not stay down. When she drank the water, it only made her sicker. All she had to take was some aspirin. She felt defenseless. If the hotel were to be dynamited by one of Leo's terrorist groups she would not have the energy to run or even jump from the window. But she refused to send for a doctor, she hated all doctors now—the ones who cut you up and the ones who examined your head and the ones who prescribed little pink pills—and refused to believe this setback was anything but normal.

Vague, stupid nightmares roused her if she drifted off. A child cried in the small hours of the night—a child or a cat. The rain would not stop.

This being the era before cable was universal, only two stations came in on the television, and she no longer had the mental stamina necessary to understand their Old World Castilian, those old sit-coms and soap operas from Madrid or the dubbed American dramas. In the middle of the night, half-asleep, she watched movies with famous faces speaking in what might as well have been ancient Mayan. She couldn't understand how to work the radio built into the television. Since she had finished her magazines and paperbacks and guidebooks there was nothing to read, not even a Spanish Gideon's. A Veracruz daily lay on the floor, all crowded with lurid red-ink photos of the latest murders and revolts: just looking at it, even if she could not fully read it, depressed her.

Voices, familiar voices speaking English—that's what she needed to hear. But there was no one to call. Her friends would doubtless ask about Paul and she didn't want to go into that at such a distance. (If she dared to call Paul one of those boys from the West Hollywood bars might answer or else be trying to listen in.) Anyway, placing a call through the operators here would be too difficult. Writing any more than a postcard to her mother was impossible. She didn't even mention the student to her mother; maybe she never would. Even her parents might think she had taken too big of a risk or acted foolishly. They might even think she hadn't given the boy enough.

A new, anonymous hotel suite is even more isolating than sleep, Madeline thought; there are no familiar ghosts, no signs of past inhabitants; like a conquistador, she might have been the first northerner to have set foot in this place. She longed for sleep to take her away from herself. Sleep as cool, as luscious as ice cream. Deep, deadening sleep. People go crazy without sleep, she told herself. She could go crazy in this country and no one would notice the difference. They would just think she was acting like a foreigner. Meanwhile, the rain kept pouring, pouring, pouring.

But her isolation did not last long. The third morning Madeline woke, as if an alarm had gone off in her head—which meant that she must indeed have finally fallen to asleep. She felt so good it was as if her body had been exchanged overnight for a new, lighter one, as if she had just emerged from a chrysalis surging with life. Now she wanted action and emotion around her, to smell things and people, to watch their faces as they breathed and talked and laughed and smoked. As soon as she dressed she went for breakfast on the main shopping thoroughfare and spent the morning browsing among the happy crowds, still trying to find the right things for friends. The rain had stopped, and for the first time in days she was able to remember who and what she was. Now, she told herself, I am ready to leave Veracruz, or very nearly ready—all she needed was some farewell signal from the gods; what it would be she wouldn't know until it happened. Only once did she reach for a tranquilizer—when a taxi nearly ran her down on a street-corner—but was relieved to remember the pills were all gone. A serene afterglow from the fever seemed to have warmed her body, to steady her, to make her feel unassailable. It was as if independence had suddenly come to her, whether she wanted it or not. Now, Madeline thought, I am really, truly on my own.

In the middle of a large, cheerless department store she heard a roar of laughter and shouting; she looked over from rain gear and leather handbags and saw the busload of Germans—it must have been the same busload—cavorting in the women's wear section. One beefy fellow (wearing a thick sweater despite the heat) had placed a lacy black satin bra on his head and tied the straps under his chin; apparently this is what had caused such a riot. The flustered clerk, a tiny purple-haired woman, was batting at the Germans as they passed bright lingerie from hand to hand, gingerly, as if they were handling rare tropical birds. One of the handsomer Germans, Madeline noticed, had acquired a Mexican escort, a girl young enough to be his daughter and who was now covering her eyes and moaning in mock horror. The German and one of his friends was all over her, kissing her forehead, her lips, her breasts, her stomach... Madeline left having purchased nothing, but knowing now what it was she had been seeking all winter.

She waited in the lobby reading old magazines and the Miami papers for two hours before she saw Leo. He was in his same hand-me-down suit, but with a bright new rayon shirt with silk-screened parrots on it, and he was emptying an ashtray into a larger ashtray when she went up to him. It was hard to tell if he were glad to see her or not, though he smiled just as broadly as he had before.

"Let us not talk here," Madeline said.

"If you please, you do not have to do any more," Leo whispered. "You are very very generous, but I—"

"Could we go to your room this time? It's important. And it's not about the money. I don't care if you spent it on new shirts or not." She placed a hand on his shoulder, was surprised to feel the bone beneath. He wriggled free but grinned at Madeline.

"My room is too small for comfort," he said, but since she insisted, since she was beginning to make a scene the maids might witness, he led the way. The room was not much more than a broom closet near the service elevator, but it was clean; it was as new and unused as the rest of the hotel. There were a few possessions on display, and they were lined up neatly on the floor. Of course there was no window. She noticed ruptured paperbacks of _The House of Mirth_ and _The Tragic Muse_ , and a large Spanish-English dictionary with a tie for a bookmark. A crumpled newspaper photograph was tacked to one wall; it was not anyone she recognized. It could have been a famous actor or it could have been his father. "Well," she said, as if she had just made an appraisal and was now offering money for the room.

"Well," Leo echoed her. His eyes were apprehensive, but he sat on the cot next to his books as if he entertained older American divorcees on a regular basis. She supposed he was feeling more surprised than anything else.

"It's not that I can save you," she said, standing beside him, close enough to smell the soapy scent in his hair. "It's not that I can do anything at all."

"But?" he said, dropping his shoulders. So he _had_ been hoping for more money...

"But, here, tonight," she said, patting the back of his hand; it was softer, warmer than she would have thought. "Call it sanctuary if you like. It's just that... If you could... Come on, I'm not too old for you, am I?" Madeline tried to laugh but couldn't. She took a small folding chair from a corner and faced him with it against her body like a shield.

They sat almost as they had before, a week ago, but this time he did not squirm and fidget; he was calm, he slouched against the wall, his fingers gently smoothed the fabric of the bedspread with its "Hotel San Miguel" crest on it, but his eyes were inexplicably full of terror. "You always make me feel like I should offer you one last cigarette," Madeline said, rigid in her chair.

"What?" He sank lower; she sat up straighter.

"Give me something for my money, then," Madeline said firmly. "It's a fair deal."

"Ah, you have a very American sense of humor." That smile. He laughed, sighed, knocked on his chest—as if waiting for his heart to answer; she had seen him make this gesture before and not realized what it meant.

They sat looking at one another for two, then three minutes. Then she rose, almost tripped over the dictionary and almost fell into his lap, kissed him as one would kiss a friend who has just delivered wonderful news, and was surprised but not unhappy when he kissed her back—inexpertly, a boy's kiss, but it would do. She returned it with more skill and started to undress him. He reached for the barrette that held back her hair.

Naked, in bed, he was even younger looking, and it took a long time for her to relax his thin dark body. Madeline could tell she weighed more than he did, she did not feel beautiful, her hair was no longer completely blond, but she knew he was pleased with her. It had been a long time for her. His body was nothing like Paul's, and there had been few men before and none since. Leo was too young to be tender, too weak to drive her into ecstasy, but she felt safe with him, this student from another world who really only wanted her money. He had probably lied, made up the whole story of political intrigue, but for this one afternoon she didn't care. The cot was too small, so they used the floor. It was uncarpeted and cold. He held onto her as if she were a boat in danger of slipping away from under him. She rolled over him, held him beneath her body, kissed him on the eyes as a child would a sleeping doll. He kissed her breasts delicately, with little pecks. She forced his arms down as she kissed his stomach. It was all as if they had been following instructions from an unknown director since they had first met, one who had slyly manipulated fate until there was no way to escape it.

When he woke her all she could see was a strip of light under the door, and there were sirens going off far away. He was dressing in the dark; she sat up and reached for him. "I must be in the kitchen tonight," he whispered, as if they were being overheard.

"Will you tell your cousin?"

"My cousin, he not to trust Americans. He not trust anyone. But you can trust me."

She switched on and off a bedside lamp, freezing his thin shirtless torso as if by strobe-light. He looked younger than ever. That coppery skin seeming more yellow now. She felt a little foolish, as if this were the morning after the prom, and yet older than ever; her back was sore. "I have a wife," he said, pulling on his parrot shirt.

"Come on. You're too young."

"We have a child. They are back in Chinandega."

"You need to send them money."

"There are many guards at the border. There are secret police, even here. My cousin is frighten they find, they will find and arrest both I and him. A friend, last week they find, found him dead in the street..."

"Then you don't want your wife and child to come here, too?"

"It is worse there even, in our little town. When we are family again we will come to America. Until, until then..."

"So it's not so easy as all that."

He looked away in disbelief, holding his shoes against his chest. She had pulled on her blouse and skirt. "Nothing is easy," he said, and turned to her. "Me, I did not expect it to be so easy when you gave all that money."

"It wasn't, after all, was it? Now I'd like to go back to my room, please."

"No, Madeline, please to sleep some more here. I work until very late." He kissed her on the cheek in the dark, like a boy accommodating a great-aunt, and left the room, closing the door behind him. Madeline lay back on the floor, hearing Leo's soft passage down the hall, thinking. In Latin countries, where people marry so young, she thought, I could be his aunt, I could almost be his mother. In America I am still fairly young, but here I am already more than halfway to the grave. He's probably somehow sent the money to his wife; together with their child they'll live in this maid's room while they dream of the north, of snow, of gold in the streets. In the dark, she stared silently at the ceiling until she fell to sleep again.

The next morning, when Madeline woke again in her comfortable bed in her comfortable suite with its mariachis on the wall, she suddenly wanted to spend money again, lots of it, and with the help of her checks and credit cards she did. She bought armloads of clothes, trinkets, jewelry, souvenirs—not for her friends this time, but for herself. Christmas all over again. She did the same thing the next day, and the next, not even having time to eat at the hotel, but on the run, between this marketplace and that row of shops. Spending money was like purging herself of past sins and past sorrows, and she did not attempt to calculate how much she was spending: Mexican dollars were like Monopoly money to her and she spent them just as fast.

By late afternoon of the third day of her spree it had begun to rain again, but Madeline did not care. By then she was back in her room, her purchases piled on her bed like pirate treasure. Several items she had already managed to mail home. For the first time in months she felt what might be called fulfillment, though part of her was appalled that it was such a shallow fulfillment, and how easily it had been attained. Nevertheless, she happily tried on all the new clothes, decided on something bright and festive, applied fresh makeup and perfume, and descended in the swift glass elevator to the restaurant, so fast to ground level she felt like she was in a plummeting spaceship. She had felt lighter after being so sick eating so little the last few days, but now she didn't care if she gained it all back—she wanted to be American, she wanted to get fat and rule the world. She was nearly laughing as she ordered her courses. The waiters were all laughing, and they all loved her. She took their wine, asked for more. The restaurant was filled with merry German tourists making toasts and slapping their tables. She chose enough from the menu for three. There was no boy in a baggy suit in the corner.

An hour passed. Madeline could not eat as much as she had expected, after all. The young waiter, the one with the attempted mustache, kept bringing her things she couldn't possibly have ordered. Half her dishes went untouched; half were merely picked at. Before she had made up her mind to go, the waiter handed her the check, as if it had been up to him to make the decision and hurry her out of there. She hesitated and then asked in Spanish, "Do you know the man who sits over there every day?" She pointed to the corner.

The young waiter smiled, raised his eyebrows, stroked his little mustache as if to make certain it wasn't falling off.

"The shabby one. Beard, big eyes, big smile. You must know him."

The waiter continued to smile, helpless. She wanted to shake him; her Spanish was not that bad.

"You give him food, I have seen," she insisted. She spread a handful of bills before herself like a deck of cards.

The waiter took a few of the bills and said, " _No comprendo, señora_ ," and then in English, "Food bad? You eat so little."

"Listen, his name is Leo. Leopoldo Something-Something. He is a student, not Mexican, Guatemalan I think. Maybe Honduran." She realized she was babbling now half in Spanish, half in English, but she could not slow herself. "Do you know where he is? I must find him, I must talk to him."

"I think—" the waiter was smiling broadly now, still stroking his mustache— "señora has enjoyed her wine." Why wouldn't he understand? Of course, he probably only spoke an Indian dialect or something. She tore the napkin in her hands to shreds, wishing she had just one last tranquilizer. The waiter stood there grinning, as if any moment she might like an empress knight him and send him on to great deeds. "Please go," she said, waving him away at last. After she had dumped all her change on the table like so many useless pebbles, she got up to leave.

The headwaiter was dawdling before the kitchen doors, surreptitiously picking his nose. Madeline came up to him, gestured toward the corner, asked, "Where is he?"

The man looked around, as if for the person in question, scratching the back of his neck. Had he forgotten already? Would he lie? "You know, the student, Leopoldo."

"Oh," he said, going to a table to blow out a candle that had burned too low. "He is gone. He just stopped coming."

"And you don't know where he might be?"

The headwaiter shrugged. She hated him. "Not Mexican, or maybe from Chiapas. _No se_ , he came and went. He is gone, not coming back, I assure you. We have, the hotel has new management. This is all I know."

It seemed impossible that so much had changed in such a short time. "How?" she pleaded, trying not to draw the interest of the Germans nearby. "How do you know for certain he is not coming back?"

"Police," the headwaiter hissed. "Yes, maybe police. He is not coming back, that is all I can say. Good night and thank you, I have much to do. These Swiss!"

She looked at him as she would at a murderer. Had he cut the deal with the police? How much money had he made? Who were these "secret" police Leo had spoken of? She wanted to cry out at the waiter like an evangelist in a fury, like one who has seen evil incarnate. She could have stabbed him with his own table knives. Instead, he brushed quickly past her and into the kitchen. She stood very silently for half a minute and left, German or Swiss tourists turning in her wake.

Outside the hotel it was cool and a light drizzle was still coming down. She walked across the street, to the seawall, sat there with her back to the ocean and the raindrops soaking into her hair, and faced the long white row of tourist hotels: like tombstones, she thought. She sat there for a long time, and it was as if the eyes of the city were watching her, eyes in every one of those ten-thousand hotel windows. How could she answer those eyes now?

But if he were in jail instead, or merely trying his luck at another restaurant, or already on his way north? Anyone on the street might know where he had gone; somewhere in Veracruz there might be an answer. She would hire a detective or bribe the police... A man walking past with his arms around a woman in a saffron-yellow dress turned and clucked at Madeline like a chicken, smacked his lips. As if she were Marilyn Monroe... The Mexican woman had not even seemed to notice, nonetheless care. Suppose she were to shout at him, scream like a woman raped, and capture the attention of all the lovers on the beach below? Who would come running? And there was that red German tourist bus rounding a corner, full of its laughing tourists, by now no doubt half-filled with prostitutes in black brassieres—she would like to scream at that bus and its occupants, too. But not one of these people could be real. Veracruz, she now was certain, was inhabited only by ghosts.

That night Madeline packed her bulging suitcases, and in the morning before the chambermaids came whistling down the corridors, before the restaurant opened its doors for breakfast, she was already gone, had already paid her bill, was already on the plane, waiting to ascend. It was raining on the runway. Madeline listened intently to the bilingual stewardess, as if instruction in how to don an oxygen mask might truly, truly save her life. Soon they were above the jungles and the clouds, far from the city, heading north. Down below she could see nothing but green hills: It was the rainy season, it was a new year. She could not concentrate on the happy smiling airline magazine before her. Again and again, until the rhythms of her words revolved independently without stop, like a sort of mental gyroscope within her brain, she told herself: "I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry..." But who was to blame, then? Governments, perhaps God. The plane bucked; through torn clouds she saw the last of the coast gliding away below. Madeline felt as if she were leaving the scene of a movie that had been filmed in a language she could not really understand and filled with people who looked like anyone else and yet had secret, impenetrable motives—a scene she had walked into entirely by accident but irrevocably altered. She turned to the centerfold map in the magazine and traced her flight back to Chicago. How much farther, she wondered, and how much longer, over what city would they be when it would begin to feel like a dream the way all vacations do—and would she be crying or dry-eyed when life began to feel ordinary and uneventful once again?
Losses

Europe, the Grants decided after three weeks of interminable rain and stuffy hotel rooms, was not going to allow them to forget what they had come to forget, after all, so they cut four countries from their schedule and returned home early. They both felt an almost overwhelming homesickness for their small but comfortable home at the wooded edge of the suburbs; they had had no reason to be away from their house so long in nearly twenty years, and missed it and its comforts as they would a good friend. Driving up the lane in the storm that seemed to have pursued them across the Atlantic, they both felt but did not mention an uneasiness, as if they knew already that something had gone wrong in their absence. Mrs. Grant gripped her husband's arm when they got close enough to see through the windows and it became evident that a change had indeed come about while they were away.

Mr. Grant stood for a while in the kitchen shaking out his umbrella after having run to the neighbors' to call the police. "This is outrageous," he said. "They've cleaned us out, even taken the phone, and no one has the foggiest—"

His wife reappeared from the bathroom adjacent the kitchen, fluttering her hands. "I can't find the towels," she said. "Why would anyone want—want..." She was crying.

"Makes no sense," her husband said, taking her hand; it was cool and damp. Together, they began to inspect one ransacked room after the other, cataloging what had been where. Nearly everything of any value was gone: The disappearance of heavier objects such as an oak bureau and a large Chinese urn proved there had been more than one thief and they had probably filled an entire truck. The thieves had been (at first glance) as indiscriminate as they were thorough in their haste to clear the house of its furnishings, which were a bit spare but of only the very best sort (the Grants, who could remember the Great Depression, had always been discriminating shoppers). Both expensive antiques and worthless memorabilia had been seized, along with anything else that might attract attention. Mr. Grant soon lost track of the losses on the portable calculator he always carried with him. Mrs. Grant held fast to his elbow. It had taken them decades to accumulate their tidy horde of treasures, and they were no longer young.

For several moments they stood staring at the wall in the dining room where their daughter's portrait in oil had always hung. There was a light rectangle there now which showed up against the darker wall, and its ghostly emptiness wrenched at something inside them. "They wanted that ornate brass frame, of course," Mr. Grant said at last. He followed his wife, who in a fit of nervous energy had surged on ahead into the den (which had once been the second bedroom), where they both saw from the darker smoother areas on the carpet where the roll-top desk and reproduction Louis XIV armoire had stood. Another spot showed where the birdcage—what they had both considered a rather useless and grotesque object since the parrot died—had been. "Old Ra's home," he stated, staring into space like a psychic led through a haunted house to make pronouncements. "The police said there's been a series of extensive thefts like this, but..." He sighed and led the way upstairs.

Once on the steps Mrs. Grant's knees began to buckle, though her husband helped her on, assuring her nothing else could shock them now. But the thieves had been even more thorough and thoughtless upstairs; articles of clothing and toiletry were strewn about, and books and odd pieces of medical apparatus were scattered down the hall. It was Mrs. Grant's turn to sigh as she surveyed the bedroom, and sigh again. Her cherished ruby-glass lamps and Art Nouveau jewelry boxes were gone; the beautiful old porcelain chamberpot that had been her grandmother's was, too. The antique celluloid dresser set had been taken—as had been the Shaker dresser and the four-poster bed. The paintings, the rings and cameos, the mirrors, the vases—vanished, as if a magician had waved his hand over the room.

Amazing, Mr. Grant commented, how meticulous the thieves had been. Even objects stored high in closet corners or kept in the backs of cabinets had been found and stolen. Although there were a few broken items here and there, the thieves had generally been less destructive than careless; they had even re-locked whatever door or window they had entered the house through before they left. "But I still don't understand it," Mr. Grant said more to himself than his wife. "It's obvious they were professionals and had to have taken a fair amount of time to accomplish all they did, yet none of the neighbors saw or heard..."

"They were most of them on vacation, too," Mrs. Grant surmised, turning off the ceiling light in their bedroom (which now felt so little like it had ever been theirs) as they entered the hall. "And with the house set so far back in the trees, with the curve in the drive..." Before she had finished, something perched on the windowsill opposite caught her eye. "Peculiar," she said, picking up the object. "They left behind the pipe-rack I bought you last Christmas. Strange when they took the time to carry it over here and sit it in the window."

Her husband took the rack, an unusually heavy and slightly ungainly device which contained a small humidor, from her. "That is funny, considering. They did bother to take all my favorite meerschaums and even the novelties ones, I see." He handed the thing back to her.

Mrs. Grant raised it to the light, turning it this way and that, the way she had when she had first seen it in the antique shop. "It doesn't make a shred of sense," she said, examining the bottom of the rack. "It's a perfectly good piece of craftsmanship. If they bothered to steal the pipes from it as well as just about everything else..." She wept silently for a moment and, after sitting on the window-seat and lifting her head, began again. "If they stole so much else, why didn't they bother to take something as nice as this?"

Mr. Grant was searching through the closet at the other end of the hallway. "Maybe they thought it was cheap," he said absently. "Dear, do you remember what I had in here besides these old accounting books?"

"Cheap! This is mahogany with real silver hinges and a mother-of-pearl inlay. The dealer in Wilmette told me it's at least a hundred years old and probably Swiss. And look at the—you can tell it's hand-carved—the detail, the little drawer that slides out of the humidor for the pipe-cleaners. I'll have you know I spent—well, I won't tell you how much I spent on it, more than you probably would have liked." She stood looking at her husband, her face now flushed and trembling.

"Honey, I'm sorry," he said, rising from his knees and going to her. "I didn't mean to imply I myself thought it was cheap. You are right—it's probably very valuable, and there's not one logical reason why they didn't take it. But if thieves were logical they wouldn't be thieves, would they, dear?" He took the rack from her again, placed it on the floor, and clasped both her hands in one of his. There was the sound of hard raindrops pelting the window.

"All our lovely, lovely things," she said, lacing her fingers between his.

He pressed his cheek against her moist forehead. "The insurance will cover nearly everything, even take into account all the appreciation if we're lucky. We'll have all new things. Better things. You'll have fun shopping."

"I liked the old things."

"Me, too."

He returned to his closet inventory, and she followed a few seconds later, the pipe-rack back in her hands. He tossed out a warped golf club he'd been meaning to have mended, along with a bundle of their daughter's clothing they'd been saving but had not yet been able to give to charity. Next there was a carton with some shattered Christmas-tree bulbs on the bottom and, wrapped in tissue paper, the little rusted leg-braces they had once hated so (though now so fiercely loved), and a shoebox full of discolored Kodak slides of vacations they'd taken as a family many years ago but could probably never bring themselves to look at again, even if the projector hadn't been stolen.

"Maybe," Mrs. Grant wondered, standing behind her husband at his task, "maybe they just didn't like it. Do you think that's possible?"

He hummed a little, indicating it was a possibility.

"But it's such an usually handsome pipe rack, unique really. Evelyn was green. She said if only Maynard hadn't given up smoking she'd have stolen it from me. Ha! She's always telling me what a knack I have for finding these distinctive items..." She was once more rotating the rack, as though looking for some subtle flaw she'd overlooked before. "So it's not like I have eccentric, garish tastes or anything. I know what art is and isn't, after all. You like it, don't you, George?"

"Hmm?" He looked up from a stack of old _House and Gardens_. "No one ever said thieves have good taste, dear."

"But you do like it, don't you?"

"Oh, certainly. It's all right."

She gave out a little gasp."All right? That's it? When you opened the package last Christmas you said you _loved_ it."

"I loved the thought behind the gift. I mean it's hard to be emotional one way or the other about a pipe-rack. Besides, you know Christmas was a bad time this year. We both had other things on our minds."

"So you don't think it's particularly attractive? Don't I have any better taste than a common thief? Remember, it was I who bought this for you. This rack _is_ you."

"I said it's fine. Of course you have excellent taste. You've been collecting for years. You must know something I don't." He tapped the base of his throat. "I'm wearing the tie you gave me for my birthday, aren't I?"

"That's different. Ties are ties." She was sitting at the top of the stairs next to him now, cradling the rack in her lap. "Besides, Laura gave you that, even though I did pick it out for her while she was—but that's neither here nor there. Who knows what ties or clothes they've stolen, and her things .... I hate to imagine them hanging in some pawn shop or used-clothing store. They obviously grabbed things right and left without any consideration, but" —she held up the rack— "they had this right in their filthy hands and didn't bother to steal it, anyway. Why didn't they?"

"Oh, I wish they—" Mr. Grant cut himself short as soon as he turned and looked her in the face. Composing himself, he moved over to the stairwell and sat beside her. She wouldn't meet his eyes. Tentatively, he patted her back, which tensed under his palm. "Look," he said softly, "it's a dandy pipe-rack. It's sure... different. I used—use—it with great fondness. I wish I had a smoke right now, in fact .... But they probably just got mixed up and forgot it in the rush to get the bigger stuff out of the house. I bet they regretted forgetting it right away." He smiled and brushed back her hair. "Say, why don't we go downstairs for a drink while we wait for the police? It would calm us both—that is, if there's anything left in the liquor cabinet."

"They took the cabinet," she said, staring down the hall.

He slapped the banister. "What about that Bordeaux in our luggage? You seemed to like it at the winery. Remember that funny little dog?"

"No one could have been that confused to take the pipes out of it and forget the rack itself. They must have taken their time picking through all our things. You yourself said they were professionals and knew what to look for." Turning the rack over and over in her hands had taken on all the persistence of a nervous habit. "I know I'm upset and can't make sense of why we've had to lose so much we loved and worked so hard for. I know it doesn't mean a thing, but... but they even stole the tobacco pouch inside."

"They didn't know what they were doing. The criminal mind." He passed his fingers through her hair, down her neck across her thin, shivering shoulders. She sank her face into his chest. His voice lowered, and everything began to shake as he held her. "It hasn't been long enough, has it? She was, she—"

"There'll never be enough time to forget."

"We don't need to."

She moved under his pressure. "This house reminds me of one of those awful hotel rooms now, nothing ours, nothing to keep. I don't know if I feel like moving far away from here or what. They've chased the very last of her away."

At that, he raised her face to his own. "Come on, let's pop open that Bordeaux. We deserve it."

She sat where she was. "They didn't even think it was worth as much as that silly old birdcage. They thought it was cheap and ugly and old and useless."

"Now, you know it's not. One of them must have already had a rack."

"We've lost so much, and now I'm probably losing my mind. I can't say why it hurts me so, but it does. We always loved the smell of your pipe... worse than anything."

"Listen, dear, it's trivial. I'm sure it's common to overreact this way about something so insignificant when something like this happens. It's quite a shock to your—there's the doorbell. Must be the police." He gave her a dry kiss on the forehead and went down the stairs.

Mrs. Grant continued sitting at the top of the steps. The storm furiously tried to enter the house when her husband opened the front door, and then she listened to footsteps passing from room to room beneath her, the men's voices accompanied by strange new echoes, hollow and distant. Soon they were directly below on the landing, but she did not bother to look down at them.

"This is Marie, my wife," Mr. Grant said to the officer as they climbed the stairs. "Marie, this is Officer Ellis."

"What's that contraption?" the officer asked, lifting his pen from his pad and pointing to what Mrs. Grant was holding.

"Do you smoke a pipe, Officer Ellis?" she asked, looking at the rack and not at him.

"I have," he answered, giving her husband a dubious look.

"Then, fine," she said, forcing the rack into his hands. "It's a pipe-rack. For pipes. I want you to take it away from here." She gave it a sharp tap with her fingernail and brushed past the men on her way downstairs to the empty dining room, to stand in the empty space, facing the empty walls.
Unfinished Dance

for Girl and Boy on a Porch:

Summer, Late Afternoon, The Midwest, The Recent Past

Kate Giddings looked through the porch screen of her family's house and saw him off in the distance, idling down the block in one of his father's old seersucker suits, shielding his eyes from the late afternoon sun. He threw down his cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk, as if he could already feel her disapproving eyes upon him, though she knew that behind the screen and in the shadows and at this distance she would be invisible to him. Covering her left eye, the scene went flat, like a movie: The screen patterned his suit like watered silk and his white canvas shoes with their hard rubber soles—the shoes she detested—melted into the white sidewalk. He seemed to be floating, not quite solid. _He's a ghost already,_ Kate said to herself. _Or I'm a ghost, too; we died a long time ago, didn't we?_

Slightly dizzy from the glare, she went back to the porch swing and swiftly assembled herself there again. She was young, she was pretty enough, she knew she made a nice picture. _Here we are_ : Kate wet her finger and opened her women's magazine to an appropriate page, one without illustrations, so as to appear reasonably in thought (the article happened to be one about how to groom one's cuticles, but that didn't matter). The rest of the Giddings clan, her parents and one aunt and a younger sister, were away at their lakeside cabin, and she was glad for that. She wouldn't want them to overhear any scenes. _Kate, a girl is always prettiest when she whispers, you know. Oh, mother!_ She stretched herself out on the swing, smoothed her sundress against her thighs, and fanned her face briskly with the magazine. Dale Peters had knocked at the porch door and entered before she had even finished saying, "Come right in." She saw that the young man looked withered and wilted; his suit slumped on him as if it had grown or he had shrunk.

"Hmm," he said by way of greeting.

"I've just been lying here reading and bored out of my mind," she said. "Sit down, stop fidgeting, why don't you." _But don't say a word, please, Dale Peters!_

"Beautiful weather we've been having," he said, smoothing back his damp hair but not sitting. His faced glowed with perspiration, which somehow made him look even younger and more vulnerable.

Kate kicked one of her feet against the wall of the porch, to set the swing in motion. Slowly rocking back and forth, the swing's chains barely creaking, she said softly, almost in a whisper, "I'm going out of my mind with this weather."

He threw his head back with a fierce sigh and made a sound something like a laugh. "I don't mind so much. At least it's dry this year." It had not rained in weeks.

She twisted a curl of her blond-could-be-blonder hair around her little finger and let the lock unfurl and fall limp. " _Rain_ ," she said, "is that too much to ask?"

"Well..." Dale tugged the collar of his shirt away from his neck and finally loosened his tie, a peppermint-striped one she hated. _That tie! Why not hang yourself with it?_

"Terrible," she said, knowing it was nothing to say, and sighed even louder than he just had.

"Hmm-hmm." He shook his head _no_ , which meant he agreed, and struggled out of his jacket. There were dark half-moons under the arms of his white-on-white shirt. Of course, he would have been working in his father's sun-drenched office all afternoon, doing whatever it was the regular secretary couldn't or wouldn't do.

"Okay, close your eyes, Dale-doll." He did, as if commanded by a hypnotist, still just standing there in front of her. With that she slid off the swing, and without saying any more, left the room and came back a half-minute later with two tall, not very cold-looking glasses of iced lemonade. "You see, I do remember," she said, "to have this ready whenever you happen to come over." Kate forced a glass into his hand. Dale opened his eyes and took a short sip; she saw or thought she saw his lips pucker just a second. "Sorry," she said unapologetically. "Not enough sugar?" _He's going to blame me again, wait and see._

He smiled—it was fairly close to a grimace—and set his glass down on the glass-topped table beside him. "No," he stated, "it's all right, I guess."

"I can go right back into the kitchen and get some sugar," Kate said, rattling what was left of the ice-cubes in her glass, then returning to her swing. _No, I refuse to get up and go inside again. Why doesn't he just sit down?_ "Listen, I will remember next time. More sugar." She spoke carefully, slowed by the heat and the dryness. _It's all a matter of control._ Just think cool thoughts, Mrs. Giddings always told her children on hot days. _All right. Despite this heat, I am made of ice._

"Simple," he said, setting his glass down hard again and still standing there as if he might catch a breeze that way, _the big dummy_. Dale stared at Kate, _studied_ her, she thought. _Am I a_ law-book _, for God's sake?_ She frowned at everything around her and took a long drink. It was sour, but she liked it that way. This porch, the entire midtown neighborhood, was uncommonly quiet. Outside even the cicadas had gone mute in the heat. Finally he brought his glass and himself to the swing and sat beside her. He curled a stray strand of her hair around his finger and unraveled it by blowing on it. She pretended not to notice.

"Sorry," she told him, her lips barely moving. "The weather, it makes me act so strange. Like I'm half-asleep. Drugged." _Don't look at him. Men can charm snakes out of baskets when they want to._

"Right," Dale said carefully, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Hot weather puts all his clients in an ornery mood, my dad always says."

As tactfully as she could, she sank beneath the grip he held on her shoulder, which, along with her back, was recuperating from a sunburn she had acquired just that afternoon. It was not a severe or very noticeable sunburn, but it was uncomfortable, especially if someone touched her. He apparently noticed something was wrong and began to extricate his arm, grazing the back of her neck as he did so. _Damn._ That was where the sunburn was worst; he might as well have prodded her with a hot iron.

" _Ouch_ ," she said as much to herself as possible.

"Excuse me?" Dale asked, folding his arms. "Say something?"

"No," Kate said, beginning to yawn but stifling it. _Who can sleep in this heat?_

"I know I heard you moan or something."

"No, Dale, I did not _moan_. I didn't say a thing." She suppressed another yawn. "If you must know, I'm just a little tired and besides, you touched my sunburn." _Steady._ _Despite this heat, I will remain cool._

He scrutinized with narrowed eyes. "I don't see any sunburn."

"Well, it doesn't have to show much at first to hurt. If you must know, I went to the lake today to see my parents and must have fallen asleep listening to the radio."

"Oh. Did you go there with anyone I know?"

"No one. Just Marcia."

Dale squeezed his eyes shut, as if to make her disappear right then and there. "Is that so. Were you with him last night, too?" He patiently rolled up his sleeves and awaited her reply as he stared harshly at his seersucker-striped knees. The answer came slowly.

"Well, if you think—" Kate glared at him and said nothing for several more seconds. _This is a game he's inventing, and only he knows the rules._ "Then you can go right on thinking that." An even longer pause followed, during which time she toyed with the shoulder straps of her white linen dress and he completely undid the knot in his tie. She could feel him watching her, so close on the swing, as she moved her straps over an inch and back again, exposing somewhat paler skin beneath. She was angered that he could see, as though she had willingly exposed a length of inner thigh and not an inch of shoulder. As a matter of fact, there _had_ been someone at the lake even though she hadn't exactly come with him. Her friend Marcia suggested the outing since they had both been feeling (in Marcia's words) "edgy" lately. They were both on two weeks' summer vacation from Heinrich's teens and young ladies' department downtown, and neither of them had managed so far to do anything much with her freedom. What a terrible time to take off from the air-conditioned store, they both agreed. The lake-shore was like a big crowded party. She hadn't even bothered to search for her parents and sister. Marcia had recently broken off an engagement and was looking at the world with renewed daring, so she was quick to make conversation when the two young men from up in the Quad Cities (whom they just so happened to have met at the riverside park a few weeks ago) came out of the water, all golden and dripping. One said he was playing guitar nightly through August at The Triangle, and it was purely out of curiosity, she told herself, that she allowed him to take her home when Marcia disappeared with his friend. _People do crazy things in the heat, don't they? It isn't even as if I'll ever have to see him again._ "I didn't even leave the house last night," she said, "because, as I told you, I was so exhausted."

"Well," he said, rising to his feet, though Kate revealed nothing else of what she was thinking to Dale, hoping his imagination was not so incriminating as the truth. "Well! I should have known it. You deserved to get burned. I tried calling you a least ten times yesterday and today. Maybe your sunburn'll teach you, maybe you'll finally realize..."

She was not listening to his words, but thinking again of that guitarist's smell, like nutmeg, surprisingly enough; Dale might as well have been droning on in the house next door. Dale's breath, however, was heating up the place even more than the late afternoon sun—she could feel his slightly sour breath all around her, like a sweltering mist.

"...not trying to blame—can't you say something?" He dropped back with an accusatory rustle into the large wicker chair opposite the swing, whipped off his tie, and flung it against the screen. For a second or two he tore at the glistening hair above his temples and then all at once he collapsed, as if his bones had rubberized, blew the air out of his cheeks, and sank with still more rustling further into the chair.

She inhaled purposefully, finally gathering the patience to say, "So. Do you want to do something? Go some place air-conditioned?" She looked at him, legs and arms limp as if all the life had gone out of him. _Remember: control. Don't even sweat._ "Look," she added. "I mean, we don't have to argue. We could cool off at a movie. It _is_ something to do."

Fifteen seconds must have passed before he raised his thick low-set eyebrows. "You want the Arion or the Bijou?"

"Anything, anywhere where we don't have to think in this heat."

The young man rubbed his chin and cheeks; he could use a shave, she saw. "OK, a movie. A movie. So, you _do_ want to go, right? I'm not so sure there's anything you _would_ like, though."

Kate picked up her lemonade glass again, and seeing that it was empty, began tapping its side with her teaspoon, like the ticking of a small clock. _Think, think..._

"So—so, it's agreed?" Dale glowered at his wrist-watch. "Even if it's nothing you'll like at all."

"You mean, _you_ won't like. You're the one who never likes anything."

" _Not_ true."

The ticking ceased. From where she lay on the swing, Kate could just touch him. She ran an outstretched fingernail along the length of his bared lower arm. He twitched, as though it were a fly and not a finger. "The last movie we saw together," she said, "was some sort of romance, wasn't it? You didn't like it. The one before was a thriller. You didn't like that, either. I'm just being sensible."

" _Sensible_! You're being impossible!" Dale straightened his back with a snap and sat up taller. "If you don't really want to go to a movie, why'd you bring it up in the first place?"

_Look at him, just a younger version of his big-shot lawyer father._ "You're the one who doesn't want to go and who's making the big fuss. _I_ personally don't care. _I_ 'd go to it. I'd do anything. Everything about us doesn't have to involve a big fuss. We don't even have to go to either of the movies playing here in town. Why not just cross the river and see what's playing somewhere else. I mean, I'm not the one being picky. I honestly don't care whether it's a thriller, a romance, or Snow White and the god-damn Seven Dwarves..." _Oh, that was clever of me. But stupid._

"Save me!" He was standing again, and gave the swing a sharp push that sent her swaying back and forth. Kate stretched out her long legs as a child might, letting the heels of her huaraches drag across the porch floor. "Save me, Jesus!" he repeated. "I wish we were at any movie right now, just so I could be listening to some actress making a scene instead of you." He pulled at his collar, nearly ripped it. "You make..."

She watched him standing there in front of her, trying to focus on her as she swung back and forth.

"You make me dizzy!" Dale said with utter exasperation.

She kicked the floor with her heels this time and went sailing higher, flickering before him in her white dress like a sheet flapping in the wind, smiling at his displeasure. _Some day_ , she was thinking, _we could even be married. Or it could be some other boy. And our house will have central air and we'll take the kids to Antarctica in July._ She could swing as high as any schoolgirl.

"Hey, I'm down here on earth," he said, his voice nearly cracking. "You don't have to act like I'm not even here. I'll go if you want me to."

"Then go," Kate whispered, just as her mother would have recommended. _See? No scene at all!_ He rose up and down before her like the rolling image on a misadjusted television screen: the boyishly messy hair, the unshaven chin, the critical eyes under their critical eyebrows, the hair, the chin, the eyes...

"You are so—so _perverse_ ," Dale said, as if on the verge of tears, mopping his face with his old-fashioned handkerchief. "You just have that filthy creep and his filthy hands on your rotten mind, don't you?"

At that Kate thrust her feet to the floor, halting the swing's motion. _Smile at him. A cool smile._ She tossed the magazine by her side to the floor and hoisted herself up from the low-slung swing and walked to the far end of the porch, among the potted begonias, turned, and looked at him, from that safe distance, in the eyes. " _Oh_ ," she said quite calmly. "I didn't know you were such a mind-reader. That's fantastic, the way you know everything that goes on in my head. It's like I have a Plexiglas skull or something. You're really incredible. You ought to be a psychic on TV or a—" She stopped when she felt her voice rising too high and faced the porch screen. Outside, the world looked so hot and colorless and empty. Hot, God, it was hot. Sweat ran off her forehead now despite her best intentions. Sweat trickled down her armpits and the inside of her knees and elbows. She shook her head, and her distressingly straight hair crackled with static electricity, as if her head were on fire.

"You know," he began, "I didn't mean anything by what I said other than that I was trying to get to the heart of the matter. You know I'm not the jealous type, I'm actually sort of glad other guys admire you. Kate, you know I love you. But sometimes, with you, it's, it's..." He spoke softly, but she was certain she could feel his hot breath from across the room as he made a whimpering, childish fool of himself like this.

No, don't condemn him, don't anything. Think instead of that aisle in the grocery store with all the freezers, think of a spoonful of ice cream on the roof of the mouth before the headache comes...

"Damn it, Kate!" he exclaimed. "You're not even listening to me again."

Kate winced, as if struck, and moved closer to him. She saw that he was doing his best to drain the anger from his florid face and so took a step toward her, as well. They might have been two dancers in slow motion. And like a ballerina assuming a pose she twisted her neck toward her burnt shoulder, trying to retain all the cool thoughts within her head, trying, too, to understand what had gone wrong this summer. It couldn't possibly be just a guitarist who was as warm as the sun and tasted of tobacco. It couldn't be him or any other boy. Dale was somehow right at her side now and almost whispering himself. "It's the heat," he was saying, the sourness still in his breath. "Heat always makes people all out-of-sorts."

There, he had explained it all for her. "Yes, it is the heat," she echoed him. And then louder: "You're right, you know, it _is_ just the heat making us argue like this." The answer was so simple it made her smile, almost want to touch him. He smiled back. But she did not like what she saw in his smile: some kind of defeat, a small but unhappy compromise. If only it were September and he were back at college and the time it took between letters allowed everything to cool down.

In that moment when she had thought of touching him but hadn't, when he could have leaned over and kissed her, Dale had instead turned away and yawned himself. Then he spoke, in the steady, monotone voice of a hypnotist or snake-charmer: "Maybe I better go and let you lay down on the sofa in front of the fan and sleep off your mood." Lie _, not_ lay _, college boy._ He had already picked up his tie and jacket. _My mood?_ she thought, but decided to let it pass, for the heat's sake. _Think of bare feet on morning tile, ice cubes melting in a glass and on your tongue..._

Underneath his dark eyebrows his dark eyes were moist—but it was probably, again, just the heat. Dale cleared his throat. "If it's all right, I'll call you later, okay?" he asked, folding his jacket the way a prep-school boy is taught and then rolled up his candy-striped tie.

"No... not tonight. I'm so hot and tired. How about in the morning or on your lunch break tomorrow? I feel like sleeping a long time. I didn't get any last night, as I told you." She passed by him without looking back and sat again on the swing; within a second she was picking up her empty lemonade glass and his almost-full glass and arranging both glasses on the tray on the glass-topped table beside her. She was humming, no sort of tune. It was as if he had already left. Had left a long time ago. Had never come.

"So—I suppose I won't see you until tomorrow, then," Dale said in a hoarse, broken, undone voice. She supposed there would be a pleading look in his eyes but didn't look up.

"Tomorrow." Kate said it in such a way it could have been either a statement or a question. "Sure. Fine. They say there's even a chance of rain tomorrow. Marcia and I still have two more days of vacation and we probably won't be doing much, anyway, probably." She finally glanced up at him, saw that he hadn't moved. "Leave a message with my mother if I'm not here." Leaning back against the swing, she closed her eyes. The heat was making her sleepier and sleepier. _Think..._ She listened to Dale rubbing his palms dry on his trousers; he spoke her name, started to say something more, didn't say it. Well, there's nothing more to say, anyhow, she thought. It was certainly only the heat troubling them, wasn't it? She wouldn't even go hear that boy play his guitar, pleasant as that might be. Didn't care if she ever saw him again, in fact. Things would be better once a Canadian front blew in, as the radio weathermen always said. Rain would help, too. Already she was half-asleep. Something crackled and then the screen door opened and closed with a shudder a long, long way away. Things had not started going this way until the heatwave, had they? If he were more of a man he wouldn't have given up so easily, she told herself. He should have stayed and persuaded her to let him kiss her. Instead, the sound of his hard rubber soles receded, echoed, faded far down the block. They could all use some rain. Rain, rain, rain. Just enough to settle the dust, anyway.

Strangely enough, stroke by stroke, letter by letter, the word _betrayal_ formed in her mind, as if written in fine white dust on the windshield of a car. It wasn't a word Kate Giddings would normally use. But whose betrayal—hers or his?

When Kate opened her eyes, she realized the young dark-browed man had been gone for some time, maybe even an hour. _Dale—Dale Peters?_ The setting sun was now shining directly in her eyes; that was why she sweating so much; her legs were cramped and when she curled her toes they felt miles away. With some effort she removed her huaraches—why hadn't she done that a long time ago? Now she could tell she was not completely numb; instead a slow, lingering fire was burning up her back—that was the sunburn, just beginning to blossom across her pink skin. Its radiance seemed to be spreading from within by the minute, consuming her bit by bit. If she moved her back or neck the pain shot through her more intensely each time. She had read of people who had suddenly undergone spontaneous combustion, burning away in an instant like lit matches, leaving the chairs where they sat charred, smoldering, but still whole. This was a subtler fire, though, one that burned out the nerves as it conquered them; sharpening, then oddly dulling the senses... _Think—quick! Think of the North Pole._

_Think of glacier fields_ , but instead she thought of poor stumbling lovesick Dale, why he had acted so much like a puppy whose tail has been stepped on—of course, she had to admit she had not helped matters much thanks to the heat, but _Dale Peters!_ And just because she had gone to the beach and maybe met someone there. As if life wasn't just like that. The weather did awful things to people, of course. It could make you hate yourself simply for being alive.

_Best not to think of it._ _I'm a cold white ghost, I'm already dead._ For the next several hours Kate Giddings would will sleep to return to her, but sleep would ungratefully keep its distance. Once she lay down on the sofa before the fan with a bag of ice against the back of her neck, the flame burning down her spine like a candlewick would only serve to keep her at the wide-eyed edge of wakefulness. _One has to trick the heat, to put it out of one's mind._ She had only to conjure up images of the frozen tundra and places still colder. She knew she had to convince herself there was a polar blizzard raging outside, and then she could think straight, figure out what had really happened this endless afternoon, this day that might have lasted centuries, and at last, at last, at last sleep. Oh, why didn't her parents have air-conditioning? _No._ She must always think the coolest, coldest of thoughts, _think of things like the touch of a salamander's skin, the bottom of a windswept lake, the frigid palm of her mother's hand when she had a fever, a smooth top-down ride in a charming man's convertible at dawn when the dew is still on the corn... A cooling kiss and many other things. Things like crystal caverns far under the earth, the surface of the moon, alpine meadows, lands of eternal snow, mountain-peaks, mausoleums, hospital doorknobs, fish swimming through your fingers, the chill after the sweat is gone..._
Painters of Shadows:

**Fragment of a Preface**

Best, perhaps, to begin our story with a thumbnail history of illusionism in art—a set of learned illustrations, as it were, in various guises and disguises. Very well, then, we might begin something like this:

Here we find Zeuxis, last in the Dictionary of Artists, but first of his time, painting grapes in his sunny courtyard in Greece. Just grapes? Ah, but such grapes! The deepest indigo, so waxy they look wet, lightly brushed with a gray-blue bloom like clouds in a night sky, already bursting their skins and just beginning to weep. You can smell them from a distance; they have begun to drop upon the ground, and the scent is indigo, too. They hang in an ancient bower more black than green among its leaves, thick clusters so heavy and lustrous on the vine they might be carved of flawless purple amethyst. In another year they will be in the goblet the old painter pours for himself. He has made himself thirsty, and the sun is hot. But in the moment he has turned away, a thrush (the more poetic say it was a nightingale) has spied the still-glistening fruit upon the painting-board, and, ignoring the real thing, now dashes itself against this expert imitation of nature. The painter picks up the lifeless little bird, amused. Art has its first victim, and what a story to tell his famous rival Parrhasius!

Parrhasius later witnesses ravens pecking hopelessly at the dried board. Yes, they are, and see how they've scratched the paint! Zeuxis's friend is seething with jealousy, but applauds his mentor. His new technique far surpasses all other artists'. Still... can he not do more? So the next week Zeuxis paints a girl-child next to the grapes, to frighten away the birds, but still the birds come; he has not equaled Zeus, shaper of men, after all, and must be content with still life and not life stilled. Not long after, Parrhasius invites the aging master to his studio to see what he has inspired. Upon entering, Zeuxis is directed to a painting draped in velvet in the corner. He goes to it and reaches out to draw aside the curtain, but the curtain is only painted there! The two old rivals laugh, shake hands, and agree they have met each other's match.

In Greece, we have _megalography_ and _rhyparography_ , the painting of great things and the painting of things small. The latter is, all concede, the much more difficult. Art is not only the domain of the Praxitelean sculptors of chryselephantine or Parian marble and the portraitists of _xenia_ (being easel paintings), both groups illusionists of the highest echelon, but also practiced by the very mosaicists who lay their tiles at your feet: Witness their skill at reproducing table-scraps and mouse-droppings so realistic the maid will sweep and sweep before she is in on the joke. Akin to these clever floor-men are the magicians who put gods on the ceilings and gardens on the walls; go to Pompeii, and some flowers seem so fresh they might have been plucked yesterday, some clouds so light and ethereal they might have drifted in through a window before fastening themselves to a cornice. There are even in ancient Greece and Rome painters who specialize in adding the ineradicable _grisaille_ dust to the works of others, cobwebs to corners, and cracks in fresh molding. There are those like Apollodorus, saluting Zeuxis from the opposite end of our abecedarium, who are expert in all varieties of dark and light, shade vying with sun; call them _skiagraphoses_ , the painters of shadows.

It is said that the eleventh emperor of China tried to brush flies off a scroll-painting presented him by a young devil named Tsao Pu-Ying. The flies were only ink; but it is not polite to fool an emperor, and so poor Tsao Pu-Ying was, like a fly himself, squashed by the Lord High Executioner. Wu Tao-tzu was more discreet. He painted an exquisite grotto upon a wall in the garden of a noble and, when rebuked for missing this or that small detail, proceeded to enter his grotto, which then faded and disappeared. Wu Tao-tzu was not heard from again. We have heard that Balzac borrows this in one of his _Études Philosophiques_ , and we hope he improves the tale.

What are all painters but illusionists, and all illusionists but men playing at being gods? From Philostratus the Elder to Vasari we have a parade of such mummers, men and possibly even one woman (we will get to her) who reveled in the visual pun, the painted _double_ - _entendre_ , the double-bottomed bag of tricks in a hall of mirrors. Before their painted curtains we are all fools clutching at the fringe. George Washington himself is said to have bowed to Peale's children on their staircase, never knowing neither the staircase nor the children were actual. Naughty boys, not waving back at the former president! But perhaps you can blame it instead, as you might with Zeuxis, on the general's failing eyesight and the ill-lit gallery.

We even have the great Leonardo to take to task. Once he painted a monster so horrible—some say it was first-hand portrait of Satan, a close acquaintance if not friend—that an unexpected visitor from the local convent saw it in an alcove and died of fright right there on the spot. The trap had been set instead for a rival who came too late. We don't know if that man, like Parrhasius, left laughing or not. After this episode, if only to escape, Leonardo began devising his voyage to the moon. Which, he might have found, is only a pasteboard prop hung there by our Creator.

Let us light just a few tapers down the hall of centuries, illuminating a treasure-trove of _trompe l'oeil_ , _bedegones_ , _óbjets de vertu_ , _quod libets_ , _vides poches_ , _devants de cheminées_ , and _faux camaïeux_. Ah, _la nature morte_! From the lowliest peepshow in a back-alley bordello to the most delicate Fabergé asleep on a velvet cushion, from the grandest of _grandes machines_ to the most minuscule of miniatures, we are as surrounded by the glories of mimesis as the dragon Fafner was by gold. Examine this letter-rack attributed to Masacchio, these exquisite lapis lazuli lilies with malachite stems, that Book of Hours illuminated with an impossible beetle. Stare back at the old woman gesturing from her cartouche, ascend beyond the oculus into a firmament of angels. The object lesson is that the lesson is in the object. What is real and what is not, when as the Buddhists say, all of life is an illusion?

We have in our current era the so-called "Philadelphia School," attended by Chase, Chalfant, Peto, and others. Their pranks, like many a collegian's, are legion: silver dollars painted on the saloon floor, cut-outs of buxom ladies _en deshabille_ placed in shop windows, desktops scattered with the detritus of a bachelor's day—except that the penny-postcards, snuff boxes, loose change, and prophylactics, like the bachelor himself, exist only as figments. It might be argued that these gentlemen have a more serious side, questioning the nature of man and mortality, as did their predecessors of the _quattrocento_ and _cinquecento_ ; where Sebastiano paints a skull, Chase's _Vanitas_ is a burning cigar. Heap on the bonfire all these antlers, playing cards, hunting horns, shaving mirrors, chalk-boards, gambling dice, train tickets, lace fans, calling cards, ribbons, medals, _billets doux_ , playbills! Perhaps to paint something, to make it permanent, is to kill it off. The mirror faces us, but the mirror itself is only a stunt of science. Nature imitates art, as the wit said. But—"Which is Which?" our modern-day charlatan Chalfant asks, and we are left to scratch at the bedbugs in our proverbial wigs.

There are those good souls lost to the vast libraries of history, misplaced, as it were, like volumes taken from the shelf and put back who knows where. Perhaps we notice the gap; often as not, the gap itself is disguised, and we never know what is missing. Only lately has a certain wandering tome refound its niche in time: that being the saga of the Umbierto family of painters from Vallombrosa. For centuries this family existed only in vague footnotes, and in apocrypha touched upon by more celebrated geniuses, or wasted away parenthetically amidst the lives of the more famous. In the age of Della Robbia, Uccello, Ghiberti, and many others familiar to any visitors to the larger museums and galleries, it may not be surprising that the family Umbierto should have become overshadowed by those less ambiguous, more clearly limned giants of the early Renaissance. Only of late has the family been unearthed like saints uncorrupted—well, perhaps a bit corrupted—from the city vaults of Vallombrosa, where their papers, not their glossy bones, had languished, castaways in time, for nearly half a millennium in that catacomb. A scholar, a Milanese—known to us from a _pension_ we shared a whole winter in that sunny country—a humble man who would preserve his anonymity, it was he who most kindly called our attention to these manuscripts from wherein is derived our genealogy. He provided us with copious notes and transcriptions from the originals, which, once brought to light, crumbled to bits, he said, in this the end of our poor smoke-choked century. That the documents themselves are suspect is only fitting, but even if the tale is not true, it is a good simulation of the truth, and what could be more fitting?

In the year 1247 Piero U was commissioned by Gualtiero, duke of Florence and tyrant of Ferrara, to paint a triptych for the church of San Giovanni: The contract is our first official record concerning the family. The triptych was to depict the world before Christ, the world during Christ's days on earth, and the world after Christ—no small order, and so we may assume the artist, because he was commissioned by the duke himself and this was a wealthy church, had already acquired a sizable reputation. Today, only the left, or "before" panel of the triptych is known to have survived, and it used to be on display at the Guelphic Palace in Venice, though report has it the palace was recently razed and so the whereabouts of this only extant work of Piero is unknown. The panel, as we remember it, was rather Boschian in its carnival of figures and objects, though painted with a much more somber palette which may have darkened over the years, true, but could never have been called gay or lively. Amidst the smoke and mist pagans whirled in autochthonic rites of the sort later described by Bullfinch, and we caught glimpses of ram's-horned Moses, Ezekiel spinning like a fireworks display on his wheel, and Solomon brooding over the riches of his fabled mines...

Nota bene: At this point, the fragment, circa 1885, ends.
Cicisbeo

"How perfectly scandalous!" exclaimed her wickedly eccentric Uncle Yardley, who had, it was clear, both money _and_ a past. "Your very own _cicisbeo_ , Cecily, my lovely little adventuress."

Cecily looked at him with wide uncomprehending eyes, winding strands of Bakelite beads between her artfully ringed fingers: cameo, amethyst, and one smallish diamond. They were too late to be characters out of Browning or James, but this _was_ Venice, after all; even in 1930 Uncle Yardley's inevitably drafty palazzo, the one he had won either from an heiress or in a game of chance, and where he preferred to paint philanthropists' fat families, still seemed to reverberate with the tubercular laughter of ancient grandees and ruined contessas.

" _Italian_ , darling," Uncle Yardley informed his favorite, youngest, most impressionable niece; he frowned at his glass, doubting the Prosecco, before explaining: "Plural _ciscisbei_. Lord, it's the _trompe l'oeil_ of romantic relationships, you innocent girl. Possibly not quite what it seems. Something more or much less. Being the male companion of a wife who, with explicit approval of the elder stay-at-home husband, escorts her from _ristorante_ to opera-house or ballroom to bedroom. In the eyes of the world, he may be her lover or he may not. He may be paid or not. He may be interested in women or he decidedly may _not_."

Cecily knew all about old Uncle Yardley's shockingly young models and the rude red Horse Guardsman's jacket she had glimpsed _in flagrante_ upon his watered-silk duvet. She snapped an amaretto _zaletto_ between her sharp little incisors. Her mother had warned her not to visit this household unchaperoned, due to "bad influences," which she supposed would include the narghiles and Jesuit poets and occasional Guggenheims. "Lanford is hardly what you might call a _c_ _hee-cheese-bay-oh_ , is it? Hardly that! He has his own income and you must know my dear Peter tutored him at Balliol. Late British Romantics. Just because we're both doing the continent this year—just because my _husband_ has encouraged him to watch out for my welfare—doesn't mean there's the slightest trifle going on between us. Ha! Or ever _will_ be." Narrowed, her eyes took on the gleeful malice of a civet cat's.

Uncle Yardley muttered something presumably Latin and held aloft his _cristallo_ as if it were a chalice. In quaint half-spectacles, under the slanted and burnished light which fell from high up in the clerestory, he could pass for a _cinquecento_ monsignor or doge, a patron of the arts. A Medici, even, but a merry one. He knew he was too late for Browning or James but was sorry to be no longer young and to be playing so small a part in this niece's racier, modernist novel. "All my friends see the two of you simply everywhere," he told her. "At the Ca' d'Oro drinking in the Tintorettos, lost among the folios of the Old Library, sharing _sigaretti_ in some intimate corner of St. Mark's or a gondola in the moonlight... Well, perhaps I made up that last part, but it's _still_ the talk of this parish, my dear."

Cecily was not the sort to give an inch in these matters. "Oh," she said, worrying a wrinkle in the hem of last season's imitation Schiaparelli, as any underdeveloped ingénue might, "Peter would be _so_ amused by such gossip. Rather _cicisbeo_ than gigolo, he'd say! He absolutely adores his boy Lanford and if I didn't know he has no latent homosexualistic tenden—oh, I _am_ sorry for being so crassly Freudian, Uncle Yardley," and with that she knew she had deftly parried his thrust.

"Really, darling, I've _no_ idea what you're implying, but you misconstrue what I'm saying. A _cicisbeo_ is a position of honor, something the elderly or, pardon me, _impotent_ husband is ever so grateful for and the woman is ever so glad for—the flowers, the fun, the flattery, the very properly placed public kiss and whisper. One goes about with a _cicisbeo_ under full protection of church and court, and if the lady's boudoir, quite far down the circuitous hall from her husband's chambers, should be a convenient and hospitable place to stop the night—"

Cecily shot up with a rattle of Bakelite and blown glass. "My, look at the time," she announced, although there was not so much as a sundial in sight and the Campanile had not rung for seeming hours. "Dora Farley-Paddington is expecting me at the Rialto any minute and you know how absolutely beastly she gets. It's been delightful, Uncle Yardley, this 'tea'—and all your other teas. Please don't get up."

"A pity," Uncle Yardley said, getting up, nevertheless, and taking her hand as he must, "to be estranged from your husband while he writes his book, for Peter could so _manfully_ fend off these horrid engagements—and share all the beauty of this island with you, as well. A husband is the real thing, you know, Cecily, and you are lucky to have found true love in _your_ own life. A _cicisbeo_ is in the end just an illusion, isn't he, an artifice one has constructed oneself, or with help from society; and just as varnished and lacquered lips cannot kiss he cannot _really_ love you the way you might love him. Speaking purely as a matter of illustration, of course."

"Of course, an illustration, merely," she said, withdrawing her cameo and amethyst hand while testing her marcelled waves with the diamond other. "You must meet our Lanford and see he's not at _all_ as you picture him. Ta!" And then she was gone, nothing left but the repetitive tattoo of high heels echoing and fading down the portrait gallery.

The amaretto-colored sunshine lingered. When he finished his latest masterpiece, her uncle thought, studying his pretty niece in his mind as if _she_ were a Tintoretto, he should like to compile a list of foreign words and terms as lovely and venereally dangerous as _cicisbeo_ : _cortejo_ , _estrecho_ , _petit maître_ , _cavalier servente_ , and so on, endlessly.
Hearken, Carlotta!

**The Enchanted Prince's Lament**

or

" _A Lesson In Love"_

Oh, Carlotta! my Carlotta! I've known your ruby-red mouth, lips, tongue, throat, Carlotta, and they taste of blood—my own. You lash me and thrash me, but still I will not whimper like a cur, Holy Empress Carlotta the Most High—I shall beg no longer, for tonight I go for your soft white throat. Carlotta, listen: My teeth are sharp, my claws are long, my lust stronger even than when I was man. Once my love for you held me with the restraint of a fine silver chain... but at evensong I shall snap it and be your damned dog no more.

Hist, my heart, for I can see her sitting reading a magazine in the rampion patch beyond the orangerie gates; you turn another shiny page, Carlotta, eyes the lidless eyes, the ever-watchful eyes of a snake. Every other page you glance up at my prison tower (you cannot see me staring through the hole I've scraped in the painted window) and the heavy iron keys are there dangling from your garter, so what are you afraid of? That I might turn to shadow and glide under this door? Yet it is as if you can see my ev'ry move, read my ev'ry thought. Have you heard of that Tartar girl, her orbs blinded with sand and bandages, who can tell the colors of scarabs in a sealed casket? Watch me slathering this pane, you vampyr, you banshee, you lamia; I scuttle like a bug; I am your lowly dung-digger.

Countless times before my lips have bruised and purpled against this tower window, anxious to chafe yours; this heart of mine blisters with sweet pain, aching, aching to cry out: Tell me, is this orphic enough? Well, you would not list if you could. If I'd knuckles like a man again I'd beat them 'gainst the pains till they were bloodied, though you (dear deaf one) would doubtless think that distant rattling only lovely thunder.

Carlotta, my White Snake, albino Negress of the most transparent skin! Illumined by the grenadine eye of the sun, one can make out the shadows of bones within your poisonous flesh: I can see those rose-petal pupils shining through your (at last) closed and sedated eyelids—the magazine having fallen off your lap—like bloodstains upon linen those eyes, but still omniscient as that theosophic Russian's beneath their guise of gauze. So sleep gently, sleep soundly, dearest, and wait for that hot white stone of a moon to drop into a pool of stars, when you will come unlock my portcullis to consume my electric flesh for the last time.

Are you dreaming now of that first time you saw me in the village square, and I saw you from my palanquin, your arms bared and outstretched to catch the rain, your body revolving like a weathervane in the wind? Casting a spell on some stinking goatherd, I gathered. You were the irresistible sorceress webbed in moiré silk, high-heeled and black-laced, corseted and satin-trussed, honey glistening on your lips .... and it was then I knew I must have your body, possess your soul, take you drugged and willing into my little seraglio. _Cigaretto?_ I offered, but you spat, splattering venom in my face—though it tasted of nectar to this lovesick puppy. So... plays hard to get, I told my onyx-eyed oryx ostler, but I shall bed her yet.

You knew I suppose of my sportive ways and wanton lays with pretty boys and handsome girls (all those trophied tussles in the sack!), you knew of my forty fat wives, even, and four-hundred hare-lipped, hare-brained children. My courtiers told me of you—they produced a thick dossier—and I learned how no man had ever had you and none would ever do so and live to tell. Ye gads, but how I always enjoyed a good challenge!

Under Cynthia's orb I mimed a mean leathered bikeboy cruising 'neath your boudoir balcony, pitching bivouac in your orchards; and then sometimes I chose to be coy, with pinched cheeks and the question mark of a lovelock curled over one eye. Daring further, I embroidered seductions on my codpiece, swearing there would be magic in my kiss, swearing in the half-light of the neons outside your daddy's café. Come to me, I crooned with viola da gamba in hand, and our bodies shall be merged like Salmicis and Hermaphrodite, to taste each other's otherness forevermore. One sex indivisible, one night of eternity. Instead of answering my lust you scratched out my eyes—and in the darkness I testified that the humble Homeric will read sentiment with fingertips, tongue and lips .... precious skin, amen.

In the temple of our bodies, at the altar of our passion we shall transubstantiate our bodies, our bloods, our souls: this I prayed aloud, reciting my rosary of desire; and humbly I offered you an aphrodisiacal wafer.

A-bazaaring I merrily went like a schoolgirl on holiday and came back laden with lovelies, gifts each wrapped in gold and silver foils embossed all 'round with " _Te Amore_." You must remember those trifles, though you called them tripe and burnt them in your hearth: cockatrice eyes, cuckolds' horns, hens' teeth, bezoar stones, flaming salamanders, gorgon locks, and orris root all in vain, bless your char-black heart. In particular I recall a charming pair of homunculi, miniature likenesses of ourselves in a belljar, rutting each other hour in and hour out with the ferocious tenderness of drone and queen. You suffered me not a single response—a street-corner Hindoo could palm off narwhal spears for unicorn horns, Knights Templar would trample the True Cross for just a smile, and both of these pretenses you would gladly endure, even encourage, whilst I could not summon one nod, one wink: In my presence you sealed your eyes with beeswax, you pierced your tongue with a herringbone, you plugged your ears with pennyroyal as do sailors before the sirens (yet there were no violins, no mandolines, just this lone _basso profundo_ ); blind, mute, deaf—still it was you I followed. Bursting with concupiscence like an o'erripe grape, I tore away the herb, the bone, the wax, and you ran all adither to your duenna's bosom, little fakir, to cry those tears that crystallize into the most exquisite pearls. How many necklaces of sorrow I suppose I caused!

Strange, how in the end it was _you_ who bewitched _me_ , you she-devil—watching your eyes 'cross a crowded room I drank from your proffered goblet (thinking Now She Is Mine), but it was not emerald absinthe; it was iced paris green, enough to stun a quagga; your falsetto eunuchs abducted me, sewed me into the carcass of a monstrous coelacanth, and after three days deposited Jonah-me, befouled and starving, at your dainty slippered feet. Too weak to speak, me you swept away on a wild midnight gallop over endless sands and savannas, your vengeful Anitra to my breathless, peerless Gynt; I was bound to a poorly upholstered dromedary while you rode side-saddle like an Albion queen on your princely Arabian. At the end of our hejira there were censers and joss sticks, rosy bowers and sunken grottoes in your palace 'neath Mount Hecate. Let me support your desire like a caryatid, I pleaded with a sigh, feigning a sheik's son of the silent screen, for my love is deathless and there's much to tell. But you were empty as a beached conch; when I pressed my ear to your ivory breast I heard only the dusty buzz of flies. Fancy yourself a corsair plundering remotest Soho, looting idols' eyes that shatter like glass in the sun; such was my bitter folly. I was your lusty blackamoor lost in Cathay, mistress mine, and you had shackled me to an eternal bedchamber, devouring my body but giving nothing in return .... and so went our fair _faience_ in your casbah, my sultry sultana.

_Carlotta—lotta—ta ta ta..._ my cries echoed each night when you left, Will you ever believe I _do_ love you? When will _you_ love _me_?

Sometimes your most careless caress would sheathe me in gooseflesh; you peeled me, skin after skin after skin like an onion, to my pearled core. A thousand and one nights in cloud-cuckoo land, and still you could not melt for your fancy man, and the coins of my passion fell soundlessly into your lonely well, you bloodless Beatrice, loveless Laura.

_Pity_ ; that was the best you held for me. You gave me calliope boys to warm my gouty toes upon, castrati to casino with at quoits and Polish draughts, even a manskin banjo to accompany my Aryan blues (and I with my ebon eyes!). After such mock-merriment I recalled Keats and Yeats and told you how sad your bland and lovely brow made me. Once—only once I saw the coldness go out of your eyes, and a minuscule flame flickered there, just a moment—but your pathos is bathos as far as I'm concerned, and I've whined and wooed enough crocs to know they don't really boo-hoo.

You pretended ignorance (or were you simply too craven to realize it?) of the fact that you—my abductress, my mistress in spikes and furs—were eating me alive. How much longer did you think I would have the strength to burn with blue sparks from your evil piston valve unless I was freed? It became hard and harder for me to meet your insatiable carnal demands—carnivorous demands—for I was fast dissipating into salt and marrow.

Even so, the buds of hope bloom eternal; your tyrannical heel had not yet crushed one last gilded lily. Someday, I believed, you would shift the weights of this love between us and make a balance. Though you had said you would bolt my prison doors for all time if you ever held a single ticklish thought for me, I dallied with Valentine daydreams even in my deepest despair. Ever the leech, Carlotta, you continued to suck my love 'cause you'd have none of your own. And because you did not, do not love me, my tears sting me evermore like nettles.

Mayhap a morn would break, I conjectured, when, after you had bathed in your vat of virgins' blood and were rinsing in the lagoon, the key to my suite would slip from your girdle, a shad would swallow it, the shad would be hooked and served at my table, and I would chip a tooth on freedom. Impatient for folk-tale miracles, I whittled a rook's claw secreted from my silver supper salver and used it to ease the lock. I slipped out while you were chewing dreamfat. Picture me now skulking through your gardens, bloodying myself in the poison rose-briar, exiting through hedgerow labyrinths as thistles kissed my shaven pate. Soon I was pursued by your hounds and henchmen, so I lay low under their searchlights like a little Caesar in a silver-screen jailbreak, and donned my incognito of sheepskin rug, a wolf among your blessed flocks, and followed the bellwether widdershin-wise to freedom.

For one hundred years, in utter secretude, while you and your court drowsed in your sad black castle and dreamt of the perfect kiss, I wandered the deserts of this wide world: the trance-walk of a tentshow untouchable on live coals. When I thirsted, I bludgeoned basilisks and squeezed bile from their livers, never eating—no manna like dew—and my bones came to rattle under my skin like a purse of yarrow sticks. Many years thus I lived and lay among nomads and lost tribes hungrier than I, many moons I was enslaved by scarified Bedaweens who bound my wrists with barbed wire and made me serve Christian infants shisk-kabobbed on bayonets to their caliphs and vizier. (How I escaped from all this is another, unseemlier tale.) A century passed and still I envisioned you in my wet and dry dreams—playing the role of unrequited romancer to the hilt, cauling your face with black lace and a mantilla of knotted hair. One vespertide I imagined how I would end it all, with a last Lucky Strike between my teeth and a legionnaire's blindfold over my very very dry eyes. While my sloe-eyed, doe-eyed vampyra played her Victrolas in a far countree, and sighed and sighed...

Damn, Carlotta, why did you not believe I loved you despite all? Would you, would you, would you _ever_ love me?

At the end, the fair antipodes of earth, beyond the engraven kraken and seewurm, I at last saw the aureate gates of my hometown in the distance, could smell rancid plantains frying up in their pans, could hear my forty wives still beating their mighty breasts in tympanic unison. Out of the wilderness into the main street of Thule I crawled, already feeling the weight of my tiara back on my brow, while— _tarnation, damnation!_ —a mirage of the ethereal Santa Carlotta's alabaster Abyssinian form drifted and sifted above the hot sands like snow. Alas and alack, it was no apparition. You had found me, starven and near death, at the denouement of my sojourn and no longer willing to go serenely into that big sleep. Up and away you swept me on the back of your winged steed like a tiger-hunting Circassian, and you sealed your mouth to mine as if to draw in my ultimate, most redolent breath. Cruel sister, why, why did you not just take an adder or cascabel from your décolletage and sink its fangs into my jugular, snuff me out as you would an opium pipe? Instead, you tossed this ol' bag of bones back in solitaire, no more your little jailbreaker, once again your toy boy, inert gigolo. I languished, lackadaisical as an odalisque, martini pitcher at poolside, swizzle stick swizzling.

In but one lunar cycle yours truly had grown an apostrophe of a puppy-dog tail (snips and snails and all!). _Trés amusant_ , Car, I thought—metamorphosing me into some sort of canine Casanova; in due time my ears would grow long and droopy, and my hair cover me like a fur jerkin I couldna doff (the old Nemean lion trick they pulled on Herakles); my nose elongated snoutwise; I gained paws, claws, drooly jaws, the whole bit. When your manservants paused in their chores to scat or sprechstimme as servants will, I found myself howling like any suburban rover. You would come running to give me a biscuit and walk me at the end of a silken but unsnappable leash through the grounds... When I lift my leg, you seize my neck (the scruff, if you like), lick my nose (hot hot hot), pat my twitching rump, and things get... ultimately, _bestial_. Sometimes when you come to me invisible with the night you change me back and forth from beast to man to beast as we're locked in fragrant delicacy and I don't know whether to growl or groan. Roll over, you command, roll over boy! and curse me if I don't.

Carlotta, why would you never believe I loved you—once, p'raps always? Why would you won't you will you never never never love me?

Odds bodkins, you are not listening, you are droning like a rebec as you snore; and you would as soon puncture your eardrums as ever hear this mutt snuffling. My diabolic dominatrix, you may be searching for an ending in your magazines and dreams, one of those which fade away without a trace, a final tide over the last turrets built of sand. I, too, want an ending, a real epilogue not made of sleep-sand, and lasting. My fangs—they long for your smooth white throat.

Is there any other way out of this penultimate chapter, this chamber with only one exit? We can't leave our faithful audience hanging, can we now? Sad Tristan shall wail a threnody for his dearly departed courtesan as the story-books decree, and I shall miss my Lady of the Hard Heart, tonight, after I have tasted her blood.

Hi-ho, but even I can take a joke. Free me and it will all be forgive and forget. Live and let love. _Laissez-faire, ma petite chérie._ This poochie-pooch'll wag his tail yet again for his beauteous bitch, thank-a-you, ma'am. We might still fall in love like dreamers do. We could tie the knot and lace ourselves up into mad mirthful marriage. We shall then become gods, architects of the New Eden, and beget dynasties. We might live forever. Indeed. Please, Carlotta, stop, think, remember the Brothers Grimm and happy ever after.
Angel

First of all, she was fat, not too young, and not a little homely—pockmarks, broken teeth, potato nose, and watery spaniel's eyes. Once, she might have been pretty, at least four or five centuries ago; they probably all start out good looking, but coming down to earth must do terrible things to you: gravity and time, coupled with cigarettes and alcohol, can seriously alter a face and figure. No wings, either—they're strictly church window stuff, she would say, along with harps and halos—but she was nevertheless a _real_ angel; he never had any doubt about that, from the very first night he'd found her drinking in the village cantina and brought her home, as it turned out, to live with him. She never had to perform anything miraculous to prove herself (though when he was drunk he swore she could turn wine into vinegar and tequila into water); it was enough to believe that she read his thoughts, communed with heaven, and was pure and chaste and innocent in mind if not always in body. He knew he could not touch her himself, though: she was, after all, an angel, however fallen.

Angel (that was all he could think to call her, and she thought it was fine, better than other names she'd been called recently) would not speak to him of heaven, said that it was something mortals could not comprehend and she was neither evangelist nor theologian, so instead he would sit up late telling her of his own life—of how he was a devout man, but poor, old, and unlucky; and how he came to be those things. He liked having someone to speak to for so long, a face to admire in its own way, eyes to look into. The stories bored her, and she would fall asleep with bottle in hand and snore loud as a sow.

True, he had always been unlucky (born to drunkards, wounded in the war, beaten by his wives, cheated of his pension), but he was sure Angel was just the thing sent from heaven to turn his fortunes around; there had been a divine reason for rescuing her from the clutches of those two drunken soldiers at the cantina that night. (Actually, they had grown tired of paying for her drinks and were glad when he came along. It was his birthday—what year he had forgotten—and he was celebrating, and hungry for a woman, any woman. Only _his_ luck would bring him a woman he could not bring himself to bed; naturally enough, he had once been an altar boy. If she hadn't got so drunk, she would probably never have told him she was an angel, and this would be another story altogether.) Exactly how she might change his luck was hard to say. She was no good at guessing lottery numbers. She wouldn't cheat properly at poker. Her angel powers, whatever they were, did not reveal to her the locations of any buried treasures. Exhibiting her did cross his mind—but people would no doubt only be disappointed by such a poor specimen, might even deny she was an angel and want their money back. As for himself, he had an intuitive sense about spiritual matters and had readily believed her when she confessed to be an angel down on her luck. Eventually he reconciled his disappointment and decided that she must be more of a potential good luck charm, which was the only reason, he told himself (though there were many other reasons he wouldn't admit to, especially his growing fondness for her), why he allowed her to stay on with him: Couldn't she intercede to heaven on his behalf? She, having fallen far, did not even pray, and, being a fatalist, said prayer was a waste of time.

Jonzen (we might as well give him a name now) had no friends, though he did have a few old drinking acquaintances about town—perhaps they could find a use for her. Otherwise, there was no sense keeping her on much longer—a woman who did not cook, sew, or clean. To throw out an angel, though, would be tempting the wrath of heaven. Never mind that the shotgun shack was filthier now than it had ever been and his cigarettes and liquor disappeared with alarming speed—heaven had assigned him to protect her (not to reform her). But after a month he told her she needed a job; his wives had always worked. At first, she agreed to try, not because she really wanted to work but because she was bored lounging about the house all day. Working for a living—legitimate work, that is—was something new and possibly exciting to her. But the excitement soon wore away. A series of odd jobs—at the bakery, cantina, and dinette—all ended after not more than two days each and in much the same way: Angel was accused of stealing from the till, and she accused her employers of cheating or otherwise abusing her. Jonzen wasn't surprised to hear how poorly things went—one couldn't really expect a creature from another world to immediately understand human economics and human conduct, yet he was determined to find some better way for her to make his fortune. He had to have a good excuse for keeping her on (love would never do).

One might very well ask why Angel stayed on with such a crank: truth be told, there was no better alternative she could think of, at least at that time. She still had a few centuries of penance left on earth (for what crime we'll never know) and had grown somewhat fond of earthly ways, especially the food and drink. Besides, Jonzen was the first mortal in a long time who recognized and appreciated her for what she was—they all wanted wings and miracles, those who still believed in her kind. It had not always been so. When she was younger and prettier she had known quite a few barons and bishops, was once even attached to the Sun King's court. Unlike in heaven, however, things down here changed, and so did she. It was good to have a man love you—even a slob like Jonzen, who was afraid to touch her though he realized her flesh must have been used by plenty of mortals. Jonzen did not of course understand that it was love, but soon did love her more than he ever had either of his wives—who both left him after they'd grown weary of giving all their hard earned pesos to pay for his drinking and gambling bills. Angel didn't mind giving him any money she made, if that made him happy; it was less than what would be asked of her from the rest of the lowlifes in this one mule town, who as far as she could tell were all misers and losers (well, so was Jonzen, but he did provide her with bed and booze—and she guessed she did like him quite a lot, for a poor old mortal).

There was one character in town Jonzen had known better and longer than almost anyone else: the owner of a run down brothel near the tire dump on the edge of town, a pimp named Curly who sometimes shared a drink or two with him at the cantina. Curly was even older than Jonzen, a former seminary student and a great believer in devils and angels and lower forms of the divinity, as most pimps probably are. He was intrigued to hear that Jonzen was boarding an angel (as Jonzen confessed to him after a few beers on the last of Angel's money), didn't doubt it for a moment, went so far as to suggest how great such an attraction would be for his business: think of how a sign spelling out REAL ANGEL in bright paint would draw the boys in! She could perform "exotic" specialties and perhaps even a minor miracle once in a while—cure impotencies, revive the sexually sated, that sort of thing. Actually, Jonzen wasn't even considering offering Angel's services, didn't think for a moment she would cotton to that, since he still believed she had her own mysterious scruples. Leastwise, she would not allow anyone less than a count or cardinal to touch her. He did agree, however, to inviting Curly back to the house to take a look at her.

They had to rouse her out of bed with cold water in the face because she was terrifically hung over from an afternoon's binge and looking none the better for it. She sprang up screaming at the two men and throwing magazines and cursing the ungodly hour they had woken her, but settled down as soon as Jonzen brought her a beer. Curly's hopes were brought low (he didn't care so much about the wings, which after all would be awkward in bed, but couldn't she at least be clean?); even so, he wondered how much Jonzen would be willing to part with her for, temporarily, mind you, and Jonzen would get a quarter of her earnings. As a matter of fact, Curly was desperate—his establishment was frequented only by ruffians, thieves, and adolescents on a dare, anyone too young or too far gone to care about disease or lack of beauty; just the other night the next to last of his "girls" (though she was old enough to be his sister) had run off when an escaped convict had shot up her bedroom and blown off his own big toe. When his friend failed to reply to his offer, Curly doubled the terms. The fact was that although Jonzen had made a similar pact with his third wife before she left him, he was a little aghast, now that he was sobering a bit, at the idea. It was Angel herself who, having overheard the two men arguing, immediately came up with a deal which both found lucrative: she would turn over all her earnings to the men, and ask for nothing more than room and board. Jonzen was surprised, to say the least, and still disliked the idea of parting for even a night or the thought of strange men touching her when he had never dared to—but after all it was her idea and money is money and he was skint and a little out of his head. To celebrate the arrangement, he went to break out a special bottle of bootleg mescal he had kept secreted under his mattress for some weeks—only to find the bottle there almost empty (she was able to read his mind, he was sure). He knew she knew he had been saving that bottle for a special occasion, and despite himself he would have hauled into her right then and told Curly she was in a habitual stupor if he hadn't known how it would spoil the deal; what pimp wants to take a black and blue lush, even if she is an angel? So he managed to control his outrage with no visible sign of perturbation—easy to do if you're drunk—and found another bottle on a high shelf she hadn't yet touched. Angel lay smoking in bed, gazing at the two men while they commiserated over the open bottle: she had never heard mortal men feeling sorrier for themselves, and she had seen quite a bit in her days. When Jonzen turned to see her lumpy body rolling in the greasy sheets, he thought that it might not be so bad to be rid of her, after all. She was no longer watching him, but the ceiling of the shack, thinking of the gilt candelabrum of Versailles. Then (a rare thing because he really wasn't that hard a drinker in his old age) the men toasted each other until Jonzen passed out.

Curly took Angel with him that night; there seemed no reason not to, especially since she seemed so willing. Life had been monotonous lately, even for one so used to monotony; she was glad to get out of that dirty little house for a while, and whoring was certainly nothing new to her—she'd done it often enough in the past, although (she would constantly remind Curly) in much more elevated circumstances and by other more polite names. It was quite possible she and Jonzen would miss each other, but then he would be dead soon enough and she was immortal, as mortals would say. Of course, they could still see each other when they wanted—it was not as if they were living on opposite sides of the earth or she in heaven and he in hell (that would come later). For his own part, Curly was dismayed the more in direct proportion to his sobering up: he came to believe she was no more an angel than he was the lost dauphin of France. She was fat even by his standards and apparently bad tempered (though so were most of the women he'd kept), and he just hoped she would not upset any customers with the angel nonsense; once in a while a clergyman happened by, and things could conceivably get sticky. In fact, on third thought, a woman who believes herself an angel and is not really one could be a downright dangerous influence in his establishment (imagine the clients—not just the girls—down on their knees). Thankfully, though she did not deny it, she did not seem much interested in discussing the matter when he pressed her about it, so her illusions were apparently not grand ones. Think, though, if he did have a real angel—which, as he had told Jonzen, he fervently did believe in, at least in theory—what a pretty peso she might be worth! If there would be no reward in this life, then perhaps in the next—certainly harboring an angel would make up for a lot of sins of the past. (He never gave a thought to the conditions under which he harbored her.)

Angel was installed in the shabbiest room of them all, in the attic, a hole with no windows but plenty of bats you could hear rustling in the rafters above; there were enough other rooms below to spare, but he felt it might do her good to taste the worst in case she was thinking yet of putting on any airs—besides, she was closer to heaven up there, was she not? That would have been a witty excuse if forced to come up with a better one than telling her he was repainting the rest of the house. For her part, about this she was apathetic, too; what did it matter as long as her mattress was firm and there were a few magazines around to read and smokes and lots of liquor in the cellar? She had some time ago resigned herself to sticking out her term in this amateurs' purgatory no matter what; a dozen decades were as good as one year to her, because one day would be no better or worse or more interesting than the one which had come before. She'd done everything, seen everything, had everything when she was young; she could expect nothing now but an occasional fling with the likes of men like Jonzen. People would come and go, she would drift here and there—these days, earth was duller than limbo. It was back to playing solitaire in bed. Below, she could hear someone moaning—she guessed it was some scalawag having it off with May, the dried up old redhead who was sole survivor of the various shoot ups, brawls, and raids which had wracked the house since it had opened decades before.

Actually, it was the convict who'd shot off his big toe the week before; he lay in bed in a fever, occasionally sitting up to scratch at the infected stump with a rusty switchblade. Curly wasn't keen on his presence in the house, but, a sympathetic man at heart, he couldn't send him to a doctor who'd only transfer him to the county jail; if he were to treat all his customers so thoughtlessly, he would be likely to invite revenge and his circumstances might be even worse than they were now, though it was hard to say how. Since the defection of all but one of his girls to a somewhat fancier and far more prosperous business downtown, they'd had only one client—a nervous young schoolteacher who'd left in a fit of frustration and without paying a centavo even though May had spent two hours carefully priming him. It may have been the convict's fault, however; his moans had a ghastly quality to them which would be hard to take for cries of pleasure. There was something else about the man he did not like, either. Maybe he was cursed and had brought that curse to this place? If that were true, his foot could not heal soon enough, so he must be kept comfortable as possible.

May and Angel naturally enough did not take to each other: May immediately saw through to what she considered Angel's arrogant side, and Angel, after the same manner she had reacted to her other former fellow workers, resented May for not treating her with the respect someone of her ilk deserved; at table, each refused to wait on the other and Curly was reduced to acting as both cook and maid. When most of the day in such a place is usually spent in preparing oneself for any potential customers and in idle chatter to fill up the idle hours, they found they must be together a lot; but they staked out separate corners of both bathroom and parlor and pretended the other was nothing more than a specter of some other whore who'd worked there years before. When Angel got drunk, which was less frequent than before since Jonzen wasn't around to booze it up with, she might even slap May across the mouth, but only after May had given her what was meant to seem an accidental kick under the table, and for all their slapping and kicking they still would not speak to one another. After less than half a week, Angel was tired of the whole situation—a customer would have at least livened things up some, although an awful tug of war would no doubt have been inevitable—and was ready to return to Jonzen, who must, she assumed, be dying for her by now. She was ready to leave any time, but on the fourth day she was called upon to deliver supper to the convict after May refused to do it any longer, and on this day she saw things would be different than she had expected.

Meanwhile, Jonzen did think he was dying—though of another cause than heartbreak: since the night of Angel's departure, his stomach seemed to be churning with hot coals—what he believed to be the result of drinking poisoned bootleg liquor, but which was really just another symptom of his body's general and gradual collapse after years of abuse and misuse. If he had not been tossing in bed, moaning loud as the convict, he would have already sought Angel out—for he realized now that it had been a very poor deal he'd been drawn into, that he was sure to be cheated, that the house could use an angel's touch (however negligible), and, well, that he missed her. Upon contemplation, the image of roughnecks cannibalizing her virginal flesh was too much to bear—why hadn't he thought of that before, when he himself was afraid to touch her sacred shoulder? Even though he now knew she was a lush and a slut, he still believed that just being an angel must be redemptive in itself: that it was booze and men who had mistreated her and never the other way around (which was only partly true); and he, at least, wouldn't burn in hell for cruelty to an angel. Oddly enough, he had not thought much of hell before she came along, for all his former wantonness, and now it was as if the fire below warmed his soles when he walked—and raged in his guts as he lay in bed. He thought of sending for a priest, but settled for a doctor. The doctor (prescient despite himself) predicted he wouldn't have long to live. Jonzen of course refused to believe him, but felt an even stronger urge to get Angel back home and fill her full of his misery.

At first, as she prepared his tray on his lap, Angel did not recognize the convict for what he was: it had been a long time since she had encountered any real devils, the nonhuman kind, and her intuitive powers had worn a bit thin. He, being much the craftier, knew what she was right away, though it did not disturb him, only intrigued him—how an angel had sunk so low, ended up in this rat infested brothel—serving him his dinner! What real difference was there between the two of them? He had wandered the earth for ages, inspiring whatever evil he could in men, settling for just a little nastiness and perversion, hopping from prison cell to boardroom and dreaming of the really big jobs in government which men always got to first without need of his help. Who cared what she had been doing for however long; he was used to the type, knew how weak they were and how quick to forgo their small claim to heavenliness. They really weren't too bright at all; he had yet to meet an angel who was. Pity, they came here to do good work or mend their ways and were all the worse for it. How old and ugly she was! While he had remained young, handsome, if a little too thin—forget the bloody foot, that would mend. He would have to learn more about this angel.

She had only been in the room a couple minutes before she left, and they had glanced at each other only a few furtive times, yet each soon knew what the other was all about. When he had asked for some salt and she looked into those black, beastly eyes, it came to her who— _what_ —she was serving. It surprised her that she was not surprised to find him at Curly's. Angel had known far fewer of his kind than he of hers (contrary to the proportions men would expect), but when he had at last smiled and winked at her she was convinced and knew he knew what she was, too: they were like two old enemies whose eyes meet across the room at a party, although she had never met him before, and she had no particular dislike for his breed; devils were no concern of hers. Indeed, she thought, it would be interesting to talk to him if she could—he used to be one of her kind, after all, and they might have mutual friends. It was a dangerous idea, but she certainly had nothing to lose... No wonder May and Curly had been so uneasy in his presence; even mortals have a sixth sense about evil at times. Max—that was the convict's name—would have to be careful in this place. And of course Jonzen, with what she considered his intuitive knack for knowing the truth about people or angels, would have to be kept away for a while, maybe forever.

So in a short time (the next day he asked her to sit at the old upright piano in the parlor with him as he played something Mozart had once taught him), Angel and Max became not only fast friends, but conspirators. There wasn't much to conspire about—Curly's operation was a failure and it was no use to hang around the brothel for much longer—but they both had various ideas for a little revenge on heaven. He would take the blame, of course; she would return home in due time, but meanwhile she had grown tired of being tired of dead end border towns and cheap-side taverns and believed Max might be able to re establish her among more genteel company (per usual she never considered her looks or weight or great age, but as we have seen, she was, as Max guessed, fairly stupid). Max was stupid for a demon, too, but skilled, and thought it would be a real adventure to assist in the corruption of an angel. If only she weren't so easy to corrupt: there wasn't enough challenge in it; he would have to lead her on to bigger things: madness, mayhem, murder.

Jonzen came for Angel during the first semblance of a celebration the house had known for years: a tired band of musicians had happened upon the place on their way through town, and now a sad little party complete with music was underway; fortunately, there were more than enough men to go around, so there was no need for competition between the women—while one danced, the other would be upstairs with one of the guests. This had been going on in a kind of boozy stupor for several hours—it was easy to figure who was upstairs by that instrument's absence from the band; when Jonzen arrived, the trumpet player was chasing May up the steps and Curly was very drunk and very happy, glad to see his friend. Jonzen was relieved to find Angel doing the polka with two of the musicians at once—the scene seemed all innocence and gaiety to his old eyes; he was sorry he'd interrupted, his head full of sordid imaginings. Max—his foot doing much better—was over in a corner, astride a chair and playing a fiddle (of course, and the best musician of the lot) and eyeing Jonzen carefully, though Jonzen hadn't yet distinguished him from the rest of the small crowd. Angel was drunk and unwashed and stank but squeezed Jonzen into her arms, between the whirling musicians. He wondered aloud if she might come clean for him soon—anyway, he had got her this merry job; did she have any money for a dying man? She promised she would see him soon—it was obvious he was heartsick—and Curly took care to throw him the sop of a few coins. He left as May came down the steps in nothing but stockings, blowing a trumpet, and several of the musicians were playfully trying to wedge Angel into the piano; nothing had gone the way he'd expected, but he was glad to leave; the music made him sad, Angel made him sadder, and he realized she was his no longer. He'd been cheated of an angel and he was marked for a dead man and he felt broken into many pieces. The fiddle player gave him a curious look as he went out—an odd looking fellow even for that place.

It was tacitly agreed between the conspirators that they would skip town as soon as Max's foot was sufficiently healed, taking with them whatever money Curly and May might have about (Max was sure Curly must have a safe-place somewhere where he'd been hoarding the profits of decades, as well as the nice little pistol which had been taken away from him that first night as he slept off his drunk). Angel felt a little giddy from their scheming, though she acted not out of malice, as Max did, but simply from a desire to better herself by whatever means she could. She even thought of including Jonzen in on their plans, but Max was adamantly against any man becoming involved, especially Jonzen, whom Angel had assured him was in love with her in his own miserable way. Max disliked that notion, disliked whatever Jonzen's crude intentions were, having a deep suspicion the love of a mortal was the one thing which could bind an angel, good or bad, to this earth forever. Quite a few women, including one or two fairly notorious ones, had loved him in his time, but he (though he used their bodies and stole from their husbands) loved none of them no matter how intelligent or beautiful: humans were worthless, every one of them, and only to be used as stepping stones to positions of power. He did not tell this to Angel, though, who he suspected still had a good heart despite what he might be able to persuade her to do now; he had her in his handsome spell for the time being, however, and would not let her go too easily. She was thinking of mere pearls and silken sheets; he was hoping to conquer the world.

For days after seeing Angel in the rousing company of all those men (seemingly dozens, though there had not been more than five or six), Jonzen moped about his filthy little shack, sober but reeling, cursing himself for having treated her like an angel when it was clear to everyone else she was nothing more than a lardy stinking tramp, not fit to darn his own socks. He never once rebuked himself for lending a helping hand to guide her into that rancid of a life—it was all her fault, she had never protested, she had closed the deal herself. To think that once he treated her as one does a genuine lover! He felt as unloving as he had in all his meanest of days; she had lied her way into his narrow circle of sympathy with her cunning stories; she belonged in hell. And he would be there soon enough, too, so they might as well go together. At last he drank up all the liquor in the house, which was not much, but enough—and, armed with a table knife, went storming out to steal her back.

That evening Angel was comforting an old blind and lame shoeshine man in her quarters—the last of Curly's semi regular customers, and the most hated. May had left Angel to him: she knew he was diseased and liked to scratch and bite, served her right. In Angel's arms, however, the old cripple had gone gentle and limp as a cat and fallen asleep before they had begun much of anything. She did have a way with men—one of her few true powers—and the random customers she'd had during the last two weeks had all ended up in close to the same docile state, awakening none the wiser, certain they had been tigers instead of kittens. Of course, they had been in various stages of intoxication (how else could they make a nymph out of a sow?), but she had been keen and considerate nonetheless and sent them all away satisfied—something May simply could not understand after a lifetime at this sport, when so many of her nights ended in kicks and screams. Angel had even made a little extra money in tips, though Max took this, to prepare for their escape, so he said. That convict was another thing May could not figure out—why was such a good looking gadabout spending so much time with that dumb bitch? Who was he, anyway—why did he raise the hairs on her knuckles? She was fully intending to go to Curly to demand that either the convict went or she did; actually, Curly had already decided he'd had enough and was, since Max could now walk, planning to show him the door the very next day and leave him to his own fate.

When Jonzen sneaked into the house and up into the attic and found Angel sleeping with the shoeshine man, he was still enraged—not only because of what he saw, which was only to be expected, but because of how peaceful the two looked, like a man and wife who'd slept together for five decades without an unkind word between them. A hot pang of jealousy shot through him—he wanted to throttle the cripple; instead he sent him stumbling out blind and naked and probably still asleep. Angel, who had another raging hangover, was furious to be dragged from her sleep this way—not that Jonzen had made that much noise, aware that there were other sleepers in the house—but he had been so obstinate and hateful, rattling off despicable accusations in her ear, denying she was an angel, and tearing the already torn sheets. She had never seen him in any sort of passion; he had always been as cold blooded as a toad, and now he was batting at her about the face with his big fleshy hands and pummeling her breasts. That she didn't like, not because it hurt so much but because her angel flesh bruised so easily; tomorrow there would be big purple blossoms all over her skin. He wanted her to come with him—presumably to keep her locked up in his basement, darning his drawers for an eternity—but she clung to the bedposts and kicked at his chest. And then, though he was a weak man and dead drunk, he produced the knife, held it to her throat, and managed to rape her, sloppily and not for long, her helpless chubby arms pinned behind her head and the gag of a pillowslip in her mouth. In her state she had no power to defend herself (angels never do a good job of it, anyhow), and she nearly bit off her tongue trying in vain to scream out. Surely no one could hear her muffled cries, but Max somehow had, and he came running, limping but armed with his switchblade.

In the second or two before Max slit Jonzen's throat (not ear-to ear, but more or less chin to Adam's apple), Jonzen, who had dropped his knife in surprise, recognized just what sort of inhuman creature Max was, and died with not so much horror of the blade in his eyes as horror of the devil himself. There had been no screams—the people downstairs were still fast asleep, including the shoeshine man, who had fallen asleep on a chair in the parlor. Angel was breathless, speechless, splattered with Jonzen's blood and a little of her own (Jonzen had scratched up her face pretty badly). Max helped her to wash and get clothed—it was like scrubbing and dressing a big inanimate doll—and retrieved the suitcase he'd already had packed for some days, not out of necessity, as he owned nothing, but to present a more respectable image to whomever they might meet while traveling. He was already out of his own clothes and in a suit he had stolen out of Curly's closet. Although he would have liked to murder May and Curly in their beds on the way out, there would be not even enough time now to search for and steal what money lay about the house; besides, he'd already squirreled a considerable amount away, more than enough to buy them two tickets west on the next bus out of town, which would be leaving in just a few minutes. Angel left the house and cut across the dump with him wordlessly, unable to believe what had happened, unable to protest, as the sun began to rise and the smell of smoldering tires brought tears to her eyes.

As buses so often will be, it was late, and they had to wait nearly an hour at the depot. Max fidgeted the whole time, sure that Curly had woken with the scuffling and was now searching the county with the sheriff. Angel had sunken into teary despair, chain smoking cigarettes, and at the last moment, as the bus was loading, she suddenly refused to board with him, no matter how he whispered threats, knowing it would not be wise to make a scene. So he had to let her go, though not without a few stealthily placed bruises and lumps. Damn all her kind, he thought; women—angels or sluts—were all alike and all as stupid as the next one. Angel ran from the depot through town and dump, all the way back to Curly's brothel, entering the door just as Curly and May were stirring and struggling with the tail ends of their dreams. The shoeshine man lay beached and very white on his parlor chair in the morning light, his black glasses once more resting over his eyes, as if he needed them in sleep, too, the better not to see his nightmares. Angel climbed the narrow stairs to the top of the house, hot and winded and sick of life, and there she went to sit by Jonzen's torn and crumpled old body, awaiting the fate of a fallen angel. She had given up on this world, but the world would keep her; it was some sort of crazy mortal love after all that had led her back and bound her here. Perhaps in the clear and pink morning light, the smoke from her cigarette providing the sort of halo she hadn't worn in centuries, she did look a bit more graceful, more beatific even, and there was a hitherto unseen serenity to her face, very like that found in old paintings of the holy virgin upon her glorious and radiant assumption into heaven.
The Sixth of July, 1981

"I only like true stories," my mother says whenever I try to get her to read something other than her movie star biographies, the leading tabloids, or the local newspaper. These things she reads, when she has the time, are full of true stories—perhaps senseless, trite, unfinished, the way life can be, but nevertheless _true_. "I don't like that fiction stuff," she told me the other day when I offered her a popular novel from the public library on her night off from the donut shop. She doesn't see any point in making up characters and plots and tricking them up with metaphors and symbolism when life is already so full of interesting things it doesn't need any embellishment. Any _real_ movie star, politician, or celebrity means much more than someone who exists solely on the written page. That's what my mother thinks.

This story, therefore, is true. Or, at least I'll try to be truthful while I'm telling it. Who is to say what truth is? Rhetoric, and I don't mean to get into that. This one's for you, ma, though I know she'd never read it even if I gave it to her.

It's early July. It's hot. I'm clacking this out on an old portable typewriter (a Remington Remette) on my kitchen table in my apartment in an inconsequential town in Iowa, in America. The typewriter I bought at a junk store recently, and I love its firecracker sound and its oily smell. There's a window fan blowing in my face from the window opposite, but to tell the truth, it's not doing much good. Kids are screaming in the yard below my window. It's after ten and completely dark except for the yellow kitchen light above me. Moths are thick on the windowpane next to me and the flies are thick in here. My cat, a senile old tabby, just leapt up on the table. So far, so good. So far, nothing made up.

This story has a lot to do with the heat I already mentioned, although I'm not sure in exactly what way. You couldn't call the heat a theme or symbol; it's more of an undercurrent flowing beneath the story itself. The weather is even worse than usual this year, and it's usually something you can't ignore in this bottom corner of the state, what with the Mississippi and the humidity and all. It's like living in a greenhouse, as my mother always says. Not to mention all the mosquitoes and gnats and mayflies rising up out of the steamy river sloughs and backwaters. An article in the _Des Moines Register_ last week said we've now entered the Dog Days, which is the time of year when the sun is at its zenith. The world, or at least Iowa, is definitely at its worst during the Dog Days—at noon on a weekend, the whole town is behind doors with their air conditioners, watching television or trying to sleep. You might as well be dead: you might be better off that way. As I said, it's hot, but that's enough about the weather.

I suppose it's time to get on with the story, which actually began a few days ago, after a night of sleepless sweltering, when I was standing in the parking lot of the shopping center at the edge of town, not the mall they built a few years ago, but the shopping center which has lost most of its business to aforesaid mall. As for "downtown," well, downtown is mostly boarded up these days. Even the junk stores have left; their empty windows are lace-curtained with the ephemeral mayflies this time of year (excuse me if I got a little poetic there, ma). Main Street is like a western ghost town, but that's not so different from most river towns nowadays. The only places doing any business besides the mall are the bars; people here never get tired of drinking, especially on hot days. You can't blame them. The whole town's been falling apart since they tore it in two to put in the freeway, a stretch of pavement that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, but gets you through town in half the time it used to. That's another story, a better one perhaps, but of only incidental relation to this story. Consider all this mere setting, atmosphere-building, then.

To begin again, and explain more fully, this time, let me reiterate that I was in the shopping center parking lot, and continue on to say I was walking toward the warehouse at the other end of the lot to apply for a job. You see, I was unemployed (still am) and I needed some money pretty badly—I won't bore you with the details, but rent has something to do with it. And I wanted to go back to school in the fall. To be more exact, this was the Monday morning after the Fourth of July, the sky was partly cloudy, and the air was very muggy. In fact, it had been raining and storming all the weekend before, washing out the fireworks and generally ruining picnics everywhere. I didn't do anything but read a little and sleep a lot. No parades, baseball games, cherry bombs, cookouts, or anything for me. Though she has always liked holidays of any sort, my mother stayed in, too, but she had an air-conditioner in her living room and her console television. The ad had been in the daily paper's Sunday edition. I had biked over to this parking lot first thing after breakfast, ninety degree already and the humidity just as high, expecting nothing, disappointed if not disgusted with the world, as I always seem to be these days. (Didn't I say already, "enough about the weather"?)

Since I'm getting a little behind in my story, I might as well move on ahead to where I'm standing in a long line leading to the warehouse. I don't know where the line came from so fast, but it is the major inspiration for this story; if it hadn't been so long I probably wouldn't be writing this. There are at least two hundred people in this line, and probably many more already in the warehouse, applying for a mere handful of positions (doing _what_ , the help wanted ad in the local paper didn't make quite clear—something to do with a new "Flowerland" ceramics shop moving into the shopping center). A ceramics shop, as if we needed one! But, hey. (An expression I hate.) People need lawn ornaments, I suppose, and flowerpots and such. Jobs are pretty scarce around here—most of the major factories have laid off thousands of their employees, and lots of businesses have folded. This county, the local paper said the other day (so I'm sure my mother read it) has the highest unemployment figures in the state. Still, I never expected such a mob. I hate standing in line, especially under a blazing sun, and I hate competing for menial jobs with so many people. Besides, I don't really want a job working with flowers and ceramics or whatever it might be, and I don't like wasting my time because I know I'll never get the job (I never do), and this heat only makes me all the angrier, and I'm tired and hot (like I said), and this sentence and paragraph have gone on long enough.

Well, so far what I've written is true, remains true, and may be even of some importance. Let's supply the reader (ma, are you out there?) with more facts, then:

Say, some of the people standing in line with me. The guy with sunburnt ears in front of me, for instance. He's wearing a dirty tank top and frayed cut offs, for the weather, probably an assembly line worker dismissed from the antenna factory or some such place. Maybe he's got this pregnant wife and two kids to feed on a skimpy unemployment check. Of course I wouldn't dare to ask him about himself. That's just not done. The policy in a line like this is to ignore everyone, and, after all, these people are my rivals.

So let's consider the woman behind me—more details this time: Late twenties. Plain but pleasant. Flared hips. Tight Kmart designer jeans. Rayon blouse. Sandals. Hair of a nondescript color I'll describe as dull brown. Leatherette purse swinging against hips. Rattling car-keys in one hand (she probably expected, like me, that she'd be in and out of this place in no time). Would I dare conjecture a past for her—the teenage abortion, the husband who beats her, the way she got fired from Spuds-a-Lot at the mall? No. This is not fiction.

Hundreds of others, too (were there, _are_ there). Just scrubbed girls in braids and warm weather dresses; a few older men, balding and otherwise; barefoot, middle aged ladies with permanents; greasy guys who look like they just slid out from under cars; teenage couples talking about movies and last night—in short, the whole gamut of life as I know it in this town. We're all sweating and we all need a job. Ain't life grand? as my mother says, and would have said had she been here. There.

Suddenly, this big red-haired, chesty woman comes running up and asks me if she could please cut in line or she'll be late for an important appointment. She really does look like she's in a hurry to get somewhere, and I always try to be nice, so I step back. The woman smiles at me; she's licked most of the lipstick off her lips and her large, crowded teeth spoil an otherwise pleasant face. "Looks like half the town needs a job," she tells me. I turn around, nod, wanting to say something, and a few people mumble in exasperated agreement, but no one says anything else and we all feel I assume a little embarrassed for the new woman because no one is saying anything back to her, although quite obviously there is a lot to say.

Summoning courage, I do find something superficial enough, yet important, to say: "Do you think they have a drinking fountain up there?" (By the way, they didn't.) She shrugs, her heavy purse (did I mention her big fringed-leather purse?) slipping off her shoulders. She's probably feeling a little embarrassed herself now. "Let's riot if they don't," I say, trying to be funny and friendly. She misunderstands me, I can tell by the way she is slapping her purse against her hips.

Stop. Those last two paragraphs didn't really happen at all. That "suddenly" would be sure to alert my mother, anyway—"suddenly's" don't really happen all that often in ordinary life. Things are usually a little more gradual, even the majority of accidents. Oh sure, some of the details are accurate, as well as the sentiments expressed, but I must admit that woman who comes running up was really just an extension of the woman (flared hip, sandals) behind me. Hence the same slapping purse. I doubt if I would have said those things even if she had spoken to me, though I was thinking of what I might say if she, or that man in front, did talk to me. Really, I can't say for sure why I got carried away and made all that up—to liven things up, you might say. So forget all that, and back to the _real_ story.

Eventually (and if only we could compress real-life time into story time!) the line did move, and we got out of the noonday heat and into the warehouse, which was even hotter inside, and smelled strongly of dead mayflies—that is, two-week-old dead fish. It was right about then or maybe a little earlier that I got the notion to write about this, hoping something dramatic might actually happen so I wouldn't have to suffer too hard coming up with a plot. My idea was to make fact into fiction so fiction would sound like fact. My mother would say that's a roundabout way of doing things. This sort of convolution is actually making me slightly dizzy and confused (I'm writing this in part in a Big Chief tablet by a dynamo alongside the river which makes a lot of noise—the dynamo, that is—so it's hard to concentrate), so back to the present tense.

There's this big, bearded man (salt and pepper: gray hair, black beard, or the other way 'round) who's ordering the merging line about like a marine drill sergeant, which I wouldn't doubt if he once was, maybe back in Viet Nam. Automatically, I don't like him, so don't expect he gets fair treatment here. He hands me a yellow number-two pencil and a one page application form, crossing out the section asking for ethnic information, and directs me further into the old warehouse (the one Montgomery Ward used to own before Montgomery Ward left town). I pass a few tables and chairs filled with people completing their forms and enter the huge inner room, where people are writing against the walls, against steel dividers, on boxes, on the floor; I sit down on a pile of dusty cardboard packing material, ruining the white "dress" pants I'm wearing (to make a good impression), and soon we're joined by the woman who was behind me in line. She glances at me with her pretty/plain face, then we ignore each other.

Now we've come to what we might call the emotional crux of this episode. Understand, I got very angry about having to fill out that stupid application in such an ignoble way, ruining my pants; the least they could have done was provide tables and chairs for us all. They might as well have had us line up against the wall and shout out our vital statistics. I'm starting to think of walking out of this place and preserving my pride, or what there is of it. But I do the less proud, less noble thing and stay put. Why do we (meaning me) always choose the easiest course, shirk the chancy situations, pick the surest bet? What was I (are we) afraid of?

Sorry, I am afraid this won't do for my mother, who would appreciate neither the quasi philosophizing, the double talk, or this sort of effacement. If this were a story in the local paper or a tabloid, she would have quit reading long before now, because obviously no one is going to draw a knife or sue anyone for a million dollars or claim to be the president's secret lover. She'd be likely to argue that this isn't really a story, even a human interest story, that _real_ stories have a form of their own and not ones impressed upon them, and what's this thing leading up to, anyway? The stories she tells, inspired by life, colored perhaps by her opinions, and given shape in the smoky bingo parlors where she tells them, are to the point. For example, a story she told me last week:

It was only a couple days until Christmas when the snow was deep and my grandfather was arrested for driving without a car license. This was during the Great Depression, when times were even harder than today, and if we had a quarter (as she says) we'd stay up all night watching it. The car, by the way, was a second hand Buick, and a license cost five or ten dollars, and this being the depression, my grandfather didn't have the money. So he had to spend a couple of days in jail. The cops, being kindly sorts, wanted to take away a pocket watch he had so they could pawn it to buy the license for him, but he wouldn't give it up. The jail was full of drunks, gamblers, and bootleggers, and he stayed right there among them through Christmas. When he got out, the family went without the car for a while, because my stubborn grandfather still wouldn't give up the watch. There was and is no moral intended. He was just a man beaten down who got back up. As my mother said, it's true. And truth justifies itself.

As _I_ was saying, why didn't I just get up and go? I wasn't going to get the job, anyway. A graying but youngish woman, neatly sprayed and starched, carrying a clipboard, summons our attention by asking if anyone here came to see about the floral designing job. Not me; I don't know the first thing about flowers. A statuesque lady I hadn't noticed before, looking professionally cool in her rose print skirt and jacket, steps forward readily, though, as if she has been called upon to deliver a speech to her women's club. A couple of the fresh girls in their nice summer dresses introduce themselves, too. You know the kind, the girls you always see in flower shops. They all appear untouched by the heat. Me, I'm as wet as if I'd just dragged myself up out of the river. The young, gray woman snaps her clipboard and leads her new entourage out.

Done with my application, I end up in another line of people turning their forms in, all of us clutching our borrowed pencils. There are some familiar faces in this line—kids I went to high school with but can't remember their names now and don't care; a big boned, bleached blonde I worked with one summer at the basket factory but who's avoiding my eyes (as I avoid hers); a guy who used to work at the A&W before they tore it down and paved it over—as well as some new faces: a tanned muscle man who's laughing with a couple of randy women in their late thirties who share cigarettes and lighters, some frowning high school boys, and a pale man in glasses with pale hair and a marked worried look on his face (did he leave his infant daughter baking in the oven of his car? when was the last time he had a full meal?). Now that the hardest part is over, there is an easing of tensions as we approach the interviewer (the same bearded man who handed out applications), and some of the people have begun telling tired jokes and talking about the heat. I examine these people carefully, trying to remember their smallest movements and mannerisms, wondering who might become my hero or heroine in that story I'm thinking of writing. But, unaware they are being documented, no one chooses to be anything but a minor character; I guess this leaves it all up to me to carry the story line, and I'm not such a great one for first person.

The pale man presents his form to the bearded interviewer, who scans a list of colleges and degrees (I know, because I was looking over his shoulder). "Master's in engineering?" the beard says incredulously, as if someone would make up something as simple as that. The other man nods his worried head, his squinting eyes magnified under his thick wire rim glasses. "Like my brother in law the math man says," the beard goes on, "you go to college thinking you'll make a million when you get out, but they can't promise you a thing. No one can. Now he's working as a busboy. Ain't that the heck? You're thirty-one years old?" he asks accusingly. The pale engineer, looking paler, nods his head again, tightening his fingers around his pencil. "We'll call you by Friday if we can use you," the beard says. The pale man exits, chin down, taking his pencil with him.

That's a lie. Actually, I can't remember what the man did with his pencil—come to think of it, he might have used his own pen, but after enduring all that, doesn't he deserve a small signature of defiance? Maybe I'm diverting attention from my purpose, but if the truth can't always be right there with a punch line, a tiny bit of fiction, a little white lie (or rather, a little yellow number-two lie) won't hurt. Even my mother might agree with that.

Perhaps you remember the chesty redhead who had been introduced earlier—it's her turn now, and she hands the beard her form. "Lacey?" the beard asks, taking it. As if that weren't her name at all.

"Yes, sir," she says, undaunted (a word my mother would never use).

"You from Texas?" He is checking her out, pleased with what he sees. She does have a somewhat plain face but not a bad figure, I guess. Although I can't remember at all if I made this up or not, I think I notice then for the first time that she has her blouse unbuttoned as far as decency allows and maybe a tiny bit farther, ostensibly because of the weather. She isn't wearing a bra. (Or is that a snarky little fictoid, too?) She also has a way of smiling without smiling, if you know what I mean, and the beard liked that. (Let me go on. _Today_ , that is, in the past tense, which here means the present, a schoolfriend sent me a fortune cookie 'fortune' in an envelope, and this is the absolute honest truth: "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge.")

As the beard was saying, "You really from Texas?"

"Yes, sir."

"Bet you it's cooler down there than way up here," he says.

"Like they say, it ain't the heat, it's the humidity." Her Texan accent seems to have grown stronger. She tosses her hair back over her shoulders, swings her purse over to her other hip. Maybe she's thinking she better humor him a trifle if she's going to get hired.

"Saw you ride up on your moped," her suitor adds. That's something new.

"Uh huh. Yes, sir. The jalopy's in the shop. Listen, I've done ceramics before."

"lt'd be a nice breeze when you're riding. You like that? Let's see, you went to junior college in Amarillo. My brother in law's from there. You know any Armstrongs from Amarillo?"

"Let's see... I did know..."

And so on.

Here is where I made what may be termed my final mistake, or missed my second opportunity to make a mistake. It is confusing. For several minutes, I'd been thinking of my grandfather and how I should have walked out of there a long time ago. Now I had a chance to make that dramatic gesture no one else had made earlier, to become the hero of my own story and leave that bearded jerk with something to think about, besides. He deserved it after the way he and his company had treated all of us. I could tear up that application before those people's eyes and storm out of there with everyone's face aghast at my back as I crossed the shopping center parking lot. That would show them. I could do it, too. What consequences were there to live up to other than not getting the job, which I had only the remotest chance of getting in the first place? If I did rebel, that would be both interesting and real, something really worth writing about. I've been known to do worse. Sometimes I have a pretty mean temper: I tell people off over the phone. I nearly dumped a bucket of paint over one boss's head once. Nearly. And I nearly stormed out of that place while the Texan and the beard made eyes at each other. But I didn't, I couldn't... It goes deeper than just being a coward.

So I told the beard my hard-to-spell name and my unforgivable age (already on the form) and my hours of availability (endless!) and then I broke through the rapidly dispersing crowd to go home. Nobody was watching me, I was watching no one by that point; we weren't anyone's characters in any anyone's pretty little lies. I would have nothing to report to my mother or the guardians of history. This was early July, 1981. It will probably mean nothing to you by the time you read this—that date. And who are _you_?

So... (a word used with a sigh to indicate some more time passed, _is_ passing), so... I walk— _walked_ back to where I'd chained my Schwinn to a fire hydrant and biked out of the lot and up and over the tree-lined ridge at the edge of town and back down toward the old limestone-and-brick business district and the river. Nothing like wind in your face at breakneck speed downhill on a sweaty day in July when you feel the world could kill you if you don't do it to yourself first. Though it was the beginning of the working week, Main Street and First Street were quiet as New Year's Day, and I glided at an elegant pace, as if bearing a holy relic close to my chest, through the Land of Used-to-Be, as in "Woolworth's used to be here, Osco's used to be over there," etc. Down along the river everything was still—even the Big Muddy itself barely seemed to be flowing (the sandbars were high and long this year), and so I coasted down Front and then bumped across the railroad tracks and more railroad tracks and through the weeds to the abandoned factories clustered below the levee. These falling-down brick buildings with their weirdly Gothic facades had been abandoned and forgotten long ago; I only knew that my grandmother had sewn ladies' fancy gloves in one and my elderly father had worked himself to death making "pearl" buttons out of Mississippi River clam shells in another. I'd been sneaking into this forbidden area since I was a kid, and although I was no longer a kid, I knew I could return to a certain kind of half-remembered childhood mystery deep inside the factories' enormous empty rooms.

So, to proceed. I left my bike, hot again the instant I hopped off it, and walked right through the gap in the chain-link fence into the glove factory grounds and then through a low, ivy-covered window into the building itself. Inside it was at least ten degrees cooler and there was enough light coming from between the broken rafters high above to see fairly well. (Ma, I know, I was cautious enough not to step on a rusty nail.) I found the massive hall that must have once held all the old "automatic" Singer sewing machines that look as large and ornate as steam locomotives in the photos I'd seen at the county historical museum—a cavernous room with moss growing up the brick sides and fungus hanging like stalactites from the doorway arches, as if this place had been carved by nature and not constructed by man—and after hoisting myself up over a pile of fallen beams, I lay flat on my back on the wreck of a couch teenage lovemakers must have dragged there somehow. Condom wrappers and cigarette packs littered the floor. I suppose in another decade my grandmother was at her machine, right over there, looking disdainfully across death and time at me right now. If I smoked, which I don't, I would have smoked there and then like a real philosopher or like my grandmother did.

Instead of smoking, I was thinking of that parking lot line and all those poor stupid helplessly hopeful people, including me, and the short story I had just read the night before, one of the ones in William Saroyan's collection, _The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze_. (Sorry, you-know-what again, ma.) I'd checked the paperback out from the public library at least twice before, and the story I liked best was the shortest, called "Common Prayer," which incredibly enough was about a young man in a small town in Iowa sitting at his desk trying to write a story. Or at least that's partly what it's about, because it seems to take in all the history of the world in only about a page or so. I was thinking of it because it seemed to be a sort of personal message to myself (only when you're young and trusting, I suppose, can you fool yourself into believing reader and author have this sort of direct psychic connection across the decades): a message that was a warning, and, yes, a blessing, too.

William Saroyan, long ago in California, was probably hoping I wouldn't write this.

And as I lay there on the hard damp moldy cushions watching pigeons flying among the rafters and getting used to the dank smell of spent love and rotting refuse, I thought of other young men like myself writing themselves into other books: the cub reporter who is witness to the world of Winesburg, Ohio; or earnest young American poets in Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, up to Salinger's distraught narrators; Stephen Crane, Nathaniel West, Conrad Aiken: I could picture a lonely universe of single young men and women, too—see the strain in their bespectacled eyes and the tender backs of their necks, heads bent low over their desks in their little attic rooms in their little towns or lost in the anonymity of cities, long after midnight and nearly nodding, typewriters wound down or blank pages daring them, in guttering candlelight and gaslight and under flickering fluorescent light or harsh tungsten lamps, trying so hard, so nobly to get to the truth, the truth, _the truth_! But scratch out the pretensions, white-out the words, delete the line if you have a word processor—my paper is wadded up, I give up, this story is no story.

But, again, I am now writing this screed at a safe distance in time and space. The tabby I loved is dead but I am still alive and only a little changed. This new "economy" apartment has a lovely view into the past and I can picture my mother at home right now, television muted on a talk-show, sleeping soundly in her ignorance of Those Authors We All Should Know. What if I were to tell her—or you—I made _everything_ up, from beginning to end? Even myself, my impossible reader?

But as I was saying, nothing much else happened after I left the glove factory, that hot July afternoon in 1981 now just as secure in history as Napoleon's campaigns or the invention of vulcanized rubber or the latest installment of the six o' clock news, and that "nothing much" even my mother might have guessed. The day got hotter and hotter and I nearly died, in that stifling top-floor apartment. Nearly. That evening, I biked over to Spruce and Tenth to tell my mother about the big crowd and tried to explain how angry and frustrated it had all made me feel. (Was I blaming her for my poverty or lack of ambition?) But I suppose I'm not too good at telling real life stories, because she didn't seem too surprised or interested. She looked over the _National Enquirer_ she was reading while the announcers droned on about Reagan or gas prices and told me I was exaggerating the size of the crowd and the temperature index and why didn't I try the ammunitions plant; she'd heard they were hiring.

I might as well admit that I did stretch some of the truths I'd told her, if only to gain her wayward attention; therefore, by the time I got down to actually writing about it all a few days later, I had forgotten a lot of the specifics and was forced to fabricate. Not that I was lying exactly, or intentionally, because some of these imagined details (the lady's rose print skirt, for example) could have been right in the first place. But to tell the truth, there are same out right lies here and there. This has been a struggle from start to finish—it could be that it's impossible to ever tell an entirely truthful story, even if it's on the front page of every newspaper.

What else is there to say? I was not hired; they didn't even call me back to tell me that. I went on with my life. I wrote this story. It's now midnight of the eighteenth of July, and it's still hot and it's raining and there's this monstrous gray moth beating against the kitchen window screen, as if it has been sent here from the heavens to communicate something to me—but what? The tabby (alive again in this memory) has jumped off the table. Maybe I should mention the mayflies once more. (Time goes by: I type this up a week later and I revise and type it again a year later in this apartment with views only into the past. I did get back to school, you see, but that my friends is another story. When I revise this again, if I do revise this again, I'll be sure not to mention where I am or what a short way I've come.) The tabby's name was Mimi and I miss her.

I will mention my grandfather one last time, since I've been wondering about that story my mother told me. Of course, I realize the two events are very different and some fifty years apart in time; it's just that we're always, I guess, trying to impose form and meaning on our lives, however chaotic they are. Not to be profound, ma, but isn't that what any kind of story is about? So in some small way I see a similarity in my grandfather's situation and mine: give in or give up. Tear the application in two, pawn the watch. Sorry again, it's obvious I'm trying to find a moral here, where there probably isn't one; morals only happen in Aesop's Fables, after all, don't they? Not at the bottom of your newspaper article or even at the end of your movie star's bio, in any event. I'm still not even sure whether my grandfather's stay in jail was an act of defiance or an act of defeat. I just don't know. Maybe my mother wasn't telling the complete truth, either.
Islands

We were talking about islands: ancient ones, lost ones, mythical ones, those faraway atolls and archipelagos medieval cartographers graced with hippogriffs and ichthyocentaurs, as if to emphasize that no ordinary mortal would ever make it there, though the bravest of dreamers might. Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, I enumerated, thinking back on what I had believed in when I was young, and the lesser-known ones—Daculi, Antillia, Saxemberg, islands that may or may not have ever existed. (Though I like to think that they once had.) As often happened, a sailor would return to a hidden corner of earth and ocean he thought he'd navigated for the first time the year before, only to find vanished that spit of land so loyally named for his queen. Perhaps these islands had sunk without a sound, like rocky Mayda somewhere off the coast of Ireland, or were simply delusions like Crocker Land, which Admiral Peary saw far to the north of nowhere under the phosphorescence of the aurora borealis.

Don't forget, you added when I finally paused for breath and thought, don't forget devils' islands, the vents of hell where ships' captains heard distant screams, saw red fire and black smoke. In the Middle Ages and before, you explained, spelling it out, an "ysland" was a general term for any sort of unattainable, dubious land. Paradise, believed to be terrestrial, was possibly just such an island, too, I insisted.

Then I told you of the place called the Mapmaker's Wife's Island: A Spanish navigator, taken captive by Sir Walter Raleigh, was asked to account for the presence on his map of a small but promising-looking spot of land near the Straits of Magellan. Ah, he said, that one belongs to the mapmaker's wife. While he was busy drawing what was known of that obscure part of the world the beautiful young woman had leaned over his shoulder and asked if he could add a country, a queendom of her own; she promised many embraces in return, so her newlywed husband obliged. Yes, I said, that's what everyone should have—there is enough room in the Pacific alone for any number of imaginary islands or real paradises.

You had said you needed a vacation, to get away from your studies and your classes; you were thinking of the Virgin Islands or certain Greek isles half-invented by travel agencies. Everyone dreams of running away to an island some time, to put league after league of water between oneself and the rest of the world. But I was thinking of moss-grown colonnades below the sea, of forgotten grottoes and underwater caverns where metallic fish swim, islands of history and legend, islands that no longer can be seen by jaded modern eyes. Fabulous islands daring seamen swore to have seen and wandered about in like dazed characters in a folktale: islands of magical birds, of naked youths, of golden cities. And those islets beyond anyone's reach, their jewel-like fruit glittering always just a knot or so away, their wise beasts with human heads who speak in rhyme and their gods and goddesses reclining huge and beckoning in the sun—the hallucinations of a scurvy outbreak after months in the horse latitudes, malaise at sea, fever and heatwaves which can multiply a floating palm-frond into a forest. Islands that never were, never could be.

Just be careful, you warned, not to pitch camp too soon on any of your fairy tale islands. St. Brendan did that and the heat from the campfire caused the leviathan his sailors had mistakenly set upon to heave and roll, drowning most of his men. I mean islands where mere humans can never plant a foot, I said. Islands of mind, of wild hopes and wilder desires. Enchanted isles. And so we talked on through the long afternoon as the rain filled the streets, making your house, too, an island of sorts.

Mornings, I had been daydreaming, we could go swimming through the prismatic lacework of the coral reefs, in water clear as air, among enormous gaping soundless creatures and the waving tentacles of anemone and curtains of purple sea kelp. You could spear fish lovely and dangerous while I shook palms for coconuts; later I would crack the hairy husk and let the milk trickle down your mouth and over your chin. Naked and burned we could chase one another along the beaches and through the dunes, surrounded by gulls and albatross.

Imagining further, while undoing my own fantasy, I could see our ghosts walking over the last dune and out of sight as we stood there together in the museum, only the plate glass and half a globe separating us from the hot noon and cacophonous birds of Saylan Island. Never had I longed so much to know what lay beyond that painted horizon until I visited this hall with you—were our dream-doubles to discover the temples of a lost civilization? Heaven or the fumes of hell? You pressed the red push-button:

### _We are looking out over the sandy expanses of Saylan Island_ , the recorded voice of a mellifluous professor probably long retired or dead announced, _an island approximately three-thousand kilometers east of the Solomons, six-thousand west of the Galapagos. This is a faithful reproduction of Saylan Island as it looked in 1908, when a team of the university's naturalists arrived to collect and bag the specimens you see here. Represented are twelve species of native birds unique to the little island and five species of native mammals and reptiles. Several of these species are now extinct. As you can see by the great number of birds depicted here, ten million at one time, they knew few natural enemies in this avian paradise_...

My hand slipped from its tentative position on your shoulder when you crouched to look at the small framed photographs and maps lined up behind the glass—the island was no more than a flyspeck in the great empty Pacific, nowhere near any place with a name I recognized or remembered. We were standing in a narrow tomblike room, entirely boxed in by the cyclorama except for the doorway; it was reminiscent of the low, cramped rooms I had visited in Mayan pyramids, and as musty and cool. The floor was marble tile and the woodwork supporting the glass panes heavily lacquered oak. This was on the top floor of the most secluded and lonesome hall on the quadrangle, seldom visited above the third floor by anyone but art students or natural historians. One could hear approaching and retreating footsteps and the creak of doors from a great distance, echo fading into echo, reverberating down the silent stone hallways and among the huge display cases devoted on one side of the building to mammals and on the other to birds. We were on the more inaccessible side, among birds of the world; it would be possible, it came to me, to make love here among the dunes of Saylan Island without much fear of being discovered, the soundtrack of wind and waves our only accompaniment. For a moment I had the insane idea of pulling you down right there.

But now you were leaning against the frame of the doorway, staring at the reflection of yourself my shadow enabled you to see in the glass. I could also see you out there among the hordes of terns like angels in heaven, your body ridiculously sweatered and booted for such tropics. My new eyeglasses were tinted amber, making the recessed lighting appear natural, golden. We were landlocked a thousand miles on all sides but all the same alone here on our tiny desert isle. Then let's go to Saylan, I had told you that morning when you mentioned again your dream of jetting off to a picture-postcard resort. You had never been here—relatively few students or teachers had, or even knew of its existence—but I knew the place as well as if I had chartered it myself; the scientists and painters might have constructed it just for me.

Along the tunnel of an entranceway were photographs of the real island and the instructors and graduate students who had sailed so far to reach what they had faithfully reproduced for future generations. Here were panoramic sepia visions and closeups of implacable faces with Edwardian mustaches—earnest young serious faces as well, the sunburnt faces of these young men who had spent months alone on this tiny island in wind-blasted tents, with the omnipresent din of bird-shrieks in their ears. I loved these men I had never met. I wished I had been with you there among these men on their days off when they stripped and dived into the cool water of the lagoon, when they chased comic puffins along the coral reef, when they sat together around a fire in the cooing and cawing night smoking the last of their cigarettes and mourning how the sky could ever be so big and vast as to hold all those stars, stars, stars. If I were a greater believer in any life beyond this one I know now, I would wonder if I hadn't been among them then, unrecognized as an impostor from another world—the future.

When I was a student at the art college here, I used to come to this hall and its museums of natural history to draw the mammals and birds of the exhibits, and then, like a seafaring explorer of the building, I had discovered Saylan in the most becalmed corner, seemingly alone unto its own remote time. It was the ideal place to stretch out with inks, pencils, and portfolio and attempt to force life into these stuffed creatures. Birds had been the chief obsession of my childhood; an avian empyrean thrilled me with an exquisite chaotic terror. But, just as the jumble of stars in the heavens begins to make more sense when subordinated into constellations and solar systems, learning to classify the differing orders and species of birds established and made discernible hierarchies amid the confusion. Saylan became my retreat. Here I felt both farthest and nearest to you, for here I could imagine us together best. I came to learn the recorded dialogue by heart, the tragic story, what made the place seem so lost and sad. This time I was here on the way to other places, to see you and be gone. I wanted to deed you my island, for it could no longer be mine.

I was exhausted after three days of revisiting the scenes of my undergraduate life (only to realize I had returned to discover that which I now saw to be lost—my youth, if you will) and, as I usually am when I am tired, much more prone to suggestion and nostalgia. The sight of you couldn't keep me from thinking back to when we had met in this town a decade ago, two lives—one heading for a career in philosophy and the other, mine, for a career of indecision—that just happened to intersect once upon a time in a boring lecture room. I can't really say how we became friends, for one is not usually aware of the process until it is long over. We became too close to become the lovers I had once hoped we could be, and too superficial with each other, too detached about the turmoil of our private lives to become commiseraters and soulmates. Oh, but how I had loved you! I loved you from the first time we sat up together late at night in your room as you read aloud ancient Greek (which of course I couldn't understand) alone in your armchair enisled in lamplight while all around was dark and silent. I felt as if I were deep underground in a catacomb or cavern, while far above me I could just make out the light of a single torch, hear faintly the collective voice of the ancients—but I was too far away to touch and too fearful to come any closer. Even if I never told you, I loved you. Maybe because I didn't tell you, I loved you all the more. One loves most the one who will not or cannot love in return—there's an aphorism I should have jotted down in the margins of your beloved Socrates. Of course you didn't love me—such things I know very well without being told.

We had been talking again of islands on the way to the hall. So many, many islands! Suppose you were to make a list of them all: Gibraltar, Ireland, Celebes, Ascension, Montserrat, the Aleutians, the Moluccas, the Marquesas, the Azores, the Canaries, the Orkneys, the Spice Islands, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, New Guinea, New Britain, Novaya Zemlya... the list would grow longer and longer, become an endless archipelago girdling the globe. What exactly makes an island so exotic, so enticing, we both wondered, when a sunny coast or a mountaintop village could be compelling, too, and open up onto charmed vistas of its own? Why do voyagers long to return to the island they were once shipwrecked upon? Maybe Eden was an island (as it is depicted on some very old maps) and people have a primal need for a place to be alone and apart, I conjectured. On a tropic isle there will be no work or strife, fruit will drop into our laps, we will revert to the innocence of childhood, wonderstruck and joystruck. An island, an island of the sort I dream of, is a protected area; nothing so bothersome as real life can touch you there; it is the perfect sanctuary for lovers.

Remember the Spanish rebel Aguirre, you said as we walked under our umbrella across the leaf-strewn campus; he rafted down the Orinoco—or was it the Amazon?—and wrested a malarial little island colony at the delta of the river from the sick soldiers there and declared it his own kingdom, at war with the distant nation of Spain, so distant it seemed impossible there would ever be a retaliation. Aguirre had gone mad from being in the jungles and on the river so long, unable to locate Eldorado and all that mythic gold. His own daughter he married and called queen, but everyone around him died in an epidemic or was executed by royal edict—his. That's what an island can do to a man, you stated. You become an emperor of mud and mosquitoes, of nothing.

In the movie I'd seen, I said, he never reached the island at all. He did go crazy, but the raft just kept spinning further and further into oblivion. Everyone was dead, shot by invisible headhunters on the shore. We shall stage history as others do plays, the actor portraying Aguirre declared to the monkeys who'd boarded his raft. Maybe the raft or any boat is a simile or replacement for an island, I wondered aloud. Who is to say after all these dim years which is the truer version? It sometimes seems we do produce history solely to amuse ourselves. In time, everything becomes legendary, fabulous; leaden facts transmute into golden fiction.

Think of _The Tempest_ , you reminded me, think of Dr. Moreau: "Are we not men?" his crippled experiments railed as one. Islands are synonymous with alienation. Symbols of the dangers of solipsism. Metaphors for madness. Islands are traps just as much as they are retreats, you went on. Think of Crusoe, Napoleon, the syphilitic Gauguin—or Stevenson, as well? The wild man of Borneo! So many desperadoes had proposed their own secret island nations, with themselves as supreme monarchs, and they all had failed. Plato's Republic was an island, true, but as implausible then as it is now, for utopias ignore human nature. Strictly speaking, my glorious Atlantis was a continent, not an island, but all the same, such empty idealism is doomed—those who turn their backs on the world and its work turn to islands, you warned. Lemuria rang with the craven banshees of such sinners. No man is an island, and so forth, so forth. We walked on to the hall, our breaths clouding the space under our umbrella in the rain.

Later, in the museum, I imagined a living Saylan Island, with you and I transfigured by love or want of love among the blinding flocks, diving into the looking-glass lagoon, watching black and indigo thunderheads blossom out of thin air—for a painted monsoon threatened from the east. But a real storm would never descend upon this stilled land under its bell-jar; Saylan was like the frozen palace of Sleeping Beauty, where the world slept and nothing could change. One day would be exactly the same as the last or the next—that's what I like about the place, I told you, its immutability, the predictability. Nothing would ever have to die here, beyond life and heartbeats, beyond any transitory world. There was no arrival and no departure, no _then_ and no _now_. Saylan Island was for immortals, the gods we would become. Everyone else could believe in the world we're expected to believe in (though most would be willing in an instant to leave it for another, as you would for the Greek Isles), but I wanted to stay there with you in our own world forever, in this time capsule safe from the whims and treacheries of history: our history, and their histories.

### _...the island remaining undiscovered until 1868_ , the detached, disembodied voice of the loudspeaker continued. _It was many years more before its longitude and latitude were verified and the first man would set foot among the birds. You see behind you the exposed ledges of the coral beach where puffins have laid their eggs in bare windblown crevices_...

You seemed to be growing bored; I thought of taking your hand in a friendly gesture as I had at the airport, but you shifted nervously, and your hand flashed out of sight like a wing. And if I had caught it, just for a moment, I imagine it would have been I who would let go, for I knew your hand would be cold in mine. Surely it would be silly to try to continue for such a short time what I had already renounced vying for long ago. I remembered the semesters when we were both struggling with our classes and how much I hated being away from you, though even then—when you were so silent, ungiving, unforgiving—I chose to run away from everyone and everything to this, my most secret place, to be at my most alone when I was feeling loneliest. Like sticking your whole hand into the fire after singeing a finger, I suppose. Is there any place more solitary, after all, then a distant island?

For a long time I could not even sketch my own face in the mirror, unsure if it were fear or desire which froze me. Summers I wrote long letters to you that despite all their words conveyed little. You answered in postcards. In my room on my parents' farm surrounded by a green sea of corn I sometimes felt I was at the center of an old conundrum: On an island there is a lake and on that lake there is an island and on that island there is a pond, and so on...

For the last several years, the thought came to me as I stood there beside you unable to speak, for all those years, while you had been gathering your degrees and introducing your beloved Athenians to mystified freshmen, your friend the drop-out (from college, from life, from responsibility) had been hopping from the stepping stone of one unsatisfying job and unloved city to another—I could picture the stations of my past below me now from a bird's-eye vantage like an archipelago in time, a necklace of islands which I had camped on for a short while each one before moving on. I had gone as far away as pre-Columbian tombs and towers whose hieroglyphs I drew by lamplight, and I had returned to our dying farm and I had strayed again, but stupidly I had never forgiven you for denying me—for I never allowed myself to forget you. Over the years we had written now and then but never saw each other. Now you had changed—in looks and demeanor you had grown less naive, more cautious (that, I suppose, is what they call maturing), and as for me, my reflection told me nothing new, people I hadn't seen in years told me I was just the same in all ways—and that I did not know how to take, as comment or criticism, though I felt for the most part disappointed. I am nearly thirty, I thought, and I am at the edge of a frightening brink, before a vast black sea—roiling, restless.

On the red sands of the eastern shore an enormous sea tortoise was lumbering, her painted image, so our trusted narrator related, caught in the act of coming ashore to lay and bury a clutch of eggs. There is something that moves and moans in me every bit as heavy, I wanted to tell you, something dragging along with it a burden I can't quite understand. Would you understand? Frigate birds were flying in from the south, their red throat pouches expanded in the equatorial sun like children's balloons. Finches were busy building nests (such a fertile place, this island of love) and teal were guarding their fledglings and two mighty albatross had begun their mating ritual—necks stretched toward the incandescent sky, beaks open, wings oddly crooked like the arms of dancers in a primeval _pas de deux_ : you could hear them, too, couldn't you?

Once, a long, long, long time ago we had argued and I had found myself here at this island late at night (the hall never seemed to close) with a sketchbook and two charcoal sticks that immediately snapped under the pressure of angry fingers. Sometimes small disturbances are merely the echoes of larger calamities, and looking at those two broken stubs brought stupid tears to my eyes. A delicate hand with gleaming hairs upon it like filaments of gold reached out from beside me and brushed my eyelids, whispered something meant to soothe—I looked into the pale eyes of a creature as foreign and feral as all these birds and saw that this intruder in my land wanted no more or less than what I wanted, would give me there what you had denied me in your silence. We had met somewhere before, a park or a locker-room, and had known, had seen through each other immediately. He took my hand, I felt his lips on my neck below the ear—but then it was I who denied, and I went running out of there in a high fever, as if I had indeed been shipwrecked on an uncharted island and had fallen under the charm of a specter, a drowned sailor still lonely for love.

You listened now as I told you what I had not dared to tell you then, but you listened as if from a far distance, misunderstanding, perhaps even mishearing my words. So much had happened since then, what did it matter? I did not have you then and I would not, would never have you now. You had been thinking of marriage, making money for a change, maybe even having a child to name after yourself. Me, I was left behind in another world, on my Isle of Lost Boys who never grow any older, never any wiser—oh, they longed to but could not.

The narrative was reaching its conclusion, a hint of melancholy having crept into the professor's voice: ... _a Dutch mariner and amateur naturalist named Max Hammer, who settled here in 1910 with the intention of studying the unspoiled and unique plant life and raising rabbits for consumption. Unfortunately, the Dutchman died soon after, his rabbits escaped from their hutches and multiplied out of control, and all vegetation which the bird colonies depended upon for their nesting was destroyed. The island was left devastated and barren. Several of the species depicted here were eradicated forever, the rest flew away to undisturbed nesting grounds, and today little Saylan Island is a wasteland where one no longer hears the cries of ten million birds—only the lonely sound of the wind and surf... and perhaps the troubled spirit of Max Hammer_...

How rabbits alone could destroy an island that had existed for countless eons had always sounded incredible to me, but then look what Dutch hogs had done to the dodos of Madagascar, think how the imported mongoose devoured into extinction so many of the bright hummingbirds and warblers of Oceania. I had often wondered, too, about hapless Max Hammer, who figured in my mind as a sort of Flying Dutchman of the South Seas, haunting any ships which might pass by Saylan in the twilight, begging passage back to Holland, away from the infernal racket of those birds, birds, birds. But I had found only one reference to him—or to a sailor of the same name—in the many sources I scoured: He had been a bit of a scoundrel, it seems, a theologian turned rum-runner who left behind grieving wives and children in various ports of the world on his way to the South Pacific, where he is known for having discovered another tiny island which bears his name—no mention of Saylan in that reference, which was just a footnote pointing to another, undiscovered, uncharted book. Had Saylan been called something else, then, or had it been wiped away by a tidal wave? Could it have ever really existed?

You had settled yourself like a listless child on the marble floor during the close of the taped monologue, unaware of me, quite likely surveying the private paradise of your travel dreams. I realized then that it did not matter to you at all that I would be leaving that very evening for another, quite unmagical island—Manhattan in this case—and the friendship I had hoped to see revive and intensify between us again, at least for a day or so, was not there, probably didn't even cast a single shadow on the platinum sands of that island in your head. For the first time since you had met me at the airport three days before I wanted to cry in a way I hadn't since that boy had touched me in this very spot years before; I wanted to brace my forehead upon your shoulder, to hold you until you yielded, until you were at last mine. But I could do nothing more than look into eyes which wouldn't look back into mine; I could go no further—this you were telling me in your silence. You were not on my Saylan Island with me at all; you were sitting on a cold stone floor, back against cold plate-glass.

I had come back looking for the island I thought I had once known so well, had mapped with such care—only to find that it was a phantom, that I was like a ship's captain alone at sea with compass and sextant and astrolabe, yet near no land where land should be; what I thought I had left and could return to at any time was submerged, or had drifted away, or had been something altogether different in the first place—an iceberg, clouds on the horizon, a madman's mirage.

I can understand illusions, I wanted to tell you then—it's the heart trying to give us what the eyes cannot, the heart interceding for the eyes. But eventually the heart is found out. Eventually we face the hard, bitter truth. And dreams? Dreams are simply the lies our desires tell us. It is our damned civilized intellect that provides the pin that bursts our happy pretenses. Even here, I could have demonstrated in a roundabout fashion, I could have spoken like an essay in one of your books: Like a miniature doll-house, I could have told you, there is something eerily appealing about a museum diorama—one longs so much to enter that other world, so taken by the strange beauty of its unreality. A common seagull will fly above us unnoticed, but an artificial one placed behind glass we will long to touch and hold. There is something much more fascinating about a stage-set of an ordinary island than the real island it is based upon. This is what I told myself now, wanted to tell you then, trying to get somehow closer to explaining my fascination. I had once spent a summer painting natural history exhibits like this, and my waking hours had been as anxious as my nightmares, which had never seemed so real. After a few weeks at the museum I began to confuse the whole world for one vast cyclorama, selected and painted and posed just for me. Eventually I had to quit just to save my sanity. What is most disturbing about such exhibits is the division between one plane of reality and another—the wall upon which the diorama scene attempts to continue unbroken and uninterrupted, leading to an alpine abyss or ecstatic expanses of jungle canopy. The effect is more or less successful depending upon the accuracy of the artist and inventiveness of the naturalists, but never wholly convincing, never truly right, for there is always that vanishing point, that border with its clash of magics where the intellect with all its attendant logic steps in and says No, that cannot be so: the mirror may look as depthless as a window, but we know it is flat. They may be real feathers, but those are glass eyes. The island looks as though it will lead us to another even more wonderful vista beyond the last dune, though we know it is really balanced on the edge of a finite world.

But I would not allow the failure of an illusion to lessen my love for this island. Somehow, I knew I was waiting for you, when you would decide to speak, to break the spell I was under. You pointed out then, as if reading this crystal skull of mine, how some wag of a student artist had included the state bird as a joke among the little parakeets painted along the _trompe l'oeil_ walls—I couldn't locate it, but you insisted it was there—or maybe it had flown away? Stuffed animals, you added, depressed you; everything here was dead and motionless, a mockery of nature, an insult. You drew my attention to mistakes in the perspective, cracks in the plaster, discrepancies in the narrative of our gentle taped ornithologist. Around me my island haven was heaving and sinking—I saw our bronzed backs retreating over the last dune, toward the hut Max Hammer had built or toward oblivion, and I wanted to strike out at you, make you fit my illusion back together; I removed my glasses to wipe them and the sunlight dwindled into fluorescence, the horizon went flat, everything faded and withered and took on the pallor of the dead. A thought jolted me: I had lived my entire life upon the mainland, had never been on a ship in the ocean, and that night when I would fly to New York, out across the Great Lakes, it would be too dark to see anything below but a cold glimmer of stars on water.

What about you? I wanted to cry after you as you turned toward the exit. The words of your insular ancients are dead, too—their very languages are dead, forgotten except in books. Isn't that just another kind of sham magic? Aren't you stranded on your own desert island of philosophers and madmen and monsters? Whether I believed such things or not doesn't matter, but I reminded myself of how much I had loved you and so I remained silent, kept my accord with you no matter what or why. There had been too many arguments in the past; let the future be one of acceptance. I was not happy. I was not unhappy. I was leaving.

On the way out we passed the birds of paradise, the peacocks, the passenger pigeons. A teenage couple sat in a corner, sketching and holding hands at the same time. Years had separated me not only from you but from the student population as well; I felt old (despite whatever I might appear) and anachronistic, the last of my species. The students you taught kept you young, divided you from me, and the thought that I had wanted to take your hand in mine just minutes before suddenly seemed ridiculous, something that couldn't possibly be imagined. I looked into the glass cases, into all the unblinking marble eyes that might have held some secret together with you which I was not allowed to share. Once, I told you as I went back to one of the cases, these pigeons were so numerous they blotted out the sun for hours when a massive flock flew over, or so some old diaries relate. And once, I explained as I passed another case, Maori tribesmen in the New Hebrides wove fantastic iridescent cloaks from the feathers of these birds, birds which are naturally enough to be found no more. Everywhere there were birds which would never fly again. Everywhere those false, dead eyes. It occurred to me then that we were standing in the midst of a great inhuman necropolis.

These Maori birds, you said, seemed to have been designed not by God but by some crazed fashion designer. They were named for princes and princesses, I said with authority, for every good old encyclopedia has a color plate or two of these birds. Because the feet had been removed from the first specimens seen in Europe, they were believed to be completely celestial beings, living like angels high beyond human vision and never descending to earth except in death. Hence their fanciful name—birds of paradise. That brought a smile to your lips. You remind me of them, you said—extra-terrestrial. Not quite so angelic, though.

Stumbling on a joke of my own, I told you how a few years ago the great ivory-billed woodpecker had somehow been stolen one night from its case right here in the hall. Much later there appeared in the campus newspaper an anonymous note, accompanied by a photograph, from an island off the coast of Texas, testifying that the extinct bird was fine and was being tended like a lover. At that time I had laughed, but now I understood what it meant to cherish something so much not because it is so very beautiful but because it is so very rare and irreplaceable. What a sad, romantic theft! But, you said, it wasn't a real bird at all—just some stuffed feathers; it wasn't romantic, but ridiculous; besides, you had just read the other day that the bird had been sighted for the first time in sixty years in the jungles of Cuba or the cypress swamps of Alabama. Oh, but island creatures spotted from a distance with avaricious eyes often turn out to be something quite mundane after all, I said, not realizing then what I was conceding. We descended the echoing stairwell, and I went on, drawing upon half-forgotten knowledge from childhood books. Remember what Marco Polo thought he saw in China, what he thought he remembered he saw, years later in his jail cell? Remember headless men and giants. Remember the ferocious half-men of Tierra del Fuego who turned out to be nothing more than naked crouching Indians, heads under deerskins in the perpetual rain. You unfurled the umbrella and paused thinking at the door, while I looked toward a distant sun silvered by clouds. I hope Crete is warm, you said. And we stepped once again into the freezing rain of another continent, another century.

There is no such island as Saylan after all, you would write me later (in a letter forwarded to my new apartment in Hell's Kitchen) after claiming to have done a little research of your own. The truth was startling. It was merely a hypothetical amalgamation of typical South Pacific islands the university professors had invented to demonstrate certain ecological precepts. Max Hammer had been borrowed from the history of another, similar (but actual) island. The cyclorama was the collaborative effort of scientists and artists in the 1920s; the "extinct" variants of bird species represented within it had been dyed to resemble possible subspecies. In toto, the island was a valuable lesson but it had never existed; even the maps and photographs had been faked. I had, you said, been dreaming all these years of a place as unreal as the Mapmaker's Wife's Island.

Your life, however, is linked across the years by a series of practical jokes I remember well, and I know your elaborate sense of mockery; it's every bit as believable that you're hoaxing me simply to amuse yourself and make me a bit more circumspect (more objective, less subjective) in the future. A philosophical study, possibly, something to serve as a classroom example in perceptions of reality. William James might have done the same thing. Only you would lie to me in this way, though, and I don't really mind—only you would be so conscientious as to produce such lies, such a history, for me and myself alone. And then again, how do we know that the Spanish navigator was not bluffing Sir Walter Raleigh? Maybe he was just protecting a treasure he meant to keep for his own. Maybe there did exist such an island...

An anecdote from the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, which you had also quoted in your letter: In the middle of the blackest of storms, the blackest of nights, the captain of a herring trawler had been asked by an awestruck journalist on board how he so deftly navigated around all those tiny islands and rocky shoals on his timeworn nautical map, without aid of any tools and when even the brightest lighthouse beacon seemed to have been quenched by the rain: Those islands, sir? Those are just fly-shit!

Walking again in the rain outside the hall we had discussed islands one last time before I left for the east. They are cruel things, you said. Minos ruled an island kingdom with terror at its heart. Odysseus sailed from Circe to Cyclops, from one island horror to another. Hell is indeed an island. The orchids of antipodean isles breathe poisonous perfumes, the three-eyed maidens are sorceresses, the dragons man-eaters.

But I was still thinking of islands that were sighted once and seen no more—were they just a navigator's dream or were they still there, waiting to be rediscovered like any other lost piece of art? To claim and name something and then to lose it—lost loves, lost souls, all those lost islands! Such islands were listed on maps with the initials P.D. or E.D. trailing after: Position or Existence Doubtful. With pictures taken of the earth from the moon, with GPS and satellite technology, however, it is difficult to believe anything is left to be discovered down here, unless it is hidden beneath an eternal cloudbank or too remote and tiny even for an astronaut's camera (and the earth, too, as they always say, is an island spinning in space).

Think, though, of the fiery births of volcanic islands off Iceland or the Shetlands or mountain peaks erupting above sea-level after a submarine earthquake—isn't it possible new previously uncharted territories are added to the earth each year? Hadn't the barnacle-encrusted sea-walls of an Atlantean city been discovered somewhere in the Sargasso Sea? Weren't there other ocean-floor kingdoms, resplendent with mossy spires and steeples like great aquatic Angkor Wats, only now being mapped in the East Indies, and weren't the great stone heads of Easter Island still a mystery waiting to be solved? There were aborigines on some banyan-encircled islands that had only recently become acquainted with fire and the wheel. I was wrong, you were wrong; there was all too much to explore out upon the seven seas.

Krakatoa was an island, you stated, as if to end the whole long discussion then and there: Islands can die the most violent deaths, stain the world's sunsets with volcanic ash for years to come. There were islands in the Bering Strait and in the Adriatic that were time bombs steadily ticking. Other islands were retreating from man's eyesight even as we spoke. Sinking or being washed away dune by dune. Venice, Palau, the Florida Keys. Some say even your hellish Manhattan is doomed to drop into the sea any year now...

I was no longer listening; I was longing to race back up the stairs to Saylan Island, smash the glass, invade that forbidden world and take off across the sands, away from a sun tarnished by rain—yes, away from you. There I would walk toward the west, toward a sunset in oils which would never fade, and I would start to run, and I would shout, and I would run faster, and I would rise into the sky with a million white-gold birds, a million other lost beings, looking back down on myself in the mirror of the lagoon, looking as I passed with fleeting curiosity on the face that would remain ageless and changeless. In minutes I would be far away, on the other side of the world. Thousands and thousands of miles away .... leaving you, leaving you, leaving you with only the sound of wind and surf.
Once on an Afternoon

When she breathed, she breathed in more than just this good fresh country air. She breathed in June and all that an afternoon in June meant out here: the golden dust that a passing tractor had stirred from the road, the pollen from a million wildflowers blown in from across the pastures, the rich damp scents of new-mown grass and fresh manure, black Iowa earth and bursting shoots in the garden. After a cold spring, the world was again as it should be. Sitting here on the swaybacked porch steps looking west, her hair drying in the sun, she could sense even more than usual the whole countryside and its slow (but too quick!) green change. Everything was greener than it seemed possible, a green so lush and intense it could make one's eyes ache. She loved it all. June was too short even if an afternoon could be forever. And so she had been thinking to herself since that morning : _The day must be made to last._

But how does one hold back time, capture a perfect day? Already she had watered the garden, tied tomatoes to their stakes, scrubbed down the kitchen, made the children's beds, put new screens in the back porch windows, swept the floors, laundered half a dozen or so of her husband's white business shirts, and lastly, as a treat to herself, washed her hair with scented soap. But doing lots of things ultimately only makes the time fly by quicker and here it was already well past noon. There must be something she could do that would act as a wide net to catch every single sunlit minute of this day, she thought, watching a lone pearl-white cloud motionless in the sky—something simple yet not something one could do just any day. The answer, of course, was to have a picnic, a picnic like the ones out of her long-ago girlhood—one that was slow and lazy and let you stretch out under the cool of the elms, munching potato chips and watching cumulus clouds build into thunderheads, not doing or worrying about a thing. It would be easy. Just herself and the children and Duke their dog on a family picnic, the way things used to be, the fret of life suddenly stilled, like the surface of a pond when the wind dies down.

She shook her head, feeling the damp waves against her cheeks and forehead, and stretched her tired arms. All around was sun and space and silence, although her world here wasn't really silent. There was a kind of music or rhythm in the slowly turning catalpa leaves overhead, the swaying clothes on the line, a distant tractor rumbling on gravel, cornfields rustling in the heat for endless acres around. She must make the children listen for this music, then, and wait for them to realize that there was no luxury money could buy like a soft breeze on a sunny afternoon in June.

Leila and Kent would be jumping off hay bales in the barn or fishing with bamboo poles down by the pond, while Suze and Marty were inside napping. Duke, the slobby floppy mutt, would be guarding the foot of their beds, their mother knew. But she needn't bother them all yet. She dangled her feet from the porch steps and delighted in having the time to think, to enjoy a little peace. The picnic would be a surprise, then. All she really had to do was spread a blanket somewhere and put a few odds and ends of food in a basket: leftover fried chicken, store-bought tomatoes and radishes, maybe a little potato salad, something to drink, and those oatmeal cookies she had made yesterday. They could eat right here in the broad backyard on chinette plates and maybe listen to the kitchen radio after they listened to the world. Together they would all be happy and content and warm, on the blanket in the grass under the trees.

Once more she surveyed the rolling green lawn and the greener fields spread beyond. Clouds of gnats hung over the sawdust in the adjacent barnyard, and up the road one of the Snyders' cows moaned. She got up and walked down under the closest and tallest cottonwood to retrieve one of baby Marty's shoes, kissed it, and held its tender sole to her breast. Why did just the sight of her children's tiny clothes make her want to cry sometimes? Gene called her sentimental. But what could he know about what it was like to be a woman and to suffer dearly if your child so much as stubbed her toe? She walked on through the yard, collecting other wayward toys and articles of clothing. This breeze, in the cottonwood shade, was cool and fluid as water. Lizzie the old palomino mare stood beneath a grove of young ailanthus trees past the fence, shuddering flies off her flanks. A torrent of dandelions flowed across the horse pasture and into the sea of waving alfalfa and corn and soybeans that spread past the horizon. A bullfrog sounded just once its deep plangent note, like an oriental gong that has called the hour, from the edge of the pond. Purple martins shot out of their birdhouse (a dozen apartments high on a pole like a citadel) bright as roman candles through the clear blue air. Joyous! Even the wasps darting in and out of their paper nests in the eaves above exhilarated her. How could she hold all this bliss inside?

Inside now, there was that chicken in the refrigerator, tomatoes on the counter, bread in the bread-box. And there were crackers, pickles, olives, lettuce, what-else, and the first and sweetest rhubarb stalks from the garden. She surveyed the clean and polished farmhouse kitchen and decided this all would do very well. A full jar of icy lemonade would also be nice; quiet music on the kitchen radio had soon joined that music in the dark of the trees and in her head—and making the picnic was almost as good as the picnic itself.

Slicing the chicken breast, she nicked her ring-finger. The cut was painless but the skin was broken. She ran her finger under cold water in the sink and was surprised to think that the scarlet stream of blood was pretty, was pleasing, too, in an odd sort of way. Somehow this swift act of nicking a finger seemed so complete in itself, so artless (if that was the word) and memorable. A punctuation, of sorts. Strange as it was, she even felt a little sorry to watch the blood diminish. Things were over so quickly. She bandaged the cut and composed the last sandwich.

She looked out the kitchen windows while stirring the lemonade. The lilac bushes darkened this corner of the house and though their last flowers were gone, she still smelled them deeply and thickly. Then she thought of Gene, who loved lilacs too, and her eyes went immediately to the wall-phone near the door. He would probably be calling in a few hours, from a motel room in a distant town, telling her that he loved her and the children and he'd be home that weekend. But... she didn't want him to call—she knew she shouldn't think like that, though when he did call she knew she would lose whatever it was she held inside her now. It would be shattered or simply dissolve into the end of the day; his casual, jocular, sometimes careless voice would somehow undo all this perfection. Why, she couldn't quite express, even to herself, but she wanted to hold off that moment as long as she could. Taking the phone off the hook wouldn't be right. At least for now the phone looked no more likely to emit a sound than the bank calendar might. Nevertheless, Gene was in that phone, she knew, a division of his spirit existed there, the way she too lived in her children's clothes and picture books and in certain corners of the countryside.

She put the lemonade jar into the basket and turned to get an old blanket from the linen closet next to the bathroom. Passing through the hallway, she peered in at Marty and Suze sleeping in their twin beds. They lay curled almost like snail shells, breathing in time with each other. Their doll-like foreheads were fringed with damp ringlets. Duke was snoring and drooling on his rag rug between their beds yet still managed to open one eye to check her movement. But she could only allow herself a glance, or she'd be watching until they all woke.

The closet was smothered under the sticky scent of cloves. They made her slightly dizzy and for a moment she felt like falling asleep then and there on top of the towels and tablecloths. The heat and the cloves pressed her, but she fanned away the urge and selected a suitably worn blanket. It was flannel, a rose and trellis-patterned one which had been on her bed when she was a girl, so long ago. Somehow it had never left this house the way her parents and siblings had.

Her husband's picture on the opposite wall of the hallway taunted her. That was too strong a word, but still she closed her eyes against his gaze. She didn't want to think of herself just now as old—thirty-two!—and married; she was young, young as a child, and she was going on a picnic with other children. She stood on the back porch steps shaking the blanket, which became a sail in the breeze, perfuming it with cloves and old flannel. She thought of all the times she had drawn this blanket around herself as a child. So many years had passed and still it gave her more than a vague sense of happiness and safety. Momentarily she hugged it to herself, freshened by the breeze, as if to ward off the inevitable end of this afternoon. Somewhere, she felt the edge of the day already folding slowly in on her, like the closing of an exquisite flower that only lasts a day. But—no, for once time would be made to stand still.

With rigid back, ritually, like a child performing a ceremonial role in a school play, she unfurled the blanket and spread it in the soft grass and white clover. Her palms smoothed the flannel until there wasn't a wrinkle left. Then she placed the full basket in the center, its weight reassuring her that this afternoon was full, ordered, and just beginning. It would be hours and hours until evening. Hours and hours before she returned to that person who was merely mother and wife.

In the distance, she saw two small shimmering shadows passing across the face of the pond. She raised her voice as in song, calling the pet names of her two older children. "Leila Lou! Kentkin!" She could feel her words sailing through the sun-warmed air, rippling with the melody of the names. "Leila Lou! Kentkin!" Then, like an echo broken into small, shrill halves, two faint voices answered hers. What they said wasn't clear—it was like the cry of red-winged blackbirds—but she knew the children were coming.

As they made their way over field and fence, she went in to rouse Suze and Marty from their noon nap. She always hated to wake them—better to let them go on drowsing like moths in chrysalids, never to grow up and away from her. But when she knelt between their chenille-covered beds, they opened their small dewy eyes almost simultaneously. For one lingering moment she placed her palms on their porcelain-cool foreheads, before they could speak and break the spell. "We are going to have a picnic," she whispered. Duke was at her side, licking her ankles, glad to be getting outside.

"I .... I dreamed that," Marty said in a slow-motion voice.

"You dreamed what?" She brushed back his reddish bangs.

"I .... I don't remember," he said, sitting up and scratching the faded words "Camp Shimek" on his chest. He was only five, after all.

Suze was cross-eyed and carefully tying on her new pink baby-doll sneakers. Pensively, she was also sucking on a strand of her long molasses-colored hair. Her mother combed back the strand and was struck by how old she suddenly looked for a child not yet seven. She looked almost a woman. She turned around and was surprised to see that Marty, too, looked much older. Not just older—wiser. Did age always come to you in such spurts? As you lay back among pillows and chenille, dreaming? "Go wash your faces, you two little monkeys," she said. "We're in the backyard. Come, Duke."

Kent and Leila were already helping themselves to the oatmeal cookies their mother had carefully wrapped in wax paper. She glanced at their faces before she said anything—but they were unchanged and young. "Don't you think you ought to try some chicken sandwiches first?" She handed them each one, and tossed a bone to Duke. Everything was perfect. The brightly colored plastic plates and Dixie cups made the picnic feel like a party; even the row of shirts on the line seemed festive, pennants on a holiday.

"Show Mom what we caught," Leila said, squinting suspiciously into her sandwich. God forbid if it contained mayonnaise! Kent raised a jelly jar for his mother's inspection. A pathetic overgrown bullfrog tadpole knocked itself against the glass. The creature was green and slick with algae.

"It's already got its back legs," Kent said.

"I see," his mother said. She wondered how they had managed to catch the brute.

"Easy," Kent explained, crossing his arms with authority. "He must have been sleeping."

"He's ugly, isn't he?" Leila said with real pride, like a new mother showing off her infant.

"Oh, I don't think _ugly_ is a strong enough word. Where do you suppose his front legs are?"

"They'll be out soon," Kent said scientifically. "Although I'm not sure if they grow or if he pushes them out from inside."

"Maybe it—" his mother began, but then Marty and Suze came charging down the back steps, pinwheels whirling like dizzy flowers in their hands. They both made loud, sputtering noises to accompany the pinwheels as they raced around the blanket. Their faces were still damp and innocent. Not grownup at all.

"Look at the babies with their pinwheels," Leila teased.

"Ooo—ick!" the smaller children squealed when they saw the tadpole. It was always fun to act squeamish but be interested nevertheless.

"There's lots to eat," their mother said, ignoring their remarks. "Sit down on the blanket, please, Suze. Those are clean white shorts."

"Are we going to eat that icky fish, too?" Suze said, pretending not to hear her mother but scooting onto the blanket anyway. "It looks like a pickle."

"It's a swimming pickle!" Marty screamed.

"It's not a fish, _baby_ ," Leila stated, "or a pickle."

"That's enough 'baby,' Leila Lou. Besides, you were all babies once, not that long ago."

"Well, any baby could tell it's a tadpole." Leila bulged her eyes and pouted like the tadpole. Suze sneered and made a disgusted face in turn.

"What's a tadpole?" Marty asked, tapping the side of the jelly jar.

"A polliwog. A baby frog. Anyone knows that," Kent said. "It'll lose its tail and grow front legs and then it'll be a bullfrog." He gave Marty a little poke in the side, just hard enough to cause his younger brother to fall against Duke, who, busy with his bone, didn't notice a thing.

"Quit it," said Marty; that was all. No one could tease oh-so-serious Marty for long. His mother thought he looked as if he had been testing his brother's knowledge. It was even typical of Marty. Ever since her youngest had been born, she had been in awe of his presence. Something about him—it wasn't in his eyes or face—mystified her. She wondered if he already knew things, certain things she herself would never know.

A year ago, at another picnic by the pond, a glossy black snake had crept alongside the picnic basket. All the children were screaming except Marty. He merely stared into the snake's lidless eyes. His mother had thought fear of snakes was intuitive, and his behavior frightened her into seizing a nearby shovel and bludgeoning the harmless reptile to death. Something she still couldn't believe she had done, but it had happened like an instinct. The silver crescent of the blade had come down again and again until the snake's head was severed and its body writhed in helpless pain. It was the most violent thing she, who winced when she swatted flies, had ever done in her life. Even Duke had run off, tail dragging the ground, frightened of such wrath. She told herself that she did it because it was some sort of viper, but when Gene came home and saw its corpse, he pronounced it "only a rat snake, harmless." "I was afraid it would bite Marty," she had said in her defense.

But after all Marty was only a boy who'd just turned five dipping his fingers into his lemonade. And Kent was ten and Leila was almost nine and Suze was six. They were her children, but how she was amazed by them all! Was she really their mother; had she really lived long enough to have given birth to them all? Or maybe they had sprung from nowhere, and just that morning she'd been a little girl huddling under this very blanket.

"Where's Dad now?" Marty asked, taking up his pinwheel again and blowing on it.

"In Missouri, I'm pretty sure," she said.

"Where's that?"

"South of here. Down-river a little ways."

"Oh." Again, the feeling that someone was being tested.

"It's hot there," said Leila, who was the expert on Missouri and other far-off places. "Even in winter it's boiling hot."

"When will he be home?" Suze asked. She was throwing bread crusts to a chickadee on the ground. Duke was watching the crumbs fall with pretended disinterest.

"Soon. Soon! Tomorrow night or the next day. Or maybe early the next..." She thought again of the imminent phone call, of the weary reports of how few people didn't already own farm or home insurance. How he might also stumble to pronounce that tongue-twister word "sorry." But no, she didn't want to think of Gene now, or even picture his face or the menacing black phone, not now.

Instead, she thought of a picture book she had read or that had been read to her when she was seven or eight but never forgotten. It began with a story about two children playing in a big field of dandelions and daisies after a storm. Purple-black thunderclouds still loomed over their heads. Their mother found them there, in the field. How long she had been searching for them, why they had wandered off in a rain-storm the way they had, the reader would never know. In the book were watercolors so bright they still looked damp, and the mother was fresh and pretty in her lovely long blue watercolor dress that clung to her calves like the drooping petals of an exotic orchid. The mother told them she was going to show them a surprise. She was so radiant and girlish it was hard to think of her as a mother, but she was, and she led her children through the yellow-speckled field, in her fantastic blue dress, and far up to the top of a hill, from where they could see the high arc of a rainbow straddling the rain-soaked countryside. In that rainbow were instructively laid out the basic colors of a watercolor paintbox: purple, blue, green... How the beautiful strange woman knew there was a rainbow on the other side of the high hill was a mystery, but mothers are the keepers of many mysteries. All her life, she thought, looking at her own children now, she had wanted someone to lead her over a field and up a hill to see a rainbow. Now she realized it was too late; roles were reversed, the passing years had changed the very meaning of the story.

"Some day soon, after a real gully-washer," she announced, "we'll have to find a rainbow. I don't think I've seen one in months and months." Her children looked up at her in reverence, a little sadder for her, as if they saw one every other day.

After they had finished eating, she led them in a new game: it was simple; there was no name for it. One person said he was thinking of something in the yard that began with a certain letter and the others had to guess; there were no scores, no totals, but it was challenging enough. "B," said Kent, closing his eyes, so no one could see him looking at the mystery object.

"Barn," Suze blurted, but she was wrong.

Marty hugged Duke and thought hard. "Blue," he said in a wise and confident tone.

"Blue?" his mother asked. "That's a funny answer."

"Blue like the sky," Marty said, and she loved him like a mother can only love her youngest child.

"Well, you're wrong, too," Kent said with a knowing smirk.

"My turn," said Leila, and she looked around. "B for bicycle."

"Lucky guess."

Her mother was mildly amazed, for there was much to discover in all her children. Leila was usually the one to guess correctly, and she invariably did it on her first or second try. Maybe she watched the eyes of her brothers and sister closely. Or perhaps she had second sight. To this day Leila insisted that she remembered a trip to the St. Louis Zoo, when she had not even been a year old at the time. Once she had mentioned a monstrous bison head, and her mother knew there had been a huge stuffed one at the entrance to the zoo.

Suze and Kent—they were special, too, she thought. Suze was the beauty of the family, with her hair like the angels' in a medieval painting and greenish-blueish eyes that changed color in the sunlight. Gene said she had an artistic temperament and, indeed, she drew wild, dancing designs with her crayons, sometimes like a cave-girl right on the walls. Kent was the oldest, full of steady determination. A lot like his father. He had already made up his mind to be a doctor or lawyer, nothing silly like an astronaut or cowboy, when he grew up, and his mother respectfully knew he was certain to become one. She was fond of telling her friends that she had no favorite, and when she looked at her children now, she knew it was true.

A melody she hadn't heard or thought of in years (one she and her grandmother used to sing together as they curried the farm horses' glossy flanks) occurred to her then, like a warm draft hitting your face in that dark winding hallway called the past, and she couldn't help but sing a little of it: "Whippoorwill cry and evening is nigh, I hurry to my blue, my blue..."

She thought her voice too low and hoarse, and after another verse was glad when attentive Leila picked up her faltering words and sang for her. Leila's voice was high, nearly out of hearing range. It fluttered like a kite up and down the scale. Her mother sat back, stroking the dog's silky coat and letting the gentle notes quaver before her until there were no more words. "We're happy in my blue..." Then all the children were humming, weary bees in the wind, losing and finding the tune again. _Heaven_.

For a while, they quietly watched the afternoon. Duke was snoring again. Lizzie the horse, too, was asleep under her shivering maple tree. There was a silvery glint rippling across the surface of the pond. A door was swinging, creaking inside the barn. The same unexpected breeze had momentarily lifted the hairs on the backs of their necks. The lone cloud, now a dusty pearl, darkened the sun for a very long half a minute and glided on. A redtail hawk circled low above the cornfields. A distant dog barked once, twice, and Duke lifted an ear but sank back into sleep instantly. Barn swallows whistled and ricocheted off barn doors, wasps conversed around their nests beneath the barn eaves, a barn owl took silent flight out of the hayloft (and that was only sound inversed). Something deep underground was thrumming with the afternoon's accumulated heat, or seemed to. Even here outside of the world in Iowa, in every animal and in every leaf and acre of soil, there was movement in time with all the earth. They felt it inside themselves, this revolving and expanding that was very nearly music. They listened. They listened.

Then, abruptly, Kent and Leila wanted to know if they could go back down to the pond and let the tadpole go. He was tired of such a small jelly-jar pond to swim in. "No, don't go yet, Kentkin, Leila Lou," their mother pleaded, seizing two impossibly small wrists, "let's all have some more cookies and sit here together just a while longer, please."

So they did—not quite touching, but feeling each others' warmth, sharing their mutual calm, Duke slumbering in their center. She was happy, happy just to have these, her children, to herself on this afternoon. When they were all gone, when she and Gene were very old, perhaps memories like this would comfort her. She stopped herself. This wasn't a mere memory yet. The present moment must be made an eternity!

Even so. Other memories—actual, recent ones, clouded her mind even now: Early that morning, which seemed years ago, old Dorothy, ancient Dorothy, the Egg Lady, as they called her, because she sold them a dozen or two whenever she happened to be passing through, had told her from out the window of her beat-up old Plymouth with its broken windows and rattling chrome, "Better watch out, Grace. Good-looking guy like that might not come back!" And she had cackled at that, just like a chicken herself, as if it were a real joke.

"What makes you think that?" she had asked Dorothy, smiling as if she were genuinely amused, which she was not. She knew she looked bad in the morning standing there in the road in her wilted housecoat with eyes bleary and hair a dirty mess, but Dorothy—toothless old Dorothy had fine, fine hair died saffron-yellow, like a just-hatched chick's fluff, and green tobacco juice running down her chin!

"Never trusted a handsome man in my life," crazy old Dorothy insisted. "Look what my two movie-star husbands got me—ha! Bunch of no-good kids never did a lick, grandkids I never see, and my back bent as a mule's. You'd be better off if he got himself lost; get yourself an ugly old geezer instead!" And with another great wild cackle she was lumbering off down the gravel, chassis nearly dragging the ground, leaving her there with Dorothy's dozen in her hands—and when she lifted the carton lid she saw two eggs were cracked.

And then her own mother from her house in town, on the phone, a few minutes later: "You sure you and Gene are doing all right? You've been looking tired. Are you sleeping? Why is he always gone so quick and so long?"

She exhaled hard into the phone. "You know he travels when he needs to. You know we argue a lot, but doesn't everyone." Not a question. She didn't want to be doing this, talking to her mother like this about things her mother shouldn't know, when she was in the middle of mopping the kitchen floor.

"Oh, Gracie! Did you fight again before he left?" She could just see her mother in that fat armchair in front of the picture-window in her parents' new run-down ranch house on the east end of town, watching the riverbend all green-brown and muddy down below the bluff and stomping her cane like a queen's staff whenever she wanted her husband to bring her another cup of coffee or the paper. The old woman would sit there all day—that view was her life now. Her mother had grown more and more imaginative about other people's lives and more and more bored with her own existence ever since they had left the farm.

"Like I said, mom, everyone has their differences. So maybe it was a little worse than usual, but that's not why I'm worn out. You know how much work this farm is, even if we're not working the land ourselves." She remembered then how Gene had slapped his leather wallet down on the bedside dresser so hard it had set the ballerina atop her jewelry box twirling to "Moon River," and next he told her how sick he was of—of, well, he had never finished his sentence, and it hadn't made a bit of difference because later they lay there on the big bed hand in hand watching the ceiling fan revolve and he had said he was sorry without having to say he was sorry. "I don't have time to talk like this, mother," she said, "the house looks like a tornado hit it."

This time she could hear her mother breathing, deeply. A long pause, then, "All I'm saying is you ought to know men don't have much patience these days," another pause, and her daughter could hear the spoon tap-tap tap-tap against the coffee cup now. "That's all I'm saying..."

Gene had left in the morning before she even got up—and she got up in the dark. Sometimes he left notes, sometimes he didn't. This time he hadn't. Rushed, she supposed.

Such thinking would not do, especially now that she had her children all around her, like a sleepy heap of newborn kittens or puppies. The cookies were all gone, the lemonade jar empty. They all, herself and Duke included, seemed to be breathing almost in rhythm now, too, as if caught up in that more-felt-than-heard music of the countryside—this radiant, transcendent countryside, and her children were the most beautiful and precious part of it; that their father knew, too. He would never, _could_ never desert them. Their private world and these little lives she had created with Gene were far too beautiful to lose or alter irrevocably. Why, she could never cease wondering at the sheer heart-stopping beauty surrounding her! It was beauty like a wound, a cut, a pain, so sharp and clear wherever she turned to look—in the prisms of their eyes or in all this wondrous world—beauty so deathlessly vivid, as vivid as the blood that flowed in her veins or these children's, as vital, as tender. Their glistening young eyes were even more incandescent now the sun was lower, and each blade of grass in the swath of yard before them was tipped with that same light, like platinum. The shadows were as long as memory and a current of honeysuckle-scented air laced its way around the house and ran its trembling fingers through the children's glowing hair. There was cool indigo shade under and within the trees, and their topmost leaves were crowned with more of the tenuous platinum light. When the breeze turned a leaf silver-side up, the light seemed to break apart, as if it were made of crystal, and shatter into the luminous air. She had somehow never before fully noticed the effects of the late afternoon sun on a June afternoon, and she was glad she had not until this moment.

A fine white caul of dust hung over the gravel road at the end of the shining lawn, where a tractor or pick-up had not passed for an hour or more. There, too, was a grayish mist pulsating in corners of the green-gold gold-green barnyard: that would be gnats. The towering catalpa trees were in full, snowy bloom, and they and the fat late peony flowers sighed their nostalgic fragrance into the air, mingling with the honeysuckle vine's. The five of them sat on the sun-warmed flannel blanket, thinking as one of this green unutterable peace. They touched one another's hands, not really holding hands. Incredibly, they all seemed to have been struck as dumb as the Sleeping Beauty's court. They had been sitting here for an hour; it could have been days or weeks. Nothing was ever going to change and the white sun would remain in the same spot forever.

Then a whippoorwill, from far across the pond, _did_ cry, or it seemed one had, and from out of nowhere, she had this thought: that life is infinitely sad because it is so short. But it is also infinitely happy, and really was there, could there be, any difference? Sometimes to feel happy is to feel a very deep and unspoken sorrow. Everyone else must have always known this; Gene certainly knew it and probably so did all the children—why had it taken herself so long to learn?

She glanced at the sun, her eyes closing against its power. Still she felt its consoling red-orange warmth on her eyelids. She placed one hand on top of Marty's curly head and rested the other on Leila's sticky open palm. Was he asleep? Was she asleep? Were they all dreaming? Dare she breathe? Ah, yes: Breathe, _breathe_! And so she did, breathing in again when the children breathed out, breathing in all the secrets of the air around them. The peonies her own mother and grandmother and grandmother's mother had once picked, the musty straw and horsey scent of the barn, horseflies, ladybugs, the greasy chicken sandwiches, the sour-sweet lemonade lingering on the back of her throat, the cottonwood tufts suspended in the platinum atmosphere, the hog-lot down the dirt road, the grass, the weeds, the clover, rhubarb sharp and tart, lavender-scented hair, the fresh-baked earth, the little lone cloud that had long since disappeared. Hours had passed, and even this day, one of the longest days of the year, would eventually _have_ to end. Now the sunshine felt cooler, a kiss gone dry, and as in a song or poem the shadows were lengthening still further and drawing down the dusk, draining light from the watercolor sky. That which she had held within herself all afternoon was loosening, about to drift off, soon to be lost to the coming twilight. She was prepared to wait and accept that loss. Most of all she was waiting. She turned her head toward the house. It might not be such a long wait.

in memory of my mother, once upon a time a farm wife

## In The Afterlife

But when I watched you burn those letters I did not try to stop you either. You said you were purging yourself of your old life with me. You were not angry with me. You were never angry with me. These were not letters I had sent you but letters written by old lovers I did not even know. I had never written you anything though I suppose the old lovers reminded you of me in different ways. I stood by the kitchen window and watched and watched you. The pages grew black, curled; they freed themselves from the fire and sailed off like big black moths. This I liked because it was a comparison I had seen very clearly, all by myself without you. I had cut the back of my hand on a glass while washing the dishes. This I did not like, of course not. The cut looked like you had just left a big lipsticked kiss right there. But wait. Let us not begin like this.

This is the hottest of all days and here I am hoping on a breeze to blow hard and blow right this way. It is nearly September and still I have not left this place, our place. Picture me like one of your old framed photographs, gray and still in this heat. So I fan myself. There is a painting of the Virgin Mary on this fan. She looks a little like you with those serious downcast eyes. I look out my window. The weeds have grown so high this year. There are so many insects out there in the weeds. They make such a racket. What do they want from me? What do they want at all? Hair growing from the top of my head sticks to my ears. But I will not comb or fix my hair because I do not want to look in any old shadowy mirror around this place. Faces look too tired and old in the heat of the day. This is the beginning of my story, see? I like it better this way.

Today I saw a baby, pink and raw, lying in the back of a brand-new car, all the windows rolled up. This baby was not crying. And it was not sleeping. And it was not dead, of course. It must have been listening to a radio I could not hear but must have been on inside the car, playing baby music. I cannot even be sure why I am mentioning it already.

Walking around town this morning: People say hi, hello. I cross to the other side of the street. Maybe I have forgotten their names. Maybe it is just that I do not really care. A white car honks. At me? Or the blue gaping sky? People are walking down the sidewalks very slowly. Young people are sitting on the hoods of their cars in the town park. Flies are buzzing around their dripping ice cream cones. Flies are trying to get into my eyes and this is precisely how anyone imagines the tropics.

Hold back, I tell myself then and there. Hold back this day, hold it with me here always and hold it against time and change. Buck the current and keep this day safe, free, alive. Forever. It is not time anyway that must be stopped but change. We must stay where we are, refuse to move, refuse to die. So this is why I stay at home.

There is a book lying open-mouthed on the table. It is full of interesting and beautiful pictures but I am too hot to pick it up, too tired to turn its pages. There is one picture in this book I remember vividly: two beautiful women at a well, talking across the blue-back hole which is the well. I wish I were deep within the mouth of that well. Somewhere cool and dark. Singing up to you. Today is much too bright and long a day. I have decided this is not the day I want to preserve at all.

Because your letter came today. Maybe this is where the story really begins. I read it outside on the grass before the sun got too hot on top of my head. Petals fell out of the envelope as I tore it open. At least I can pretend they were petals; they fell into the weeds as I tore open the envelope and I could not find them again. You made no mention of flowers or petals in your letter. Maybe they were something else entirely.

You say you are enjoying the trip downriver. The river, you say, is cool and black and dirty. Every day you lay your body down on the deck in the hot sun while your long hair dries. You are burnt black, you say, black and shiny as patent leather. Every day you eat small meals in your cabin and read large books, "the sort you wouldn't like." Every day you sleep on a firm ship's cot and do not dream of me or anyone. You are trying not to think of me. I do envy your life on the river, as you drift down the river. Ever farther from me. But I do not wish I were with you. I do not wish I were you with your black lips and black eyelids. I do not wish or hope or pray at all, except for a breeze.

But I do think of writing you a letter in return. There is no way to send this letter to you on your boat as it drifts down your black river in your black world, and I have never written you before, but I do like the idea of writing you a letter nonetheless. I imagine it would go something like this:

"Yesterday I saw a man who walked naked in the street and he had many wounds about his body. In each wound there was an eye or a mouth or an ear. Though I shouted he paid no attention to me. He was intent upon perceiving himself and not the world around him. I saw that he was a Symbol, that I was living an Allegory. But I don't know what it means or who he was. He walked into the river and was gone.

"The day before yesterday I saw a house on fire. There were flames and smoke coming from the roof, but the flames consumed neither the wood of the house nor the people I saw trapped inside. They were all on fire but did not seem to mind; they went on reading their books and writing in their diaries. I understood the fire to be Metaphysical, that the flames represented something else Unknown, and the house's occupants were all aspects of my own Self. How do you like that? I will now lay my pale body down and think about this."

Instead I get up and wash the dishes. Then I scrub the floors. Then I take out the garbage. Then I reflect upon the mystery of life.

The mystery of life, I conclude, is just that: a mystery. When it is night and the moon shines and you can hear the river lapping far away and the trains whistling low through town you can feel the mystery of life very close, but it is still a mystery. Things come and go each day, they change, they die and disappear, but something does remain—and it is always there, though I cannot name it. It could be the only _real_ thing if it is a thing; maybe it is not but it does remain here with me at night, resting inside me and burning up inside my head.

I am glad the night has come because now I can think bigger things and forget all about you on your boat slipping away forever downriver. I can think instead of the past: What is it? The past is me and you in a room, me and you in a bed, me and you outdoors in the sun. The past opens up like an umbrella, growing wider and wider until it shadows the entire world, making this night. And I see sometimes in dreams your strange burning horrible beautiful eyes, like candles at the deep end of a cave, and your breasts so beautiful too and your lips like licorice sweet and black.

Walking around town: It is night now so when the cars pass I cannot see the drivers. There is no longer a moon to see anything. When the cars pass it is as if they are guided by ghosts, and I hear ghost-music, ghost-talk coming from inside their open windows. The closed and silent shops along the streets remind me of tombstones set in a row, dark and shiny with stars and with big letters across. This all makes me sad but also somewhat peaceful. It is as if I have forgotten you, as if that were an ancient Egyptian barge you left on, one of those boats that sail toward the land of the dead. Yes, that is how the ancient Egyptians thought a person met death: on a boat laden with all the things one would need in the afterlife. A book told me this once. I can imagine you arriving in the afterlife with your suitcase full of my dresses, my shoes, my books. You will live my life for me, in the afterlife.

I walk on alone without fear through this valley of night, thinking here is my idea for the picture I will paint for you, though you will never see it now: In this picture will be all the gods of yore, the heroes and heroines, too, and golden youths and maidens in love and knights and their ladies dancing at a feast and many brave and wonderful animals and flying naked children. Then, in the corners I will add angels—cherubim, seraphim, and so on up the angelic hierarchy they used to tell us of in church school. Their angel faces will peer out from pink and gold clouds as I imagine does the sun in the morning, though I am such a late sleeper I could not say for sure. Anyway, it will be a large painting, larger than any canvas I could find, so I will have to turn it into a sort of mural, covering the walls of the house, and the outside of the house and the garden, the flowering vines and the picket fence and I would not stop there. The figures will tower across the town. There will be drunken gods on the side of the courthouse, huge trees full of golden pears and silver apples across the freeway, gryphons leering from warehouse roofs, sphinxes staring with serious black eyes up from the depths of the river. Eventually I will have to spread out into the countryside, approaching other more distant cities...

As the heat sometimes persuades me to do I fell asleep making sketches in my notebook for this painting. And again I dream, this time that I awaken to find that a mouth has grown in the palm of my hand and the mouth will not be quiet as it speaks and moans on about life and death and the true nature of things. After a long time I realize that this mouth speaks with your voice. Other mouths appear one by one over my body until they are all chattering away like maniacs. In your voice. In your many voices. At last a mouth erupts over my heart and reveals all your innermost secrets.

But I must confess: that I did not invent in a dream. Still it was a fine thought. Instead I did not dream at all except of the burning of the library at Alexandria, which I have just recently read of in a large and dusty book I found at a garage sale. This book is titled _The Secret Museum of Mankind_. It is a very unusual book filled with lovely and gruesome pictures. There are pictures of men with entire books tattooed across their bodies and pictures of ancient lost cities of the gods and pictures of stone monoliths that chant at the break of dawn. You should read this book if only you had not left.

So I did not dream at all except of old Alexandria on the Nile and when I woke I was feeling strangely sad again. So I turned on the radio and a man was singing that old song we know about time and the river and singing it very slow and sad and I thought of this storm we had once sat through together beneath a large paradise tree, afraid the lightning would strike us, and I started to cry. I am glad you can no longer hear from me because I would not want you to know I cried like a schoolgirl over such a silly thing.

This somehow reminds me of when I was quite young and there was a terrible storm. My mother rushed me out of the house to watch an apartment house across the street burning. Lightning must have struck it. Most of the people had been rescued but from within the depths of the old brick building a baby or maybe it was a cat could be heard faintly screaming. That is odd because there was the roar of the fire and the roar of the storm and the roar of the people in the street but we could still hear that baby. Firemen crawled over the building like ants on an anthill, smashing windows and hosing down the roof and eaves. No one seemed to be able to locate the source of the screams. At last it stopped crying—whether the firemen, the smoke, or the fire got to the baby first I will never know. I thought then it was the building itself that was screaming. And as a little girl might I cried for the building.

Now that I have told myself this story about myself I think I will write my own _Secret Museum of Mankind_. It will be a large book, a very large book, the largest ever. For it will contain the secret of all mankind's dreams as well as the words and objects that haunt you in any day, this mystery held tight within me: a flame, a sword, a cross, a brimming chalice, a burning heart, a love which is a strength. This book will call forth something from deep inside here, my heart, my soul. Something I had once years past with you, without you, with you. This book will be nothing but an invocation. This book will contain every word in every language in every other book ever written in the world. It will consume the world in an effort to describe the world. It will become the world.

Today or some other day I heard a prayer I like: Oh mystery of life grant that I may know you always in everything. I know what this means exactly and that is why I like it. I know what it means to know the secret life of the world. When I speak the words of this prayer in front of a mirror I see flowers and birds and dragons and whole cities come out of my mouth. Then I know what a terrible responsibility it is to be omniscient and why I need you here to tell you all of these lovely lies.

There is an old story I have learned to repeat well though it is not mine and it is not one of yours. Today I was thinking of it as I walked through the streets and looked at the people and looked at the buildings and the people and buildings looked back at me. It is about Catherine of Siena, who was a Saint. But of course she was not always a Saint. This concerns how she became one.

Catherine was a very young beautiful laughing girl but as stupid and common as any other until one day in a field of lilies she met Jesus when she was not even praying. I think that she might have been picking lilies for her mother. That's it, she was picking lilies. Anyway, Jesus spoke her one true name (which we could never guess) and she instinctively said "yes" and lo and behold he reaches into his bare naked chest and pulls out his holy pulsing bleeding heart. Naturally she screams but he says, "Shut up girl I am about to make you Saint." Then he rips open her pretty church-school blouse and replaces her living heart with his. The world's first heart transplant. She looks into his wound which is gaping like a red mouth and then at her smooth skin which is unblemished and white as ever but she is burning burning inside and faints dead away. Then he leaves her. He leaves her with his heart! Poor girl. She failed to see that this episode was Metaphysical and she was nothing but an Ideal and Jesus was using Symbolism. That would teach Catherine of Siena a lesson!

But what does this mean and why should I want to tell it to you now? Why do I remember that old fable? Is it because you have replaced my heart with yours? Maybe if I were to take the time and really put this down in a book I could tell you more. But maybe then I could tell you the meaning of life while I was at it. Which by the way I was sure I knew a minute ago and just forgot.

The unknown child within me, the child I have not even conceived yet, tells me many things. My child says I must stay here even if you never come back. My baby rests hard in me like a clump of blackened weeds and waits so patiently to be born. This baby will know every language and will not be afraid of fire. He will see the future for me. He will be my crystal, my memory, my wisdom. Sometimes I grow frightened of his darker twin though that is the one I will love the more. "Keep, keep, keep," the unborn murmur though this you would not believe either.

It is night now as I said and easier to believe in this past which is pressing against me on all sides like the hard darkness. And it easier to believe that you have really gone. I look out my window. The silent cars go by. But the night is making an awful racket and suddenly it is as if I have swallowed the White Snake. The one in the book by those Grimm Brothers, the one that gives you Animal Magic. Because now I can understand everything that the animals are saying. "Storm clouds are coming in like a flock of big black birds," the insects in the weeds are saying. "The moon has been snuffed like a candle," the insects in the trees are saying. "Run for your sweet life girl," the insects in the air are saying.

Instead I go out into the garden and lie on my back between the trees and the dark flowers. I want to feel the rain coming down on me. I want to feel the hard drops hit my body like little electric shocks. There is this great longing moving and moaning within me like an unborn child. And the insects in the grass have a story to tell:

"There is a woman who walks naked and alone in the street and she is sheathed in blue flames. Her hair is on fire and her face is on fire and her dress is on fire and the book she carries in her hand is on fire. But she is singing to herself low and sad. She thinks she has lost someone but someone has lost her. Someone has gone away downriver in the night without a sound.

"Picture her. Like a schoolgirl running away from home down a dusty Kansas road. All by herself in the great big world until the winds take her up.

"Picture her again. She looks like a saint on a votive card with serious serious eyes. She has the opalescent eyes of a blind black girl. She has a mouth full of nettles. She has ears stuffed with dollar bills. There is a white snake around her throat like a necklace. There are thorns around her breasts. Those are pearly lamprey teeth in her deepest wound. Beware her.

"Can't you see that she is a madwoman? Can't you see her crouched at the edge of the river, her long hair over her face like a veil? Can't you hear her warning you warning you that she is real?"

Nothing will come of this however. I am weary to my bones. At dawn I shall lay my body down to sweet sleep at last on my wide cool mattress and nothing will come of this. In sleep I do not have you, but I have parts of you—your lips, your eyes, your smell. In my mind I have already changed you into someone else. That which is remains. There is no one drifting down that black river. But there is a shadow that follows me like a dark angel. The wallpaper watches me and the otherworld listens at my door. Grant that I may feel you always in all places, oh mystery. Grant that the distant days too shall be revealed, oh life. The wind sings, the house cries, my shining twin in the mirror holds her silence. Everything has its secret side; everything I knew before will forever after mean something else.
