John Domini

Bedlam and Other Stories

For Mary Ann

Your aim is true

No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined;

rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches.

— Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”

Bedlam: an Introduction After the Fact

For reissue by Dzanc Books, e-format, 2015

Now, asserts the Evangelist, we see as through a glass darkly. Now our mirror’s pocked and grody, and only in some better, brighter future will we see face to face. The author of First Corinthians had the story to go with it, too, the transformation on the road to Damascus. Right there on the highway, Saul became Paul, as his imagination carried him far into the future, beyond his own death and to the end of the world. Come to think, doesn’t the imagination always face the way? Towards the future? Isn’t it about what’s emerging: a Kingdom above the sky, a story beyond the scribbles? Seems so — or rather it seemed so, till Dzanc Books and their generous ePrint program showed me how the imagination colors a look back, too. For a writer, even in the future to which he once looked forward, the mirror of “now” remains smudged and blemished.

The publication date for Bedlam was the start of 1982, and that edition held just nine stories. In the first months of that year, though, I completed two more, “At the Dig” and “Chasing Names.” Both landed at good quarterlies and, in light of the Dzanc offer, both look to be of a piece with the rest of the collection. They’re products of the same inspiration and follow the same binary code. One is urban realism, the other another road-vision, voyaging out beyond death. So too they share the book’s most common narrative tension, between the gathering grind of the mundane and the tenuous filaments of the heart.

For the collection I wrote most of the back-cover copy, and there I claimed that the stories “sooner or later come round to the subject of love.” It does appear — now — that I had in mind the two I was working on, as well as what was already in the Table of Contents. I can see how “Dig” fumbles through the same lovers’ glitches as other stories here, while “Names” completes a trilogy of intimacy that extends beyond the body. That much I can discern, at least, in the distant mirror of this born-again text.

Other details remain clear, to be sure. The book appeared on fiction international, a magazine that was branching into publishing, the brainchild of the resourceful Joe David Bellamy. I’d appeared in the magazine, and Bellamy had circulated a request among his contributors, asking for story collections. By decade’s end, I should add, he was chairing the literature division of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he’d sold the entire venture. San Diego State now publishes the magazine (the name in upper case), and for all I know, a few of Bedlam‘s first print run languish yet in a warehouse in La Jolla.

The pieces I sent Bellamy were selected from a group about twice that size. I went for unifying concerns, that balance of types and tensions, and I made sure to include the two stories with the best magazine credits: Ploughshares for “Ul’Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo,” and Paris Review for “Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be.” The latter publication may still rank as my Greatest Hit, when it comes to fiction, and some thanks must go to Stanley Elkin. Elkin was teaching in Boston in those days, as I was, and he’d just finished a story set, like “Kookaberry,” in Hell (“The Conventional Wisdom,” brilliant stuff). The man proved generous, sitting down with my manuscript. Yet grateful as I am, I can’t point to specific changes he suggested. Elkin didn’t make notes, we had no more than an hour in his BU office, and once again, I see but darkly. All I know is, at the time I tended to resist coaching; I wasn’t in school anymore.

In the same way, I went with my own versions of the two stories edited by Gordon Lish, at Esquire. Lish worked over “The Return” and “Special Instructions, Special Instructions,” then accepted both, telling me when each would appear and estimating I’d be paid a thousand apiece. Both were then returned without a penny — over the phone, Lish blamed his superiors, but many writers have since told me similar stories — and so for the submission to Bellamy, those stories were back the way I wanted them. “The Return,” happily, found what used to be an excellent venue, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (which paid just shy of a thousand, FYI), and that story was also the one I most often read aloud, during those years. For the Dzanc ePrint, I’ve gone with my “reading copy,” a version in which the drama’s knuckles stand out more whitely. I’d kept the old marked-up typescript.

Typescript, yes. That’s part of the shadow that falls between the first Bedlam and this one. These stories were all composed longhand, and even when I took the drafts to another technology, it was a clumsier device by far than my MacBook Air. Now, typewriter nostalgia does sweep me away from time to time (ah, the roller bar), but nostalgia always, so to speak, whites out some part of the reality. What matters is the change in affect, while writing. Myself, I still occasionally go back to paper and pencil, I muck out the channel between the tips of the fingers and the back of the brain, but even then, I can only wonder at how the flow has changed. About that change, I’ve seen what others have to say. Robert Coover, Geoff Dyer, others. The light they shed on storytelling and its machinery, though, doesn’t reach in where my thumb used to throb, as I scratched and scrawled.

Bedlam also affords a glimpse or two of my masters, sure. The piece that most smacks of Donald Barthelme, wouldn’t you know it, was first composed while in Barthelme’s seminar. Yet I revised “An Encounter” several times more, and though Barthelme remained a friend I never shared it with him. I sent him the issue of Transatlantic Review in which the piece appeared, and he told me he heard John Hawkes in it. So too, while one story may carry an echo of eloquent John Barth, and another a strain of streetwise Richard Price (both close readers for a while, each kind enough to commit blurbs), the noises I notice most are personal. Bedlam came out of bedlam, a citified hullabaloo that suited a scatter-shot career and, in a fitting touch of the aleatory, launched a long marriage. Love wore frayed corduroy and Truth arrived smeared with cheap ink, in the pages of a so-called “underground newspaper.”

It was such a paper, the Boston Phoenix, that gave me my most thorough review. The author, Kathleen Hirsch, liked “Some Numb Commitment” especially (indeed, she went on to publish a book on the mad and homeless). Other praise appeared in places like North American Review, and the book helped me land some good jobs. But what really came to matter, as the glow of publication dimmed, was the private approbation.

An outstanding case concerns a grim ‘90s birthday. My latest career had gone off the rails, that same early marriage had fallen into its dying spiral — and a letter arrived, happy birthday, from a West Coast writer who’d loved the book. A letter as long as the Phoenix review, it mattered to me more, by far. The same goes for the woman who showed up at an L.A. reading in 2007, an event to launch a very different book. She had Bedlam with her, this woman, and she told me she was there because of how much “Kookaberry” meant to her. In exchanges like that I recognize, through the murk of everyday, that the collection amounted to more than a stray shared “now,” in which my stolen hours dreaming on paper overlapped Bellamy’s luck with state and university funding. Something in the text proved durable and nifty enough to last, to reach an occasional stranger who sampled the text, through the ever-more scattered and unruly decade and a half before my next saw print.

The imagination may be built for looking ahead, but you can’t pretend it’s got no influence when you’re looking back. Gilbert Sorrentino observed that art was “the act of smashing the mirror,” and so when it comes to Bedlam, finally I have to give up on tracking down sources and meanings. I have to trust in its power to break through my own mirror, scuffed and pitted, and get clear. Dzanc Books, thanks for the smash.

Des Moines, IA 2014

Over 4000 Square Miles

What Hartley couldn’t take were the Town Halls. Up the coast from the Everglades the limousine carried him, cutting through Fort Lauderdale to reach the ocean. Then it was one resort after another, places where most of the buildings had been put up since 1975, getting wealthier as they headed north. Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach. And in each town Hartley would be amazed by the Town Hall. They were dinky, flattopped, single-story jobs, a slap in his face it seemed. They were painted effeminate seashell colors, with stucco walls that looked like wrinkled paper. Even the lettering on them looked like paper, like something Hartley’s kid could do. The one in Boca Raton had obvious plastic flowers standing lamely around the front door.

“Are you kidding me?” Hartley complained. “You call that a Town Hall?”

Garbeau, sitting beside him, right away cracked up. She was from Vermont originally and knew what he was talking about. The limo driver meantime lowered the divider between the front and rear seats.

“What’s the matter with that, man?” the driver asked. “Ain’t they got Town Halls where you come from?”

Garbeau laughed even harder, putting her head in Hartley’s lap. Hartley felt her throat trembling through his swim trunks.

“What they make ’em like where you come from, man? Your Town Halls got reefer on ’em or something?”

Garbeau had brought along a cigarette pack filled with joints. Hartley cupped his out of her reach now and concentrated. The driver was a big middle-aged black man, with a classic serene expression, like soggy jungle leaves.

“I’m quartered at Fort Devens,” Hartley said. “That’s in Ayer, Massachusetts.” He tried to make it clear he was still complaining. “And up in Massachusetts a Town Hall is serious business. A Town Hall up there has got a plaque for the war dead. It’s got a cannon on the front lawn.”

“That so?”

“Hartley, God.” Garbeau tweaked the inside of his thigh as she sat up. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re a soldier.”

Hartley nodded; he’d heard it before. But with that he fell silent. He moved his eyes from the rear-view mirror, where he’d been watching the driver, and he took a couple nervous tokes.

“Not in Florida, man,” the driver said finally. “A cannon on the front lawn is way too heavy for Florida.” The car was in cruise gear and the driver’s voice had changed. “This here, man, this the shadow world. Don’t you know that? All these fine new buildings, don’t let ’em fool you. Florida Indian land, pirate land. It’s alligator land, you dig?”

The driver’s voice was rounder, more hushy. Easily he fell into his tall tale. It seemed President Carter—“that’s President, Jimmy, Carter, you dig”—had to wrestle an alligator in order to win some important endorsement from the Seminole Indians.

“I heard that story,” Garbeau said, suddenly businesslike. To Hartley it seemed like she hadn’t spoken in twenty years. “I did research for that story, in case we were going to use it. Carter had to send a couple Secret Service down.”

Hartley started to regret his last couple tokes. Too much grass made him anxious.

“Course,” the driver said, “ain’t that hard to wrestle an alligator.”

“That’s what I heard,” Garbeau said. “Just have to stay clear of the tail.”

The driver nodded seriously. Hartley racked his brains for some joke to break up this insane conversation. In the end he could only tug on his dogtags and say directly, harshly: “Look, I don’t want to be a tourist. All right? You guys are filming my life down there. That’s what I want to see.”

Garbeau had lit her own joint by now. With the artificial smell of the air conditioning, the car stank.

“You told your wife,” she said, “today you’d be a tourist. You told her that last night you were out watching us shoot.”

Hartley filled his lungs with more smoke.

Noon. He was farther out of his head for noon, Hartley realized, than at any time in the last dozen years. When they pulled onto a public beach above West Palm, he sat in the shade with his elbows hooked over his knees. Slowly the sand irritated the white scars on his lower back.

His trouble was, when he complained it came out like a wisecrack. Garbeau and the driver had treated that entire business of the Town Halls as if it had been some kind of joke. And now Garbeau came and said he sounded like a little kid. She sat beside Hartley, gulping down a fried-clam lunch with doped-up speed. There were good reasons for his being here, she said. Her company had brought him down so that he’d serve as Special Advisor on a television docu-drama. They were filming the story of his escape from prison camp and his flight, alone, back to his own position in the winter of 1967-68. Garbeau’s company was trying to tell a simple human story without political overtones, a story of one man’s struggle to survive that would be truly meaningful for real people everywhere. Hartley tried saying he’d heard this speech before. But Garbeau only laughed.

“Look,” Hartley said, “if I’m just going to be doing the tourist bit, Claire should be here.”

This time Garbeau’s laughter had an edge. Something confidential; it made his groin tingle. Mildly, she pointed out that his wife Claire would be down no later than next week. Hartley had to look away. Claire and he had talked it over for three nights running and each time they’d reached the same decision. One parent should remain with the kids while they took their exams.

“Good reasons,” Garbeau said, finishing an enormous milkshake. “All very good reasons. So don’t be a crybaby. It’s high tide and I’m going in to body-surf.”

He sat watching her. When Garbeau stood up after riding her first wave in, the three patches of her wet string bikini came at him like a rose thrust in his face. Hartley had always thought he’d be a success at adultery. Or at least, he’d thought so since the Army had started sending him out on local publicity assignments. Sitting round with media types and New England pols, he’d been impressed by how much better in shape he was than most married men. Put Hartley in a T-shirt and jeans, and he’d look like everybody’s lippy teenage grease monkey. This at thirty-two. Plus, the first joke out of his mouth and the women would start asking him, my my Captain Hartley, is that the way a soldier talks? What does the Army do when it finds out the truth about you?

It was the war-hero business. He’d always known it gave him an advantage. Only last night, at the hotel bar, he’d pressed the advantage home.

“I’m so glad you’re here with us,” Garbeau had told him. This was after dinner. “You make our story true to life.”

They’d eaten Chinese. Beforehand, she’d shared a couple joints with him, and ever since they’d been drinking rum. During dinner he’d been able to keep her talking either about high school, where she’d been a year behind Hartley and his wife, or about how she’d gone from St. Johnsbury to Hollywood. But now Garbeau had wanted to talk about the war.

“Hartley, God,” she’d said. “How could you go through what you did and not wind up, just, an empty shell of a human being?”

“Well”—Hartley had grinned—“I wrote a song about you.”

She hadn’t seen he was joking. She’d lifted her eyes to him, almond French-Canadian eyes Hartley had thought were beautiful since the age of fourteen. Over her rum, Garbeau’s expression was still all piety.

“Oh, on your guitar?”

Piety, piety, piety. Everyone was always so impressed that he’d had a guitar with him in the prison camp. Hartley had long ago stopped bothering to point out that it wasn’t his guitar. You couldn’t do a recon up Hill 1338 carrying a guitar. The guitar had belonged originally to one of the Dak To support personnel, a P.O. boy who’d gotten picked up during a convoy hit. The boy had died under torture.

“That’s right.” Hartley had grinned again, forcing it wider. “I wrote a song just for you. I called it, ‘For Ronnie G.’”

She’d smiled back uncertainly.

“No,” he’d gone on, “no, that’s not true. I called it ‘For V.G.’ So no one there would know who I meant.”

After that it had been as simple as Hartley had expected it would be. He believed he understood the psychology at work. Since the woman had allowed herself to come so close already, since she’d already made herself vulnerable, Hartley needed only to jiggle that first impression the least bit. To demonstrate the fun they could have with a shared trust. Then the interest in him would turn special. Any number of times, he’d seen the signals change in a woman’s look. But only here in Florida had he pressed beyond a look, beyond the surreptitious gropings and prolonged good-night kisses he’d gotten once or twice before.

In Garbeau’s room, however, things hadn’t been nearly so cut and dried. At the first snort of her cocaine Hartley had thought he’d turn inside out. He’d made fists in his pants pockets. Watching her undress, with every button and snap he’d suffered another nightmare about how he might perform and what it might do to him. When she’d turned and seen the bulges in his pockets, she’d made a funny moue. And his guts had gone blank. If she hadn’t knelt to unlace his boots, unbuckle his belt, they wouldn’t have come off. Meantime Hartley had heard himself saying the most childish things. He’d told her that this past April he’d run the Marathon in under three hours. He’d told her how many situps he could do. Never in his life had he sounded like such a fake. And so, soon, even the delicious slippery movement of Garbeau’s pelvis, even the lecherous wisdom of her small features — so all of it had become for Hartley a trial. He’d thought: Hey, I was just kidding around.

Nonetheless he’d performed. And after calling his wife he’d gone through it again this morning, with more zip and cocaine. Then they’d set off on this tourist ramble along the coast, ending up here, where he sat and itched while Garbeau ate like a fiend and then ran into the surf. Now she was waving her arms at him, oddly. Hartley shifted and felt his scars irritate him in different places. Yes oddly. Garbeau seemed just able to keep her head above water, though it couldn’t have been more than hip-deep where she was. Hartley squinted and saw her panicky eyes, the forced and painful shape of her mouth.

The lifeguard had started clambering down from his high seat. But Hartley beat him easily. The soldier was at the water’s edge while the lifeguard was still getting his board. Hartley got Garbeau around the breasts. She had her knees tucked up tight and he cradled her in two arms, carrying her well above the waterline.

“In my life,” he said a few minutes later, “I’ve been in three places. I’ve been in Vermont, I’ve been in Vietnam, and I’ve been in the Army.”

An old joke. She didn’t smile.

“But to see someone actually get a stomach cramp,” he said, “I had to come to Florida.”

Now she smiled. Faintly. She lay on her side with her hands on her stomach.

“You owe me one, Ronnie.” The point came out just right, dealt from strength. Handed down like an order. “Take me and show me what you’re doing with my life.”

The shooting site was lit up incredibly. The brightness of the lamps and reflectors seemed that much more ferocious against the Everglades swamp growth and the heavy sundown colors, a spectacular purple gloom. Hartley, looking at the sky reflected in the swamp water, was reminded of the pads on animal paws. They’d set up practically at the water’s edge. Then Hartley saw the actor playing Hartley, a lean kid he recognized from a TV series set in the 1950’s. He remembered once getting upset at a reference to underground papers on the program. That was a lie; they didn’t have underground papers in the 1950’s. Hartley stared at the actor. The kid’s face — he was staring back — had been so painted up that in the spotlights it glimmered like the surface of the swamp. Hartley studied the fatigues, the P HARTLEY tag over the chest pocket. He envied the actor his paratrooper boots, muddied and scuffed all day to get the proper effect.

But something was very wrong, something absolutely off. The smell of the place. Hartley started to move away from the lights, filling his nose with a falseness that would never show on television. This scene they were shooting now was supposed to take place in the prison camp, but it smelled like jungle. The air here gave the impression of continual ripening, the heady effect of violent blossoms. Whereas in the prison camp it had reeked without end of decay, of clotted water and smoke. Hartley still became edgy whenever someone doused his barbecue coals at the end of a summer party. And here, in the Everglades, a man at least could find that odor from the marrow of a carcass. Hartley moved farther from the lights, towards the purple shimmer of the pool. The ground sank beneath his beach sandals; he felt mud between his toes. Yes here at least a man found the genuine shit. Uprooted tendrils of ancient trees stank as they died. Reptiles prowled the muck.

Garbeau called him back to the shooting site. In one hand she held a clipboard and despite her bikini she looked all business again. Hartley returned slowly, savoring the atmosphere. He stopped as soon as he saw what they were doing. The actor who played Hartley sat wrapped in a blanket. He held a guitar. Around him settled three other actors: a muscular black, an urban Hispanic type, and a Midwestern-looking blonde. The four were huddled around a small campfire.

“This is the Christmas scene,” Garbeau said. “I thought it would give you a good idea what we’re up to.”

The actor who played Hartley called for some help with his makeup. He said the blanket and the fire were making him sweat too much.

“What about the fan?” Garbeau shouted.

“A campfire?” Hartley was asking quietly, beside her. “No way we could ever have a campfire.”

“If we use the fan,” a man with another clipboard shouted, “we’ll have to boost the footage back at the shop.”

“It wasn’t that kind of camp,” Hartley almost whispered.

“Well so?” Garbeau shouted. “So what’s the hangup? We got the montage to patch in anyway. Let’s get it.”

A fan came on, making Hartley’s shirt billow.

“It was windy back there in wintertime, right?” She spoke to Hartley now, her voice back to normal.

“Are you kidding me?” Right away he felt ashamed of his weak tone. He tried for something harsher: “You might as well have these guys roasting marshmallows.”

Garbeau looked at him a while, her suggestive eyes level. She drew herself up so the lines of her body were emphasized. Hartley suffered an asexual pang, a cramp in his chest.

“This particular scene,” Garbeau said carefully, “may not be perfect in terms of actual experience. We may not get an exact one-to-one correlation with the facts. But the scene will echo the feelings of real people in trouble, everywhere.”

Nobody else looked Hartley’s way. They made a big, unnecessary production of riffling through the notes on their clipboards.

“This is just not, not right,” Hartley managed finally over his chest cramp. “Camp was freaky, it was hard.”

“We know that. We understand.”

“Understand? Understand? Look, you think those drugs you have are anything?”

“Easy, Hartley—”

“Camp made those drugs look like the Sunday funnies. Camp was — every minute you realized there were more terrible things inside you!”

“I’ll play it that way,” the actor playing Hartley called from beside the fire. “Don’t worry man, I’ll do it right.”

“Hey, pretty boy, I’ll do it right!” Hartley shouted. “I’ll do it right on your face!”

“Easy Hartley” Garbeau put her hand under his shirt. “Easy, easy.”

“Check out that anger,” the actor was saying to the group round the fire. “That anger is great. That’s what I’ve got to have.”

“Quiet,” Garbeau said. “I’ll handle this.”

“I understand,” the actor said.

An odd sound moved through the shooting crew, a kind of chuckle.

“Hartley, please,” Garbeau said in another voice, “think of the story. A man, alone, far from his loved ones. Think of it. He’s forced to take whatever help, whatever small comfort he can get, from others as lost and miserable as himself.”

Her hand continued to hold him at bay.

“You really believe this garbage, don’t you?” he said at last. “This whole pack of lies — you set it up.”

Garbeau just laughed. “Hartley, come on. We’ve had some fun, these last couple days. All right.” She spoke so mildly, like a lover. “We’ve had some good times. But this is serious business. Think of it, please. A man, alone and lost and miserable. He huddles together with others like him, seeking protection from the winter wind. And then that man lifts his head and sings the true feelings. He sings what we all share.”

Hartley had to look away. He cast his eyes over the metal angles of the cameras, the whiteness of cue cards and notes on clipboards, the gloomy backdrop of a swamp that now seemed miles and miles distant. He saw two other women he hadn’t noticed earlier. He saw a cherry-red van and a driver smelling what looked like an orchid. There were so many in the shooting crew, so many watching him. Finally Hartley looked at the actor playing Hartley. With a start, a flinch he couldn’t suppress, he saw that the kid was grinning. Grinning. In fact the glimmery tones of the actor’s face were stretched so wide and lewdly that all at once there was no room left for doubt. Everyone here knew what Hartley and Garbeau had been doing.

In a moment the evidence fell into place. “I understand;” and that low-bore chuckle; and Garbeau’s soft, soft tone of voice. Garbeau and Hartley had been the only ones to stay behind at the hotel this morning. They’d been the only ones to visit the bar last night. Everyone here knew.

Now Hartley couldn’t free himself from that grinning, painted mirror. He tried to straighten up, be a soldier, but instead stumbled backwards on the heels of his unfamiliar sandals. He thought how he must look, in his colored beach shirt, his swim trunks that showed off skinny legs white from a New England spring. He felt utterly freakish. The wrinkled member between his legs seemed without warning to hang down enormously, heavy and prominent, as if Hartley was dragging around some kind of dinosaur whose tail was roped to his waist.

“You never wanted me to come here.” He spoke to Garbeau but kept his eyes on the actor. “You did everything you could to keep me from seeing this.”

“Just let them sing,” Garbeau said. “Just let them start. You’ll see.”

Hartley’s chin dropped to his chest.

It seemed that the actor playing him had already struck the opening chords. There was some dialogue Hartley didn’t catch, as the kid strummed. Then they were into it, “Silent Night” of course. They sang with a wonderful shivering raggedness. Hartley found he could lift his head, they sounded so good. He saw a man by one camera holding up a cue card with the lyrics printed on it. He saw that the actor who played Hartley sang looking just enraged. The kid sang with a look as if he were ready to tear somebody’s guts out. And by “holy infant, so tender and mild,” Garbeau had pressed up close to Hartley, pinning one of his arms against his side.

“Now tell me,” she murmured in his ear, “doesn’t this feel right?”

All he could feel was the uneven gentleness of her body against his arm. His knuckles dangled in the cushioned opening at the top of her thighs. He thought: I must be in love. Only if he were in love, he reasoned, could he have let her play him so easily for a sap.

“Hartley, you’re such a natural,” she whispered. “You’re such an apeman. You must see this is true to life.”

And to hide his feelings, to pretend another explanation for the tears that had started to stream down his cheeks, Hartley opened his mouth and crowded it with song.

The next morning he made an honest effort to get resecured. He’d been unable to resist spending the night with Garbeau again, unable to resist yet another bout of roughhousing come morning. But when she went out to swim he drank coffee at the coffee bar. He wore his fatigues, long sleeves and all. After his second cup he knew what he’d do. Yes, really get resecured. He climbed the stairs back to Garbeau’s room. Her company had set up a couple business lines, so a person could talk as long as they wanted. He double-checked the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Then Hartley let down his pants and settled himself once more in the bed. He didn’t bother with his boots, only pulled his pants and shorts down round his knees. He and Claire had done this before. Took so much concentration, so much give and take, it always wound up clearing his head. He dialled the number and then held the phone in one hand.

No answer. Hartley tried twice more. He had the switchboard operator try a third time.

“Afraid no one’s home, sir.”

Hartley tried to think. He’d thrown the pillow on the floor and lay at ramrod attention.

“Operator. Ah, could you tell me. I was wondering what day it was?”

“The 15th, sir. Father’s Day.”

“Good, good.” What? What was good about that? “But I mean, operator? Ah, I’m from out of state. What day of the week is it?”

“Friday, sir.” Obviously the woman handled this kind of question all the time. “Friday, June 15th, 10:06 A.M.”

Suddenly Hartley was furious. His insides were going on spin-dry for the third day in a row and this headphone jockey downstairs was showing off her watch.

“Operator? Hey, operator, I’m in love. I came down here to see my life story and now I’m in love.”

“Very good, sir. Would you like a newspaper?”

“Huh? Hey, operator, never mind that. You know what Willy Peter is? Willy Peter, Make you a buh liever. You know what Willy Peter’ll do to a dink in a cave?”

“I’m sorry, sir. It is the policy of the hotel to stay out of our patrons’ personal affairs whenever possible.”

Her formality had iced over about two questions back; by this time nothing would crack it. And Hartley knew that he wasn’t being straight either. This bragging on love, bragging on violence — it wasn’t him. He slammed down the phone. He was still lying there, frowning and with his hands where his belt would be normally, when Garbeau came in.

Wet, her short hair had grown longer. Rivulets wandered slowly into the bottom of her bikini. Hartley was so disturbed he spoke up first.

“I tried to call home.”

Garbeau had been standing looking startled. Now, again, he’d made her laugh.

“Hartley, God.” She shook her head. “You are such a natural.” She sat, picked up the other phone, gave him a different look. “But I guess you didn’t get through. Poor boy. It’s still all wrinkled up like Mr. Froggy.”

She turned away from him and started making calls. More TV shorthand. So far as Hartley could tell, it was something about when he’d get his first check. Then, the phone still over one shoulder, Garbeau picked up a clipboard from the hotel desk and began making notes on the attached pad. The noise of the pages riffling back and forth grated on Hartley.

“It’s Friday,” he said finally. “Friday is when the wife does the errands. Plus Bobby and Janey are at school.”

Garbeau turned a couple more pages.

“The wife,” Hartley almost shouted, “is doing the errands.”

“All right.” She left the clipboard and phone where they were but met his gaze. “All right, let’s hear it.”

Hartley could only blink.

“I’ve sat through this riff a hundred times. You just go right ahead.”

A hundred times. So, Hartley thought. Men fell in love with her right and left. So he was Sap of the Week.

“Oh, come on, Slim,” she said. “It’s the real people like you against the TV people like me, right? All TV people are artificial. All TV people are parasites. They don’t have feelings of their own so they suck off everyone else. Right?”

Hartley felt his ideas going inside out and looking foolish. Suddenly he wanted just to hide in a hole somewhere.

“I mean, you married your high-school sweetheart. You have Bobby and Janey and they go to school. But a person like me, I’m hardly human. All a TV person like me wants is money and a good fuck. Well fuck you, Captain Hartley.”

Her face was wrecked. She whipped the phone off her shoulder and shook it at him.

“Maybe some of us didn’t go for that quaint-little-New-England crap! Maybe some of us thought a little more of ourselves than just, ‘the wife’! The truth is, Hartley, if I’d stayed in St. J. I’d be so godawful beaten-down by now you wouldn’t give me a second look.”

He lay there bewildered. He was hurt by the crack about wives, thrown by how far off base his own ideas had been, deeply embarrassed about his nakedness. He’d knotted his fingers over his stomach tight. Yet at the same time Hartley felt — and this was the bewildering part — honestly good. He felt as if he’d just got some bit of what he needed, this morning. There was an honest satisfaction in finding out another terrible thing about himself. Hartley began to think of wisecracks, and of how he might take off the rest of his clothes without insulting her.

But nothing came to him quickly enough. Almost at once, like putting the period with a sledgehammer, Garbeau went back to her phone calls. She looked a little thrown and embarrassed herself. Hartley had to watch her sit there stiffly, had to listen through two more conversations in that maddening shorthand code. The pages on her clipboard riffled again. So the more satisfied part of his mind dropped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. He couldn’t even decide whether or not to pull up his pants. Garbeau meantime went through a lot of gimmicks, ignoring him. She touched the stems and petals on the flowers he’d bought her last night. She wrapped the phone wire round her index finger. Somehow she found time for a cigarette too. Hartley understood the lines of battle had been drawn, that much he could trust, but he couldn’t be sure if a man in love was supposed to cross those lines or back away.

“Hey?” he said finally.

Another surprise: Garbeau smiled at him. She untangled her finger and lay the phone on her shoulder again.

“Okay, Hartley, okay.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I guess I—okay, I apologize.”

“No,” Hartley began. “No, don’t.”

“Let’s just say I brought a lot of stuff down on you that other people put on me.”

He wouldn’t nod, wouldn’t give any sign. He didn’t want those clear lines of force dissolving.

“But look, now, we’ve had a lot of fun these last couple days but, I do have work here—”

“Ronnie.” He actually waved a fist at her. “What I want to know is, what do you think of this? What do you think of how you and I can do this?”

The question, lumpy and badly put as it was, exhausted him. He watched as Garbeau changed the way she was sitting. And she took time for another cigarette. Between slow drags, plainly trying to feel for what he was after, she told Hartley that during these past couple days she’d come while he was inside her. “I mean, that’s pretty rare, you should know.”

Hartley shook his head. That was just something he’d learned over in Nam. He pressed his knuckles against his stomach muscles, felt the coffee down there bubble against his diaphragm. The only things that came to mind were more wisecracks.

“You’ve done this before,” Garbeau said. “I mean, God, with this war-hero business, what else do you need? The AP put what you did number six on the list of the ten greatest stories of American bravery since World War II.”

Again Hartley was waving his fist, as if to ward this stuff off.

“Hey, Hartley. You’re the one who goes around giving speeches. You’re—”

“I don’t give speeches,” he said quickly. It was such a relief to put in something simple and certain. “I hate speeches. I feel like the world’s biggest fake up there. The Army stopped making me give speeches a long time ago. They know I’m at my best working one-on-one.”

Garbeau bought some more time with her cigarette. Then she smiled.

“Well, so, that just proves what I’m saying. You’re a natural, Hartley. I mean, if you’re telling me these last couple days have stirred up some doubts,”—she snorted at the idea—“forget it. You’re what every man wishes he was. You’re lady bait.”

She laughed. The flowers changed color behind her scattered smoke. And when Hartley tried to chuckle in response, to help her blow away this silly idea of doubts, he discovered something that left him ruined. He was almost in tears again. His throat clenched round his breathing. Everything beneath the neck was straining, revving with the pedal to the floor. Hartley must have gone three years without crying and now he was breaking up two days in a row. He thought: What have these guys done to me? He flexed his feet in his boots, locked his fingers together tight, tight. What had they done, now that Hartley couldn’t ask a simple question? Garbeau’s laugh now was nothing special, only the same trick she’d been using on him since he came off the plane in Fort Lauderdale. She was only trying to keep the customer satisfied. But how was Hartley ever to get round that act, here with his dinosaur hanging in his way again, falling out over the edge of the bed, trolling across the hotel floor? Ladybait? Hartley had to get out of there. These users, with their codes and contracts — he had to escape.

Garbeau had stopped laughing. No doubt she’d seen he wasn’t going along with it. She sat back and waited for him to explain.

“You people,” he began. His tone was just barely under control, but the lie took clear shape as he spoke. “You TV people.”

The fight that followed didn’t take much imagination. She’d already given Hartley all the weapons. The first time he said that Garbeau didn’t have any feelings, he could see he’d scored. The surfaces of her eyes flattened. When he asked if she ever planned to have some kids of her own, she threw the clipboard at him. It caught him on the ribs and sent paper flying everywhere. After that Hartley no longer had to work to keep his voice from cracking. He began to shout like a born officer. Garbeau made the mistake of going for him with her fingernails, and he put a quick hand-to-hand move on her. Then she simply lay on the rug awhile, screaming insults. Hartley could swear that at one point he heard a maid giggling outside the door. In no time the two were reaching back for high-school slurs: tramp, white trash, stupid grease monkey.

“Why don’t you go back to, to camp or wherever it is they keep you apes?” Garbeau was standing up. “We sure don’t need you here. You can come back with your wife.”

She shook her hair angrily. Hartley was still lying in bed, playing the cool dude. From this angle he was stung by the unexpected revelation, her fine legs against the numb synthetics of the hotel curtain. He felt the old tug. Amazing, he still wanted her. Could that — could that have been the reason he’d gotten so jerked around? For now at least it was obvious that he’d never been in love with Garbeau. No never; love had been only a game for switchboard operators.

“You’ll still get your checks,” Garbeau said.

They sat and made the necessary phone calls. She in her chair and he on the edge of the bed, they sat with knees touching, with even a few inches of their naked thighs touching. They faced each other. He called Fort Devens and then Fort Pope, Louisiana, where he’d done his basic training. He had no idea how far Fort Pope was or how he’d get there. Meantime she called Los Angeles and New York.

“Put a stop on F.L.A.,” Garbeau said into the phone. She spoke pointedly, loudly, her eyes fixed on Hartley. “No, this is just paper. We’ll promote the same S.A. Just reroute the signatures through Ayer, Mass.”

“Let’s get this exercise locked in as of thirteen-hundred,” Hartley said to the man at Fort Pope, glaring back at Garbeau word for word. He felt the sea-salt inside her knee. “The C.O. and the gate should understand it’s strictly S.O.P.”

Hartley was back behind the plexiglass divider, back with the driver whose face he found so reliable, so soggy. He’d finished sneezing at the limo’s air-conditioning. He lit a joint. He’d bought about a half-dozen before leaving Garbeau’s room. She’d asked a high price and he’d insisted on paying what he called “recreation tax.” Now, outside the big car’s tinted windows, he saw the foliage closing together to make jungle, the Everglades.

“You know,” the driver said, “Louisiana’s a long way.”

Hartley hadn’t noticed the divider coming down.

“You’re getting paid,” he said.

“Gettin’ paid is just bidnis as usual.” The driver gestured for the joint and Hartley saw no reason not to pass it. “But I think you and me can work out a better ‘rangement.”

Toke. Hartley wondered if he’d missed something said earlier. Also, for no reason, he realized he wouldn’t have any lunch and for breakfast there’d only been that coffee.

“Army got installations in Florida, you know,” the driver said later. By this time they’d pulled over to the side of the road. They sat under some powerful flowers, like morning glories on spiralling vines, and were sharing a bottle of Catawba Pink. Hot pebbles dug into Hartley’s behind.

“Now I can cover for you with any kind of story you like,” the driver said. “Army won’t mind. A war hero like y’self, you can bend the rules a little.”

“That’s not true.” Hartley felt he had to stand up. “The Army”—he groaned and made it—“expects a man to be where he says he’s going to be.”

“Ahowoo, Soldier-boy.”

“Hey, I’m not kidding, I’m not kidding. The Army, I know just where I’d be if it wasn’t for them. I’d be up in those woods living out of some two-bit mobile home, working on the heat, working on the car, working every goddamn minute of the weekend. Breaking my back not to get laid off. Half the time I’d be scared of my own children. I’ve seen it. I know.”

“I got granchillen, myself,” the driver said.

But Hartley went on pacing, back and forth along the unshaded road. Every step in his heavy boots seemed to send the point of a spear poking through the top of his head.

“What you’re talking about,” he said, “is just the kind of thing they show on TV. They think they can tell any lie they want to. Right out there on TV!”

“That’s right, Soldier-boy,” the driver said. “Be fifty, sixty million see it anyway. So why not—”

“Never mind Louisiana.”

“Now you talking.”

“We’re going to find that shooting site.”

The driver’s grin dropped fast. His whole sloppy middleaged face seemed to shrink while he argued that, man you gotta know, the site moved on different days. And he’d never been any too clear on Everglades roads, especially halfway in the bag like he was now. And then also, Soldier-boy couldn’t do much except maybe mess up their timetable a little. Hartley wouldn’t hear it. Finally he promised to let the driver go home as soon as they found the place. Deal. Hartley performed isometrics in the back seat as they moved into the jungle. He did up another joint, smoking almost all of it himself, when he felt his thoughts get foggy. He ordered the driver to keep the air conditioning off and the windows open; he wanted to hear what was going on outside. From bigger roads they pulled onto smaller, muddy even this late in the year. The smaller roads ended soon in blank swamp walls. Insects would fill the halted car. The fourth time they came to one of these dead ends, just as the driver had started to shout that Soldier-boy didn’t scare him, he’d been in the service himself, the Coast Guard just like Alex Haley, and a deal was a deal but he sure didn’t need no ofay Yankee asshole racist Soldier-boy comin’ down here tellin’ him to drive with the damn windows open — just then they found something. Hartley was outside before the car had stopped rolling. On the wet ground lay a clipboard with a yellow legal pad attached.

“Ahowoo.” The driver scowled.

Hartley turned the thing over in his hands. The paper was blank and the lines had run. The clip hinges were dark with rust.

“Man,” the driver called from behind the wheel.

“Shut up.”

“Don’t you be giving me no more orders, Soldier-boy. You don’t know what I’m cap’ble of.”

“They’re here. I can smell em.”

“All right Tarzan, you just go find ’em then.”

Without a word, Hartley dropped the clipboard and headed into the bush. Another half-dozen ducking steps, holding his hands before his chest as if cradling a rifle, and he knew the driver would never find him.

What was Hartley doing in here? Maybe an hour had passed since he’d left the road; the sun was beyond its high mid-point. Siesta time, Hartley thought, and where he came from they didn’t have siestas. That should give him some advantage. He’d smeared mud on his face, partly to prevent his white skin from being seen and partly to keep off the incredible bugs. His neck was already misshapen with bites. His hands kept moving, slapping, moving. Despite the bugs however, this apparently was some drier patch of the ‘Glades, perhaps one of the Seminoles’ old hideaways. He’d gone this entire time without hitting any impassable stretches of river or lake. He seemed instead on an endless waterlogged plain, broken up by occasional cypress or crucified oaks and palms, but for the most part a monotonous trudge through nasty long grass with saw edges that cut the skin. He stumbled often. He recalled a statistic from yesterday’s tour: the Everglades occupy over 4000 square miles. Then what, he sometimes had to wonder, was he doing? Yet the answer always came to him at once, a grappling hook slung easily across the gap of hesitation, slung that much more easily because Hartley would never take a moment to gauge the depths. He would think only: I’ll get them. And he’d crash ahead.

Not that Hartley didn’t experience other inklings, other thoughts. He felt pervadingly alone, an ant crossing a gymnasium floor. He recalled the rare look his son had given him the first time Bobby understood why his father was called a war hero. Also the soldier could picture his victory, cue cards floating on the surface of a pool, powerlines shorting out and everything going up like the slow lightning of tracer fire. Yet these other inklings were no more than inklings. Wing shots at something glimpsed once and then out of sight. By and large Hartley was going on nothing but the grapple-hook-swing of action itself. He didn’t think. For miles of forced march it seemed as if Hartley wasn’t there at all. Whenever he felt his mind beginning to slow, grow foggy again, he did up another joint.

Until…Hartley forced his head through a particularly dense section of vines and brush and so came down face-first within an inch of standing gray water. The surface stank of pupae and limestone. He held his position a while. His mudsmeared face became visible, crossed here and there by water striders, in the rank pool before him. Then Hartley, maybe, sensed something. He looked over his right shoulder. Not ten feet away a solitary alligator lay sunning itself on a strip of flattened grass.

Hartley froze. His head out over the water, his body trapped in sawtoothed vines, he saw himself as perfect prey. And the alligator’s eye was open. Hartley couldn’t miss it, a yellow and pink smudge of goo. The pupil was a black chip. Hartley kept still through a feast of mosquitos, kept still while the scars on his lower back numbly repeated one word of pain over and over. He ignored even the massive bees. These tickled the back of his ear, going in and out of some fragrant orchid or honeysuckle behind him.

Just when Hartley went up on his palms, began to move, he couldn’t say. But he started to pull his long trunk forward, forward by inches with one eye on the reptile the whole way, until he got his boots under him and could squat carefully, finally, on the edge of limestone over the water. His head was hot but clear. The gator hadn’t come for him yet. Hartley flexed his ankles, risked turning a couple degrees on the balls of his feet. No response.

Instinctively or from soldier’s habit, he sized up the beast.

The blunt snout, the blunt tail thicker than the body where they joined. The inward pinch between tail and snout, just behind the blunted cone of the skull. Christ Jesus, an alligator was ugly. The color effects were sick, snotgreen with diarrhetic yellows and browns. Under the mouth sagged an awful bulk of jowls. Vivid teeth protruded from the lower jaw over the upper lip like the sneer of a mongoloid. The legs were pudgy as a baby’s. Then all the way to the back, beneath the enormous tail, Hartley saw the bloody half-head of what must have been a swamp dog. Indeed there were traces of blood, and shitty bits of stuck hair, up and down the gator’s rough length. The teeth also bore a stain. Meantime that clouded eye stared Hartley’s way and never blinked. A baby’s legs and an old man’s eye. The alligator was a stained bag of diseases, stitched together from wrinkles and stones. Hartley wasn’t sure when he began moving towards the animal.

He paused after a couple stalking half-steps and laid out a thick line of his cocaine. On the back of his hand, the stuff felt icy and wonderful against his mosquito bites. Hartley snorted and then saw plainly what he must do. This creature was the thing he’d been after since coming down here. The shooting site he couldn’t visit, the questions he couldn’t ask Garbeau, the deals everyone wanted to make and he could never get free of — this was the horny soul of them all. Beyond this, Hartley couldn’t think. He eased forward another step, another half-step. Impossible to move without the saw grass rasping against his fatigues. Impossible not to set off insects, popping up comically or buzzing away at slow speed, every time he covered another few inches of ground. Yet Hartley pressed on. With each pause, each new trace of gator’s blood smell, he felt more positive. The grappling hook was already caught in that ridged and cracked hide. Hartley himself was already deep in enemy territory. When he straightened his knees, his shadow reached the animal’s belly. He waited out another insect uproar. He turned and his shadow fell across the vulnerable pinch of jowl and backbone that was the neck. He stood fully upright now, savoring the meaty stink. He saw how, blackened by shade, the alligator looked ancient and brittle as some fossil washed up in a storm. And then Hartley sneezed.

He sneezed twice. The second time was louder and more wracking than the first. The explosion emptied his head, left his senses reeling with dispersed cocaine.

The next thing he was aware of were some tiny swamp pansies between his knees. After that, the reptile’s gummed and staring eye. Farther away, he saw a beetle with red horns fish out a tick from behind the dead dog’s lip.

Slowly, very frightened, Hartley hauled himself upright once more. An agonizing rise, as if he had a rachet binding his neck to his ankles. But once on his feet he turned and headed into the swamp water. In his mind there was no question. If he could sneeze in the gator’s ear, if he could drop senseless for who knows how many dopey moments almost eyeball to eyeball with it — then what was the point? He hadn’t come this far to cuddle up with a teddy bear. Was Hartley no better than another insect, like the beetles under the tail or the dragonflies teasing the snout? The water, in the water now, that was more what he needed. The heat actually stung him, weakened his calves like when he took steam at the officer’s club. His boots sank to the straps in sludge. When the water reached his genitals, Hartley thought: I’m not a kid any more. He wasn’t some teenage draftee with a teenage wife, married before bootcamp and sent overseas before he knew what an orgasm was. No. These days Hartley saw under the wallpaper. He’d reupped, done his time in OCS, made captain, all with the private understanding that he’d get another crack at it. Now in water up to his waist, his feet trapped in mud, the muscles in his legs slack and tickled by invisible fish, his upper body tangled in gnats and mosquitos like a dead tree in vines, Hartley turned to face the alligator. Once more he took in that mongoloid sneer, those wino eyes. He began to splash.

He used his fists, they were louder. He used his entire body, a wildman boogaloo. In his mind’s eye he saw two down-home grunts who had done an insane dance out on the Cu Chi perimeter. Hot water streamed down his face. He began to scream. No words yet, no sense, nothing but grunts and howls growing louder and going deeper down his throat with each jerk of his hips and clenched stomach. In no time the hams of his hands burned from the pounding. And Hartley bit them, bit them to draw blood. To draw blood and have that juice draw the beast. Then with the salty taste on his teeth actual words started to come: Freak, slope bitch, dink freak asshole racist trash meat. Hartley’s cap dropped and sank. His long pants pockets seemed to be filling with silt. Against the walls of his mind now were flashing pictures from last spring, a stockade riot at Devens, prisoners cracking guards with two-by-fours as they tried to bust out. Still the words came, bitch freak bastard ape. Solid words that never echoed in the muggy swamp air. The screaming went on till the soldier suffered the raw scrapes of three days’ smoking, screaming with mouth wide open till he got an insect in there, some spread-wing creature that felt like stiff paper against the tongue, so that Hartley choked and coughed weakly but kept on splashing as best he could. The alligator lay where it was. Throughout, it lay where it was and didn’t move.

The shadows changed shape, grew longer. Hartley’s muscles gave out on him, left him to sink. The gator’s face became indistinct. Didn’t move.

“Freak.” Hartley knew this was his last gasp. He tried to put some final power in the words. “Meat. I could have you. I could have all of you.”

Maybe eating the swamp dog had left the gator comatose. Maybe the eyes that terrified Hartley were already sightless with sleep, veiled by some filmy additional reptile’s lid. Or maybe the thing was sick. Yes. The alligator might have been dying of some gutty infection even as Hartley screamed for its rough body in the swamp. Who knows why? The soldier never got the comeuppance that had been sniping night and day at his nerves, the man-eating proof that he’d been so positive he could discover beyond AP, beyond TV.

He was a long time getting out. In his exhaustion the heavy suck of the mud against his boots seemed like home itself. He floated with just his eyes and nose above the water. But after the sky darkened, while the pool lost its heat, Hartley understood with great clarity that he would die in the Everglades. So much mapless space. Already he was starving. And the certainty of his death in some perverse way energized him. Hartley wrestled out of the muck, through the oppressive growth at the pool’s edge, back out onto the moonlit plains of saw grass. He never gave a thought or glance to the alligator. He began almost to run, moving half-blind across miles of open territory, a black and silver fit of searching for where he would die. Then Hartley stumbled onto a road.

As if the swamp weeds had been holding him up, he collapsed.

For the Park Security, the next morning, it was a simple matter to trace the officer, filthy and stone asleep though he was. He still wore his dogtags. The TV shooting schedule in his pocket was soaked but still legible. The only delay in his getting to Fort Pope came when the soldier insisted on making a phone call from the airport. He insisted on leaving word with the TV people that the man who drove the limousine should not be fired. Between sneezes and wretched phlegmy coughs, Hartley repeated into the phone that it was not the driver’s fault, not the driver’s fault. So the Park Security never got to tell the soldier that his wife would meet him at Fort Pope.

She had left Friday, Claire said. When she hadn’t been able to reach him in his hotel room, neither Wednesday night nor Thursday night, she’d left the kids with another officer. She’d taken the first plane south. In Fort Lauderdale, the hotel switchboard operator and one of the TV publicity crew had told the wife all — and she broke down, her tears staining the paper on which she’d written a numbered list of Hartley’s lies — all she needed to know.

“Now you tell me what happened,” she said through her teeth, through her tears. “The truth, Philip Hartley! The truth!”

He tried for days to win back her trust. He bought so many flowers it seemed the entire outpost was drenched in the bloomy smell. The orchids down here, especially, tore him up. Their petals were speckled and gummy, suggesting the spread arms of an octopus or some unknown brown amphibian, but hold one up in the least breeze and you’d see the flower was thin and shivery as paper. Hartley bought them from a Spanish kid who worked out of a tent nearby. Just a raggedy-ass kid who’d stand there singing “Flores, Flores, Flo-ri-da.”

The Return

Though Rucker had designed the house in New Canaan himself, and though he had designed it for every season in the long year, these past couple summers he had traveled to Cape Cod. His wife’s family owned beachfront property. She had pointed out that, since now Rucker was semi-retired anyway, the world would go on without him if he took off eight weeks solid. Rucker wore bowties and garters, and for thirty-nine years he’d worked as a stockbroker, but he had an open mind. His wife’s idea seemed like a way to celebrate his change of life. Therefore during June, this year and the last, he found a young couple to take care of his Connecticut house.

The first year he had seen as a lark. It had seemed like no time at all. This year however the time off felt always in some way wrong. The sun on the ocean was to him a nervewracking light. Either Rucker slept heavily in his own sweat, or he was overexcited, with each glance at the bright windows like a new cup of black coffee, Rucker started to go round angry. He slapped his youngest grandchild over a dropped spoonful of cereal. Then during the next-to-last week of vacation, he was called away from the Cape because the couple babysitting his New Canaan house had been shot.

Rucker insisted on going alone. He arranged the return so that he would arrive in the morning, and be done with the ugly business early. But once there it seemed as though no one could tell him anything he didn’t already know. He heard again that his house was handsome and unusual. He heard that the young couple hadn’t been married, that the woman was an astronomer with a telescope thrust out the attic window, that the man owned a sailboat and studied the music of the Renaissance, that the police didn’t like any of this. Rucker himself was still in what he knew was his traveling frame of mind, a heavy-headed mix of relief at getting away and shame about feeling relief. In this case, moreover, the mix had become painful. The aggravation of the sun on the sea was still too much a part of his thoughts, and also he could remember the outcry when he’d slapped his grandchild with the same overbearing clarity. As he listened to the police talk and talk, he crossed his arms over his lapels and declined to sit.

At last the murder itself was described to him. The couple had been led into the kitchen and shot there, apparently while standing holding on to each other.

Abruptly the tone of his experience in the police station changed. Rucker was shown a diagram. A detective made the explanations in an unnaturally loud voice. Rucker was shown a minute-by-minute chronology.

8:25—First three bullets fired

.

8:25-8:35—Approximate time of death, male victim

.

8:38-8:39—Second three bullets fired

.

8:40—Approximate time of death, female victim

.

Rucker saw ballistics reports. He saw computations of the angle of fall. Several times he found himself gasping and blinking and shaking his head, because under the rush of brutal data, without knowing it, he kept holding his breath. On the police diagrams the corpses were designated by dotted outlines.

Eventually Rucker understood that this preferential treatment, his being shown so many police documents, was out of respect for his age. When the detective at last fell silent, Rucker knew it was incumbent on him to say something.

But the stockbroker discovered then that his feelings had been let out — blown out — on a long, very thin line. They were miles away, years away, and he was unable to bring any of them in close enough for use. He attempted to concentrate, turning away from the detective and closing his eyes, but in the darkness all he could make out were the distant words for the emotions he should be going through, like kites up in winter weather. He opened his eyes to find himself facing the dotted heaps on the police diagram. If he turned around, he would have to face the detective.

“Violence,” Rucker managed at last, “horrible violence.”

Somehow the detective made this into a conversation.

“No mister,” he said. “No sir. This was an act with a motive. It was passion. The youth had another liaison going at the time.”

As a final formality, in order to keep police accounts regular, Rucker was shown the woman responsible. Had he ever seen her around the house? She was being held in a sort of fortified office, a room with both bulletproof windows and a coffee machine. She was a small, young woman. On her lap lay a book, the title of which was hidden under her fingers. From his great inner height, Rucker looked down at her youth, her book, and thought that he had never seen anyone so satisfied. The detective said she had turned herself in. Out of some obscene instinct to keep things businesslike, she had taken note of the exact time when she’d fired each shot and later informed the police. Now soon she would be retreating behind more windows, thicker than these and farther away. What could possibly cover such a distance? By the time she got out of jail Rucker would be dead. He told them he had never seen her around the house.

He stayed in town for dinner, then stayed after dinner at the piano bar, listening to the songs. He set out for the house late, and couldn’t locate his driveway. After a while he realized he was driving with his lights off.

Later, he saw the young couple that had been babysitting his house. They were dancing, in his kitchen, between the uniquely-constructed counters, under the runners from which hung pans, serving forks, spatulas. He was very tired, but the noise of their dancing finally brought him downstairs. His wife had insisted they keep a revolver in the bedroom, and now Rucker came downstairs with the gun in his hand. This is how it’s done, he was telling himself anxiously; this is how I have to behave. Then when he saw them, dancing, he let his pistol hand drop and he leaned heavily against the kitchen door jamb.

Yet Rucker, such was his character…he believed there was a chance you could reason with these people. As he watched, the thought came to him, and he felt compelled to try. If you could call attention to their predicament, the dancing should stop. He moved into the kitchen, placing the gun on the counter that held the cereal bowls and unbreakable children’s cups, and he attempted to get between the two figures. Within their space the air was disturbed. The front of Rucker’s robe opened. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest to keep from shivering and peered into each face as it went past him. He called to the man, then the woman. The air grew colder. The long hairs on his chest and belly stirred. With enormous concentration, overcoming even his natural revulsion, his sadness and fatigue, Rucker persisted until finally a slackening and slight widening of their area let him know his presence had been felt. Immediately he asked if they knew where they were. Any telling question that came into his head, he asked. He asked if they knew what time it was; he asked if they knew who had done this to them; he asked if they knew the motive; he asked if they knew their way out; he asked if they felt any pain; he asked if they knew who they were. No answers were forthcoming. But the pair danced only haltingly now, and they were beginning to drift, mist over, quiver. Rucker sensed their unwillingness to complete the thoughts he’d started. He insisted. He asked if they knew who he was.

He would never have believed himself capable of such effort so late in the day.

The final trace to yield to him was their music. After that Rucker stood still a while where he was, in his silent and empty kitchen.

Then, though he had the thought that he must return to bed, he started to dance. He followed the rhythm of the couple’s music, which he found he could remember clearly, the notes rising uncalled-for to make the unshaved skin of his throat tremble. He danced a simple box step. In time his senses started to go dead on him, his feet numb, his tongue dry and thick. Nonetheless in another way he remained alert, as if some offshoot of his personality were permanently fired up by the idea of dancing. In this frame of mind Rucker recognized the couple’s song. He’d heard it before tonight. A popular ballad with an elegant melody, he’d heard it many times. And so the stockbroker understood that, since he’d already known the tune when the ghosts had first got him out of bed, the entire experience was cast into doubt. Yes he did have a mind — he glanced round his unusual kitchen — open to suggestion. Yet how could he stop dancing for this one prickle of uncertainty, when by his third or fourth refrain of the song Rucker had begun stepping through whole industrious colonies of tangled feelings, through swarms of emotion gathering close, close? Gently Rucker tried to sort these out. He identified the child’s exhilaration at being alone in his own house, the working-man’s relief and shame now like two file folders balanced neatly in a satchel, the grandfather’s desperation about the importance of rules, and the aging husband’s loneliness. But as Rucker pulled free each feeling from the tangle, others crowded into its place. Subtler creatures, crisscrossing masks and shreds of his inner life. With every dance step, more were felt pressing in round his cold legs, herded against his aching shoulders. At last Rucker understood that all the sensations of his long experience had this night joined together, in a motiveless musical triumph that was almost violent.

From time to time he caught his reflection in the polished cook-ware hanging overhead. He also looked out the kitchen window at the sky. He regarded the stars there. The light from those, he told himself calmly, has been traveling towards me since before my lifetime.

Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be

Much later on, long after Judgment Day, we remembered that a man had once passed through here and then returned, still living, to the world. Across the lightning and malefic smoke of Hell the news traveled. A human man! Only passing through!

Among all my fellow devils the one I most often conversed with, at this time of the news of the escaped man, was a polymorph named Miplip. I had no choice about talking with him. He was my overseer. In his natural state he possessed a hideous face: scaly, pendulous cheeks and a long nose with a circular tip and the nostrils on the tip. I had heard it said that the inspiration for his looks came from an ancient river turtle of South America, but this of course could not be, for Miplip had been created eons before either the turtle or the river in which, until Judgment Day, the creature had made its home.

He was my overseer. Still, still it rankles. In our Division there was Miplip and I, only we two, though there were visitors, and he — he was the one in charge. Everywhere devils work in twos; one must be in charge. Then why should it hurt so? Miplip, Miplip. Our relationship was oppressive.

Why did you argue with me, perpetually shaking your brittle cheeks? They made a rustling sound, and anyway I conceded every point, sooner or later. Why the heartless flaunting of your superiority? I concede: you have all the advantages. Don’t you think we have been at it together long enough for me to know? I concede that your tongue is longer than mine and that the inside of your mouth is a nastier yellow. I concede that your polymorphism dwarfs anything I am capable of. Then why should I be reminded, again and again? Miplip. The nagging. The nicknames. The shapes you sometimes assumed, just to delude me. The jokes far over my head. The remarks to others. Everywhere devils work in twos, and one must be in charge. Therefore I needed you; I could never be in charge. But what did you need, to cause me such pain?

Yet Miplip and I, like all other devils, discussed this new development (or rather, this newly-remembered old development): a man who had slipped our grasp and returned to the world unharmed. On some occasions Miplip and I were lucky; our conversation would be more of a discussion and less of a harangue. On other occasions, unlucky, the reverse. But we did talk, like all the others, and we asked those demons who came by what they thought. The general response was confused, halting, even pessimistic. Some avoided the question altogether, darting away before we had finished so much as a single sentence about the escaped man. A troubling situation, especially in the light of all the other worries we had been suffering recently. Then came the day that one of our regular visitors, a sightless demon whom Miplip and I both regarded as a friend, rendered himself invisible in order to escape us. After that, Miplip made a suggestion — a suggestion, as it turned out, of monumental proportions.

He had his tail curled about him at the time, and he sat on the air, maintaining levitation by a gentle flapping of his wings. He seemed unusually subdued. The blind devil’s exertions in bursting out of sight had left a brown stain on the air, just over Miplip’s head.

“Lover,” my overseer began quietly, though he was using one of his most offensive nicknames for me, “no one knows who this passerby was, as yet?”

“No one, Miplip.” I stood on a boulder nearby, disconsolately knocking off flinders with my fork into the damned below. That particular nickname, Lover, is so offensive to me because it is so duplicit. “But I have heard he had a guide, someone from among those already dead in his time. Yes, I think this is generally accepted as true now. He had a guide, from Limbo, just above us.”

“From Limbo.”

“A non Christian. Surely you know.”

I was pleased to be one up on him, and not a little surprised. But instead of sneering and challenging my news he continued to sit where he was, in silence. The brown stain faded and disappeared. When at last Miplip spoke, it was thoughtfully:

“We could make use of this man, Lover. The mere mention of him might make an excellent torture.”

I left off swinging at the chips of rock and turned to face him. “Look here, Miplip, it seems to me that ‘the mere mention’ of a human being who got away would be joyful news to these souls.”

To debate with him was pointless; innumerable experiences had taught me that I lacked even the shadow of a particle of a maggot of hope. He had won every argument since Lucifer’s Fall. And yet…once again I experienced the wretched excitement, the stirring of a spirit that will not be held still, the baffling resurgence of — what was it? It overwhelmed me, every time Miplip and I began to heave our opinions back and forth. Uselessly I struggled to keep quiet and let him say what he had to say. That scrambling monotony inside me took over. In the thrill of discovering that there were two points of view here, Miplip’s and my own, an eternity of lost arguments dropped out of my memory. In other words, I became an idiot.

“You say Miplip!” I shouted, banging the heel of my fork on the boulder. “You say he will cause pain?”

At that Miplip shook off his introspection. He laughed derisively, showing the yellow inside of his mouth. It was a nastier yellow than my own, and his tongue was much longer.

“Lover? ‘You say?’ What do you say, Little Gash? You have an idea? You are thinking? I doubt it, Cunt. Listen to me.”

At least I am not alone in my miserable enthusiasm for arguing. Debate is the most avidly pursued activity in Hell. This is not an exaggeration. I have never seen two devils get together and not immediately take up some pro and con to occupy their leisure time. If a third demon joins them, he will find a middle ground suitable for contention. Miplip, too, took obvious pleasure in it — devastatingly obvious.

“Now Lover, see if you can follow what I am saying. I will use small words. I will pronounce them slowly. How…”

“Miplip, I have a mind as good as yours!”

I was an idiot.

“Blasphemer!” my overseer cried. “And the One in the ice below? Your vocabulary is equal to His?”

I kicked the rock beneath me. Miplip assumed a commiserating look.

“Dear boy, who was put in charge here?”

I looked down, and scratched and pawed for a moment or two, but finally I pointed at my overseer with the handle of my fork.

“Who, boy?”

I unwrapped one finger from around the handle and pointed it, too, at him. I had no one else to appeal to, no one else at all.

“Well all right, since we are not speaking. Now perhaps you could show me who — or Who — set me in charge.”

With my free hand I pointed downward, exaggeratedly and repeatedly. One should never be uncertain about Who is running the show.

“Lover, I hope I have made my point clear? Well yes? So then, small words: How…do…you…know…what…our…pri-son-ers…think? Can…you…hear…them?”

He then outlined for me the main points of his amazing suggestion.

The great problem in Hell is that since the Last Day we have been incapable of communicating with the souls under our jurisdiction. Before the trumpet blew, when they were all merely spirits like us, we could hear their screams, their lamentations, their boasts, their pleas, and their empty threats. When we wished to, we could speak with them. But the reunion with their bodies, though it went off without a hitch, spoiled all that.

As was the plan, at the Final Reckoning the numberless hosts of the damned were reinserted in the bodies they had worn on earth and then one by one hurled back down into his or her designated area of the Pit and locked away from the face of God forever. I watched from the far left-hand corner of the assembly; even at that distance it was an impressive spectacle. The excruciating mental torment of that fall! And the physical pain of the landing! And then to waken, not only still alive but never to die again, never even to sleep, on a desert beneath rains of fire…or in the putrid slime…or the burning ice….

A masterful plan. In all the debating I have heard, never once has anyone disputed the beautiful piece of work that was Judgment Day. But then I am consigned to one Division here; it would be incorrect of me to speak for all demons and all Hell.

Thus the infinite project began well, and it was a long time before our confidence eroded, even so little as to allow us to notice that we could no longer hear what our charges were saying. Did a demon think he recognized a certain body and try to torment it with questions rather than his fork? Did the problem suddenly dawn on that far-sighted devil — some smart bastard like Miplip — as he saw his scarred or mutilated or burning victim’s mouth open and close soundlessly? I myself can remember reflecting, very long ago, that something seemed to be missing. Yet I admit, I concede, that the situation remained mystifying to me until Miplip explained it. For once, he did not claim complete authorship: he acknowledged that the information came not straight from him but from the demons guarding the monstrous City of Dis, where the Heretics are kept. Miplip is allowed to descend that far; my own limit is higher.

Our first reaction was to go at our tasks with renewed energy. It is not necessary to hear screams in order to know a body is in pain. We put aside our quarreling and, for immeasurable ages, spoke only to suggest some new kind of mercilessness, or to point out those we had missed. But at length our confidence ebbed still lower. We were simply not getting the proper response. Miplip might change into a huge, furious wasp, stinging at will, but the reaction would be little more than a slight agitation. And was that a smile — a smile — I sometimes saw on the faces of those unlucky humans I now and again hoisted high into the air and then let fall, down to the rocky floor of Hell? A smile?

I never had a body and so have no way of knowing its capacities, but Miplip was one of the many who had worked temporary assignments on earth combatting the forces of righteousness and faith. He wondered (and, of course, bullied me into wondering as well) if there were not limits to physical suffering. He postulated “the development of an anticipatory psychological uplift,” and “deprivation of pleasurable stimuli,” by which devious phrases he meant, in so far as he let me penetrate his meaning, that whatever pain we inflicted was, with the passage of time, wearing off. In fact, Miplip feared that we might even be giving our prisoners some small measure of happiness.

There followed a concerted attempt to learn to read the lips of the damned. We received the orders from the City of Dis. For centuries Miplip and I howled and roared at the damned, the idea being that one of them might shout back at us in words we could understand. But our verbal abuse elicited no more than a perfunctory response; the attempt failed everywhere. The variety of human languages and the vastness of time since any devil had heard human speech proved obstacles too great to overcome.

And now came this awful news about the human passerby. As if we needed anything more to make us feel impotent, outsmarted, and ridiculous! The existence of such a person certified our deficiency.

Thus it was a low and worrying moment in our history, when Miplip made his suggestion. Smart, Miplip, very smart. But doubtless, as had been the case previously, bright fiends all over Hell had already hit upon the same idea, before you.

As always, he drew out his points to cruel, tantalizing lengths. I was asked a thousand leading questions, and gave a million wrong answers. Hell’s principal and outstanding quality, my overseer asked, was what? Its utter absence of earthly pleasures? Correct. This absence was the reason it has come to be in the first place. But now…

“But,” Miplip thundered at me, “does memory have its limits?”

“I—”

“Does it?”

“Memory—”

“Imbecile. Respond!”

“Yes it does. Yes. I can’t remember when we first met.”

“Correct. Neither can I, neither can I, though my memory’s a damn sight better than yours.” He flashed his tongue, showed the yellow inside of his mouth. “So then Lover, pay attention puh-leeze: if pleasure is nowhere to be found, one can become accustomed to pain? Respond!”

If pleasure was nowhere to be found, one could become accustomed to pain. All Hell had become routine, to our charges. The abyss was their home. They had forgotten the world.

I found it unbelievable that we had gone so long without realizing this simple fact. My overseer’s lecture had hurt, but I felt more astonishment — bewilderment — than anger or pain. For some unremembered time I stood on my boulder thunderstruck. At length I discovered myself, gazing down at my fork. I was holding the tool, my tool, in both my hands, and I had been looking at it so hard it felt as if the weight of my eyes had increased. The fork had been given to me at the dawn of creation, shaped in one piece out of an inexistent alloy: a weapon, an instrument of torture.

I began gasping, speaking: “Miplip…how could we not have considered…Miplip, our job, our job…myself, I, this is all I’ve ever…”

Who else was there to appeal to? I looked up at my overseer.

He had remained where he was, sitting on air, but he had unwound his tail. Now it flexed lazily beneath him. He looked at me in silence a while, then suddenly made a short speech.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “The whole structure is filled with silly types. Oh, yes it is, Lover. The entire place. We have silliness above us and silliness locked in the ice below.”

That was an odd speech, for him. The contemptuous debater’s edge was gone from the words. Odd, too, was the philosophy espoused. But oddest of all…well, we hear devils all the time; we can talk to all the devils we want…well, lately I had been trying to recall the exact sound of a human voice. What was it like, once, so long ago? And in all my remembering, and as much as I had tried, sneaking off by myself, to capture that special timbre, I never came so close as Miplip did during his odd speech. This may be significant, in the light of later events.

My overseer was quick about returning to his old self: “So, Lover, what do we have to say now? Listen to me, Baggage! I would say we have time enough, wouldn’t you? Tick-tock, tick-tock, savvy? Time enough to change our rather high-pitched tune, hah? Respond!”

“Yes Miplip.”

“Yes indeed; time to make them scream again. What our good people need, Lover,” he broadened his nostrils in anticipation, “is a reminder of what they’ve left behind!”

So began the next great cycle of torture.

Miplip put his protean abilities to fuller use than ever before. He was a thoughtful father with money in his hand; he was a dear, small pony; he was a kind white-haired matron wearing a gray sweater with maroon trim; he was a voluptuous girl dancing; he was a gleaming new building lit up for the holidays; he was a bush in bloom.

Myself, I am incapable of wizardry like that, but I did make use of a small talent for projecting visible images. It requires enormous concentration and a continual up-and-down pumping motion with my head and shoulders, very tiring. Prior to this time I had used the gift rarely, and then only as a vent for my more frightened or sadder moods, because I thought the monsters and bilious landscapes thus created would strike terror into my charges. I had done it, for example, when I was lonely. But now, with Miplip’s guidance (for I repeat, I had never visited the world above), I painted the interiors of Hell with grain fields, with rows of fruit shined and on display, with city streets at evening swarming with living souls, with human youngsters in clusters playing games, with sailboats on blue waters, and a great deal else. I was ceaselessly reminded that my renderings were somewhat stylized, but Miplip frolicked about in them nonetheless, “bringing them to life,” as he put it. As if such sheer variety — I was astounded; what a world there had been! — needed anything more.

At first, in order to be sure of the efficiency of our new tack, we had to descend among the damned and inspect our audience after each show. They were not writhing, or clawing at their eyes and hair, or biting themselves in a mad frenzy, as they had done earlier, and so we had to investigate. It was upsetting to walk among them — so near, so repugnant and so fascinating at once. Could we possibly understand them? How did we ever hope to know what caused them pain? Would they never speak? But then Miplip and I discovered they were weeping. Open, unchecked; it had been millenia at least since we had seen such weeping. We looked closely, making sure, because as devils we lacked the physiological tools necessary for crying. When we saw their puffed, blinking, quivering eyelids, and their wet cheeks and lips and chins, we rejoiced. Their silence was not free from pain.

We took to punishing our audience immediately after each show, as a vivid reminder — made more vivid by what they had just seen — of where they were and where they would stay (on the negative side, this did seem to stop their weeping; they did not weep as we beat them). Then we added music to our charades. The single earthly tune Miplip could recall was a mere jingle, something he said he once heard a boy singing to a girl, but he sang it nonetheless. Assuming the form of a sweet-looking girl, on a swing perhaps, or sometimes even in the form of both children, wrapped in each other’s arms, Miplip would then screech out, malevolently, in his harsh and lowdown devil’s voice:

Kookaberry sitting in the old gum tree:

Merry, merry king of the bush is he.

Laugh Kookaberry, laugh Kookaberry,

Gay your life must be.

With all these new cooperative ventures, the relationship between Miplip and myself changed. I say it changed, but I cannot define that change with any real precision. We never became friendly, exactly. My overseer never once accepted any of my proposals for our shows, not without first altering it enough to call the proposal his own, and I continued to slip away by myself and try to speak in a human voice, so that I might hear once again that forgotten sound, echoing among the stony retreats of my world. Yet the relationship did change. I do believe that the ferocity of his insults declined, and the number of them as well, but that is only a feeling. And so the one concrete proof of our changed relationship that I can offer — if indeed it is concrete proof, if indeed it was a changed relationship — is the fact that Miplip and I became lovers.

By accident, during an unusually lengthy show, I discovered that if my designs were done with proper force they would remain as they were for a good long while, without my attention. I began joining Miplip onstage, after that. At first, having nothing better to do, we depicted the story of that man who had passed through unscathed. Miplip played him and his guide (they were reporters of some kind, investigators, we had learned by then), linked at the hands, while I did my best to represent the many fearsome torments of Hell. Our goal was to stir up jealousy and despair in our audience, but it just seemed unrealistic to expect only jealousy and despair — that is, jealousy and despair unmixed with a sense of human triumph — and so that show was dropped. Our next idea was to parody the human sexual act.

Most of our charges had been rendered impotent, in their post-Judgment bodies, and the others had been condemned to insatiable lust. Therefore sex was the perfect subject for a show, dividing our audiences into mutually antagonistic extremes. We would pit some picture of innocence, such as Miplip’s girl on a swing, against my febrile approach, and the effect on our guilt-ridden spectators, all of whom had at one time or another allowed their own good natures to be usurped by evil, was immensely gratifying. Even those that did not leap upon their fellows in a paroxysm of need were nonetheless overwhelmed: they wept, waving their arms, clapping their hands, flopping about, and they silently shouted and shouted. During one such performance…

Oh yes, I remember. I may not remember the moment Miplip and I were first brought together — thrown together, forced together — but this I remember. My overseer had assumed the form of a loving and discreet young mother, sitting in a rocker, smiling gently, knitting some garment for a child while at home alone one evening (that I had painted, darkly shining, outside windows I had painted), and then I finished my painting and climbed in through one of my illusory windows, menacingly drew near, and took hold. Him? Her? Miplip? What did it matter? A human form. And I went into my puppet act, the same act that according to Miplip tired husbands and tired wives had once enacted repeatedly in their own incomprehensible imaginations, and not just tired husbands and tired wives but lovers too, lovers, imagining other races and mechanical devices and other species when they had no devils handy, because somehow that husband or wife or moment’s lover was not enough (in all that magnificent world’s variety — not enough! Perhaps the idea was only one of Miplip’s tales, something to keep me cynical and in control of myself), but even while meditating this way I experienced the impossible tremor that uprooted my stagnant spirit, shook it so it would not be held still, and informed me that there would be no puppetry because this was no act, it was not a suggestion but an order, and Miplip heard the order too because in wholehearted response he at once caused his wifely clothing and rocking chair and uncompleted knitting to disappear, and lay naked beneath me on the air. I closed my eyes; they were all too familiar with his deceit. In my arms he became human.

Unfortunately, genuine sexual congress between myself and Miplip had a ruinous side effect. I did not notice this side effect that first time, because I kept my eyes closed, and my overseer remained blind to what was happening a much longer time, a lack of perception which would have disastrous ramifications. This side effect occurred, always, at the moment of climax. Devils do experience climax — the letting go, the timelessness. At his climax, Miplip would lose control of his morphology and revert momentarily to his natural state. On top of that, he would return to himself as he was at that moment: in transports.

From his natural ugliness he then always returned, as the orgasm wore off, to his previous shape. Whatever small changes were thus produced he either ignored or failed to notice. It was a humiliating, not to say sickening, process. And as for myself, well, I lacked the heart to tell him. Implausible as it sounds, centuries passed before Miplip learned what our lovemaking did to him.

Look at that: “It was a humiliating process.” For him, of course. “And as for myself, I lacked the heart.” The word for it is revenge, one might think. But I cannot agree that revenge was my sole motive in continuing our onstage trysts, even as much as I hated Miplip, even as long as it had been since I held the upper hand. I was shocked, more than anything else. In the rising steam of new emotions brought on by our lovemaking I lost sight of any one particular feeling; only much later on did I recognize sour little Revenge among them. By then I had long since gotten even, long since, so debasing were Miplip’s transformations.

Indeed, in all the uncountable times my overseer and I had intercourse, his sudden metamorphosis never caused me to feel any emotion but sadness. How could it have done otherwise? I made sure always to finish quickly, while I was still connected with a human being, because when Miplip reverted to his natural shape my blood shrank with acute, total disappointment. To fall from inexplicable rapture to this repulsive eyesore of a rutting partner from whom I was never free…who can find revenge in that? Oh, there was some satisfaction earlier on, before I finished. I do not deny feeling happy then, in those brief moments. But then, to wait…to know what was about to happen…every single time I wondered if I could possibly survive (though how I got the idea that there is anything besides survival, I cannot imagine), and yet every single time I survived, and Miplip survived, and together we would return to ourselves, transient Lords of partial Torture over some of our unforgiven subjects.

If I was cruel about keeping what I knew from Miplip, it was not so much because of him and me as because of our audience. What happened to Miplip during ecstasy was, from the point of view of our spectators, hilarious.

It soon became obvious that our public intercourse was having an opposite effect from the one intended. When, at the close of each performance, Miplip and I broke apart and attacked our charges, pronging and clawing and whipping, they seemed to welcome us. They laughed — or grinned and shook, at least. They toyed with us, feinting and parrying my thrusts, trying to grab hold of my overseer’s whip. They picked up flakes of stone or handfuls of excrement and heaved them at us. Worst of all, they clasped each other and rolled around in vicious imitation of our intimacy. Miplip recognized what they were doing, but unlike me he did not understand.

Yet my overseer did not, as I was certain he would, put an end to our shows. His reaction, in fact, was unlike anything I had seen in Miplip before.

Concerning other matters besides our assignations, he became meaner and more superior than ever before. He strutted and floated around our domain in every kind of insulting disguise, railing at me, bragging of trips to earth and to Dis, drumming in his greater knowledge, greater status, greater gifts. At no time did he let slip an opportunity to tear at the skin of my feelings and expose—there! — one of my nerves. Perhaps my memory is not entirely accurate, for his infinite unkindnesses do tend to become confused, but I know that it was during this period that once in a while I looked upon our love-making as a form of revenge: well, it serves him right. More often, however, I got my revenge simply by keeping silent. Whenever I could summon up the strength, I fielded his insults without a word. I would not give him the satisfaction; I made no response. And Miplip, Miplip. This forebearance, when I could hold it, drove you to your wildest excesses. It was degrading. Even I was surprised, my overseer lost control of himself so utterly: falling into apoplectic riots of crack-voiced provocation, involuntarily changing shape, becoming several different creatures at once with several different parts of his body, and descending even to physical abuse. Miplip, what did you need, to put yourself through such abasement?

Yet concerning our performances his behavior was just the opposite. Miplip became uncertain, tentative. He made four or five suggestions, more or less along the lines of dropping the show, or nine or ten suggestions, or nineteen or twenty-nine or maybe ninety, but all of them were no more than the merest suggestion. “Only mentioning it,” he was, in a voice devoid of belligerence, sounding halfhearted, half himself, half afraid. He sounded a bit like those demons with whom we had discussed the human passerby. I find I cannot fully reconstruct any of these conversations in which Miplip spoke of putting an end to the performances, and this lapse of memory is the natural result of the way in which he always handled the subject. Miplip talked of it as if he wanted me not to notice.

So our trysts continued, if somewhat less regularly than before.

Perhaps my overseer’s problem was essentially one of conscience. He wanted to do a good job, but he could no longer be sure what was torture and what was not. Certainly, our duty had never been so open to interpretation, so questionable, or so strangely involving. It was infuriating to admit not knowing where you stood. Myself…but I have already explained my feelings.

During one show — during one climax — which Miplip had begun as a ferocious woman with soft fur covering her hands, one of the damned threw a stone at him. At her? At Miplip? What does it matter — the form was no longer human. The stone struck on the wing, hardly hurting Miplip, but shattering his mood once and for all. He knew that the woman with furry hands was not supposed to have his wings. He jerked upright in the air, in his natural ugliness, alert enough to realize what had happened and smart enough, of course he was smart enough, to understand in a moment that this could not have been the first time.

I cannot describe, because I lack the ability, the look with which Miplip regarded first the audience, convulsed with laughter, and then myself, still straddling him. There was an awareness of betrayal in the look, I can say that much. And a great deal of pain, as well, a pain too large for me to comprehend, because I have never seen anything that large, consigned as I am to a single blankened Division here, above the City of Dis and below Limbo.

This impossible look was quickly gone. Almost immediately his eyes resumed their customary irony. He may even have winked. What had he thought? Nothing. What had he felt? Nothing, nothing. Then he dropped away from me and began to give his usual vigorous lesson to those who had laughed.

For a few long moments I watched him, making sure.

Not that I was frightened of what Miplip might do to get back at me. What more could he possibly do to me? But I wanted to make sure…he was all right. That look he had given me — well, never mind the look, a look can be misjudged, but I knew Miplip better, and I had more tangible cause for worry than a mere look. I mean that my overseer now knew that I had successfully hid something from him and kept it hidden, and so, if one was inclined to put these things on a competitive basis, the day was mine. Miplip now knew that for once I had won.

Can I be blamed, at all? How had I done wrong?

He lay into our charges with a will. After a while he called up to me, perhaps not with all his usual vituperative gusto, but with most of it. How loudly could he shout, anyway, out of breath as he was? So I dropped down beside him; everywhere devils work in twos. What happened just now was only an incident, as much his fault as mine, and Miplip was not one to be bothered by incidents.

While I was distracted — while my back was turned — he disappeared. I found his whip, but he was gone.

With thoroughgoing care, I searched the corridors and enclaves of my Division. I examined the eyes and body of every demon that came through, and those of the Centaurs and hounds as well. I went so far as to embrace them, and whisper in their ears suggestive phrases Miplip would understand. This only served to increase my isolation. I bent my fork on freestanding rocks, hugged riven trees, kissed small dank pools, and caressed shafts of fire. Stumbling and uncaring, I made a blind descent to the monstrous City of Dis and, far exceeding my authority, interrogated the fallen angels guarding its gates. They punished my insubordination. Seeing the bored expressions on the harpies who administered the punishment, and noticing its ritual nature, I understood I was not the first to be disappointed and reprimanded.

I thought: did the others who were punished continue to search? The punishment was hardly slight. Yet the devils who sometimes traveled through my Division were always alone, and though I had never before thought of them as seeking after something, that could well be their situation. Once a demon is chastised — perhaps not the first time, but after a few more times — the aches and festerings must eventually become less painful than the thought of abandoning the quest. Yet the idea of so many devils on so many private crusades raised the most horrifying prospect of all in my mind’s eye, that of a vast place devoid of pleasure, in which there are no overseers and subordinates, no giants and mites, no punishers and punished, but only an infinite calendar of torture and impenetrable silence, in which the ones who can fly are no more free than those who can only walk, and the pain inflicted on whoever happened to pass below was thriftily recycled for a second use higher up, and a two-hundred-million-and-second use, always the same pain, never growing smaller but only narrower and more extensive, until Hell had been dirtied from end to oblivion by that same original drop of blood, or tear, or both, which had been squeezed out at the first instant of the creation of pain. In an effort to break this nightmare cycle, I tried giving up my search for Miplip. Why torture myself pursuing him who had tortured me?

I again took up my attempt to recapture the sound of a human voice. Having so much room to myself, so much time to myself, I was able to vary volume and experiment with echo effects as I pleased. Visiting devils heard me, and no doubt guessed what I was up to, but I felt incontrovertibly separated from them already. I did not care what they heard or surmised. I only wished, from time to time, seeing one pause while flying overhead, seeing him look down at me inquisitively, I only wished that he would lend me a hand. But no one ever mingled his voice with mine. I went on alone. My duties I gave less attention, but after all, considering the doubts I had been suffering, a certain inattention to my duties was the least that could have been expected.

Perhaps it was this laxness, then, or perhaps it was simply the strangeness of a devil trying to imitate human speech, but eventually I began to draw large and quietly attentive audiences from whatever group of damned souls happened to be in the area. Try as I might to chase them off, they always returned to listen some more. My fork caused only the briefest withdrawal, and my renderings of their earth’s beauties were now, without Miplip’s help, no more than vague glosses out of a confused jumble of memories.

Sometimes, when approximating a human voice seemed like too great a task, I instead tried to recreate the special sound that my runaway overseer’s voice had once had, that time he made his odd speech about silliness.

And then…though I fought against it with every weapon I had…once more I felt my insensible spirit rising, rising, though I shrieked out loud against it, tried to lose myself in orgies of torture, ripped apart those unfortunate charges of mine that got in my way, even dragged myself down to Dis and had myself punished again. It was all to no avail. I had got it into my mind, never to be driven out, that I could find Miplip. I reiterated as many of his injuries as I could recall, marking them off on the impartial face of a boulder, but though the stone was so covered with markings it crumbled to bits, it made no difference. I knew he had to be here, he had to be among my charges, and I would find him.

With Heaven and Hell the way they are, he could not be anywhere else. My overseer is more clever than I, but not so clever as the devils around Dis, and they have less wits than the ones farther below.

Therefore he had become one of the damned. The ploy was characteristically wise: there are more of them than anything else in Hell. How could I know, while working my way through a crush of preterites, if one of the bodies ahead of me quietly metamorphoses into a rivulet of vomit running between my feet, and then into another body behind me? Moreover, Miplip’s taking a place among our charges was characteristically proud, as well, for in human form my old overseer would find himself vulnerable to the fearsome geography — he would suffer the heat, the stink, the pestilential lichens — and therefore remaining untraceable would require a tremendous effort of will. One cry of pain at the wrong time and I would have him. I knew that the enormous discipline involved in keeping silent would appeal to my own, my old, lofty Miplip.

So I began to inspect my charges, one by one. Never had I been so close to them. I touched their faces, gazed deep into their reflecting eyes, stroked them frankly, boldly spoke to them. They will be here forever, but they have not been here forever: that thought sustained me. I resolved that, on the untold day when I exhausted their number, I would start again.

In the course of my searching, I discovered the man who had once, so long ago, passed through this inferno unharmed.

He was among the Wrathful. Who can understand? Perhaps he had neglected to control his powers, and his poetry — for even in my present solitude I had heard the news that he was a poet — had not done the job it was given; instead of describing a pilgrim’s journey, in the middle of life’s road, down through the circles of torment in this world, back again through Purgatory, attaining at last to beatific Grace, his poetry perhaps had merely trumpeted himself and his petty angers. Having set out to demonstrate eternal values, he instead revealed himself. Or perhaps the Powers had planned it this way from the first, that would be like Them. No man may just visit; he must return to stay. Or maybe the poet with the formidable nose was actually Miplip, Miplip, still a demon, still torturing others with visions of alternatives, of there existing something else, something more. Miplip — more? More than we have? More than we see? But Miplip was gone, after all. It was unreasonable, very strange, that I should worry so much about him when he was gone.

Whoever he was, this man conversed with me.

We exchanged ideas by means of pantomime. Apparently he was very excited about being given the chance to try. He had jostled his way to the front of the line I was examining, and as his hands and arms flew about he grinned, whenever his mouth was not being called upon to aid expression. Each statement was made with a huge energy, a silent, ambidextrous outburst of human feeling that strove always for the most accurate effects, the thing closest to true speech. He succeeded in getting across a great deal, more than I would have thought possible. He said they had gotten accustomed to pain, just as Miplip had suspected. The reminders of earth were very depressing, he said, as we had hoped they would be, but after a while this sorrow, too, had faded, and the damned had come to look forward to our shows, as refreshing variations in the routine.

He then said that their fondest wish at present was to begin, somehow, communicating with us, because they had developed a great fondness, a great sympathy, for their keepers. A devil’s existence is predicated on torture, he said. Since it is impossible to torture anyone forever, we were now condemned to what was originally intended for them: a life without hope.

After that his thoughts moved beyond the range of mime. But I lingered there before him, enjoying his mute philosophy. Others in the area watched us, or else began again their aimless, milling search for something besides the routine. I had no more regard for them than I had for how time was passing, as I watched this man struggling to make his points. Nor did I care how that damned deluder Miplip might be using the time — always his greatest ally — to slip further away. The poet seemed to be saying that the problem of hope (hands clasped over heart, raised to forehead, then opened upwards and raised to roof) and the problem of speech (mouth opening and closing while left hand, palm up, moves from lower lip out towards listener and back) were one and the same, and that neither hope nor speech had very much to do, in the final analysis, with pain (face in a grimace, left hand in a fist and jabbing chest repeatedly, in the vicinity of the heart).

This last sight seemed to penetrate me, actually enter and pass through, like that man or any other who had passed through Hell and been reborn, leaving in the wake of its emotion a vacuum that could no longer be filled by mere looking. I had to touch. Moved, startled beyond even the constant abjurations my conscience had made against physical contact since the disappearance of Miplip, I reached out and took hold of his fist as it once more struck his chest. With his free hand he covered mine. All at once there was speech, real speech, in a voice that had been consumed twice over, once by agony and once by the implacable need of forgiveness:

“Don’t let go, please, please, don’t let go,” Miplip said. “Oh lover, please.”

Special Instructions, Special Instructions

It was an ordinary urban incident at first, the sort of thing you get accustomed to sooner or later, here or in any other city. One morning I was walking from my apartment to the bank, along the one-ways on the Charles River side of Massachusetts Avenue. It was spring then. I’d been up early, 6:15, hearing the radio report the day’s weather with what sounded like a smile in its voice, and that made a fine start. The alarm was set so early because Priss had set it, not the night before but the night before that, so we could get up in time to make love before we had to go to work. She wasn’t ordinary about love. Most people don’t like to have it early in the morning. But according to Priss, it was much better then than late at night, when, again according to her, you were tired, achey, cold, insensible, numb. I had the house to myself this particular morning, though; Priss wasn’t there. And actually that added to the pleasant flavor of events. Because while I never said no to Priss — I didn’t like to say no to Priss — it could be nerve-wracking and hard on the body to erupt out of sleep so abruptly, so incontrovertibly. I spent another hour-and-a-half in bed after the weather forecast. I ate breakfast on the porch, in the sun. I decided then to walk to the bank rather than drive. So it was on a small street lined with trellises and flower boxes, just this side of the Square, that an old woman standing in the doorway of a wooden triple-decker called to me.

“Have you seen my children?” she said, or at least that’s the way I heard it. “They’re right here most of the time and now they’re not. No, they’re not. They’re usually playing right here in front of me and I’m so frightened now. I haven’t seen them all day. I’m so frightened, so frightened now.”

She was an old woman. She wore a decent gray wool dress with thin red lines in squares. Her face and hair and fingers were all finely kept, very clean. The house in whose doorway she stood wasn’t nearly as cheerless and dilapidated as some of these places. The paint was recent, the front step intact. But she had awfully thin arms and legs, where they showed, where the gray dress stopped. I guessed she felt the cold more than most. It was too warm out for wool otherwise. I asked how old her children were.

“They aren’t my children. Oh. I didn’t mean to give you that impression. I apologize if that’s what you thought.”

She spoke without smiling, her head planted on her neck and her entire thin body still. One hand was on the door jamb, the other on the inside knob of the open door. Only her eyes moved, constantly scanning the street, meeting mine on every fifth word, or possibly every sixth.

“They are little children who play here right in front and over on the other side of the street. All day long they play. I’m an old woman and I live alone and I’m so frightened. I’m so frightened all the time.”

I can’t say just when I began to get my idea. As I mentioned before, you get accustomed to this sort of thing. But you never get so accustomed you lose all sympathy, certainly not. In any event I spoke up. I concentrated on sounding formal, because of the strength in sounding formal. The woman needed a friendly touch but also she needed the boost of real muscle. I tried to catch those wandering eyes.

“Ma’am,” I said, and maybe it was with this one unlikely word, a word I never used, that my idea began to come—“Ma’am, it’s a beautiful day out today. Don’t tell me you’re so frightened you haven’t noticed that. Why it’s only, it’s only 8:45, give or take a minute, and already it’s a lovely day. I hope you’re not so frightened you haven’t noticed.”

She didn’t respond, but her eyes seemed to change their path. They crossed mine more often.

“On a morning like this, Ma’am, those children might be anywhere. They might be up the street buying candy, or visiting the zoo. Or they might not even be out yet. It could be they‘re all still indoors. Now, I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, Ma’am, but I can’t help wondering if you’ve got any good reason to be so frightened. Why, I wonder? Think of all the places those children might be on a morning like this. Is that so frightening?”

I paused and waited till her eyes came round to mine again. And by then there had arrived my idea, my crazy idea, something that bore down on me more and more wildly during these few moments of silence, so wildly at last that it couldn’t be denied. I deepened my voice.

“You know, actually, I’m not a stranger, Ma’am, not to you or to anyone else. No, I’m no stranger. You know who I am. I’ve come here from a far distant place, far distant, on a special mission. I’ve come just for a short while, and just especially for you, Ma‘am. To help you in your old age.”

Suddenly she gasped, cutting me off: “You’ve come, you, you’ve, you you.”

And then, though she still couldn’t stop her glancing across the street, her face changed shape and took on a terrific smile.

I thought, well. That was easy. Success came into my chest with a sensation that made me think of a well-kept pocket watch opening and showing its face.

“That’s right, it’s me, I’ve come. Just for now, and just for you. I can see there’s no need to tell you my name, and actually I prefer not to speak my name if it’s not absolutely necessary. But I’ve come a long way, just to help you and to tell you that your life isn’t so bleak and frightening as you think, living alone as you do. I want you to remember that. Goodbye now. Goodbye, but remember what I said. You won’t be seeing me after this.”

“Oh,” she was repeating happily, “oh, oh.”

I headed away and turned the first corner. Very easy, I thought.

I remained pleased for the rest of the day.

When I was sixteen, I escaped the required football program at my high school by convincing two teachers I had extra-sensory perception. An experiment was run with a deck of cards. I had stayed up the night before and marked the deck with a pin. Instead of football, I spent my fall afternoons (and most of my winter ones as well, since the teachers’ faith in me was strong) pretending to read minds, predicting the directions a man in another room would walk, and picking out the letters on flash cards held up behind a screen. My senior year they dropped the required football program. And at accounting school, of course, there was never any need to try something so strange. But now, after the conversation with the old woman, I felt as happy as I had when I saw those two teachers begin to shuffle my marked deck of cards. What others had to endure, I was exempt from.

Priss often showed up at my office. She came at lunch, or at 3:30 when she got off from the plant store, or even at both times. I realize this business with Priss isn’t in the main line of my story, but I feel compelled to talk about it anyway. Things didn’t work out between Priss and me. Not that the incident with the old woman had a direct bearing on our breakup, either. Priss’s reaction to that story was less than I’d hoped for, but she didn’t condemn me for what I’d done. There wasn’t a scene.

Priss…into the office she’d stride, all body, wearing her plant store outfit. It’s a small office to begin with, and it contains, besides my desk, the desks of two of my associates. Then how did Priss ever fit in? She told me, “People like you marry people like me.” Marry? Thank God I never married Priss. I gave it considerable thought. I did propose once.

It was during winter, a freezing day we’d spent out at a beach north of here. This was Priss’s idea; it was entirely too cold for the beach. We got behind an enormous rock, bigger than my office, big as a sailor’s chapel I visited once, south of here, and Priss and I built a fire. We had a meal beneath two blankets, one of which was electric, as it turned out. We made a great deal out of plugging it into the sand. We snuggled until it seemed we had between us not four arms but two. During the drive home I was quieter even than usual, giving as my excuse the Sunday-rush traffic. One sensation stayed with me throughout the ride: our warmth in contrast to the purple cold. It was as if a buffer zone of magic feeling had got fastened irremovably to my skin. I felt it even though I could see my hands on the steering wheel, ordinary hands with ordinary skin, badly dried and chapped by the day’s rough weather. When we got home I rubbed them with lotion but the impossible zone remained. Then late in the evening I got out an old bottle of Cointreau (the stuff’s too rich for me, under most circumstances) and proposed. Priss had been coming on so amorously before that, all hands and shiftings of position, even though it was night now, not morning. But after my question, no. She got up from the sofa and began moving around the room, barefoot, wondering about “the noises outside.” But these were only the usual. These were no more than the babies and dogs, the teenagers belligerently calling attention to themselves, the sirens veering loud and soft between the high yelp of brakes, the deeper uproar of public transportation, and the firecrackers that blasted no matter what the weather, and the shapeless blurt of harmonica and drums whenever the door opened on the dive down the street — the ordinary rumble, here or in any other city. I didn’t repeat my question.

A wise move, as I say, because it soon became obvious that no one body, no matter how warm, could provide me a lifetime’s solace and distraction. Priss’s body was only the torso, anyway. Her ankles were so weak, she once told me, she could never wear high heels comfortably. When we danced, though it was always she who hauled me out to dance, her fleshy hands would sweat unbelievably. They’d sweat as if the amplifiers were sending shocks directly into the lines of her palm. Slow dances would become ferocious, her pelvis grinding against me till I couldn’t even focus on my watch. Really, I should have recognized our problem earlier. Priss was too highly wired, too finely tuned, too changeable, too young. In short, she was too much pressure for me. I assist in the loans department of a small bank with few branches and no pretensions to creativity or farther expansion. In this world Priss might fit as a receptionist, or just possibly a teller, but only temporarily at best. Myself, on the other hand, I‘ll continue to approve only moderate loans and I foresee no changes except the rare raise in pay. Why should I weasel around after my own office, and then a larger office, and then another one still larger? After a certain point’s reached, they’re only rooms. But someone like Priss, with that disorganized heart of hers, they scramble your priorities, and suddenly ambition sets in. Every minute of the day you’ve got to own more money than you did the previous minute. Every year of your life you’ve got to own a bigger house than you did the year before, and live farther away from “the noises outside.” When the important thing in life, in fact, is to know who you are and exist accordingly. I believe it is. But Priss, her name wasn’t even Priss, exactly, but Priscilla.

Perhaps my description of her is incomplete, or exaggerated in places. But as I say, Priss isn’t entirely to the point, here. The only real bearing she has on the story is that after the breakup — because of the breakup — I began a strict program of running. That the breakup should lead to running seems to me perfectly understandable. I only turned twenty-nine this May.

Every day after work I ran along the Charles River. I changed in the Men’s at the bank and carried my working clothes in a pack that I wore on my back as I ran. Summer was ending. Some days the sun appeared to smile as it set, an optical illusion caused by cloud formations, which reminded me of the weatherman’s voice the morning of the day I spoke with the old woman. You see, I told myself those evenings in August and September, a hard choice doesn’t mean the end to all pleasure.

It was on one of those runs (the last of them, because I haven’t run since this happened) that I went up the wrong street on my way home and was seen again by the old woman.

She was sitting on her stoop this time. She wore khaki pants and a bulky wraparound sweater, outdoor clothing. Her elbows were on her knees and her chin in her palms. The steps appeared darker than before, not swept as often possibly, but the glass in the front door was so clean I could see a bit of the foyer inside. I could see a photograph or painting in an oval frame on a pale wall. She had let her hair grow since spring. Now it was pinned up, with a few strands shaken by the evening breeze down about her ears. Then she jumped erect and stared.

Even in the poor light there was no mistaking where she was looking. I should have dropped my chin and run on, or I should have nodded once, nodded with an affirming smile, and then turned the first corner as I’d done before. But I couldn’t repeat what I’d done before. I was tired and my thinking was gummed. I couldn’t focus on the choices available to me. And, and more than that. How was I to know why my garbage should have touched her the first time? Never mind that I shouldn’t have lied to her. I shouldn’t have, never, certainly not. But how was I to know that when I said what I did, I would somehow get past her restless looks and her fright — would get inside? I stood silently, facing her, dipping my head to inhale.

She continued to stand erect, but I couldn’t tell if she was scanning the farther sidewalks again. I could see her hands, though. She brought both her hands up slowly, so slowly I suffered a vivid moment’s impression that she was going to hit me, lay into me with those brittle fists. I may even have straightened up to take her attack “like a man.” But she only moved her hands up past her own shoulders, setting them in the end against her temples so that the wisps of hanging hair were pinned down. Her mouth went open like mine. It was getting so dark now I would see something first and then figure out what it was, like watching a color cartoon in black and white. She sucked in one breath and held it, as if she too were gasping for air.

“Ma’am,” I managed, starting to put together some line.

“You!” she hissed.

My voice broke; I flinched. One strap of my pack slipped down to my elbow. I’m not the kind to make suggestions — I don’t make many — and I don’t expect them to take hold.

But that was her single outburst. I continued my stupid patter, too uncertain even to readjust my pack. But she merely lowered her arms and stood composed and silent. I began another argument, then let it drop.

Still I stood there. I realized I was waiting, though I could not and cannot figure out what for. But no good ideas came to me, no ideas, not like they sometimes come, wildly clapping their hands and screaming and whining, until they get through to you, no matter that you don’t want them. Nothing came to me. I only felt that I should wait.

The old woman stood, and I stood. Finally I broke away in a very slow trot, feeling against my back the flop of my rumpled dayclothes. I stopped again at the corner, still close enough to hear her over the evening rumble.

I heard nothing.

Each day the loans department receives sheets of computer printout from an intown bank. These enumerate the latest developments on all our loans, including every new penny of interest as it accrues. Lately we’ve reached such a level of organization that I need only flip through the thin cards on my desk in order to know my schedule for months in advance: number of account, date opened, date of last payment, regular amount, collateral, rebate factor, special instructions, special instructions. The coming years, also, are embraced by this system.

The old woman wasn’t a witch or an oracle. She was only who she was, and living alone. I tried to help. Who knows why she fell for it? That was a quiet street, calm houses, trellises and flower boxes, like so many of the one-ways in this area. How could I have known she’d be so…frightened, or whatever it was…to believe me? I don’t speak up often. And yet now I find myself always walking to work, in order to peek down her street. The urge to apologize is strong. No doubt it is the urge to apologize. What else could I want? Some mornings I see “her children,” what a delusion, but her door remains shut. Still I go on getting up early, to brace myself for the walk, because these days are so cold. Slowly the night’s thickness leaves my hands; slowly my few rooms grow warm. Early, 6:30 and sometimes earlier, an hour when the body’s need for heat alone will pull you hard out of dreaming.

Astral Projection

WHAT IT IS

Empty this body out: there we have Astral Projection. And right now stop, stop thinking there’s anything so incredible about Astral Projection. Stop it right now, at the start. Because there’s nothing so incredible here, nothing occult or grotesque, nothing satanic or weird or alien. Nothing at all.

At one time, granted, Astral Projection had substance. It was hung then with weights of obscure ritual and truth, like a hammock nestling a cloud. A hammock knotted between the two hard t’s of its five otherwise ghostly-soft syllables. Ass-trill Proche-kt-shun: I can imagine a king murmuring the words, sunk in his robes. Or a sorcerer out of Disney with eyebrows sharp as the hands of a clock. In those days even the most sentimental melody could press my mind and heart together, tight, tight. But now a person can stumble over Astral Projection anywhere. Even people who’ll go no further than to switch on the radio, even they’ve heard of it. Yes switch on the repeating round of the radio dial, hear the spirit world gutted. Listen to the dim feebs calling into Dr. Joy Brown, “Up Close & Personal,” Monday through Friday 10 to 1 on WITS. Hopped-up skanks excited by mumbo-jumbo, trailer-park juiceheads making a big deal out of nothing. Never cracked a book in their lives. Don’t pretend you don’t feel the same as I do. Don’t pretend you don’t hate these people, and hate what they’ve done to Astral Projection. They’ve put all the magic in the National Enquirer:

WIDOW VISITS FIFTEEN STATES

WITH DEAD HUSBAND

Souvenirs fly through air, witnesses say

Yet in true Projection, in that moment of trust and substance I believe I once believed in, the soul leaves the body. You must remember this. Empty the body out, and the soul travels. Or if the word “soul” bothers you — what they’ve done to “soul” on the radio! — think of it instead as separating two bodies. The first of these two would be our habitual place, five senses multiplied by three erogenous zones et cetera, and the second would be another body somehow carried inside the first. The second body is “bigger,” in most senses of the word, than the one in which it lives. Likewise the second body is far more changeable, movable, extensible. Think of stuffing a large and active mouse under a teacup.

But body-and-soul or simply two-bodies — the fundamental things apply, in either case. Myself, trying here to expain, trying to get once and for all a grasp that won’t betray me, trying as if I had an extra set of hands to hold back the breaking up of what I did…myself, I can’t split hairs. When my character was cracked open nothing so incredible came out. I don’t want to get all subtle and elasticized and strange. Rather, when I look for an analogy I recall the first time I held a lead fishing weight. I was just a kid then. It had Chinese markings but the brand name was French, Quinze. Something so small yet so heavy. Myself, I believe Astral Projection can be that simple, that firm. Or maybe I believe merely that I once believed.

CONNECTIONS

As for example Plato believed. He constructed kingdoms of migrating souls, hierarchies that proved which spirits you could trust. From Pythagoras Plato took the original geometry, then he fit those theorems to coordinates of his own. He sketched a supernatural universe, which he claimed provided the outline for this one. The World Soul, Plato called that universe, and he said it assumed the perfect shape and motion: a sphere, rotating around itself.

In reciprocal cycles of birth and death, like the swooning tranverse vibrations of radio waves in space, we left and returned to the World Soul. Through love of philosophy we could visit it also during our “lifetime.” Moreover the World Soul, or something similar to it, was responsible for the special tug one person can feel, from time to time, towards another. In the Symposium Plato had Aristophanes explain for him, you must remember this, that our bodies were once androgynous: “a circle, with four hands…, one head and two faces, two sets of genitalia….’’ But we were all then split in two.

In fact beliefs of this kind, beliefs in a cosmic Body of which all other bodies are dismembered parts, turn up everywhere. Back, well back before Plato. To start talking about a body that’s split and yet still living is to plunge beyond any measurement we have for historic time. Osiris for instance, in the remnants left of Egyptian mythology. Osiris may or may not have been torn into fifteen pieces by his rival in love; but according to every version of the tale, the separated bits of the god thereafter came back to life.

And go deeper still, try for something firmer still. Nature itself is dismembered, bodies split and sent flying. Caterpillars and mushrooms turn to butterflies and psilocybin. The land itself can rescue a person in one form while betraying him in another. There’s a river the name of which I can’t recall at the moment but which lies in Western China. Not that I’ve ever been to China; not that I’ve ever traveled so far. But many famous fossil hunters did try to find their way to their digs by following this river. Only the river kept disappearing. I remember reading, especially, the exciting accounts of Roy Chapman Andrews. A mere few hours earlier, the scientists had carefully marked and numbered fragments they’d assembled thus far of vast, vague skeletons. But then en route back to the boneyard, the river would suddenly disappear, “in the shifting sands of the Gobi.” Name begins with a T?

But to root Astral Projection in mud and sand provides a foundation of a mere few million years. If someone should care enough — if you and I would just care enough — we could link the magic up with the very system of the earth in the sky. Because when I hear these stories about dismembered existence, in two places simultaneously, I am hearing about the moon. The moon is dismembered night by night. Part of it exists forever in darkness and part in light. When a boy and girl join hands while looking up at the moon, without realizing it they chase down the first thrill that passes between them with harder stuff: the sky’s luminous proof of decay.

WHAT I DID

AN EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

“Listen honey: nothing is going to convince me you can do Astral Projection.”

…

“Listen, you can do all the reading you want. Oh yeah, you’re very good at that. But honey babe, no way. It’s like asking me to care about somebody when I’m not even sure what happened to him.”

CONNECTIONS

And Astral Projection is often compared to sex. I’m thinking again of Plato, and of those other classical thinkers who claimed that during a kiss the soul went out at the mouth. And Dante also comes to mind, naturally. John Donne, Walt Whitman, some passages from the chapter “Night Watch” in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood. Possibly also the contemporary writer…or is Djuna Barnes still contemporary? Alive or dead? Whatever, I believe these authors all speculate along the same lines. Leaving your own body, entering another body….

Now there is a man, a contemporary, who claims to have had sex while in the “Astral body.” His name is Robert Monroe. He’s not a writer, but rather a successful business executive. Yet since his first out-of-the-body experience back in the ‘60’s he has conscientiously investigated Astral Projection, journey after journey, and he claims that his work has involved a great deal of sex. He has a theory. We in this world of physical details are overstuffed sexually, he explains (“the one satisfaction most often denied us”). Therefore upon reaching the other world, our first need always is to unload. What precedes sexual fulfillment in the Astral sphere Monroe doesn’t hesitate to label Hell; Heaven lies beyond any lover’s desires that might be left over from the physical plane.

Yet Monroe too, for all his experience, in the end leaves us confused. He says that during Astral intercourse he feels no tug on the heavy overlapping muscles of the penis, no tightening of the scrotal sack, in fact no rush of blood or any other sensation whatsoever in the area of the male genitals. Then is this describing sex at all? He says that a person experiences Astral encounters more or less in the upper trunk, and that they are “like an electrical discharge.”

Connections? But how can I pin it down?

Sex is compared to so much, so much: playing cards, a Chevy Corvair, the sort of close reading generally associated with poetry, playing chess, a Ford Edsel…. Except that we actually do it from time to time, we might lose track of what sex was altogether, in an oblivion of comparisons. And along with it, Astral Projection. I remember that once, several years ago now, a Newsweek critic wrote: “Sex hovers over the movie Five Easy Pieces.” But, suggestive as the phrase is, he wasn’t thinking of Astral Projection.

PHYSICAL DETAIL

There are, in the last analysis, no physical details in Astral Projection.

AN EMOTION

fear

WHAT IT IS

Yes fear. “This soul of yours,” Dr. Joy says, “whee! Have no fear—” stop stop, I want to say, or scream. I want to punch out the radio’s clockface. Because on all the talk shows, all the phone-in shows, all, they take our ghosts and turn them to clowns. Yes fear, because their yammer even now fills the dial. Repeats endlessly, as we run the needle round the cycle. We run faster and faster and get nowhere. Don’t pretend you don’t hate them the same. Gum chewers, bonehead goobers whose idea of passion is going one-on-one for a Michelob Light. As for what can be discovered in the gray weekly newspapers, in the hollow behind the checkout counter, it’s too painful even to think about. Only keep searching through the dismal closed circle of stations and we will find them. Oh, on that you can rely. And then, finding them, I find what I fear: the insinuation of their voices. Powerful voices, an undertow of tongues, something logy and liquid and flattering that hauls you in deeper. I hate them, but I pay attention to them. Though they cut against the grain with every vapid word. I think they must deliberately pitch themselves off-key, in order to project in a way that’s so habit-forming, in order to engage your curiosity and get you drowsy at the same time, in order to send such unlikeable yet spellbinding voices over the incalculable miles of airwaves, in order to continue sounding alien even as their whispers penetrate deeper and deeper into our ear as we doze off with the sleep-switch set. Weird saturation. Painful to keep listening and yet we keep listening; weird weakness. The outsider gets let in as the rest of us tumbles away and down into the distant parts of sleep, until that voice seems to have threaded the very wrinkles of the brains, though we know it’s talking trash, idiocy, babytalk, like singing babybabybaby…and the talk runs wild like a strip of golden infection out even to the barely sensory palms of our hands, as if we could hold the sound, feel its weight, and it runs farther because we’ve nothing left to resist…and therefore fear, yes, fear is just the word.

WHAT I DID

ANOTHER EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

“Hey, nobody dies of a broken heart. Don’t give me that. It’s not like Humpty Dumpty around here.”

…

“I mean, look, I read about that Robert Monroe. They had an article about him — it was in Penthouse. Now look, what do you think he does, once he gets back in his body? I mean, he could have been to Hell, honey babe, it’s still the same old story. Robert Monroe comes back, he picks up the phone. ‘Hi. What’re you doing tonight?’”

PLACES

Monroe has written a book, Journeys Out of the Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971). There, he separates the Astral world into three distinct “Locales.” Each Locale has its own set of rules and creatures, and its own threats. Locale I is here, meaning right here and now, but made for another set of hands. The walls, for example, become like erect sheets of water, that effective and that much fun, and within your own familiar walls there may be other “non-physical beings.” Ghosts, those would be. Locale II is the dominion of Heaven and Hell, the place where Monroe had all the sex. Locale III is another universe, which he believes is composed of anti-matter. This third Locale possesses unusual tools and no electricity, but while visiting the place Monroe experienced adultery (in this Locale sex occurs without electricity), loneliness, failures to communicate, and the pain of growing old. He concluded that in all important respects it was a universe the same as our own.

Monroe…hold on to him a while longer, a moment longer please. Granted, he’s a terrible writer, but please.

Certainly we have no way of demonstrating once and for all that he’s wrong. At least not so long as we remain in this world, in this body, asking ourselves what’s the physical proof, asking in which incident can we at last get hold of the proof and cuddle up to it tight, tight — in what incident, what detail? Certainly, against the unrelenting static of such doubt this man Monroe’s worth another moment at least. Just imagine, he travels alone. What a person. A star of the strangest magnitude. In his case there is something incredible about Astral Projection. He discovers: demons like immense hard-muscled thumbs; angels as ready to roll in the sack as any whore; the Cheshire cats of previous incarnations, grinning and grinning; the barrier at the end of the universe where all travelers, even the most sophisticated, come crashing to a stop; and other people’s dreams, which he can visit like the recurring image of a lover. He has rested in the infinite chamber that waits, reserved eternally, as his personal heaven. Granted, granted, the man then ruins the effect by comparing nirvana to a heated swimming pool, with colored lights and underwater stereo speakers. But…just the idea that we each have one…. And Monroe has braved the worst inferno of all, the whirlpool of armless sharklike souls. These spirits will remain forever unfinished, alive or dead, and they seek forever to mutilate like themselves any whole being who wanders too close.

Places, connections. Time goes by and these joints become curiouser and curiouser. I wanted to weight my story like lead holds down a line, but by moonrise I find that the harder I try to reel in the taut nylon, the faster I’m circling round it, hooked and circling round a metal I managed not long ago to carry out here inside my coat.

PLACES

I wanted to send up my life like a kite made from Scripture, but now the Gospel itself has turned to papier mache — half the King James edition was used to make the feminist erotica I saw at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Was that my own drama, embalmed inside those vulva-shaped pages?

But you’ve worked at your habits, sinking habits through the visible hours like the Times sculpts a Sunday. The habit of reading, the habit of sitting studying some unknown woman when you should be reading…. Myself, actually the voices on AM spook me too badly; actually when that clockface lights up, I’m a man for the FM. “The More The Music Changes The More You Need WBCN.” Oedipus cues the local group, Shane Champagne, “(Living In The) Shadow World.” This weekend they’re at The Underground, used to be called Lucy’s In The Sky when I went there, now it’s got a new form…Oedipus speaks “you” into his mike and that hooded syllable becomes “me,” someone that wasn’t meant yet has been made from the name, like the Mock Turtle…

What proof? What incident? What detail?

Places. Outdoors at the seashore, nearby here, on a rare afternoon with a powerful cold wind but a brilliant hot sun, with the moon so visible it was as if the sun were shining in the middle of the night, I once encountered a man and woman together, on the ground. I have a habit of walking alone, compounded by a terrible habit of not watching where I’m going. The woman was naked only from the waist down. Blonde and healthy, she wore a sweatshirt with a brand name printed across it in French. He wore a gray gym T-shirt marked between his large back muscles with dark smudges of sweat raised, even in this weather, by the exertion of the act. They’d had a blanket but they’d kicked it off. The air thickened with their odor. They lay in the hollow behind a dune crowned with short blasted yellow stalks. Yet this was a historic site; nearby the couple stretched the shadow of the new wooden tower commemorating Marconi’s original iron one, out of which he’d sent the first transatlantic wireless message, a flowery address filled with philosophy. A message from a President, for a King. Only the roots of the old tower remain, the stubs of iron and concrete nearly out of sight in the sand at the edge of the sea. Therefore it must have been a sightseeing impulse that had brought the man and woman out here originally, but then one or the other had felt the lowdown and habitual tug. Now they’d finished, and their hands lay curled for warmth under each other’s armpits, so that for a moment they seemed nothing but two empty shirts: still soggy from the wash, still connected by the bit of colorless line that had been torn free, with them, by the wind. I got out of there before she recognized me.

So…I say “so,” but rhetorical connections drop off to sleep as well…rhetoric and logic and argument as well. Without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick.

So…and…have I stiffened in my habits till I’m some kind of human playing card, finished while half-formed? Would a kiss flesh me out beneath the belt? Just a kiss, just a sigh…no. You must remember: this is no Disney. Nowadays I don’t even care for Disney. My ears howl with the sea wind. So…and…have I broken up now, here even before my next part, my Part Thirteen (won’t it at least contain bad luck, my Thirteen? at least never repeat, like AN EMOTION, so many stiff pages back?) — have I broken up now and here into my last locale? A conte a clef in which the clef is a cunt. Squirrel away the memory, fish it out for a cold night beside the radio. Any hand which once held that spot soon enough holds nothing except its own.

Places, places.

In Locale II, according to Robert Monroe, there stands the Sign In Space. “Stands” is the wrong word, granted, “sign” and “space” also wrong, all three imply physical existence. And how fill a ghost? But:

It seems that an almost measureless time ago…

Those are the correct words, I mean those are the words that Monroe uses. “Almost measureless”—such a tin ear, I’ve fallen in love with the man. His prose feels like he ran chewing gum through the typewriter, but I did read his book. That, I did.

It seems that an almost measureless

time ago a very wealthy…woman

wanted to ensure that her son would

get into heaven. A church offered

to guarantee this to her, provided

she paid the church an enormous sum….

The woman paid but her son did not get

into heaven. In…revenge she used up

her remaining wealth to have a sign put

up in the skies of heaven so that throughout

all eternity those who saw…

Yet this sign is unreadable. I can’t imagine a more hogwild hope, cartwheeling and cranky like a child’s, and at the same time I can’t imagine one more meanly and permanently gutted, betrayed behind the back. But I can imagine, nonetheless, the way the dead and their visitors come to see it.

Yes imagine, because I never saw that sign. I never traveled so far. But the ghosts…see them come to see it. All assemble out of far places, blots and shafts of deeper darkness approaching across a dark muculent expanse. The dead world’s atmosphere hangs in thick dollops of goo, so that when the faces at last appear they’ve pressed through these treacle curtains unexpectedly, and very close. Faces — faces I know at once I’ve encountered only through the reflecting plastic of my radio dial, through their distant living voices that changed shape at a touch of my fingers. These people come, press past the curtains, come. Awkwardly they plump down beside me or rise like erratic bubbles, unfinished souls of every description gathering closer, feebs and jerks — grotesques maybe, stained with the slime of their locale, satanic or drab or…my hands are trapped, my chest pinned and caving in…their hard surfaces are decaying till, like honey, like gum, we bend in the brainless wobble of a wave, pressing nearer still, and my heart itself caves in, at which moment we’re made over finally together into a single uncomprehending whirl. We move in a circle around ourselves.

Before us dangle the undying figures of the sign. Hieroglyphs in limitless frieze, a bedlam of wrinkles and typefaces steaming from the imprint, bodies themselves. Feel the pieces shiver, the tremors sap the ground surface. Hear…the roar, the static and roar…

WHAT I DID

YOUR LAST EXAMPLE (written in lipstick)

“From the first big moment to the last big moment — from the first little moment to the last little moment—

Honey babe — we had our chances but I just couldn’t care. I’m not even sure what happened.’’

PHYSICAL DETAIL

At times these days I’ve felt as if I had a third hand. I’ve felt it between my other two. This third hand is visible only in unpredictable glances, glances off-angle, and it floats unattached at the wrist. Yet I will itch with its presence for hours. Time and again my senses are betrayed; time and again when I try to catch the ghost it breaks apart. Yet I continue to glimpse it, the freak, the further apprehension. If my eyes have started to water for some reason, I can just make out the hollowed palm, the winking lines of heart and fate. Fifteen separate fingertips wave across a murk of sleep-sand and tears. So a girl shrinks out of reach beyond a mirror that once tricked you with her reflection; dark men shape love songs round their cracked voices and without a move, without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick. What is all our caring but these vacant and half-connected hands?

At the Dig

Now, unexpectedly, Pinnerz found himself swamped. His son was no longer in town to help. Now, no question, he had to go wangle with the construction crew. He waited till he saw the men break for morning coffee. Then he hurried up the plankway from his dig to the crew’s worksite, squeezing sideways through the gap between the granite walls of the condemned warehouse and the 4-x-4 that anchored the plywood partition against the downtown traffic. He announced that he’d need another day at least.

“Another day.” The crew foreman measured Pinnerz with a look that could be taken two ways. “Another day.”

“That would pretty much kill the week, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it Bud? We couldn’t get that cable in this week if we took off another day.”

But that second speaker was the nervous one in the crew. Italian or Greek, he could be seen jawing every time a person looked over from the dig. Pinnerz knew he could be ignored. But the crew foreman, though he didn’t look at the talker, didn’t change the way he was sizing up Pinnerz either.

“I could talk to somebody else,” Pinnerz began, “if—”

“No call to do that,” the foreman said.

Pinnerz couldn’t believe he’d made such a bonehead move.

“I make the decisions here,” the foreman said.

“Yeah, hey. Bud makes the decisions here.”

Nod. “Sure.” Nod and smile. Pinnerz realized that the uproar about his son, especially since the girl involved was still staying at Pinnerz’s house, had thrown off his concentration.

“Sure, Bud. Sorry.”

The foreman’s look grew softer again, heavier through the jowls.

“Or that is,” he said, “if I say you should get another day, then it’s more than likely you’ll get another day.”

Pinnerz opened his stance to try and catch whatever breeze there was. He broke off eye contact. The rest of the crew slouched without speaking, backs propped unprotected against jagged large pieces of pavement, faces shaded by their helmets’ short brims. The wrappers of their candy bars or donuts poked up stiffly from their meaty grips. Pinnerz thought of lizard-necked old card sharks settled in for a few serious hands. This at ten-thirty in the morning.

But on an urban dig — so he himself had told the TV people, when they’d taped a spot a couple weeks ago— sometimes what mattered least was what you knew about archaeology. Particularly at a dig like this one, a rush job forced by an improvement in the public transportation. As delicately as Pinnerz broke down a soil sample, here, he had to be that much more delicate about when he chose to go over the foreman’s head. And no dropped button or coin was ever so iffy as Bud’s look. Those three-quarter-mast eyelids and the droop at the corners of the mouth, a loose-muscled scrutiny that might suggest a sneer at the visitor or might instead be a simple playing-down of the whole situation. Such calculations were measured in the fraction of a wrinkle. In fact a get-together with a crew like this, despite their beef and grime, could turn on something as tricky as the emphasis given a single syllable. By now Pinnerz got some enjoyment out of all the balancing necessary: PhD versus dropout, desk job against manual labor, a man who ate dry salad for lunch against those who had donuts or candy at every coffee break. He had to carry his point through these as if shepherding a bubble up a chimney.

“Anyway, Henry,” the foreman said, “I thought you had them bones all figured out yesterday. I thought your son was going to do that.”

“Didn’t work out.”

The foreman’s eyes hitched up, and Pinnerz understood that he’d spoken too roughly.

“Look, Bud. Bones are difficult. It’s not just a matter of radiocarbon dating, and anyway radiocarbon dating would take time too.”

“You told us that already, Henry. You told us that two days ago.”

Another bad move. With one hand Pinnerz opened the neck of his shirt a little more, and touched the sweat already in the hollow at the base of his neck.

“Now we were planning to go in there today, Henry. We got some cables to get in there.”

Pinnerz was nodding again, holding himself carefully eye-to-eye with Bud and letting the man have his say. Thank God he’d built up some goodwill before this. Thank God that when the TV people had come, he’d had sense enough to make sure they got Bud’s side of the story as well as his own. Indeed that visit had provided a kind of backdrop for today’s. A kind of rehearsal. For the cameras Pinnerz had dressed down, just a working stiff, while this morning he’d chosen a good white short-sleeve and pants with a crease, in order to have that extra hint of authority. More considerations very different from what he’d gone to school for. But he could tell the DPW’s men felt the same; he could hear the way Bud now plumped up the words “public servant.” Even Pinnerz’s first name had become a stage prop.

“So, Henry. You can see my position, I hope. I’ve got to know what you’re going to do with the extra time that you couldn’t do already.”

“Well I’m not chasing after anything impossible,” Pinnerz said. “Honestly. All we’ve got now is a tooth and a bit of that jaw, but with a human skeleton just one more bone is usually enough to make a, a more precise identification.”

“Or you could find nothing. You could waste a day.”

“Well there are the property records, too. If we don’t at least take the time to look them over, then that day’s work’s been wasted.”

“Wasted?” Bud tipped his head slowly towards first one ear, then the other, as if the next words required special balance. “You said your son didn’t do the work.”

“I said he didn’t work out. He did the work.”

“Don’t start shouting, Henry. I get enough of that around here already.”

Like that, Pinnerz decided to talk. Where had keeping secrets got him? Where, except stumbling into one wrong move after another? He wasted a moment freeing his shirt from the splotches of sweat across his back, but he’d made up his mind already. Because no matter how carefully he controlled the story — no matter how much he made it seem as if the story was only between the girl and his son — talking would get some part of it off his chest at least.

“Okay.” He squatted for the first time. “Okay, you might as well know. You see I’ve got this research assistant this summer. A woman. A girl, I mean; she’s my son’s age. She’s 23. Ah. And so you see Tripp — that’s my son — well he’s her age, like I say, and she’s, she’s not bad-looking.”

“No kidding,” the talker in the crew said. “She’s the blonde, right? The one with the hair always blowing in her face. She hardly ties it back even when she’s over there working. And she’s got—”

“Quiet,” Bud said. “I want to hear this.”

In fact all the men were looking at Pinnerz. But before he continued he squinted back towards the dig a while, forearms on knees and one set of knuckles grinding against the other palm. A pause long enough for one of the crew to choke on his coffee and thickly spit.

“So yesterday,” Pinnerz said at last, “I, I sent them over to the state records office. I sent them both over there. Ah. I sent them in order to get whatever material he, ah, in order to find whatever material they might find that could help us. I mean we have to know who owned this property to begin with. And then also since this used to be shoreline here, well I don’t want to get your hopes up but these could be Indian bones. These could be 400, 500 years old.

“Anyway I, I sent my son and this girl over. To find out. And, ah. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a records office, but I’ll tell you, it’s just a big empty library. Essentially. It’s just, the stacks. These rows and rows of shelves and nobody ever there to bother you.”

A couple chins started to rise. Some candy-stained teeth were showing.

“Well so midway through, ah, sometime yesterday afternoon, I have to go over there. To the state records office. And there they tell me, my son and this girl—”

The talker in the crew, his Mediterranean eyebrows and cheekbones emphasized by his glee, clenched both hands into fists and slapped the inside of one wrist against the back of the other rhythmically.

Pinnerz managed a small grin himself. “Need I say more?”

End of the card game. Helmets came off, faces cracked wide with laughter. A couple men even massaged their bald spots or, with goofy smiles, hooked the front scoops of their undershirts and yanked them down to reveal tattoos of stubby threatening knives or hearts fat as balloons. “Henry,” the foreman kept saying, “Henry.” A better relief than any breeze Pinnerz might have caught earlier. With the men laughing, he could wind up the story as fast and sloppily as he wanted. He could say that, since the state was paying for this project, it wouldn’t have been wise to let his son hang around after a scene like that. Nobody was going to forget a scene like that. So the boy had been asked to skip town; so the crew’s noise eased again as they followed his logic, the sniggers and chesty hoots drowned out by the traffic that went on circling just beyond the dry plywood walls round their excavation.

And the girl? someone asked

“Well I, I do need a research assistant.”

“Henry, Henry.”

“And of course the money’s an obstacle for her. The summer’s almost over and a girl in her position doesn’t have many options.”

Spoken like he was sorry. His wild story had resolved itself as an ordinary problem of hard cash, sorry. And the crew had quieted. The foreman even looked at his watch. But Bud’s half-smile showed more lip, and the corners of his eyes more white.

“You know,” the foreman said, “I useto have a place up in New Hampshire. Wasn’t much I mean, but my grandparents useto farm and we had the barn converted like. Well that didn’t work out after the divorce. Henry here being divorced, he’ll understand.”

Pinnerz understood; now the foreman had to have his turn.

“Before me’n’Charl, before we went our separate ways so to speak, my Eddie was up there practically every weekend, I mean all year round, up in that barn with a different girl every weekend. Regular cathouse we were running. So then about two months after I had to sell — and I don’t mind telling you that was some kind of shock, letting go of the place. I had to just sit and look at the papers for a whole weekend I think before I could sign ’em finally. But anyway like I was saying, two-three months go by after we sell. And then I get this phone call, from the police up there. It seems my Eddie broke in. They’d changed the locks on him but he broke in. And him and some girl, up there—”

Bud nodded the conclusion. His crew didn’t so much laugh as shake their heads noisily, hitching their boots in closer, hooking their elbows round their knees. Pinnerz stayed in his squat and kept his eyes on his folded hands.

“You know just last Saddy,” the talker said, “I was up by the rotary there, the one by Tufts there, when these two girls, I swear to God they looked like college girls, they—”

“Save it, Rudy,” the foreman said. Bud was crumpling his coffee cup unnecessarily, folding it into something hard and wrinkled as a chip of granite. Pinnerz noticed that the black man in the crew was already on his feet. “We’ll have time for that kind of story at lunch.”

Careful now. The space here at the top of the chimney was small as anywhere else, the bricks round his bubble as toothy and close as anywhere else. Pinnerz held his place while the men rose and chucked their papers past him into the nearest can. When he stood, likewise, he ignored them. Only after the archaeologist had stretched two ways and squinted back at his dig once more, after the black man and another worker had pulled on their gloves and wrestled one shoulder each under a massive loop of black cable — only then did Bud step deliberately into Pinnerz’s line of sight.

“So it’s your professional opinion,” the foreman began, “that them bones might be Indian bones.”

No such luck. Pinnerz would have liked this to be an older skeleton, and not only because a native American drew more attention in the field. Also an Indian could be anyone. This sense of possibility would always tickle at Pinnerz, whenever he worked with preliterate cultures. An opening in the past that seemed as large sometimes as the opening beyond his own future. But no; these bones were more recent. That very night, in his study, Pinnerz was astonished to discover that in fact he might know the corpse’s name. The records his son had dug out the previous afternoon revealed, after an hour’s cross-checking between old maps and new, that for thirty-two years this land had been used as a fitting-yard by one of the shipbuilders who thrived during the generation just after the Revolution. Thomas Handesyd Perkins. And like most Brahmins the man had been a tyrant when it came to keeping the books, insisting on the same careful records for slaves and indentures as for ship’s rigging and townhouse improvements. So, with that much to help date the findings made at the same level as the bones, the key for Pinnerz became the fragments of a pelvis his students had unearthed that afternoon. They’d never have found it if he hadn’t gotten them the additional time. First dusting the new bit of skeleton once more, Pinnerz now took a good half-hour working it over with a pair of calipers, and he checked each measure against the appropriate graph. No question, then. This had been a woman. Judging from the tooth and mandible found earlier, she’d been young, less than twenty-five; judging from the soil at the site, she’d lain underwater, kept from rising possibly by some length of rope or chain like those that had turned up throughout the old fitting-yard. Back to Perkins’s records. About midnight, just as the aches were starting to close round his spine, Pinnerz found her. An Irish indentured girl assigned to the dockside kitchens, Mary Chasuble or Chaseable. The name in either case no doubt had been invented, once she’d come to this country, so that she might have that much more of a fresh start. “Dissap’d,” the record read. “Thot Drown’d or run away. 21 Sep 1799. Ag’d 19 or 20.”

The aches were starting to close round his spine. He headed for the stairs, for Zefira’s room. At first he climbed with one hand gripping the bannister, but the tight hold made him think of his mother and her walker. He let go and instead opened the neck of his shirt a little more.

She wasn’t in bed. Of course she lived on all-nighters anyway, the driven star student, but it looked as if this one had been worse than most. Her desk lamp burned feebly inside the rough column of her smoke. On every side of her, books stood in stacks. Plus usually she played up her hair for all it was worth, teasing it to such a fine blond blowziness that the first time Pinnerz had met her he’d asked a classic roll-call question: was Zefira a Jewish name? But tonight she’d let herself go so badly that her hair’s snarled ends looked like a smearing of seafoam. As if Pinnerz’s son’s shirt, a couple sizes too big for her, had gotten stuck to her shoulder blades by a line of those dirtied bubbles.

He’d been stopped in the doorway. At last her head jerked up, startled, and she turned from her papers.

“You were right,” Pinnerz said at once. “They’re not pre-Revolutionary.”

He kept his hand on the knob, carefully holding himself eye-to-eye with her.

“They’re not?” Finally. “That’s too bad. Too bad for the old savage.”

“Well they’re not bad, Zefira. They’re just not pre-Revolutionary.”

She gave him what might have been a moment’s lead-in to a smile, then stubbed it out with her next cigarette. He took the three steps to her bed and sat.

“I came up here,” he told her, “and I said you were right.”

She faced the bed.

“Okay, Dr. Pinnerz. What else can you tell me?”

He inhaled through his mouth and began about the bones. Right away he found that — in spite of the hour, his back, the unwashed closeness of this girl — he couldn’t keep down his enthusiasm. His two-way excitement, first at having done such good work, next at having found the work so rewarded. Together they picked him up like a spiral wind Now he could no longer look at Zefira, only let his eyes lock and talk on. He heard himself start to fumble for words and even, very unprofessional, to chase after ideas with no clear sense of where they’d lead. But Pinnerz let the awkwardness go. The rest of his life after all felt to him like a continually narrowing rat’s maze, with department chairs on one side and editor’s desks on the other. Yes he could get a rudimentary charge out of this everyday slog, just as this morning he’d found his own low-level relief in the nip-and-tuck with Bud’s crew. But tonight was inspiration. Another stumbling sentence and he was sure of it. Tonight, the reason he toughed out all the rest had whipped both his assistant and himself into its rising spiral. Because this woman he’d brought up, and named— there’d never been anything like her at an urban dig. Now she’d stand by him forever. The Pinnerz Case. “We’ll go on TV again,” he said, “you and I. We, we’ll have to break out the jeans and T-shirts again and—”

“Hank, Jesus!” Zefira wailed. “You old. . Jesus.”

He blinked, focussed. Apparently he’d been staring at the button of her jeans as he spoke. When he raised his eyes to her face, Pinnerz found a look so uncomplicated that at first he couldn’t think of what it meant.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. “I can’t believe... Look, tell me. How far are you going to take this?”

His forearms were back on his knees. He turned his hands as if trying to catch the last breath out of a restroom dryer.

“You know years and years from how, Hank, it’s not going to matter how hard you tried to hang on. All that trouble yesterday, all the times I had to sneak around, it’s not going to matter. And even what I got into with you, back at the beginning of the summer… I mean, I admit it was a wrong move. I made a wrong move, Hank. But you weren’t married or anything. You were just, this very impressive older man who’d given me this wonderful opportunity.”

Deep sigh. Pinnerz watched her flick one big toe with the other.

“But Hank, how long are you going to think that gives you some kind of hold on me? Last night, you threw such a fit, I admit you had me bulldozed for a while. You had me talking to the walls in here today. But finally I realized that years and years from now all that’s going to matter to me is, this was the summer when I met Tripp. Jesus, I hope so. I hope…” She cleared her throat. Then, louder: “So Hank, tell me. When can I go see him without sneaking around? When do we all stop acting like I’m some kind of slave?”

Pinnerz couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even think what was practical, or begin trying to reckon her background against his. He knew only that if he so much as looked at Zefira, he’d have to deal with the same uncomplicated hatred he’d seen in her face a minute before, and seen last night in his son’s as well. Lying, scheming bastard, he’d shouted at Tripp then. All summer long you never cared what I was after, lying bastard kid. Hard words that now emerged again to ache in his neck like mutant teeth. Between that new bony catch in his breathing and what this girl had asked, it was all Pinnerz could do just to manage a ghostly gesture with one hand. A signal that he wanted more time.

Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side

She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She’d appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially. Syl, he wished he could tell his wife now, you were up in that room with us. And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive’s one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom’s control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.

And Grissom knew also he wasn’t your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He’d been through all that crap already. He’d started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he’d switched to a job where it wasn’t the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He’d gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days — Grissom wasn’t then thirty-five — he’d told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom’s reasoning. Grissom’s father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.

But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn’t been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom’s career had been getting started, he’d been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He’d gone over them carefully with his lawyer.

The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn’t try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he’d always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent — or wherever, in the suddenly very wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.

Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.

And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he’d gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who’d mixed the drinks — even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he’d so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he’d held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He’d felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn’s girlfriend’s, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he’d tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.

He’d been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband’s yen for a night’s adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he’d tried to put this idea into words…he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone, he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he’d wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.

Unfortunately however young Grissom had not merely been led into a whore’s hotel room. The room and the lady had been a trap. Worse luck, it had taken all these two and a half decades to get at the truth of the matter.

Finally, now when he was pushing sixty, the story broke. Grissom had first seen the news on TV. It seemed that a couple of those hush-hush, top-level intelligence agencies in this country occasionally used to slip unsuspecting victims a drug, an hallucinogen. CIA, Army, whatever. They would drive somebody clear out of his mind for a few hours, as an experiment.

While “the project was in operation,” Grissom had learned, these agencies had sometimes hired prostitutes to “administer the substance.” Thereafter, an agency man would sit behind a two-way mirror and “monitor the session.” Oh, Grissom had come to know their bald lingo well, this past month. The agency records had been subpoenaed, and he’d seen his own name in them. He’d seen the faraway date and verified it against his old business records. He’d seen, he’d seen.

And so Grissom and his lawyer arrived at the troublesome business of the whore’s actually going through with her original job. Why had she let Grissom have her? The two men had discussed the question one afternoon a couple weeks ago, in the lawyer’s office. The woman’s motives might prove important if the suit came to court. The office was bright, with buttons flashing red and yellow on the enormous desk phone. The lawyer raised the question in a friendly way, but Grissom at first kept quiet. Since he still couldn’t find the words to explain it to his wife, Grissom figured, no way he could talk it out with a lawyer. In silence he watched the phone buttons flash. Eventually, calmly, the lawyer tried out an idea of his own. He hypothesized that the agency had wanted a subject who would truly feel guilty, in order for the experiment to be more, more — the lawyer frowned, searching for the expression — more emotionally impactive.

Now Grissom frowned. Emotionally what?

So, the lawyer finished with a grin, the girl had let Grissom zap her as part of their research.

Grissom found he couldn’t sit still. That kind of talk, he’d said loudly, shaking his head and striding round the office, that kind of talk—. His lawyer was looking at the wrong side of the picture entirely. The drug’s effects, Grissom said, were way more complex than that. Instead his lawyer should look at the other end of the picture, the human element. One way or the other, Grissom suddenly started shouting, you have to join the human race. One way or the other!

Bad idea, getting so fired up. The next day the Sun-Times carried a photograph of him throwing a fit in the public corridor outside his lawyer’s office. As he’d jumped round screaming about the human race, a camera-flash had caught him. The picture showed a heavy-bodied man in late middle age, with one knee raised in mid-stomp. The other foot, in its elegant European boot, was actually off the ground. This leaping person had an intelligent forehead, broad and pronounced, but at that moment it was cracked into so many wrinkles it looked like intestines caught in a vise. That morning (only a couple of weeks ago, now), Grissom had come into work and found the paper on his desk, folded open to the page with the picture.

He’d jumped back into his car, that morning, and driven the thirty miles to his home at well past the speed limit. He thought somehow he could pick up the house copy before Syl saw it. No dice. He found his wife at the kitchen table, with the paper open to his photograph in front of her, murmuring wearily over the phone to someone in her family. Her body sagged in its chair. After the first startled glance, she wouldn’t look at Grissom.

Revenge, Grissom thought. The whore had let him have her as a means of revenge. The drug after all was too freaky, too mysterious for anyone to go predicting its effects. Therefore you had to look at the person, not the apparatus around the person. So this woman, Grissom explained later to his lawyer, had wanted a hooker’s revenge: her own special way of showing her ass to the men who gave her their grubby orders and then sat, smug and above-it-all, behind the mirror.

The lawyer had looked sincerely surprised to hear Grissom come up with such a subtle theory. The lawyer took off his glasses and touched a stem to his lower lip. Grissom, in turn, could only give a disgusted half-smile. He would never get used to these narrow preconceptions people outside of business had about those on the inside. A man could work as an executive and nonetheless perceive the soul. Grissom had imagination enough to appreciate what must happen to a whore’s spirit while her body rang up trick after trick. For a moment he felt like jumping up and shouting again.

This conversation however took place the day after his photograph had appeared in the papers. Grissom therefore calmed himself. He watched the silent mechanical flash of the phone buttons. At last he shrugged. Look, he told the lawyer, the possible explanations for the prostitute’s behavior were endless. This much only was certain: she didn’t have to. By the time the hotel sheets had been heaped up round them like thunderclouds, the backs of Grissom’s knees had been going crazy, trembling with more than sexual fever. He’d bristled everywhere with his first rush.

After that, memory became spotty. What isolated moments he did recall were vivid, indeed far worse than vivid. But now Grissom had entered the mystery, a vastness complicated by a million wiry connections, and there not even his most enraged recent efforts to recall could fill in the blanks.

He could say, at least, that when TV or the movies handled this kind of experience they were way off base. The hallucinogen had never once caused Grissom to see things that weren’t “there” in some sense or another. The cow did not jump over the moon. Rather, every far-out vision had long psychic trailers rooted finally in some humble taste, some homely touch. Yes TV was way off base. TV started out to protect their viewers and wound up shoving everybody who watched into the garbage. TV went for the bright lights and never got at the truth, which was this essential combination of the homely and the psychedelic. It was because of that combination a person on acid knew the experience was real. And because it was real, it made you crazy. Madness therefore was a kind of ground pepper scattered over the experience, and though the bursts of memory could shatter Grissom like a sneeze, the grainy heaps of black to either side were just as large.

For example he could remember a time when the whore’s icy features had reddened and shriveled into those of the Devil himself, risen from his dark home. Her legs had run together into a ropelike tail holding him tight. Okay. Surely that guilty hallucination was only to be expected. Syl was, as he longed to tell her nowadays, in that hotel room with him. But then how, and when, had the prostitute become the Moon Maiden? How had her hair turned the consistency of cream cheese, and how had those tentacles sprung from her ribs to circle round him and tickle his spine so excruciatingly? All was doubtful, rough and tumble, transferences felt only in separated bits around the dark passage of asteroid chunks. Or never mind this woman and the million dreams that rode her skin. How in the world had Grissom come to spend so much time standing facing that hotel room’s mirror?

Yes that floor-to-ceiling vanity mirror, ow, ow. No sooner had Grissom put his fingers to the glass than he’d received a shock as if he’d been hauled upside-down off his feet and spanked. He snatched his hand back. On the spot he realized that he could have taken hold of any item from his young life — his first child’s first spoon, his wife’s jars of lotion, the ungainly watch his father had given him — any item, and not one would have devastated him so much as this deep stretch of reflecting glass. The rows of bulbs shining to either side pained his eyes. Of course, during this month just past Grissom had found out that his shock, too, had been part of the setup. The agency records explained how the surface of the mirror had been lightly electrified as a precaution. But knowing these things now didn’t change at all the cataclysmic feel of what he could recall from then. For instance he could remember also that at one point he’d thought of lowering his head and smashing on through. And this past month, he’d learned the agency types had been prepared for that move as well: he would have knocked himself cold against their protective steel supports. But knowing so now didn’t lessen the pervading weakness, like a steam leaking outward from his marrow, which had kept him from crashing through and which softened his bones all over again every time he remembered the moment.

So memory grew spottier, grainier still after that. Hours, young Grissom must have remained there, silently weeping. He had an odd recollection of pulling the hairs away from his navel and thrusting his reflected belly up towards itself, God knows why. He could be positive only that he’d been standing before the mirror when he’d seen his worst.

He had no idea just how far along it was. The woman had brought him a dripping facecloth. He hadn’t noticed her coming. But after that agony of wet and cold hit his forehead, instinctively he brought up his palm to cover the blazing damp spot and hold it there. The liquid streaming down meantime had forced him to blink repeatedly, lengthily, till under the pressure of light and dark the surface of his thinking had exploded and Grissom could see clearly at last that this “water” striping his skin was itself composed entirely of mirrors. He stopped blinking and watched. Tiny mirrors, these were, each no larger than the fragment of a tear. Like the row of black reflections he’d sometimes seen clinging to his windshield after a storm: tiny mirrors, all wriggling their tails. Yes and in this case they weren’t merely wriggling, either, but moving, actually moving with a purpose. Down from his enlarged eyes, down his cheeks and down, the mirrors traveled in linked chains, with a jerky sinuousness like something out of a cartoon. Grissom’s heart was going so hard he couldn’t move his eyes. He could just make out infinitesimal pairs of dirty bare feet. He could see finally the hemp ropes holding the mirrors in place. One wobbled for a moment; a black hand rose to steady it, the pressure of the fingers — minute as the hairs on a fly — making a small depression in the bulbous reflecting surface. Mirrors, lugging away on their backs what the larger mirror showed! Why, then, these germlike native bearers, these shimmery work gangs Grissom had wrung from the washcloth himself, why they were going to carry away his face. Even now his face was going, running down, in trapped particles of eyelash and eyebrow, bits of sideburn and lip beard stubble….

Grissom had got tough with himself. He whispered into his reflection that this was only another hooker’s trick, another slut way of getting him to spend the entire night and so pay more (why, if she succeeded in driving him insane for the rest of his life, just think what he’d pay). But he couldn’t remove his hand from the facecloth, nor his eyes from the glass. Desperately then he looked to the woman with him — in the mirror. He was startled to discover she stood beside him. She stood in an old-fashioned robe, fixing her face. And as she smeared on some ointment, businesslike but in no rush, he could see she was rubbing away not just the bags under her eyes but her eyes themselves, not just the lines round her nose but her entire fineboned nose itself.

Yet though she met his gaze, with the blank indentations where her eyes had been, she never offered more than a bored smile. Even when her mouth too was wiped away, he could tell she remained unperturbed. She didn’t see the damage done. So Grissom had understood, and thereafter the night was lost to memory. He had wanted to see what he was alone, what he was as an individual away from Syl or anyone else. And now he knew.

Afterwards, well. It was hardly anything you could confide in the wife. Grissom went on the wagon. No surprise, considering.

Also, more or less secretly, he went on the couch for a couple-three years. Syl knew, but no one else. It was Syl in fact who’d suggested Grissom start seeing a psychiatrist. She’d told him, at the end of one unending, weepy night, that some time with a headshrinker seemed to be the only solution to his problems. Syl was also terrific when it came to keeping the analysis a secret from Grissom’s father. The old man was from the old country; he’d never have understood. The two kids, as for them, weren’t even talking yet during those years. And the psychiatrist’s office was in the same crowded steel high-rise as Grissom’s dentist’s, so he always had a ready excuse. Yet a psychiatrist, too…Grissom could never see his way clear to telling a psychiatrist either. How could he? The doctor would stand over him and say: for a businessman in America, there is the work and there is the family, two very strong drives which often conflict. Then how could Grissom start to talk about microscopic native bearers carrying away his face?

Nonetheless he was grateful for the time. Grissom progressed soon enough to a point where he was able to ask for the less demanding job, in the jet-aircraft line, without shame. Once there, also, he found himself prospering. After he reached middle age, after his father had died, Grissom didn’t bother keeping his work with the doctor a secret any longer. Indeed he became a regular advocate of analysis for management-level employees. Couple years on the couch, Grissom took to saying, and you’ll die a rich man.

But he suffered, nevertheless, some lower-grade infections left from his night before the prostitute’s vanity mirror. These remained hard to put into words. Really, the slack hell of the last twenty-five years was rendered best, in capsule version, on the night of his return from that first executive-level trek. Oh, he could say he’d done some other things in the interim. He’d remained faithful to Syl. He’d gone back to the Church, finding his place among those crowds whispering to themselves with eyes closed. He’d raised two sons during the 1960’s, he shouldn’t forget that. Yet really, it had all been in the return.

Two or three more nights had passed since the insanity in the hotel room — impossible, rough-cut dark hours stained with dreams of being born and then going to work at once, still trailing the greasy umbilicus. Impossible nights. So when Grissom did in fact make it home, his young hand was shaking so hard it took him three tries to turn the kitchen doorknob. And—? “Yaaaay, Grissom! He’d stumbled bang into the raised glasses and popping flashbulbs of a surprise party. Syl had been so proud of him for earning the right to go on such a trip, and his birthday fell near enough to make such an excuse. So neighbors, relatives, even slight office acquaintances had been brought over. Syl and he, in those days, were trying to expand their circle.

When his wife rushed out of the crowd and hugged him, fiercely, Grissom had burst into tears and shrieked something hysterical, Godgodgod or something, at which everyone in the room laughed and said: Awww. Look at that, awww, what else can you say? He returned Syl’s hug, tight, tight, burying his face in her neck to avoid seeing these loosened smiles and roving eyes that had come at him out of the darkened rooms of his own home. Syl had finally told him loudly, party-volume, to loosen up his hold, hey come on darling. The crowd found this hilarious. The people who’d laughed too raucously, or who’d made the wrong sort of jokes, Syl and Grissom had never seen again.

And—? His reaction had been nothing short of a miracle. He didn’t call the party off. Yes of course Grissom wanted to avoid a scene; yes too he was hungry and the baklava Syl had baked reeked of sweet honey. Yes, most importantly, he’d been too frightened to go through any more high emotions for a while. So, a miracle, Grissom stayed on his feet. Manfully he circled among the wisecracks about growing old and the fearsome traces of a perfume that would be right for a sophisticated lady in a big-city bar. The night followed the pattern, in capsule version, for that brutal cross-country running around that a man at Grissom’s level of the business was supposed to do: racing from the freezer to Kansas City, then catching a late-night shuttle for Savannah, with a connection for the baby’s bedroom…. Hours had passed. He’d stayed on his feet. Then finally and without knowing how it had happened, he’d discovered himself alone with his wife for the first time all evening. She was sitting in the after-party dark, lying back nearly, on the sofa. She’d brought their son downstairs and, her breast like a softening in the smoke and upholstery, she was nursing him. Grissom watched. The infant’s large eyes were closed; her own were lowered to see him suck. They might both have been asleep, except that she was murmuring to the child in babytalk. And the wife had the second child sitting up in her belly already, that’s how fast you went about such things then. So Grissom had come to believe, as he stood watching the two of them, that he would never again take part in this world of Syl’s, this drowsy continuous talking and touching. The calm fullness of bellies and the tongue living inside the kiss: never for him. Syl had made too fragile a web, a wisp strung between two monsters, for the boom and bust of Grissom’s inner life. When he saw the baby’s saliva start to dribble down his wife’s breast, Grissom had to turn away.

Yet he’d remained faithful. After the second baby was born and Grissom’s numbness in the sack continued nonetheless, Syl had broken down and screamed at him, weeping, to see a headshrinker, see one. Then he’d punched in his hours on the couch. He’d taken also his more conservative medicines, the Church and raising children. In time there had come a night when Syl could go farther than merely laying a hand on the back of his thigh to let him know the choice was still open.

And after more time still, Grissom came to yet another — what could he call it? — another moment of private graduation. This time it happened at the office. A late September day. He was then 52, his night on acid twenty years behind him already. He was standing at the urinal in the executive washroom, looking over his company’s latest annual report. He tried always to bring some work with him into the men’s room, so as not to have his concentration broken. The place, with its aluminum and Muzak and air-freshener, could rub your brains clean in a minute. There Grissom had noticed that his photograph at the front of the report appeared odd, incorrect somehow. Moving to the basin to wash his hands, he thought it over. And then, on an impulse, he’d splashed the water up onto his face and looked into the mirror, bright and humming with Muzak. Like that, the answer came to him. Of course: the boys in Design & Layout had airbrushed his picture, so he wouldn’t look too old.

That morning, that day…again his mysterious failure of speech afflicted Grissom. He couldn’t say with any precision why this retouched photo in his company report, a simple matter of good business, should pick up his spirits as much as it had. But he went back to his desk at a strut. He felt so with-it he invited the other vice-president on his corridor to lunch. And in the restaurant, Grissom had shocked the man by ordering good imported Scotch straight up before the meal.

Indeed, that last graduation had picked him up too high, too fast. Every one of Grissom’s shot glasses, these past five years, had dropped like a small bomb behind his ribcage. He’d gone back to hard stuff, after all, at an age when he should have been switching to milk.

In this business, too, Syl had impressed him. Any time he reached for a third highball, she would start reminding him of the two or three men in their circle who’d already had their first heart attack. She would lay her broad hand (she had a fisherman’s hands, he’d always thought) over his whenever he began to pour an unnecessary J&B. She’d ask: you forgetting who you are, Grissom? Yes with that mock-businesslike way she had of using his last name as if it was something serious enough to joke about. Hey Grissom, she’d say. You trying to catch up with somebody out there? Grissom, settle down a little, don’t just stand there talking to yourself. Hey, look at me. Hey Grissom, talk to me.

It might have worked, her familiar needling gab. Those fisherman hands might have hooked the right words in the darkness beneath Grissom’s thoughts. She could have made him tell her how he’d wanted to define himself as one way or another, in that hotel bar a generation earlier, how he wanted to see himself without any gray areas showing. But no dice. After his first heart attack, a man gets everything from a new perspective.

Less than a year ago, now. The attack had come in the form of a gum-slow pain, as if he were giving birth to a creature that needed first to burrow from his breastbone through to his spine. Afterwards, as he’d floated through the white and steel of the hospital, with the color TV going all the time, seeming a million starstruck miles from his brown home in Lake Forest, then Grissom had drifted mentally too. He lay there reconstructing. A damaged chest and a rattled mind, both reconstructing. Yes both, because at his heart’s first vicious twist inward — in the very moment — uncountable tough lumps of memory had erupted farther up the spine.

Somebody will pay for doing this to me, he’d told himself at the time.

My whole life passed before my eyes, he’d told his visitors at the hospital.

Thus, there, plugged into the heart-support machinery, he saw the stories of what the intelligence agencies had done. His first day back on his feet Grissom called his lawyer. It wasn’t till this month just past that they at last received verification.

Now arrived the TV people. They came into Grissom’s home tonight and caught him by surprise. Though of course he had arranged the visit himself. Hours earlier, he’d telephoned the Chicago station. Plus before that he’d arranged every step of the procedure with Syl: the room they would use, the time of arrival. Yet then Grissom’s wife had unsettled his nerves. Simply by asking a few hard questions, Syl had got him striding back and forth across the living-room rug, so intently that when he’d touched a lightswitch — it was near sundown — the static electricity gave him a bad shock. Syl had sat on the sofa watching. She was waiting for something it seemed. Finally, her voice growing quiet with determination, the lines of her face deepening, she’d refused absolutely to take any part in Grissom’s bit on the TV news.

So he was caught by surprise. A man near sixty, in a bright silver suit he’d cleaned especially, he lumbered around gesturing to himself. He hadn’t even noticed Syl when she’d crossed the entryway to answer the door.

Only, one moment Grissom looked up, and in came the TV people.

A tall Oriental woman went first, angular at the jawline and hip, unmistakeably a beauty even though from Grissom’s distance her face was vague. In her angles alone he could tell she was gorgeous. Her hair was tied back flat against her skull, her long body cinched up tight in a three-piece suit of that flecked, metallic green which was popular just now. To see her stalk in, trailing wires — so bright, so pinched and sectioned, trailing wires — Grissom thought of a hornet prowling the air. Round her long neck there tottered a steel mirror on a hinged apparatus that allowed her to look at herself as she walked. The reflected sunset coming through the open door behind her colored her small face oddly.

Grissom stared, in wary shock. He went on standing in the center of his living room.

The Oriental reporter stopped to check something in her mirror, parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth. As she paused, there strode past her a creature that seemed to have three heads, each with a different size and a different degree of mobility. Grissom squinted and blinked several times. Finally he managed to distinguish between the plastic half-moon of the microphone, the iron angles of the camera, and the emaciated young cameraman’s half-visible, red-bearded face. Meantime closer to Grissom something else went rushing by low to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at it: some kind of large black box, an uncertain shape. It made the air stir around his ankles. The man hauling the box however was impossible to miss, a tough working stiff in his prime, twice Grissom’s size, his body under its golden T-shirt as blunt and efficient as a dead-bolt lock. Gold, it seemed, was this guy’s thing. Along one side of his face dangled an earring a good two inches across, bright gold. His belt buckle also was gold, and worn up on his right hip to catch the eye. Then next, coming in the door next, now — a wide aluminum bowl, freestanding, with consoles of switches and toothed snap-latches bolted on both at top and bottom. There were nasty-looking yellow bulbs at the bowl’s center. Crossing the slate entryway, its wheels shrieked. How did it move? But the girl who entered next certainly wasn’t pushing anything. A frowning blonde who looked like she wasn’t yet out of her teens, she came through the door tilted sideways, groaning, uneasy on cheap-looking high heels. Under this girl’s chin swung a legal pad clipped to a board; up on one shoulder she barely managed to balance a steel briefcase with sharp, studded corners; cradled against her other side was a bone-white gallon jug crookedly labeled HOT STUFF. All was positive, hard-surface, solid evidence thrusting forth dynamically into uncut sunlight. Even this overloaded teenage girl had an upper body that mushroomed out into a high-school jacket with bulging shoulders.

The jacket’s elastic hem was hiked up, revealing her midriff. It was the only ordinary, untucked flesh anywhere among these people. To Grissom it seemed the girl’s belly was rising towards him, rising…the hairless teenage skin blending with her unbelted jeans….

“Say three, three and a half right now,” the girl said, or rather grunted loudly. She’d come quite close. “And with these curtains — minute—” she bent, set down her burden. Her midriff disappeared. “With these curtains, better make it two.”

“Starbaby, I told you, I got the meter right here.” This was the grip in gold, answering over his shoulder and through his earring. Grissom couldn’t be sure, but the man appeared to have a hand between his legs. “They got rooms upstairs. Starbaby! Let’s go be alone and shut the door.”

“Knock it off and give me six hundred.” The Camera/Face, who closed in on Grissom and then backed away. “And make it a wide six hundred. I want to go override and we’ll color-down right here.”

He pressed in close again, his black lens twitching.

“Starbaby,” the grip went on shouting, “I told you, you want to travel with us you got to decide. What’s it going to be girl? Them or me, girl?”

Oh I understand, Grissom thought, sounding the words against his inner ear with forced sensibleness. I understand. He’s trying to put the make on the blonde girl.

“That’s an old song,” the girl shouted back without looking at him. She waved around something that looked like a compass. “I mean I heard my grandfather singing that song.”

“Oh you just don’t know, girl.” The man was working expertly, hopping up and down like a gymnast, making swift settings on the aluminum reflecting bowl. “Starbaby it ain’t that I’m old, it’s that you’re new. Girl you ain’t even been born yet.”

“Go, just — just stay on the other side of the world from me.” She sounded uncertain. “Just, get us the count.”

Grissom stood watching them all come into his house. The girl’s midriff like a piece of his own flesh orbiting now behind him to his right. The topheavy cameraman, the jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip’s shouting. Grissom thought he’d never seen these rooms so crammed with humanity. Although — he thought again — that was an odd way to feel with Syl out of sight. But ow, those few hard questions she’d asked him earlier. They seemed still with him, here like seastones under the carpet. Why, Syl had asked him, did Grissom leave it to her during this past month to reconstruct the whole twenty-five-year-long chain of events on her own? Why didn’t he come tell her straight out: first there was that original executive-level trek, and, and next, Grissom…He tried to answer, saying there were things he could tell his lawyer and the people in the media that, ah, naturally Syl, ah, well like my fat her used to say, Syl, there are a lot of bastards out there….

She’d reached out and taken hold of his chin. She’d thrust her face at him: Look at me, Grissom! Finally he’d had to rise from the sofa shouting you’ve got it backwards Syl, you’re looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I’m going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.

Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.

“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let’s go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”

“All right!” But that wasn’t the blonde girl’s voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.

“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”

The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.

Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She’d changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom’s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected.

“Mr. Grissom, I’m sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who’s new, I mean she’s just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”

“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”

The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn’t get a clear view; she’d turned away quickly and squatted over the grip’s black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.

“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”

At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blindness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it on either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his — Grissom’s — lelt thigh.

“It is three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.

“When they’re old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just goes.”

“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time’s running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don’t you. We work for you.”

“Give it some back light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There’s no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I’m telling you, his face will just go.”

The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman’s eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom’s cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.

“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you’re related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”

Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom — the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he’d heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he’d used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.

“The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”

“I see,” the reporter said.

Grissom’s eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.

“And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”

“No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.

“You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”

“No.”

“Your typical executive,” the grip said. He’d hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It’s just me, me, me, me.’“

“Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “is a new song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.

“I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”

“Counting two sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.

Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew’s sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.

“Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it’s your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He’s going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”

“Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there’s one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she’d frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don’t be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can’t tell them.’“

“Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it’s like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he is?”

“Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds’ leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”

“I can’t live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie’s always saying, ‘respect the family,’ ‘protect the family.’ And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we’ve been married, is that nothing? I loved him, is that nothing?”

“So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who’s all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don’t have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you’re all business now. So then let’s start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings up. And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it. Go.”

“Counting one sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.

“Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can’t.”

“Watch my language?” Grissom said.

He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter’s face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror — yes they showed me the truth.

“I can’t live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.

“Watch my language?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how’s this. Don’t you blankety-blank-blanks think it’s time to join the human race?”

Chasing Names

Not that we hadn’t struggled time and again to escape, to leave behind the agony of having died nameless. Not that, faced with our deaths, we’d given up caring. No. From the beginning of our time here we’d turned our backs on the hurtful earth, as if it were a calendar scratched with the fingernails into the bricks of Death Row. Instead we’d dragged ourselves towards brighter possibilities. We dragged ourselves towards the stars. We knew even then that the stars were the others here, the ones unlike us: the men and women who’d died with names. Against the dark, their ghosts shone like gods.

We knew we may have been nothing compared to them, these people who could face the night so brightly sure of who they were. But we measured ourselves against them. From the beginning of our time here, we saw them and wanted better for ourselves. We wanted our names back.

So our betrayed lump of souls, spastic as an infant and bawling injustice, went crawling from star to star asking for help. Imagine a faint whorl of galactic dust, drifting across a cloudless, moonless night. That dust was our unmarked grave. That groaning you heard — that night you noticed us at last — was the cost of every step of our journey through the black. We made a powdery cluster of thousands of thousands. And worst of all, time and again the bulges of our group would have to shift as new nameless rose from the world to join us. The fresh-spawned ghosts were hauled into place by the specific gravity of the tortured and overlooked, and the interruption would jostle every exposed bone in our entire punchdrunk mob. Awful stop-and-go. Though it was a batch of these newcomers, to be fair, who eventually helped us discover what the stars were made of.

Eventually. For untold ages till then, however, all we could do was beat on through the dark. We paid little attention, also, to the astral wanderers from the plane of the living, the psychics and mediums and so forth. We brushed them off like instellar flies. Really, all we had eyes for was the next tackhead in the black, the next fixed spot in the night sky. Whenever at last we reached another, our begging was shameless. Again, again, again: Tell us our names.

Nothing. Not even the smallest murmur of sympathy. Each star went on glistering in silence, as grim a spectacle to us as each new glacier must have seemed to a million nameless stone-age tribes.

Why did we go on? Everyone loses something, in the shuttle from one life to the next. Everyone has to start all over, as a ghost. And though in our case some scrabbled along with throats slashed by the guards’ machetes, though others in our musty group had elbows broken backwards by their torturers or hair burned away where the electrodes had been placed — nonetheless these wounds no longer hurt. If a brother-ghost tripped over the ropy length of an intestine, spilled from the hole in his gut, he felt about as much pain as if he’d had an earlobe tugged. Then why go on begging for this scrap of personality left behind? And we did have our dropouts, giving up the chase, floating off to blackness lonesomely. But always the vast majority strove on. Or at least we did in these early days, before we began to learn what the stars were made of. We stumbled from shiny spot to shiny spot like a lost two-year-old pulling on the pants leg of any adult he can find. We would risk any humiliation, in order to escape the one from which we’d come.

It's not that we’ve forgotten our names. It's that our names were taken away. We were some bug in the grotesque machinery of the State, and the State hadn’t merely crushed us, but also had scraped whatever stain we’d left off the iron altogether. They’d caught us and they’d rubbed us out. Then whenever someone came looking for us, some blue-ribbon panel of diplomatic investigators come combing the prison register for us, the warden would sit fatly grinning. No such person here. No such name on the books. And all the time the guards would be down in our cells slapping the dreams from our heads so they could then hammer us back to unconsciousness once more.

Cell without a number, prisoner without a name! Our families were told we’d “disappeared.” Our friends were let know, with a glance blunt as a rifle butt, they shouldn’t ask any questions. Our enemies smiled. Meanwhile nameless as dust, we died.

We remembered nothing, or what we remembered was no help. Someone might pass along a recollection of machetes raised overhead, their blades nickelized by the swollen moon. Or as we travelled we might brood on a freezing night spent curled in the blackness of a metal box too large to keep a person warm. But where these memories came from, we couldn’t say. We didn’t know even just whose memories they were. What we recalled of earth seemed to spring up from all of us at once.

No wonder we ignored the visitors from physical existence, the psychics and astral journeymen. Because these people could hear us groan and ponder our memories as we slogged along, and because the lights sprinkled round us seared the night in silence, the psychics and so forth would come pester us with their questions about “the future.” But the future here seemed so much more than these limited nags could imagine. The world of the dead, understand, is not the world in which we’d died. Here it's nothing like a prison, a compound lined with electrified wire, a bamboo cage in which you can neither stand nor sit. Instead — for everyone except us, except us — the afterlife looked like a perfection that went on forever.

Even in our most primitive days we’d given names to the spots we headed towards. Even then we’d seen that each white fleck could be placed with others near it, and that each such grouping of stars had its meaning and name. Thus a dead woman, imagine, could become the throat of a dove (or at least we liked to think of that far dot as a woman; we didn’t yet know what she was). She could become, indeed, the lit center of birdsong itself. Those intranscribable rises and falls, that music in the trees — a woman could do that just by dying and taking her proper place in the stars. She could become a name burning outside the reach of any graystoned cell, any grinning warden, forever.

How did we know that the stars were the dead? How, when they told us nothing? We knew. They told us nothing, but just by staying where they were they told us enough. Who alive or dead hasn’t looked up at least once and known?

So: silly Madame Psychic would come to us, as we walked the surface tension that will bear a careful ghost across the dark. From her medium's tableside back on earth she’d seen our spidery sweepings. Between stops, she would swoop in and try to slow us down. She wished to know, she would ask, if her client so-and-so was going to make any money.

Money! Money seemed as puny to us as the papers from which the overseers had scratched our names. Or it did until we at last began to learn how our guiding lights were put together.

That night, an unusually large number of newcomers started to shiver our group all at once. Perhaps there’d been a machine-gunning of an entire nation's dissidents, in some backwoods countryside below. We don’t know; as always they came to us with no useful memories. Instead they murmured with surprise at how their wounds had stopped aching, or at how our own gaping slashes fluttered whenever one of them passed close by. So many men and women wriggled in among us just then, with arms and legs splayed and crisscrossed in such vicious tatters, that it was as if we saw, advancing across the sky, roughcut sentences in the world's first alphabet.

We couldn’t help but stop our march and stare. Then behind these murdered souls we noticed a handful of ghosts unlike any we’d seen before.

They weren’t dust, weren’t nameless. But they weren’t stars yet either. Chips of mica against the sky's black gravel, maybe, or the diamondlike refractions of rain-spatter on a pair of glasses. No doubt this newly discovered brand of dead couldn’t be seen from earth at all. But now that for the first time we actually stopped and studied the dark, instead of rushing through it brainless as a kid, we could begin to see what these strangers were. There were eight of them. Of course the precise number doesn’t matter, all that matters is that there were more than one, but at that moment we counted and doublechecked as if we’d just discovered numbers. We identified three women, five men. None had wounds that couldn’t have come from ordinary living and dying. Yet they were dead: visible only to other dead like ourselves, and capable of things only spirits could accomplish — such as what happened next.

These eight crammed each other into each other. Their movement didn’t look sexual, but plastic. It looked as if a mosaic were composing itself, a gold mosaic, the hot pieces running together so prettily against the black that we felt sorry for those back on earth who couldn’t see the show. And then came the real mystery. Out of nowhere — without even the cloud-trace of a warning that one of our kind would have given — an uncertain black density attached itself to the golden heat. A chunk of jet-stone, sucked out of nowhere, into the bright wheel of the eight others. The rest happened too fast for us to follow. Only, after an implosion whose blast even we could feel, after we took in the constellation round this newmade star and reckoned its place, we realized that we’d witnessed the birth of a church. Or rather the birth of Church in essence, the perfect and eternal thing, the one from which all other churches get their echoing soild swag.

“Ask it!” one of us shouted then. “Ask it now!”

The voice took us by surprise. We’d sunk into such unanimous unspeaking shock that we’d half-forgotten we were separate individuals, with separate voices.

“Ask it while it's weak!”

The speaker was a woman who’d been scalped. A corona of bloody hair exploded round the corners of her stripped skull, the tips curled slightly by the star's hot birth, and her eyes were wild with her new idea. She looked like the hieroglyph of a lion god.

“Ask it our names!” she shrieked.

Of course. So far as we knew, every star we’d gone after had been in place for an eternity. Every star had seemed like an entirely different order of being. But this one had come together out of bits and pieces we could list and count. Even its ebony core, though unknown, was just another part of the assembly. The rest — seen it with our own eyes — was human.

We wheeled our entire sandbox-full of dead round towards the new light. We lumbered over at full brokeback speed, tumbled to our knees before it. But this time we kept up our questioning. This time its silence wouldn’t make us despair. If for a minute some section of us grew uncertain, the hieroglyph-woman would rush over to rally that part again. “Tell us!” she’d shriek. “Tell us!”

When we noticed its newly-cooled surfaces had started to flicker, when we glimpsed again its mysterious black centerpiece, we knew we were about to hear something at last.

On my first deal, the star told us then, I still thought a million dollars was a lot of money.

How long did it take us to figure out what was going on? Some among us began to keep track of our visits, counting off each constellation, keeping records for the first time. But for most the trips remained a cramped and measureless enigma.

Look, a kiln-fired number 3 told us, the history is what you’ve got to watch. The history will tell you, demand always picks up at the end of the year.

Did we really hear such talk and not understand? Some of our number learned to distinguish the sky's pockmarks, to tell a planet from a sun and a sun from something larger. But most of us scrabbled on ignorant.

A star who sounded like a sage said: I always go by what W.B. tells me. I consider W. B. money in the bank. And W. B. says processing won’t dent the market for years.

W.B. Speaking to us, yes, they’d use a name. Then how could it have taken so long to come out of our ages in the dark? Some learned, kept track, even tried to explain. But so many others in the group remained fervent children on a hideously misled crusade. We’d gather and pray at every gleaming facade, but each soon proved to be the red keep of a slavetrader.

A firecracker star told us: When they see how the old money system hurts today's market, people are going to start getting out fast.

What these far branding-irons were doing, of course, was giving us advice. By now it seems so obvious. They were talking markets, talking demand, talking money, money, money. Advice! As if we were some greedy pack of living souls, as if we’d come to them merely strapped for cash! It's hard to believe that the revolt which eventually tore us apart didn’t come sooner.

As it was, instead, we suffered through the time of our mass dropouts.

How many? Easier to tote up the galaxies themselves. At least you knew that those milky tilt-a-whirls would remain visible for a while. But whenever another knot of our comrades gave up the chase, in a matter of minutes they’d have seeped out of sight into the surrounding blackness. We could never stop them. We’d try, rumbling and clattering to a halt. We’d gather by the hundreds around, say, a half-dozen of our comrades who’d started to weep in each other's arms ominously. But we could never get between them. Squealy and huggy as teenage girls, these soon-to-be-gone would congeal into something like a single wailing stone. At last the combined weight of their doubts would pull them out of our ranks, away into the night forever. And our dropouts were so quickly petrified, so completely changed, they didn’t leave behind even the cloud-trace of a goodbye one of us would have. Worse, it always took a while to get our main body once more under way. We’d always have to hang there and watch them disappear.

Naturally we could also see what this was doing to us. Whenever we drew close to our latest guiding light, we could see. A single glance along our shape, along our pitiless toughening and lengthening, a single sobering onceover to note how the earlier fat had gotten stretched taut — one look and we knew we were less. The replacements could no longer keep up with the casualty rate. Once a vast whorl of dust, we’d tightened into a coil and grown hot from the wear and tear. Against the night sky we must have looked like a thumbsmudge of loose smoke, or a faraway wheel of smoldering cosmic gas. A sense of self we’d never set out to gain — a sense of how little we amounted to.

Again, it's hard to believe our revolt didn’t come sooner. Worse and worse doubts set in. Our dropouts after all embraced each other lovingly; they sailed off as calmly as someone who’d died surrounded by friends and grandchildren. Meanwhile we were strung up like some young and eager heretic drawn and quartered for his beliefs, watching ourselves come apart. Our “main body” itself appeared to be the one who’d forgotten its purpose and fallen away. The exploded planet trailed behind its own satellite fossils. So at last we had to wonder: which of us followed the better way out? Which was the escape route the group should hope for, and which was the individual tragedy? Which, which took us nearer our names?

So at last, the revolt.

We’d grabbed the evening star itself. We’d held out through the moneywise self-promotions. We’d even shrugged off mention of another name, a Blynd or Blind who had something to do with an oil cartel. We hooked elbows and deployed our sinewy platoon in a human chain that circled the master, and our pleading grew so dense that we wondered if back on earth the yellow spot was still visible when the moon rose. Nor did we need any lion-goddess to rally us. We were a mob surrounding the sunstruck palace of the king and for the first time realizing our power. Louder, angrier, again. And after who can say how much hammering, who can guess how many repetitions… we saw the lowhanging planet go dim. The fabled love-goddess didn’t merely flicker, but in fact lost her heat altogether. With it she lost the perfect sphere she’d forged of herself as well. Her shape loosened till we could see that one person, folded over, composed both her arms. Another of the named dead had hooked its elbows round her neck and hung down her back as a robe. A face stared from each breast. Just visible through the astral gauze of these others, a coalish center of gravity on which the rest somehow balanced, lay the planet's queer black nut.

Meanwhile a green light started to ebb across the linked ectoplasm, as if cash were soaking in fabric solvent. We fell silent. She spoke. None of the goddess's faces looked at any of ours, but we could tell at once that this was a lone voice, a single speaker making an honest answer, rather than the group declamation of a star.

“A name —” But the loner gasped, and couldn’t go on.

“Revenge isn’t everything,” a second speaker moaned.

What? Those of us nearest the planet eyed each other, bewildered. What sort of final answer was that?

“A name,” the first managed, “will only get you so far.”

“Just try to be strong,” put in a third, weakly.

What were we hearing? Bubblegum sympathies. The cheapest kind of talk.

“If you make the effort,” said another of the goddess's people, “you’re bound to get somewhere eventually.”

At which, at last, we felt a break rip through our withered group. Our first deliberate break, our first act willful enough to be called adult. Though of course we had no idea how to take it at the time. We could be sure only of a heartsore rage at how these masters still tried to shrug us off. Our front ranks continued to clutch the wilting fragments of the planet, and at most we were puzzled to feel the sudden impossible room to move. Not till the screaming started did we begin to understand.

“Oh they’re all such big deals! All the Names. They’re such big, shiny deals!”

Another single voice. But not, we could see at once, from any part of the fogged-over evening star. By now those lay in a feeble green heap over their mute black core. So we nearest turned to look behind us, the lips of our wounds fluttering in the sudden roominess. We confronted ourselves. Ourselves, but this time not merely dropped out, lost, too sad. This time we faced revolt.

“Make the effort?” our rebels screamed. “We should make the effort?”

And merely by looking once more over these illfitted stones, their blood-smeared faces turning to surreal new national flags under the planet's green shine, we could understand what had them so enraged. Blood on every face, every face.

“Make the effort?”

One woman thrust out her chest, flaunting the crescent of welts where her breasts had been. She modeled for us in the starlight, the scars casting pale, horned shadows across her belly and neck. But then in mid-pose she was startled by a sob, by heavy tears, and she tumbled forward, she tottered back, folding at knees and waist and neck while repeatedly she slapped the word WHORE branded across her forehead. Others meanwhile showed off more of the same. The stumps of fingers, the stumps of tongues, the permanent ooze at the stump of an optic nerve at the center of a socket picked hollow. Farther up the line a man shook his penis viciously. We didn’t understand until the specks of broken glass started to sprinkle from the tip. Torture's leftovers: they’d forced a glass rod up his member and then worked it over with a mallet. We stared as the specks winked emerald an instant in the love-planet's dying glow and then… no, they didn’t “disappear.” No glimpse like that can ever disappear. Just the opposite. As we watched we knew that if we could ever again take up our chasing, the night's pretty latticework of symbols and forms would forever be dirtied by this cock's falling gristle. A nameless death immortal as a star that stood for a god.

We were shocked, we were desperate. We made the worst possible mistake. We began to argue with these ghosts. And:

“Don’t tell us we’ve got no choice!” The horrible thing about their screaming was that the only times we’d heard it before, we’d all been howling together at someone else. “It's the Names that don’t give us any choice. They’re just toying with us!”

But, we tried to say, the masters didn’t mean to —

“Masters? The last masters we had murdered us! These people are the enemy!”

But surely the truth had to come from them (here some of us jerked a thumb at the dismantled goddess behind our backs). Surely Truth itself was a hard slog, a prolonged evolution which, in time —

“Get out,” they said. “You’re starting to sound like Names yourselves.”

Already however it was they who were getting out. Already they’d dropped back so far that they began to lose themselves in the ruthless dark. We squinted, leaned forward from our threadbare ranks. But not one of us felt sure enough of his former soulmates to take a step in their direction. If they’d gone so far as to revolt, they were capable of anything. We strained our ears, but the last words came from a voice too well-hidden to place.

“If you get in our way again,” it said, “we’ll stop you once and for all.”

Understand then the raw universe that confronted us as, this last time, our remaining squad inched across the dark to discover who we were.

We didn’t know how our traitor comrades might stop us. We could only creep along wide awake, no longer chalk dust, now instead toughened to chalk. We let our fingers stretch and go webby like antennae, our eyes poke from our faces telescopically. So, full-grown and fully equipped at last, we few saw the limits of stars and sky. The universe, we saw, was a gourd. All these millenia of chasing, we’d merely rattled loose inside its hollow. A dustball inside a saddleback rind. Then we went frantic trying to doublecheck without dropping our guard. We threw a frightened glance behind us, and when had we ever imagined we’d care to look behind us? But there we only got worse proof of how little our travelling mattered. The love-planet, back there, was pulling herself together again. Tomorrow at sunset she’d rise again. The system remained unchangeable. And thus with our next inchlong forward sneak — realizing that even the fathomless black itself must be enclosed, that all was sealed in the universal rind — we saw that every one of our earlier dropouts must still be here. The hard logic of it made us click our joints together, terrified. Because between the speed of light and the ease of talk, every one of them must also have learned how little we’d come to. Still here and still travelsick, they’d seen us go on grinding against the night. They must hate us too.

Revolutionaries, dropouts, it made no difference. Every dark step here might turn up someone new to worry about. Every unlit fold might take us as implacably as the wrinkles snaking over a person's looks. Could we find no sanctuary?

We looked for help, as a final straw, among those shadowy newcomers who’d died with names. Those mica-chips against the black gravel, spatters of rain against our glassed-over eyes. We could see them quite clearly now. But all these new ghosts’ energies were given over to a crablike scramble for position. These sketchy apprentices clawed across the night's stick-figures; they pressed against each other with a terrible blind need to grow larger, to have the safety of numbers. And if one of the new dead found the least extra flyspeck of space for himself, his childish face would stretch in a machete grin.

The grip of enclosure, the grin of endless cold. Could we find no sanctuary? Then just here. . dead stop.

We’d pick up a low but unmistakable sound, a shuffle or scrabble in the dark nearby.

Dead stop. The one part of ourselves we allowed to move was our ears, which spread wide and turned outward like immense, rotating dishes. Nothing. Our nightscope eyes scanned, scanned. Nothing. But then a crack outfit doesn’t back away when the going gets a little complicated. A crack outfit doesn’t run scared. We kept up our alert. We did manage to tune in that low shuffle again, never mind how long it took, and a few additional web-fingered probes into the dark at last flushed out the kind of rocklike clump we’d been expecting. A stack of stones head-high, wide as my spread arms, and black.

Rebels? Dropouts? No matter. We hit them with every hard side we had. We got our full weight on them. When we started trying to find out the extent of the danger, asking questions, they proved hard to crack. But their silence didn’t stop us either. After all they’d been through interrogation before.

Our knees thickened, broadened, because in that shape they provided better support. Our feet stitched together in order to counterbalance our interlocked shoulders, and our heads bobbed as one back towards our waists. Maximum pressure on the prisoner. We gave it question on question bangbangbang, with so little room to breathe in between that we started to go red from the exertion, then to shimmer with a cauterizing white heat. The light intensified. It began to infuse our victim as well. Indeed before long we both would have burned explosively enough to gleam across a galaxy, except that some in our squad still misfired. One or two among us still lacked that final efficiency. But as the rest continued to get off questions as fast and hard as the work demanded, outlines of the piece beneath us started to appear. They were visible at least to us, from within our new-made shine. We saw their faces blown open by the firing squad's nervous coup de grace, their slashed throats and the burn spots where the electrodes had been strapped. All as expected since that first glimpse of the universe unwrapped. Next however — next, unbearably — we heard the new question we’d started to ask. By now our scrap of the dark had been fired into place once and for all, understand, and so it began to send back an echo.

Never mind who we are, we heard come back at us. Who are you? And who's that under you? And who's that under him? Look, never mind us; we’ll ask the questions here. Who are you?

I myself have since heard, often, the words used among the living whenever news comes of injustice and violent death. Despair, I’ve heard. Outrage. The childish I didn’t know especially. Yet I’ve begun to wonder lately if the words these bright labels are supposed to represent can ever tip my heart off-balance again. Yes that's the trial I must endure every moment, lately: the doubts about whether I still carry living feelings at all. I can’t be sure I’m still human, at all. I know only that when I heard those nameless insensibly give back the hard question my squad had come to, I found myself as well.

I didn’t drop away because I’d recognized my own kind, their agony this time my own doing. That would have been the human response, but no. I dropped because I didn’t belong. I mean I heard myself once more letting down the troop, failing to get off my question as I should have when the rote of interrogation came round again to me. I heard myself proven the nonfunctional piece. And no sooner had I realized my own voice was absent from that yowl of confrontation than, with the rubbery chill that spanks us when out of nowhere we get room to move, I found myself absent as well.

The living say, when the bad news comes, I suffer with them. But I suffered alone. I moved without even the will to move, that sleepless pal hauling you by the hair from crib to deathbed. I suffered alone. I wonder if I can so much as say I know what suffering means.

That I have since stumbled into a destiny of my own, managed actually to come across my own name, in no way eases my doubt. I came to my present place merely because after my involuntary fall I started to drift. Past shooting stars and speaking dark, I floated paralyzed by shame. In this condition I became an easy target for those still-living souls who practice the arts of communication with the dead. The mediums, the psychics — I became in fact the first one they’d ask. Because I’d travelled so far earlier, understand; because I‘d been through such a rough history. With that kind of background, I could go quiz some grand Name about the future at will, and I’d feel no worse during the visit than some toy bird might while it was fooled with by a sleepy king. I can’t be sure I’m still human at all.

So, once, I happened to work for a psychic named Miriam. She wasn’t special. Unless it matters that, as an older person, she seemed a little gentler. But as soon as I entered her trance, I found my name.

Blind luck? I can say only that since I discovered myself in Miriam I can’t work for anyone else. I know only that I’ve been part of her makeup since the morning she saw my frozen body, fetally curled, hauled out from a dumpster under her kitchen window. I’d died a baglady.

And prison? Torture? Once more I can’t say. A greater soul than I will have to flash the tablets on which are revealed the degrees of namelessness. I see nothing except what Miriam saw. Apparently before crawling into her dumpster, in desperation I’d padded my coat with paper. Not that anyone lent me a quarter for a newspaper; not that any super or liquor-store clerk on the block could spare me an empty box of good corrugated cardboard. No. The only paper I could get hold of was light-gauge stuff, covered with dates and details from history. The sort of flyer you can pick up for free all over Boston. So fetally curled, I spent the night in a metal box too large to keep a person warm. Yet I wonder how many who lived to see morning, that sunless December morning, realized their own blankets were in the end no better than mine. I wonder how many understood that the living can claim no better entitlement than the dead. Let a person chase the sun from horizon to horizon, still his day's work will result only in a few extra dollars to line his resting place. Dust to cover dust. I can see it no other way. After all I’ve travelled through every such flimsy self and place my times offered. Beginning as a nameless tribe forced from their homes by a glacier, I then was left thunderstruck by the world's first alphabet, made to suffer as a lost crusade, cut to pieces as a heretic, and next I knew the queerer destruction of a mob in revolt, tearing itself apart to find a better way. Finally I’d just tried to hold my direction as the latest news and technology set their traps. History's a meteor. Beside its millenia of hurtling, the house it drops on amounts to ashes, the gold letters on the door to dust. I can see it no other way. Only the stones last out the impact.

But my name, you ask finally? The handful of syllables I have to show for all my deaths, all my doubts? This answer comes hardest yet. I’ve stopped caring about my name. What matters to me instead is simply that Miriam learned it. Yes she learned the baglady's name, she approached me and spoke with me. Miriam did this even though her own rooms are always snug, her own clothes unfailingly light and fresh. I in turn spat out the name Vera and frightened her off with drunken flirty winks.

Vera. I don’t care to know more. I discover again I don’t care. Then does all our history, all each one of us has learned, move lockstep towards an ever-crueler question?

In fact my one glimmer of a more human certainty these days has to do with my former troop. That self I knew briefly between freezing and falling. I find I retain a living soul's wish to see them again — but only in the way a living soul can. After all I could still go visit, any time I chose. I could stop by that newborn star and hear it force its question down the world's throat. But what I wish now, maybe the one wish I’ve got left, isn’t a matter of visiting or listening. Miriam, I. . I just want to see them. To stare at the stars through your living eyes, rather than always from this stunned overlook that shows us nothing except the tortured and doomed; to gaze, without feeling driven to follow the dots across that icy random glitter, without getting desperate for some escape from the severe twinned outlines of one story and all history; to bear witness that eternity may be etched in better than brute black and white. But Miriam, you. . you won’t grant me my wish. You won’t release me from my doubt. You keep your eyes shut whenever I’m called on, the nameless here inside.

Whenever you’re faced with the dead and forced to speak in a voice not your own.

— John Domini

An Encounter

Did you tell him there were heavy tornado warnings? Did you tell him snow was expected? Did it ever make it? Did you describe the coastal hurricane? And the high pressure, could he relate to that?

Did you tell him you had read all his books? Did you tell him you had understood all his books? Did you confess to not understanding one? Didn’t you have one read to you? Does it make it any easier to understand? Did you tell him it doesn’t?

How well do you smile? That well? Did this communicate?

Did he respond to the new oil problem? Did he suggest old oil? Mention India? New Orleans? Was it, in his opinion, murder or democracy sales? That is, good for democracy sales? Isn’t he opposed to democracy sales, quivering excitedly when it’s mentioned, like someone hitting the old oil again? Did he demand you take down a call, his call to the people? You told him to get himself some other wimp, didn’t you? “Fetch Bas!” for example?

Did you tell him your father invented the pedal steel guitar? Did you tell him your mother read in her sleep? 85 % retention? Did you try the brother business? Did he think it was important? Did you mention your sister, who never — not once—made an irrational decision? Whose family is interesting? Did you ask him that?

And then did you tell him you liked sex? Did you like sex? And now? Did you mention that thing about ribbed, button-up sweaters? How well do you smile?

Was God invoked?

Or only the famous? Handel, Abba Eban, Dorothy Day? Did he make a response? Botticelli? Or no games? Did Gustave Flaubert find a place? Was the difference between the number of famous you could summon up and the number he could summon up sufficiently exciting? Painful? Is pain still the only form of excitement in social encounters? Did you relate the meaningless advice of Erasmus’s fool? Is Erasmus still broad enough to block further progress down a conversational route?

Did you tell him you harbored his books? What was his response? Did he appear creative, as the long afternoon of his life drew to a close, still creative, bowling everyone over, corrupting the waiters and bartenders, menacingly creative? Did you ask him when he was going to write his second book, now that he had written his first one four times? He wasn’t yawning then, was he?

Did you tell him he was a wretched goon-pig, as the hostess’s look trembled? Did you take the rings off your fingers and heave them in his face, crying, “There, that’s what you Yanks like,” crying, “Eat gold, Judas,” while the host gestured to his sons? Did you explain at the top of your lungs that he had stolen everything he had ever written, while he removed his glasses and with a white hand tucked his hair behind his ear? Did you continue explaining, “His work is so full of a borrowed cup here, a borrowed cup there, that if you dropped one of his books you would hear the sound of breaking porcelain”? Did you hurl him into the cold, unlit fireplace? How did you do with the host’s sons? And the hostess — into the fireplace?

What was his response? What happened? To five of the people with whom you discussed this encounter, did it seem rewarding? To three? Why bother about response? Most people were kind, weren’t they, rationalizing, saying, “It’s hard to talk in a snowstorm,” that sort of thing? Can response be categorized at all? Isn’t his response to your opening tip of the head a completely separate world from his response to your final goodbyes? Can there be such a thing as an entire response, certifiable as a receipt, or are there merely unrelated manifestations of a very simple, unconsidered awareness? And what does it matter? How many friends simply said you were left with a horse on you? Did you say there was another point they had left lying around, unnoticed? Did you take up this point, the point that the important thing is making an impression? Remaining unforgettable? Don’t these so-called “friends” realize how exciting, in his eyes, you might now be? “Watch out — this new one, needs polish — but so young! Devastating moves!”—could they relate to that? Could you? What point then, noting his response? What point caring? How subtly do you smile? What point, unless…you began with some idea in mind? Did you have something like that, some little personal device you wanted to leave him with? One of those? Can you or your friends pick this apart? Some little thing, like a coin going from your pocket to his, only the transaction wasn’t made, and you blame yourself, don’t you? You look at it, still in your hand, still in your pocket, burning its hole there, so to speak, you look at it there, known to only you alone, and you wonder, “Won’t it ever move?”

Some Numb Commitment

“What I have in mind,” Mr. Challait said, “is for you two kids to live in the house next door with my son Robbie. Robbie, well. Well I don’t want to mislead you.”

Robbie had gone mad, some years ago. Since then Mr. Challait had taken the case to a half-dozen institutions, had talked with doctors of every stripe and leaning, people from as far away as Tokyo and Buenos Aires. But at last he’d lost faith in professionals. “Any idiot can get a degree,” he said. So the father had decided instead to try a good diet, a place to live where Robbie would feel like part of the family, and a couple of guardians who wouldn’t come in with a lot of half-baked ideas they needed to work out even if it meant putting Mr. Challait’s son through Hell in the process.

We nodded. Or rather I nodded, ignoring Erin, who I’d glimpsed trying to catch my eye. Mr. Challait rang the engraved brass bell beside his place-setting at the dinner table. When the maid came, he asked to have his son brought in. Erin meantime was keeping her chin raised, her neck-muscles tensed more than ordinarily, trying to get my attention. But I went on playing the Young Man At An Interview. I wouldn’t look at her.

The son lumbered down from overhead somewhere. I remember that first visit as quick and obscure, the top of his lowered head sinking between his poor shoulders like one sketchy oval sinking into another, larger, sloppier one. He was no more than a few chalk lines melting together on a wet blackboard. I barely understood that he was an older person, in his late twenties or possibly even older.

But Mr. Challait, Senior — he was there in the flesh. After Robbie was ushered out again, his father’s natural attractiveness became that much stronger. Erin and I agreed later that he reminded us of the Headmaster at our school. And we, of course, still suffered vertigo from finding ourselves so unexpectedly on a mountaintop of obvious old money. When Mr. Challait twisted his body to speak with the maid, the inner lining of his vest glimmered like antique silverware. Even his speech rolled out of him with the dignity of brass beds on casters. The way he suspended his name before us so we wouldn’t miss the pronunciation: “Shall-I.” The way he spoke the word “maybe” with the accent on the second syllable. And in every room we’d visited there had hung another mirror at least a yard square, framed in scrollwork that had been burnished mahogany, or trimmed in red and ocher, or left alone as simple fierce gold.

“I can understand,” Mr. Challait was saying, “if you don’t want to be a part of this. I can understand a young couple preferring to be more, ah, more in the world.”

To make it seem as if I was thinking it over, I gave Erin the look she’d wanted. One long moment of eye contact and mysterious choices already made.

Most people aren’t married at our age. That was all we had to offer. In our case, the dogwood of high school graduation and the magnolia of marriage had scattered on consecutive weekends. Not even my mother had had much to say about any trouble we might run into afterwards. Our parents — hers are divorced; my father is dead — made the arrangements but kept out of the way. Though Erin’s mother did make some trouble at the wedding reception. Her mother really got on us, for a couple minutes there. “Bright boy,” I remember her screeching at me, “oh you’re much too cool to let it show, but I know what’s going on inside.” The only drink at the reception was a champagne punch, yet her mouth had reeked of whiskey. “My daughter,” she’d shouted, looking suddenly very much like Erin as her face came at me, “she is so stubborn, she is so stubborn—” and then Erin’s father had stepped in. The rest of the way both families bent over backwards to make sure things went smoothly. I can’t count the number of times we were told we’d made the right decision, not going to college. As if there’d been any decision about it, any conclusions first weighed and then assented to, about college or about any of the rest.

Our eye contact, at Mr. Challait’s table, had grown to something larger. Erin has such bony cheeks, such intelligent lines at the eyebrows and the lips. Between that face and my own we had been the Bobbsey Twins of Cool. Yes long before her mother’s eruption over the wedding cake, I had learned how uncomfortable an adult was made if anyone under twenty kept his mouth shut and his face relaxed. Much too cool to let it show: I may have baited the woman. At our school, in fact, Erin and I had made a private game of our looks. We would paint our faces white and walk around the quad in ponderous hand-me-down Chesterfield coats. Like two ghosts, “incapable of human feeling,” we’d glide in our padding and speak to no one. Then late on one such painted night, Erin had taken my hand conclusively and led me into a closet off the main kitchen, a walk-in closet where the extra mattresses were kept. Without taking time even to clean off the whiteface, I’d fallen beside her in that airless hold. And Erin also had been the one to think of what we could do for a job. She’d found out soon enough how the riptide murk of my days and hours since my father died had floated me far beyond the reach of any college application. She’s like most girls who keep a journal, snooping, snooping. So Erin had let her own notification deadlines pass (I think Columbia was one place that had accepted her), and instead took some of the wedding money to run an ad in the better magazines. YOUNG RESPONSIBLE MARRIED COUPLE will cook clean house babysit… We received Mr. Challait’s appointment card before June was half over.

The rich man rustled his napkin. A genteel noise, but one plainly meant to be heard. Like that, as if with this napkin Mr. Challait had yanked loose my backbone, all my feelings turned to panic. My stare went out of focus. I was no longer pretending, no longer merely making it seem I didn’t know about his offer. The man could pay for any doctor in the world, and he was throwing his son at two kids. His full-grown madman son. In that one glimpse earlier, I’d seen Robbie weighed more than Erin and I put together. And worse yet, I myself…with the insurance coming I could pay any tuition in the country and I was…my fists, below the table, pressed knuckle to knuckle painfully. I blinked my eyes into focus again, looked to Erin again. Nothing? Her mouth was shut, her face relaxed. Nothing there?

“Ah,” Mr. Challait said, “if you’d like to discuss this privately—” Erin lifted her chin; nothing was about to speak for me once more.

“We’ll take it,” I said roughly. “We’ll take the job.”

Our goods filled two shopping bags and a trunk that had belonged to my father. Mr. Challait’s two homes were on a spread of a couple hundred acres stowed away beyond the reach of highways but nonetheless not far from the train to New York. We drove, however, a secondhand Duster, yet another gift. A wedding’s presents shape what you do as stubbornly as the ring squeezes your finger. We drove, up shoulderless roads where the heavy branches of June pines came down after the car passed, like the paws of a hungry creature who couldn’t quite gauge when we’d be in reach.

That very afternoon, for the first time, we learned the full ruin of Robbie’s character. We were carrying the trunk through the front door, the shopping bags still in the car, when the madman took off out the back. He was in pyjamas. On queerly stiff legs he ran to a chainlink fence Mr. Challait had put up around three sides of the house. Robbie ran, in fact, as if he wanted to reach the fence rather than the open side. Erin dropped her end of the trunk first. By the time I got there Robbie was lying face-down in the dirt, the twisted bottom of the fence-chain clutched tightly in his hand. I mean that he had his naked palm closed, tightly, around two of those jagged steel tips which poke down all along the bottom of fences like that. Blood was seeping between his fingers. And as I came closer — slowly, wanting to put my arms around Erin, not wanting the first touch to betray any fright — I could hear Robbie counting by fours.

Our next step seems to have come naturally. At the time, at least, it felt natural as our asking Mr. Challait to fence off the remaining open side of the yard. Erin and I decided we could analyze and classify Robbie’s sickness. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. The man did, in fact, eventually recover.

At the time, anyway, it seemed it could be done. Analyzing Robbie, those early weeks, seemed as likely as our being there in the first place. So: what are the usual questions asked? From the maid, in bits and pieces, we learned that Robbie had been a good enough boy. He wasn’t so tough and out-of-doors as you’d like a boy to be, the Irish maid said, but he had a touch of the artist in him. Not once had he so much as harmed the hair on a fly until he was sent away to college. Mr. Challait himself explained the rest. “His mother had passed away only a few months before, you know.” Heart attack, the father said, a simple heart attack. “Well, six weeks after school started I had to go up there and find him in the university police station, and he was banging on the walls of his cell with a camera she’d given him.” The ringing of the lens guard against the sheet metal still came to him in dreams, the father admitted. “And there was a boy in the infirmary with a broken leg that Robbie, ah, had given him. That afternoon, that very afternoon, my son was in Boston talking to a man with so many degrees on the walls of his office you wondered what he was trying to prove. I should have known right then that route would get me nowhere.” But for more than ten years Robbie had lived at the mercy of those degrees, doped up and slipped aboard jet after jet, nodding among uneasy crowds of executives. But always the oh-so-impressive degree crumbled before Robbie’s madness. “Nothing,” Mr. Challait said. “Every time, there was nothing there for him.” By the time he reached the last institution, Robbie’s pants size was a full foot larger than it had been when he’d left for college.

At Christmastime, when Mr. Challait had come for a visit with an armful of presents, his son had started to run away from him. This happened in the parking lot. Robbie had run from his father, and also from the nurse who’d brought him outside. He’d run towards the gate. Then after maybe twenty steps the aging boy had collapsed, bewildered and gasping for breath. That afternoon, “that very afternoon,” Mr. Challait had his son back where he would feel like a member of the family.

“And if there’s one thing I know about,” Mr. Challait concluded, stroking the front of his vest significantly, “it’s dieting.”

“Say what you like,” the maid said, “but the boy’s lost thirty pounds since he’s been home.”

But whenever Erin and I tried to examine Robbie on our own, without anyone else lending a hand, what we noticed most was something else the maid had said: a touch of the artist in him. The man had sensibility. This despite continual pimples and cold sores, despite a flabby hipslung posture that would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so obviously, terribly impossible for him to correct. But if we asked him about how he felt, the answers we got were intriguing rhymes, sung in an operatic falsetto. His table manners were delicate and he drank without slurping. And if we asked him what he wanted to do — what you truly wanted, Robbie — he always reached for a camera. Taking pictures was the one pastime that brought him anywhere near enthusiasm. With a camera in his hands, Robbie could even stand up straight. Mr. Challait therefore had collected dozens of the solid black machines for his son. Literally, dozens. We found cameras in the salad bowl, cameras lens-down in the tub of shaving cream, cameras stuffed inside the large athletic socks that Robbie masturbated into. His darkroom then came as a surprise, an ordinary panelled closet downcellar. But after the first moment’s astonishment, standing together in the darkroom doorway, Erin and I noticed the dust that lay over everything. Even the developing pans had turned gray with dust. Robbie instead had his rolls of film sent out to the town newspaper, where one of the people in layout was an old family friend. The contact sheets that came back bore ruined shot after ruined shot, nondescript lumps out of focus or empty squares of white. Yet every once in a while there would turn up a miracle. Every once in a while we’d discover a razor-sharp and expertly composed shot of Erin and myself. Robbie would always catch us in some corny domestic pose. Erin and I might stand filling the flower vase with water, each holding the other’s free hand. Even the one contact sheet still left, now, has a shot like that.

Thus it wasn’t a vacancy, beneath the sore moonscape that Robbie presented to the world. There’d been something of substance betrayed when the connections went wrong. Yet precisely because Robbie was a complicated man, soon enough the thought of understanding him began to look grimmer. Too many wires needed untangling, too many levels of language needed unearthing. And Erin and I, our energy waning, his complications mounting — Erin and I felt the few reliable specs of our personalities going soft.

Grimmer: we became careless. We made some bad mistakes.

The first came when once we spoke about Robbie in the third person, while he was there listening. By itself, talking in this way caused no great disruption. Sometimes it seemed to irritate him, but mostly he’d let it pass. We must have been into our second month there by then. Erin and I sat with knees touching on the living-room sofa, and the sun through the front windows was a sleepy-making August sun. Robbie muttered and snapped photos, and the mood was romantic. Erin hitched her breasts in a way she knew I’d notice. She told me that on hot days like this one her older brother used to make her get in a “Kissing Box” for the neighborhood kids.

“Just a big corrugated-cardboard box,” she said, smiling with her lips exaggerated. “But the open end was towards the wall, so that nobody else could see when a boy went in there to get a kiss. Really. Simple but effective, Mr. Bond. My brother charged a nickel.”

“Er-rinn.” I was playing hard to get. “Is this the kind of talk for in front of Robbie?”

“No. No, I’m saying my brother was just like Robbie. He liked to have the kissing and the sexy stuff around, but he would never get in a box like that himself.”

I had to laugh. But just before Robbie started shouting, the cool planes of Erin’s face broke up and I watched her realize she’d said too much.

“Loving is juvving! Loving is juvving!” Robbie let the camera drop, knocked it into a corner with one awkward foot. “It is. But I’ve never juvv, j-judged anyone. Never never never never, always let everyone judge…me!”

Without the camera’s counterbalance, he’d gone hipslung again, his wrists beind his pelvis. His head looked distant. The lower lip hung trembling.

“I’ve never been married, either,” he said.

Then he was turning to the fireplace in the wall behind him, maybe so we wouldn’t see him cry, or maybe so he could add some queer extra dramatic gesture to his latest outburst in operatic falsetto:

“Oh kiss me,

kiss

me, I’m a bee—

Then you’ll lose your

beak

in my

tree

!”

But on “tree” he squatted suddenly, a violent move, a more athletic move than I would have thought possible for him. And he started whaling away at the fireplace with one of the andirons. The brass made a lousy whining clang against the brick.

I was already on my feet. Mr. Challait himself had said the first rule was never to let Robbie get worked up. We had Librium, Thorazine, even a straitjacket. But somewhere along the way during the last couple moments, though with Robbie on one side and the sun on the other I hadn’t noticed, Erin had taken my hand. Now she held me in place.

“Let him,” she shouted over the banging, “let him, please.”

She sounded almost in tears herself. I tried to turn and look at her but instead Erin stood up beside me, softly crushing the bent fingers of the hand she held between her breasts and my own. She touched her mouth to my ear.

“He needs to let it out,” she whispered. “It’s what he could never do before.”

“Uh—” She flexed the fingers that held my fingers; I felt it between my legs.

“What do we care about the rules? Let him, let him, really. We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to break the rules.”

The single clear thought in my head was that, when Erin had said “he” in the last sentence, she’d meant Mr. Challait.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Robbie won’t hurt anything. Let’s leave him alone and go upstairs.”

So this was our first serious mistake, allowing Robbie to think that smashing things was acceptable behavior. I should say too, though, that he did look harmless. For instance this time with the andirons, Robbie looked almost businesslike. Methodically his shoulders humped and went slack, humped and went slack, while with each blow the brass changed shape. So we let him be, our first mistake, and then tiptoed upstairs straight into our second. We ducked into our bedroom. We turned the noisy iron lock and went at each other. Knowing exactly what we were doing, Erin and I took it right out of control. Even the pause to slip on the rubber became charged with the determination of foreplay. Call it an outbreak, a mutual fit. In any case these gasping explorations back and forth across our locked room occurred more and more often as the second month dragged on into the third, as the hope of knowing Robbie better first started to turn frightening and then was dropped. We were trying to take our minds off the problem; we were trying to drown in each other’s mouths. Rough and dedicated encounters. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. Because where could we two ever have learned what our daily lovemaking would do to the loose-necked enigma in the rooms beneath? Even at school Erin and I had stayed away from the psychological stuff, the sensitivity sessions and rap sessions and skull sessions. These were always run by the Masters anyway. It was like strip-mining the ego. Erin and I instead had chosen the Independent Study Projects. It was forever said about each of us that we were “the precocious type.” We do like to read, and Erin keeps her journal. So what did we know about how our mystery prisoner would take the bumps and bangs above stairs that oddly echoed his below?

Common sense, someone else might say. Simple common sense should have told Erin and me that we were heading out awfully far over a surface that was awfully thin. But what did common sense ever have to do with the situation at Mr. Challait’s? Conclusions, decisions, all brands of being sensible here meant nothing beside the slack-bellied wreck whose groanings made us doubt our very names. Here the only rule which could be counted on was behind the bedroom’s lock. By the onset of fall weather, I could no longer bring myself to wonder for any length of time about Robbie and how he was made. My curiosity had instead been transferred to the journal Erin continued to write in night after night. She’d ordered me never to look.

So I looked, on the first night that was truly cold. Erin was standing beside the kitchen stove as if she’d never leave it, bending away from me over the heat to study her face in the chrome panel where the dials were. I went out to set the table and wound up in the bedroom alone. Her journal, one of those 1940’s black-and-white composition books, sat on the lower shelf of her nightstand under a magazine. It was the magazine, I think, that hardened me enough to look. I knew she’d written in the journal since she’d last read the magazine; I knew precisely what the routine had been last time we were in here. But she’d slipped the journal underneath because of some leftover schoolgirl impulse. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked. I hadn’t turned five pages before I got even angrier. The entries seemed to be, without exception, about Robbie. I shifted my legs and ran a finger down the pages, skimming lines to find my name. Not there. Not there. But Erin could go on under three separate date headings about Robbie’s bee-in-a-tree song:

Human beings see the whole tree, the

whole leafy outer surface, but to see

the tree from the inside, the way a

bee does, to see the bark change color

and to see the aphids crawling over

the knots, to circle and circle and

still

not see the whole tree in the

human way, this requires a drastic

change in point of view.

I lay there stunned. So much thought. So much exploratory digging. In fact, I had to do some internal explorations myself, had to poke around considerably before I discovered the pebble I felt under my heart and identified it as betrayal. I lay there feeling betrayed. Therefore — and because the chill had made the house quieter, the wood in the stairs less responsive to the pressure of steps — I didn’t notice Erin’s coming until she was in the room.

“Tommy!”

If in my life there has ever been the kind of shouting and argument to make me think that my experience was going from bad to worse, that the next explosion would be the last straw, that in fact left me looking forward to the tragic breakdowns now sure to come, looking forward because at least the end would decide, would decide — if in my life there’s been one brush with the apocalypse, it came that evening as the dinner grew cold on the table downstairs. Erin lost control. The knob on my wrist ached for days from protecting myself against the lamp she threw. I knew I’d done wrong but I’d never expected such bile, such unpredictable whines and shouts. “It’s private!” was her main point. “It’s like, like how I can’t be positive with a diaphragm because I’m sort of between sizes down there, that’s how private this is!” More than once I saw not Erin but Erin’s mother, thrusting her boozy, drawn face at me. Meantime, after the throwing of the lamp, Erin kept taking up other items but then setting them down, dress shoes and those woven-wood jewelry boxes and the clock-radio. As she moved, reflected in the dark windows, for a moment I saw her differently: a slight-shouldered teenager throwing a tantrum over some little thing she’d believed was the whole world. But Erin began to move faster. With locked knees she went stutter-step through the dreck of our bedroom, touching and touching as if to fix her location. Somewhere along the way her insults expanded into anxiety. “One place where I can say anything, one place where I can let go and trust things—” this I’d stolen from her. With each chew of her lower lip her tone changed again. Yes and the change always seemed hooked, I‘ll admit, to some muscle in my own face. I may have baited Erin. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked and downplayed the whole scene, never mind that it was the first real argument of my life. The careless looks I’d mastered at school were set in place, defenses I would have thought were as hopeless against Erin as studded bronze shields against nerve gas. Yet it worked. These rundown old bogeymen left Erin backed against the vanity table. And when I at last got a complete sentence of my own in, the table’s mirror started to rattle.

I pointed out only that the entries I’d seen were all about Robbie. What was so private there? The vanity mirror rattled so loud I thought it would break. Then Erin’s tears started to come.

“I feel guilty about him — can’t you understand I feel guilty about him?” She was bent forward slightly over her hands, looking out the opposite window and crying. “I know I shouldn’t have said what I did, I know I talked like he was a piece of the furniture, I know that. But there’s nothing I can do, he just gets scarier and it always feels worse—”

I understood what was expected of me. I should clap my arms round her, take her face against my neck, whitewash the entire scene.

“I’m so sure something terrible’s going to happen,” Erin said.

I didn’t move from the bed. When Robbie started to howl, downstairs, I slipped out and left her standing alone.

Then, our worst surprise. For weeks grinding on into months, nothing happened.

Erin’s and my escapes to the bedroom did slowly intensify, and Robbie’s smashing likewise picked up steam. Maybe we just weren’t used to the waiting, the way irrationality must permeate the spine vertebra by vertebra. But I recall September and October differently. They felt blocked. Each afternoon following lunch, Erin would plod through her repertoire at the piano, five fugues by Bach. Five pieces of music that fell back on themselves every time they inched forward. Each Sunday about eleven my mother would call, and I’d do my best to wriggle away from her hints about having a baby. “Come on, Tommy,” she’d say, “this isn’t all happening in the mind.” I would chuckle gamely. And as I looked past the sweating phone, looked down between my own unathletic knees, I’d see my old house as it must be for Mom. A scarred welk-shell in which at every turn of the tunnel stood another bleary ghost. Come November it was only a year since my father had died. And as Mom went on teasing, as all her bright lines were eroded and the naked plea beneath revealed, I understood also why my mother hadn’t warned me about the dangers of a marriage so young. But…young? Erin and I were young? We lived like two fogies on a pension. Even our meals were mushy as if we wore dentures, since no knives were allowed in the house. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. The living-room flower vase, the one in Robbie’s only remaining photo of us, was so large you could waste an afternoon making sure it stood precisely in the middle of its table. The Girls In Apartment 3-G could take all morning. Plus there were the letters from Sylvia, Torsten, Cynthia, Nick, and Kimberly; there were the letters to Torsten, Nick, and Susan.

“If we weren’t married,” Erin told me once as she thumbed a stamp into place, “we wouldn’t be writing to each other.”

Meantime between us there kept coming Robbie, our very queer lull. Our pocket of thought, loud and charged with sensation, but nonetheless a lull. At dinner for instance, if Erin and I sat gumming another conversation into its nastiest shape, he’d whip something off the table and break it. He could shatter a plate so thoroughly that later on Erin and I would find pieces under each other’s clothes. If that didn’t get us up and bustling, if that didn’t at least change the subject to a dustpan and brush, soon enough Robbie would be at it with something bigger. He’d go get a camera and pound one of our dining-room chairs to pieces. A few days later, a few weeks later, the smashing would have picked up still more steam. Once a chair’s leg came off, Robbie would punch it foot-first through the nearest wall — a much more complicated business than the earlier flap about breaking the rules. He might tear the stuffing out of the sofa cushions only to replace them with the plastic seats ripped off the kitchen chairs.

“He has all the instincts,” Erin said once, during the first week of November, I think. “All the natural manly instincts.”

Yes in the glue of that autumn, Robbie offered unpredictable rising bubbles. Certainly Erin seemed to be forever bringing him up. Talking about his dead Mom, his protective shell of flab, his talent. It was as if now that I’d looked in her journal she’d decided I should know exactly what it was she spent all her time writing. Thus the queer lull could become queerer still. Talk about Robbie’s eruptions would end in one of our own. Erin would start going after me again about broken trust and I’d let my face do my dirty work. And then when Erin had slammed the bedroom door shut between us, when she’d thrown the lock, when through that barrier she’d shouted at me, “Why don’t you go? Why don’t you do something for once and go?”—when that hard place was reached, it always seemed that Robbie had come to stand in the hallway beside me. He might have started out by tearing apart something on the back lawn; in fact, by the middle of October it took only a single harsh word between Erin and myself to get him going. But before long his lumbering ostrich-step would echo up the stairwell. He’d slump into place, beside me but head and shoulders above me. Dully eyeing the bedroom doorknob.

Myself, I started to muscle him around. I never let Erin touch him, but it became a rare day when I didn’t at least hook his collar, jerk him down to my eyes’ level. God, the vapor in his look. Then what was he after, to come staggering more and more often between us? I never let Erin touch him. But I said some mean things to him, maybe a few obscenities even, trying to get a response.

No doubt we should have asked for help. There were any number of potential last straws. This smashed pitcher, that piece of upholstery gutted and scattered over the rug. But though Erin may have let the question dangle once or twice, I never picked it up. Certainly neither of us admitted anything directly. Instead we worked extra hours with plastic and putty to repair the holes Robbie had punched in our life. Instead we hid what we could from Mr. Challait and the maid. And most of all instead of asking for help we kept returning to the bedroom. Sometimes with disagreements still in our teeth, sometimes with no better excuse than the paper’s being read and the mail’s being late. Yes, these visits did slowly intensify. The morning we were to go pick up the Thanksgiving turkey, the maid had to ring our doorbell a half-dozen times. I can look at it clinically nowadays; I can say that Erin and I were learning about the timing of orgasms and so forth. A person with a technical way of looking at things would say we were getting better with each fuck. But the experience itself was brutal and way past analysis. Across acres of fields we’d discover low walls of human flesh. And these explorations were made room for more and more often, and we came up with all kinds of excuses for Mr. Challait. We assured him the broken windows were no bother. We never let him see how Robbie had trashed the darkroom downcellar. We pointed out that his son had some vendetta against the property, not against us, so that in fact Robbie was no more dangerous than a dog who needed to be housebroken. Finally, we would stand up to the father and insist that this was what he’d hired us for. We’d been brought here in the first place because the conventional thinkers had failed. For several long moments, the rich man would measure us with an impassive look. Eyes low-lidded, double-chin just visible. Then he’d nod. In the end nothing was allowed to stop us.

But no. No, that’s a lousy way to put it. Maybe “nothing was allowed to stop us,” but Robbie and Erin and I never for a moment had the sense that we were worth stopping. Never for a moment, never for months. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. If I could make these three words into a dumb hit single and play it a million times a week, you might get the idea. Our calendar seemed a warehouse, stacked with empty boxes. The evenings were the worst. More and more I’d find myself out in one of those sticky inflatable plastic pillow-chairs, out on the front stoop. Looking beyond the chainlink fence, beyond the uncolored and half-dressed trees. I’d feel the restlessness of fall. School was underway; my father had packed the trunk for me and winked a sardonic, affable goodbye till Christmas. Or I would sense Erin’s birthday, coming up or not long past. A chip-on-the-shoulder mystic at school had told me once that Erin was “classic Scorpio,” but I preferred to think about the other implications of someone’s being born on Hallowe’en night. And then while picturing an infant girl surprised by masks and crepe paper, or while frightened boneless once again by the image of that grown man whose wink had gone to worms, then from my chilled and flaccid seat eventually I’d come to notice Robbie, who was taking another of his rackety naps on the sofa in the living room behind me, our Robbie, whose life between sleep and waking was the same slack cocoon of nightmare. My own tears would start to come. I’d have to run indoors, upstairs. Without turning on the bathroom light, with the colors of sundown burnishing the medicine-cabinet mirror, I stripped. Crying without end. I went on to the shower, crying face to the washcloth, as I had done morning after early morning a year ago in the shower stalls at the dorm. There no one would know about me.

I’m not so smart. I’m not so good in bed as it may have seemed till now. I’m not the kind of person who would marry a high-school friend out of honest loneliness or because I felt scared about the future. I’m only restless. No one at home half the time and always very restless.

Until the morning I left the bedroom door open. The lock unturned, the door itself ajar.

I’d ducked out in mid-foreplay, on the old child’s pretext of needing a glass of water. I’d stopped the door with my heel and fallen on Erin too quick for her to notice.

In letters since, letters from friends, we’ve learned that this experience is common enough among people our age. The roommate comes back to the dorm a day earlier than expected; the parents decide to beat the snowstorm home from the party. And always my friends write that they were surprised by how quickly they returned to dry reality. But sex is fragile, the web of mood far more important than the muscle and mucus clutching beneath its spidery reach. After Robbie crashed into our bedroom, Erin and I both recovered fast — though I believe she had the edge on me. I felt her hipbones jerk out of rhythm while I was still lost in the dark acreage between us. “Robbie!”

He was on all fours, in pyjama bottoms. Apparently his first move once he’d got in the room had been to pull over Erin’s vanity table. Now under his chest, his face, his crooked fingers, there lay scattered pieces of the broken vanity mirror. And over the beefy white arc of one shoulder was strung, of course, a camera. Also his mouth still hung open. From our angle his tongue was visible, reflected in a shard of broken mirror the size of a hunting knife.

“Did you leave the door unlocked?” Erin was asking me. She had the covers pinned up under her armpits already. “Did — did you?”

But before I could answer — something very strange. Robbie sang a snatch of a song we recognized. “It is time,” he sang roughly, “for you to stop all of your sobbing.” We’d never have thought he paid any attention when we listened to the radio. And then Robbie broke down himself. Suddenly weeping, he let his face sink onto the broken glass. His spine drooped, his big rear poked up sloppily, till he looked like an overstuffed old chair or sofa gone over onto its front. He cried like nothing we’d heard from him before. Till now his tears had come in mere childish squalls, pouts and sniffles and I-banged-my-tootsie: a distraction like his violence, but also in the same way finally of no harm. On this morning, however, Erin and I felt our naked shoulders prickle at the sound of full-grown grief. Great extended sobs, cracked all over, came as if dragged from beneath sediment that had coated the bottoms of his lungs for years. He rolled his forehead over the bits of mirror till one piece left a white scar across the floorboards. His noise made the windows buzz.

“Robbie,” Erin said in a different voice, “don’t cry.”

“Quiet,” I said. “I know what he’s thinking.”

And maybe I did, maybe, because otherwise there’s no good reason for the way that sentence galvanized him. Robbie sat up. He went back on his haunches, showing us an impossible face, where tears mingled with blood from the new cuts on his forehead. Showing us also that beneath his elastic pyjama waistband, against his belly, he’d tucked what appeared to be a sizable pad of stiff construction paper. What? When he yanked the pad out from under his waistband, his eyes were enormous with decision. The paper actually rattled. What was it? Then in another moment he’d picked up one of the larger mirror shards, and clumsily Robbie began to hack apart what he’d smuggled into our bedroom under his belt; the contact sheets of his mad negatives.

“Stop!” He was weeping but giving orders. “Stop! Your! Sobbing!”

I realized that, for some time now, Erin had been squeezing my arm. My elbow burned already from the pressure. I shook free by thrusting that arm across her breasts, as if to protect her.

“Get out of here, Erin. I’ll handle Robbie.”

In fact by the time I’d finished saying that my feet were on the floor. My solid calm voice, the solid cool floor.

“Tommy—” Erin’s voice on the other hand was changing at practically every new syllable.

From the foot of the bed I picked up the robe I’d worn for my faked trip to the bathroom. Seemed like hours ago, and hours ago too I’d peeled off my rubber. It was pleasant to feel the inside of the robe’s sleeves again tickling the insides of my arms.

“Tommy,” Erin said, “Look, look I know I’ve been teasing you, kind of testing you lately but please, look—”

I pressed the back of my arm against her breasts again. The mattresses I’d tumbled into so many months ago, tumbled into tricked by paint, were at last giving way. The truer stuff was making itself felt. And so I took my place beside Robbie. I enjoyed the swag of my genitals as I spread my knees against the floor and I felt my sinuses wince at the unwashed smell of his hair. Behind me Erin continued to natter. But I’d mixed it up with Erin before. I got one good deep breath before my chest was dented against Robbie’s shoulder blade. He sat on his heels now, hunched forward again, hunched over his butcherwork. I went for the half nelson. Robbie slammed me onto the floor so quick I didn’t notice when Erin left.

Perhaps that hadn’t been her talking I’d heard a moment earlier. Perhaps it was only the clock-radio going off at the hour we’d set for waking up.

Look one way, there was the blunt camera he’d brought in with him; look the other, there was his outsize slice of mirror. I lay on my back on broken glass. But even as my awareness flooded with dread about getting cut where I couldn’t see, I felt also how I was trapped. The front of my robe had opened and he’d straddled me. His weight on my intestines cut my breath to shreds while something loose inside his pyjamas tickled my diaphragm awfully. My left arm was helpless against one corner of the vanity table and my right, he ground into the floorboards beneath his knee. Smothered. Truly roped in for the first time. Even my face was covered, spattered with his blood and sniffling. I had to blink and I saw him go crazy in strobes, my view drawn up closer and closer in a flickering pus-colored montage. The red hood of his open mouth, the dented metal walls of his back teeth, the spit-sheen from the tunnel that led in still farther. And now Robbie moved. With another of those weeping groans, that noise which seemed kicked from under his deepest sediments, he brought nearer the length of glass in his hand. He brought it between our two faces and turned it slowly. My breath made the mirror darken.

“Robbie—” But what could I ever say to him?

I actually hit on a plan, then. I started to think I could buck up my middle hard enough to get him off me. And I was willing to believe the mirror wouldn’t hit anything vital, I’d gotten that desperate, when over the unending grind of his sobs I heard the noise on the stairs. Erin banged into the room. I could see enough to tell her arms were full. And her robe too had opened; catching a glimpse of one thigh, I suffered an absurd pang of want. But the thigh moved, my wife moved, I couldn’t see much besides the blur of a shape like a dump-bucket, and then with an explosion of water Robbie’s weight was off me, his reflecting weapon was out of my face. I sat up wet and uncertain.

My deep breaths still tasted of his sickness. The renewed circulation of blood froze my elbows and the palms of my hands. Erin wasn’t allowing anyone time to calm down.

Of course time itself was a different shape by now, every available fraction of a second cram-packed.

I discovered her behind me. I felt a knee or a touch at my back — or was it blood? Had my back got cut? In any case I whipped my head round — she was holding the living-room flower vase at waist level. Around it her body appeared drawn, nervy, and her robe was a single hard red. Even as I understood she’d used the vase to drench Robbie and me, she turned away from us and set the thing on the bed. She started to tug the covers straight around it. I’d just had my life saved, but here my perspective still felt unsettled, unrelieved, and my neck hurt from turning so fast to look at her. Now the sound of the bedclothes stretching — so pointlessly, with that mammoth urn in the way — was as bad as anything I’d heard since I’d left the door open.

“Robbie,” Erin began, “I know you’re really just sitting back in your easy chair.” She was moving more than necessary; her robe bent back my arm-hairs. “I know we’re supposed to get all upset over you, and you, you just go right on sitting back in your easy chair.”

I blinked vase-water off my eyelashes. Again the strobe effect. But now it was Erin who flickered, Erin’s looks coming round in montage as she turned to confront Robbie. Her breath was short as if she’d been in here wrestling with us.

“You could still jump up right now, you could jump up and get us both.” I touched her thigh, but she wouldn’t stop. “But you can’t be bothered. You can’t make up your mind.”

The way Erin pulled together her robe — with one neat hand to her throat, a womanly gesture — was so at odds with the shakes that got into every syllable she spoke.

“I’m sick of worrying about you. I know you can’t ever hurt us.”

No time to calm down. No choice except to see again about Robbie. But there, God, the shock of my relief. Robbie looked finished for the day. He lounged, with knees crookedly splayed, against one edge of the fallen table. In those speckled pyjamas he might have been a caterpillar drowned in the rains (plus possibly even then I was responding in part to some hint of the change in him, some newly calm line in his forehead or in the drooping oval of his chin). But Robbie also was holding another piece of mirror. Smaller than his last, yes, and that one detail alone couldn’t change his battered general appearance. Nonetheless, however, he was frowning into the glass. His knuckles were trembling around it. And Erin, worst of all…to hear my wife’s exasperation changed my thinking finally…Erin, you kept going after him. When you stamped your foot I could feel it right up my spine. That familiar stubborn rant cleared out whole seconds in the otherwise bumper-to-bumper cram of my fright. But Erin, no. No, there’s nothing there. I admit I’d been the one to let him in — I mean I can see what you had in mind exactly. Because why else would I leave the bedroom door open? I too couldn’t live any longer with these blind household cycles, sex and damages and do-it-again. I too couldn’t stand it. And Erin — I’d mixed it up with you before — your promise of last things had proved no good. We’d merely gone limping from one blind alley to another. Therefore earlier this morning I’d arrived at the same conclusion you had now, namely, that Robbie and no one else could strip away our life’s elastic wraps of pain. The bone in my heel knocking flatly against the base of the bedroom door had been the gavel banging down on my decision. But look where it had got me. Instead of breaking any syndromes, I’d been laid out, useless as the rubber mat beneath my shower-stall tears. I’d practically gone blinking up into Robbie’s sick mouth. Now at least the poor wrecked child sat away from me — Erin, away from you and me both — we had him away from us at least, at last.

I reached again for my wife.

“Erin,” I said, “we’re wrong about him. Please—”

“Erin,” Robbie said then, “please. Please don’t be so hard on me. If you just go down and start breakfast, I promise I’ll be there in a couple minutes. I just have to clear away some of this mess here.”

Recovery is a word I distrust. A word like a feather, like ragweed, it blows in unreliable patterns over too much ground. Because the sanity Robbie has come to enjoy lately must be understood as taking place within strict limits. He’s sane enough to live in a guest house on his father’s property, with a maid next door and a doctor in town. Though these days the songs he sings come from off the radio, on the other hand that’s not such an accomplishment, bringing a thirty-year-old man to the point of singing hit tunes as he noodles around in his darkroom or shovels snow outside. Robbie is a trusty, nothing more. He’s the inmate you can rely on for a job like shoveling snow. And if Robbie does shave most mornings, if generally his hips are lined up under his belt as he walks, if he can now process most of his own shots and use an enlarger correctly, nonetheless I have yet to see him buy any of those razors or clothes or chemicals for himself. He can’t so much as go into town without someone else doing the driving. He visits that doctor four times a week. In fact, the softness of his awareness, the shrugging innocence with which he gives up on harder questions, sometimes can only be understood as his new form of violence. Robbie uses helplessness now the way he used destructiveness then, as a means of stealing our attention from whatever’s upsetting him without at the same time revealing the full ugliness of his case. He hits us with his pillow in part so we’ll play with him, and in part so we won’t see the jissum staining the other side. Thus recovery, no. Recovery will never convey the full sense of what’s gone on during Christmastime this year. For my wife and myself, the better word is remorse.

In the narrow hallways of a school like ours, a person learns fast enough about cruelty. The smirks at the table where you aren’t hip enough to sit, the lies told so evenly it’s as if the heart itself was wrapped up in a winter coat. A person learns fast enough, and we spent all the years we remember best learning. Then why is it Erin and I could never recognize how cruel we were to this boy? Entire landscapes of viciousness, we’d traveled, but why only after the fact could we comprehend the rough proof of the snaps and slides? Late in December hardly a meal went by when there didn’t come to mind, say, some time I’d yanked Robbie to his knees and then laughed at him. Or some freaky valentine we’d ignored, some furniture or silverware in the shape of his own splintered nerves. Or a cold afternoon when, nothing to it, he’d looked our way and we’d turned our backs. Yes, Erin and I couldn’t analyze, couldn’t classify. None of our experience around the quad had prepared us for the raw simplicity of shame. Though of course we’ve tried to rationalize. When we couldn’t manage to forgive ourselves, of course we could smart-talk someone else into doing it for us. “You two must have seemed like the blessed angels to the boy,” the maid told us, or we got the maid to tell us. “Like the blessed angels of the Lord, after the hardship he’d known.”

Ration out the reassurance. Any idiot can get that degree. It’s useless paper before the agony, useless agony after the fact. Every forgiveness lately seems no more to Erin and me than the creaky and overworked string of sanity itself. With each new claim that we helped Robbie, we hear the fastenings shriek that much worse against the rusty cleat of the truth about what we did, and in the glasses of the crowd below us the reflected glare seems that much more dizzying. We understand now that, for the madman, there must also be some numb commitment to the air itself. There must also be the decision to drop. Yet by the New Year, Erin and I had to wonder if our whole life hereafter wouldn’t be this same pinch-footed balance, this softening rope over deeps of remorse, two teenage hoods tottering along forever on boots that have just enough padding for us to pass as cool.

Then during the last week of January, Mr. Challait asked Erin and me to stay on indefinitely.

He asked, and this surprised us both, with Robbie there to hear. The two men sat side by side on the sofa. Robbie sat back, fingers nervously playing over his tie-clip, while his father leaned forward with elbows on knees and thrust that attractive Headmaster’s face at us. Radiators clonged soggily in other rooms. As always since the new windows have been put in, the house felt stuffy. Mr. Challait began by mentioning the possibility of relapses or other secondary disorders. He explained next that, beginning February first, he would become semi-retired. His older son, he said, had taken over most of the traveling since Thanksgiving anyway. Finally the man leaned still closer. He made his offer.

“I can’t pretend I understand the chemistry,” he finished. I’ll never understand, with any precision, that is, how you three worked this out. But frankly—” and his voice broke, his head dropped.

We’d seen Mr. Challait crying before, these past weeks. When he and Robbie fixed the broken rocker, the tears had started to show the first time the son demonstrated he knew where the glue went. Erin and I had learned to go on as if the high emotions weren’t happening.

It was Robbie who spoke next.

“It’s so hard,” he said. “For years and years, for the longest time, all I could think about was my own problem.” His voice was timid, and as he spoke he looked down at himself in his tie-clip, but there was obvious thought behind the words. “That took all my energy. The decision that anyone else matters—” suddenly he looked up—“it’s just so hard.”

Remorse. Remorse seems our only recovery.

“So.” Mr. Challait was folding his handkerchief. “So, ah, everything here would go on the same. But don’t, ah, don’t get me wrong. I’d allow you kids full privileges. Nights off, weekends away, whatever.”

Pretending to think it over, I looked at Erin. Though I could tell already she agreed with me. Yes, sadness may slip my attention way off the mark — I might be distracted by the briefest hint of a remembered bad time — but I can catch my Erin’s sly indicators out of the corner of one eye alone. The way she causes the shadows to change shape in that hair the color of a yellow crayon. The shifting dangle of her blouse’s fold between the peak of her shoulder and the tip of her breast. And she has wonderful hips, my wife, muscular and full of surprises. Especially after she’s set you up with those strict lines in her face.

“Frankly—” Mr. Challait began.

“No thank you,” I said, a little louder than necessary. “No. You can’t expect so much.”

Later that day Erin and I sat at the kitchen table. This was after dinner actually, and we put together our vita sheet line by line. We’d done a lot of writing at this table recently anyway. We’d answered all those letters from friends, the ones about how tough their first semester at college had been. And we may try some of that university life ourselves. I mean a job in a college town doesn’t seem too unlikely at least, since Mr. Challait promised us a “glittering” reference. So we wrote. Robbie bustled in and out, taking our photograph, humming tunes we recognized. The kitchen’s heat too had its familiar light touches, the odors of bourbon and oregano. And after listing what foreign languages she spoke, Erin told me a secret.

“What I always loved about you,” she said, “was that you never took for granted anything the teachers told you. You never took for granted anything they told you. I remember one day Old Witch Winslow told us not to put our hands up behind the radiators in class because there were spiderwebs there. The very next day you had to sit next to the radiator and find out. You were so cool about it, but I saw you. I saw you at your desk with a handful of spiderwebs.”

I realized then that, remorse or otherwise, these nine months at Mr. Challait’s had left me at that moment very calm. Erin of course was laughing, her face full of buttery wrinkles, and I understood also by now that whatever we’d learned in this job wasn’t going to be of much practical use in the next. But I sat feeling calm nonetheless. Calm like when my mother and father used to dance in the kitchen, humming uncertain tunes of their own, calm as, for example, the resume on the table between my wife and myself. In fact, reaching across it to touch Erin, I was overcome by calmness, except my heart, which was down there somewhere going insane.

Ul ‘Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo

We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul ‘Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, “you jewel-you, Ul ‘Lyu.” This was before I fell in love. Our very first meeting, and she turned my afterlife into a hell. Ul ‘Lyu asked me, at that time:

“On your world, what’s the principle for recycling souls?”

“A moral principle,” I said. “We operate on a moral principle.”

I’d had to give my answer a long moment’s thought. Here I’d just for the first time laid eyes on this creature, and she was coming after me with the hardest question I could think of. Indeed, the setting for this conversation alone still took some getting used to. Ul ‘Lyu’s eternity had rammed into mine, a terrific collision of afterlife environments. The souls in my world were knocked flat. Now that I have traveled — now that Ul ‘Lyu has compelled me to travel, past farther orbits, past the solar winds — I can picture how it must have looked, that initial accident. Ul ‘Lyu’s world must have smashed into mine like a plaster birdbath dropping from its pillar edgewise onto an old compost heap that had hardened to clay. The lip of her world had sunk a short distance into the tough ooze of mine and there got stuck.

So: one moment I was marking time, living somehow through the excruciating boredom after death, and the next I was flat on my back. Above me the smoky ceiling of my world trembled unnaturally. And then after picking myself up I’d run towards the crash. At the blurred overlap of the two worlds, the astral floor had buckled from the impact, so that finally I had to stop running and pick my way from buckle to buckle, as if hopping stones across a river. There I found her, there at the borderline, floating off the ground. She was an indistinct Other, a kind of jellied ball, floating off the ground. And at first glance, unmistakably, she was female. My heart rose like a flipped coin. Yet no sooner was I standing before her, on one of the higher buckles in the astral floor, than with the very first words out of her mouth this visitor had come after me. This visitor, this intruder, had challenged my entire life and death. My principle, she’d asked? My principle? I’d had to give my answer some thought.

“A moral principle?” she asked next, that first meeting.

“Yes.” And I frowned. It was time to demonstrate I also could come out swinging, I also could play hard. “You know?” I asked with exaggerated politeness. “You know, right and wrong?”

Ul ‘Lyu’s jelly surface quivered. For a few seconds she withdrew, floating away from me and into her own world. But she had the strength to back up her curiosity.

“A moral principle?” she repeated more firmly, coming again into full view. “Impossible. The complications, ooo. Just imagine…it’s impossible.”

I stiffened up on my astral hillock. Ooo? I wasn’t even entirely sure I’d seen this creature’s face yet. I thought: Okay. She wants to play hard, we’ll play hard.

“What’s your system?” I spread my stance, aggressive but being careful not to slip. “Or I mean, what was your system, when your world was still alive?”

For I knew from the nature of the collision that she lived, unlike myself, on a true dead world. Of course Ul ‘Lyu and I hadn’t done any talking about that difference between us, yet. Our talking came later. But I knew nonetheless, even that first time, that she knew. Ul ‘Lyu knew this difference between us; she knew her disadvantage.

Yet, unbelievably, she ignored my insult. Instead her reaction was something I wouldn’t have imagined in a thousand years alive or dead. Her surface turned to iron in certain places. While floating in mid-air, before my eyes — solid iron! The change startled me so much that I stumbled, falling back off my floor’s wrinkle. I wound up unevenly in and out of a crevice, like a man sitting sideways in a bathtub.

I thought I’d been humiliated. I thought I’d be laughed back into my world forever. But Ul ‘Lyu, oh my Ul ‘Lyu. You never noticed.

“I don’t recall,” she said finally. Her body softened to jelly once more. “I’m not sure we ever knew why we were in heaven or on earth.”

Didn’t recall! She didn’t recall the very reason she’d lived? Then had these been children, on Ul ‘Lyu’s world? Now she hovered over me, even her laws of gravity an enigma. And those moments she’d spent thinking, the iron that had emerged at various places along her pale, gelatinous soul, that had intrigued me. Moreover, especially, there was the way the entire power struggle underlying our conversation had eluded her. That too….

Next, she asked my name. Trouble, I should have told her. Trouble for us both.

The principle, on my world? The system by which we recycle the living spirit? Ul ‘Lyu never grew tired of talking about it, and I never grew less than amazed that she didn’t know her own.

In my universe even some of those “down” there, in the physical world, are aware of the system. I can recall that when I was last a teenager (Ul ‘Lyu couldn’t get enough of these memories) there were some extremely dull books that described where people went when they died. These books proved to be correct. The dead, we dead, come first to a vast reassignment depot, like any immigrant. From there, from here, we are eventually cycled out again, as newborn physical types. Eventually, it happens eventually. All this is as reported in those dreary paperbacks, and one thing more as well. There exists a priority system for the re-entry. This system itself I never fully understood; nor do I now. But the principle behind the system, as I told Ul ‘Lyu, was and is clear. A good individual is rewarded and an evil one punished.

“Yes I see, Baby,” she would say, using the pet name she preferred to my own. “From here, it’s so easy to tell which was good and which was bad. But I wonder—”

And so soon, on one of our first trips together, my remarkable Ul ‘Lyu came to the tricky part of the business.

“But I wonder, Baby. You tell me you were always the same, the same person in every appearance, the same you are now?”

I didn’t answer. Though I understood her argument, I was already more interested simply in hearing her voice, its musical changes. And I loved to feel the electric hum within her. Because in order to speak with her this way, in order to be near her, I had literally to attach myself to Ul ‘Lyu. I had to sink my hands up to the wrist in her creamy essence. Beneath her surface tension I found nothing to hang onto, but if my hands were inserted far enough I would be held by the suction. Then Ul ‘Lyu would fly, over my glum landscape, as I dangled below.

“The same person, Baby? In all the different lives?”

I relented: “Yes, Ul ‘Lyu.”

“Then how could it ever be? Are you bad now? Are you good now? It’s impossible.”

I understood the argument. I’d often wondered how the same me could remember, though vaguely, so many types of experience. My last physical appearance, for example, was joyous, crackling, with everything I wanted given me at once. Even those dull and morbid books were the gratification of some rainy afternoon’s morbid state of mind. I died, that last time, on the night of high school graduation, in some devil-may-care catastrophe that I can’t now recall, something like a motorcycle accident. Direct, vicious living and dying — wonderful! Yet there were also darker hours, among my recollections. I had also once starved to death, my joints atrophied so I couldn’t move, following a lifetime wasted as a household spider.

“Yes, Ul ‘Lyu,” I repeated.

“But then besides, Baby, besides. It gets so complicated, ooo. How is it ever all worked out?”

And this argument, too, I’d heard before. Ul ‘Lyu again was quicker getting to the point than I’d expected, but the essential problem of a moral principle certainly is easy enough to grasp. What are the gradations of morality? What sins and good deeds, when tabulated together, translate into the blue housefly which dies of poison? What sort of good guy or bad guy becomes the reptile which suns itself brainlessly, eating flies of another color, till its cold heart stops? What moral formula will produce one particular casting out of the million million human types? These questions, this one question, is common here. But never once had I heard anyone talk it over the way Ul ‘Lyu could.

“Baby, please try to remember when you were a spider. Was it summer or winter when you died?”

“Winter.”

“Anything else? Please tell me.”

“All I can remember is stones, Ul ‘Lyu.” And in those few seconds of talk alone, the memory had devastated me with its sadness. “A winter of stones.”

“Okay. Okay I think I know what you were punished for. I think you might have been one of those men who rape little girls.”

I looked back up at her, startled.

“See the stones around you, Baby”—how could she use that nickname, talking about the things she was? — “the stones are so much bigger than you. And feel the sticky dirt of your web, sticky and oozing out from a hole under your belly….”

She frightened me. Right from these first flights of ours, Ul ‘Lyu could go on and on about the most hideous sufferings, about pain that would have my elbows flinching beneath her just to hear it. Yet she’d describe it all in that sweet-tempered voice of hers, as if it were cocktails on the lawn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her now, as she flew along talking about the most hateful life I could recall living. At the edge of my vision there passed the familiar gray stalls from which were handed out the physical assignments on my world. Yet it was Ul ‘Lyu who held me, who held my hands and eyes both. She frightened me, but she could talk. Every question she raised became a romp of meaning and sensuality.

“But now all your joints go stiff, Baby. Stiff. Think of eight steel rods growing out from your ribs.” And I had to think of these rods growing so heavy I could no longer stand, then so heavy I could no longer hold myself on all fours. “You are paralyzed as a spider, Baby, but still you inside.” So that finally as the dying insect I became in fact the little girl I’d formerly raped, trapped in the stiff hold of the hairy molester. “Think, Baby, think of the girl trapped under the enlarged, stiff….”

Yet even as she spoke these horrors, in the throes of her imagining, she performed a trick I always loved. Over the round surface of her body she rotated her face, until soon it came to rest above mine, very close. She could do this even when we flew “forwards”—that is, in the direction I was facing. She didn’t need to see where she was going.

“Ul ‘Lyu!” I had to shout. “There are so many possibilities with you around!” And then the rhyme: “You jewel-you, Ul ‘Lyu!”

She grinned, her face snug between my two buried wrists.

My own guess — my own way of avoiding the truth — was that her freewheeling attitude about the meanings and monsters of my physical life had something to do with coming, as she did, from a dead world. In this she was, after all, different from me. Truly dead worlds were the one important piece of information left out of those sober-sided books I’d read the last time I was a teenager. Other planets and moons had their dead too. And from time to time, after some vast cataclysm, a faraway place may cease to be. A sun may explode; there are wars. An infinite choice of destructions exists, so Ul ‘Lyu told me. Then after that apocalypse, the now heavily-populated realm of the dead would begin, naturally, to wander. During the lifetime of their particular physical world, those dead had of course remained “nearby,” if only in the way that on a clear night the stars are nearby.

“But after your point of reference goes away,” Ul’Lyu told me, “you’re free. You can go anywhere.”

Beneath her, flying beneath her, I wondered. Free. Then was that why I felt…? And I wondered further. Just how, exactly, did I feel, just how was I beginning to feel, about Ul ‘Lyu?

“But this place of yours, Baby, well. It’s different. It’s like a fog inside a box, isn’t it? And then you have those little gray booths at one side—ooo! Oh-oh-ooo!”

I had turned my wrists over, inside her. She always cooed and yelled this way while I inserted my hands deep enough for another dangling flight. And this time I was deliberately tickling her, making her scream, to distract us both from the smoky sameness of my slow world.

“Just checking the suction, Ul ‘Lyu,” I called up.

And I turned my wrists back and forth till the muscles grew hot. Ul’Lyu warbled like a piano. The rest of that flight, at least, passed in conversation about safer subjects.

But the trick of course didn’t work forever. No. Compared to Ul ‘Lyu I was a cripple with tricks. There came a later flight. Then despite hours of tickling, my persistent bird, my singleminded passenger pigeon, you wouldn’t be distracted.

“Your system, Baby,” she said then, “the amazing thing about it is that it takes so much time.”

And there she had touched the hard heart of the matter. I suppose I knew she would sooner or later. The great problem of living between lives as I am is simply how leadenly and blankly it stretches on. We have no way of telling the time here, but we wait a long time. And yes, “we,” yes there are others here, a group as good or bad as any, I suppose. But the company’s no help, in the last analysis. We all share nothing but the vacant density of prolonged anticipation. And “down” there, in the physical realm, every act holds meaning. Spider or slap-happy teenager, every living thing moves by significant steps to a significant end. Whereas “up” here all meaning turns to smoke. We wait. I do not know what goes on in those gray stalls at the edge of our depot, but I do know that we ghosts have fought like murderers in order to get an assignment that wasn’t even ours to begin with. Since our assignments aren’t written down but instead simply told to us, since therefore we hear our names only as they echo through the gloom, confusion can arise. I myself once actually tore out the legs of another here, when I’d thought it was my name the Powers had called. I’d torn out the other’s legs and left him there, like something out of a sadistic cartoon. But that assignment turned out to be in fact for him; the name I’d heard was his. I was told to wait.

“And were you punished,” Ul ‘Lyu asked when I told her about the fight, “during your next lifetime?”

I didn’t remember. Bits of dream may linger, but who can recall the date of the night?

“You should have been punished, Baby. You were violent and cruel.”

Ah, is it surprising, is it any surprise at all, what happened once Ul ‘Lyu broke my grim orbit? After the preposterous roar which shattered the air when her world rammed mine, the birdbath dropping into the compost heap, then I rushed off to find any distraction. And there I found, not just distraction, but my whole life and death put to question:

“On your world,” she had asked, that first time, “what’s the principle for recycling souls?”

Ul ‘Lyu, we never stopped asking. Soon I never wanted to stop asking. I felt how it was to ride beneath you. I saw how even the limits of my smoky hall could seem aired out by new possibilities. I heard you say violent and cruel, but in a voice as nimble as the carnival colors that glimmered always beneath the pale jelly of your soul. In a voice that conveyed only the most neutral meanings of the word, cruel. So I fell in love with Ul ‘Lyu.

If she’d wanted to fly dead-on into the next star due to explode, I couldn’t have said no. But she enlarged the circle of our flights together only slowly. She handled me with care, keeping within the borders of my world. Still for all our talk, for all her wicked grins and for all my many hints at my own feelings, we never told each other outright that we were in love. We traveled and gabbed, no more. And then one time, touring the periphery of my depot, we passed again the point of contact, where the two eternities were jammed together. There, ah there, I saw how Ul ‘Lyu’s place was going eventually to get free of my own. It would roll around the edge.

So Ul ‘Lyu and I paused, hanging above the point of collision. Together we observed how the lip of her heaven advanced against the rough edge of my hell. We came to see the certain precise amount advanced, always, over a certain regular period. We came to see, in other words, the grinding sameness of Time itself. Before I knew what I was doing I’d lifted my face away from that terrible watch-works and started begging Ul ‘Lyu to get me out of here, get me out of here.

“What, Baby?”

Her face loosened itself and rolled down towards mine.

“Ul ‘Lyu, I love you!” And so I’d said it. “I want to leave my life! The same waiting and nothing matters, the same waiting for the same, same world — I hate it, Ul ‘Lyu! I want to live in your world forever!”

“Oh.”

She became thoughtful. The hum inside her increased. I felt the hard places, the iron places, emerging from within again. But I said nothing. I’ve learned how to wait. Besides, the more Ul ‘Lyu considered, the more the suction holding me in place evaporated, and it took all my energy to grip the solid edges of what she became. Soon I lost the strength to keep my head up. I thought: I’ve told her, but she’s never told me. Again I saw below me that pitiless turn and turn.

But then — between one slipping handhold and the next — the suction returned. Ul ‘Lyu’s body rippled against the hairs on my arm again. I lifted my face and found hers, smiling.

“Okay,” she said.

Ul ‘Lyu turned and plunged into her atmosphere. Beneath, I dangled without a care in any world. I even swung back and forth in order to experience more completely the freedom, the trippy looseness — and in order to set my love caterwauling, once more, as my wrists turned. Meanwhile gradually the dust of the collision dispersed. First shimmering then stark, I saw Ul’Lyu’s world.

It was not gelatinous, like her. Just the opposite. The ground beneath our flight turned out to be a badlands of sheetrock, with canyons and buttes absolutely razor-edged. Fierce magnificence; I will never forget it. Unlike my murmuring indoor death, this one was crystal, exposed to the weather, silent. The single feature against the ivory strictness of those rises and falls was a repeated series of stiff lines, chiseled into the rock. I never learned their purpose, those lines. But we would cross them at regular intervals, since they ran everywhere, even up the sides of the tallest butte. Going past these markings, always at the genial pace of a tourist, Ul ‘Lyu and I resembled a hawk carrying a rabbit as it flew across a row of telephone wires, the bird slowed by its heavy prey.

When my arms grew tired, she preferred to rest on top of a butte. Her flying ability, so far as I could tell, never suffered wear and tear, though she would occasionally plump herself onto the rock next to me. Then, the usual gabbing. And my usual lame steering clear of the one question I wanted most to ask. Through all our early talks and flights, also, the grinding borders of our two worlds continued to sound, distantly. But we went a long time, over whole continents of her lined place, before we ran into others like Ul ‘Lyu. Yes, they were very few, these round creatures. Even during my most lonesome waiting, my own way of life had not seemed so unpopulated.

“I suppose,” I said once, as she lowered me towards a butte-top, “loneliness could be part of your principle. Your principle for living and dying.”

“Baby, I just don’t know.”

Her face was directly above mine. She smiled and the colors within her glimmered and blinked, making me feel as if somewhere within my chest hung a sloppy lower class of beast that I myself was carrying.

“After all, Baby,” she went on, “it could be that in my world something like myself was split into two people. Ooo, or ten people”

I had to look away. My God, her merciless speculations. My knees buckled as soon as my feet hit the white slate.

“Baby, when I was alive, I could have been schoolteachers and dogs and….”

But at last we did meet up with others of her kind.

There, what a spectacle. In a wanton symphony of talk, Ul ‘Lyu and her countrymen bobbed on the air, catching riffs of excitement off each other until I cried out that my arms were killing me. I was set down, gently, but thereafter the conversation riffed on, rattled on, astonished me on and on. Never mind that, when they rested against the tough ivory landscape, Ul ‘Lyu and her fellow-talker looked as ordinary as two scoops of ice cream stuck on a kitchen counter. Nor did it matter that some had female faces and some — yes, at first it cut me deep to see — had male faces. Together they improvised as if the physical universe was no more than a choice of walls and rougher surfaces they might bounce off without end. They began, say, with how my arms must have felt when I’d said they were killing me. Then the two impossible creatures were just gone. From sodomy to bananas, from the Arabian look of a certain cathedral to the way the mind goes black under the pressure of a thumbscrew. Talk, talk, talk. I would put in what I could. I’d try to be good company. But always, soon, I’d be left behind, literally a hanger-on.

And so I began to think long thoughts. Because what could you count on, with these people? “Good company” in the usual sense meant nothing here. Nor did “love” itself. The others in this world, yes, shared Ul ‘Lyu’s puzzling familiarity with the details I recalled from my own universe. Sodomy, yes, and bananas. But their connections left me dizzy. More than once, they left me disgusted. Therefore what could I rely on, what could I trust, in such bewildering party chit-chat? Hanging beneath their talk, I began to wonder what I was worth.

Now, these bad moments always had an end. After the worst and most stupefying conversation, after I hung drained and positive I’d made the wrong choice, then with a particular extra beauty in her voice Ul ‘Lyu would thank her friend and, always, lift me away. With us would rise my nincompoop of a heart. Oh Ul ‘Lyu, you may not have known your principle, but I knew mine. We flew; we flew. Timeless freefall. The bee and the rose set loose together. Flying again, I could ask:

“Ul ‘Lyu, why do you stay with me?”

Stay with me: oh was I a cripple. I still lacked the strength to ask straight out whether she loved me.

“Don’t be silly,” she’d say. “I stay with you because you’re different.”

But that wasn’t an answer. In fact Ul ‘Lyu, for all your ability to talk, it wasn’t you who gave me the answer.

Lost in a romantic vertigo as I was, I didn’t notice just when the faraway roar of overlapping heavens stopped. Only, as I dreamed along to the calliope hum of her belly, during one flight or another, I noticed the familiar noise was gone. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had broken clear of my own. I had become, in short, truly dead. Then began the visits by other dead worlds.

I couldn’t say just how many visits there were. Ul ‘Lyu and I remained capable of entertaining ourselves, despite my doubts. We didn’t tour every last one of these traveling cemeteries. But unquestionably the number of dead worlds passing through hers was high. Two destroyed ways of living, it seems, emit compatible fields of magnetic despair. When Ul ‘Lyu’s stony place ran into mine, that was an accident. But actual dead worlds mingle often. For myself, the numbers alone told the story: awesome numbers, sobering numbers, deeply upsetting stuff. Far more universes had collapsed and been set free than I would have thought possible. And now to feel repeatedly the form of their sadness, to blink as clouds of ghosts darkened our sunstruck flights, to watch the hammered shapes of catastrophe pass again and yet again over the badlands below…. Let me describe only one.

Out of nowhere, once, a seeming warehouse-full of colored streamers, party streamers, started to pass “upwards” through the white rock. They kept rising, past Ul ‘Lyu and myself, till they disappeared into the sky. Unfortunately, however, we couldn’t communicate with whatever creatures gave life to this swiveling forest of celebration. They didn’t speak. But after a while I discovered I could tear off strips of their souls for myself. In my hands the bits of green or gold or orange streamers still made no sound, gave no word. But they wriggled and flipped over comically. When I let them go these strips of color again leapt into the sky, and again took up their rising, even as they continued to wriggle and twist. So we passed the time, in a never-ending New Year’s Eve. For those rare days I enjoyed a superiority over Ul ‘Lyu, simply because I had fingers and a thumb. But then came the moment when the first streamer finished passing through. Then we saw the way it tapered off into an elongated wet tip. Then we recalled how, at the start of their visit, the “upper” ends of these creatures’ bodies had been bulbous, permeable like a sponge, and also wet. Wet beginning, wet end. At last we understood. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had been penetrated by a universe of enormously long tears.

“No!” I cried after the discovery. I buried my hands deeper than ever in Ul’Lyu’s jelly. “No no no. What have I done?”

“You were cruel,” my mysterious lover said. Mysteriously neutral again and yet mysteriously forgiving me. “Destructive and cruel, Baby.”

But that one case isn’t enough. That one case provides only the woeful melody of these passersby; it lacks the startling coloration added by the mind’s orchestra at each new visit. Let me describe another.

We saw also a type of dead which came not from somewhere in deep space but from out of a history I recognized. Not from dead worlds, that is, but from dead civilizations on my own world. One such group crossed the landscape here in the form of statues, statues of men only, half-rising from chambers of marble or alabaster. My own history, dead and wandering! Now all right, yes, I could understand the theory involved — or I could after I’d done with my shameful screaming and carrying on round and round the top of another small butte. In time, I could understand how these statues represented a philosophy, a system of gods, that had passed out of existence. Yet I thought further. Might I not once have worshipped these marble gods myself? And, stranger still: since the intense worship of a given principle creates its own heaven, then the number of heavens could go on forever. There could be a heaven for one soul alone.

No. No those two cases together also fall way short of the whole effect, the percussive attack of surprise after surprising visit, the counterpoint of horror and lunacy. And the numbers. Let me describe them all. In my memory, clustered around Ul ‘Lyu and myself, these dead souls appear like nothing so much as an overbearingly lit-up bar-&-grill at sundown. Among the slick stains of spilled brew and the rotating advertisements, I can identify, glumly, the workaholic commuters and city types, the skanks and nerds and the ones merely bent out of shape, and I watch them all getting a buzz on during Happy Hour. Happy, oh yes, happy. For not only did Ul ‘Lyu waltz through these visitors with her customary light step — that much I’d expected, that much I loved her for. Also, strangest and worst of all, these blasted cinders of a former belief claimed to be more or less happy. If they could talk, their tune was always more or less the same.

The death of their way of life? — I would ask, sadly.

Oh, no big thing — They’d come back.

Over and over, up down and sideways, they denied carrying any leftover ideals.

“It became an injurious doctrine,” the marble men told us, in their profound marble voices, “continuously striving to be pure.”

“There’s only so much light a body can put up with,” an aluminum creature told us, with a rattle in its vowels. “Light, light, light. Do you think the rocks noticed while I was there trying to shine my brightest?”

“One realizes after a while that the concept, funny, covers too large a spectrum of related ideas.” This was an unusually delicate group of beings, made of what appeared to be nylon and rotted fruit. “One tried, but one never understood all the complexities.”

These creatures could communicate only by inserting a kind of appendage, an olive-colored nylon filament, inside each of their listeners. When the point had gone in, just below my diaphragm, there’d been no more than a moment’s pain. But now, as the creature began explaining itself, I suffered a pang of jealousy from head to toe. Ul ‘Lyu, at the nylon touch, had started to warble.

“One realizes after a while,” my filament spoke just before I violently jerked free, “that life goes on.”

Life goes on! Those last words in my belly meant more to me than all our other loose talk with the dead put together. For in that one simple shock of jealousy, after the uncounted arousals and depressions brought on by these visitors, I’d perceived at last the unique hold I had on Ul ‘Lyu. Now I kicked and tugged like the worst spoiled brat of a child. I hauled her away. Behind us, the freed points of the nylon people waved feebly. But I wouldn’t allow Ul ‘Lyu to watch; I shrieked and yanked with both wrists….

Really, it embarrasses me to recall the scene, these days. Even after all that’s gone on since. But with more weeping, more low opera, more hysterics than ever before, once I got Ul ‘Lyu away from the nylon people I made it clear all over again that I loved her.

“Don’t be silly, Baby,” she said many times. “Oh, you are silly.”

But no, Ul ‘Lyu, no I wouldn’t stop. I knew what I’d just at last perceived. Because you remained always yourself, my winking, motley darling. During a thousand visitations from dead worlds everywhere, we’d met no one so irrepressible as you, so uncaring as you. Yes. While the other ruined creatures looked on amazed, you would make pleasant conversation about, say for example, waking at night in a barracks to hear two soldiers buttfucking a third. Any ghost in earshot was struck dumb. Meantime I would stand there, or hang there, smiling knowledgeably. That’s nothing, my look would say; what you just heard was nothing for my Ul ‘Lyu. So what if these other dead worlds had learned to put on a thick skin? Not one of them, Ul ‘Lyu, not one that we’d come across yet could match your range. Monster girl, what did you know about caring? You asked the aluminum people what it felt like to be torn apart. You asked the men in their alabaster chambers whether, as their world collapsed, any of them had slashed their wrists. Innumerable times, in fact, I’d watched you poking and prodding, drilling for any new sensation. And now that the nylon filament had poked you, now that for once your guts had been converted to mere talk, now I understood. What you saw in me was precisely that thing I’d feared made me bad company. For you, I was the one grip on true feeling. Among the cool talk of destruction, the flick-of-the-wrist way these people could dismiss hopes they’d once believed they would live off forever, I alone offered genuine caring. Ul ‘Lyu, I was your touchstone.

So I screamed, I wept. It embarrasses me still to think of it. I ignored the little insults that would have stopped my tears in their tracks before this. I showed Ul ‘Lyu what feeling was.

And soon enough, sure enough, she was responding: “Ooo Baby Baby, I love you.”

I think I noticed in those very first words the falseness, the utter vacancy, of what she was saying.

“Ooo Bay-bay, yes I do.”

I couldn’t help but notice. She sounded exactly like one of those vapid soda-pop love songs I could remember from when I was last a teenager. I could almost hear the sappy strings, the faked echo effects.

“Ooo Baby, I love you-ooo too.”

But I wept on, drawing the promises out of her.

I should have realized what would happen. No insight, no matter how genuine, no trick no matter how devious, could have blocked every possible way I might lose her.

From some unmarked place high overhead, at some unmarked point in time, there arrived a dead population of singers. The music, however, was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s; it wasn’t accidental. In the shape of trumpets, more or less the consistency of brass, these new singers flew into the chalk-bright air of my adopted world. Around their distant bodies the sky became a mottled blue and green. I too was intrigued, during those brief moments before I realized the danger.

But then those trumpets began to play, then the bells of their horns grew and shrank according to the demands of their song…and then at once my Ul ‘Lyu began to respond. Of course I wouldn’t have minded if she’d merely wanted to talk. But something extra came into her electric hum, while the trumpets sang. I felt — oh, something extra. I felt the iron surfaces spreading once more against my palms, my fingers.

Ul ‘Lyu, trying to sing, went higher. The first time it happened, as she struggled for the tune, it became obvious that she would forget me if I let her. But, my bright bird, talented as you were, you couldn’t master the art right off. I did manage to survive pass after pass of these visiting trumpets. I did get to see how, below us, the buttes and canyons would shrink to no more than wrinkles in the white sheetrock, marked from end to end by the irregular intervals of five grouped lines. Against them, our shadows were dots.

For the music was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s. In order to play with this new kind — in order, it seemed, to communicate at all — she had to work. Ul ‘Lyu began by simply trying the melody. Then since the trumpet-people seemed uninterested, my lover turned to harmony, to counterpoint, or to adding a baroque, quasi-woodwind flourish. Yes, of course I took note of every least modulation. I was desperate for any chance at regaining her. And very pretty, Ul ‘Lyu, your work was very pretty. With each additional music lesson you put a new crack in my heart. Moreover the trumpets, also, must have liked something of what they heard, because they returned for pass after pass. At the edge of her sky, the brass ghosts would swivel like snakes and come back for another attempt at the combined symphony. And the more my lover tried to round out the score, the more metal she became.

Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu. I…

I don’t like to think, now, of the humiliations I went through to get her attention. Maybe the Powers on my world, inside their shuttered stalls, can identify gradations of pain. For myself, however, there is only a single, seamless ball-bearing of shame that rattles up and down the spine as I recall my excesses. I will admit I shouted till the muscles of my lungs were weary. I will admit that, with forced jealousy, I pointed out that the trumpet is considered a masculine instrument. Whenever I succeeded in tearing Ul ‘Lyu away from her music there followed pitiful bawlings of “true love, Ul ‘Lyu, true love.” And there are tricks even a cripple can do. By the end I was injuring myself deliberately. I kicked my feet bloody, against the metal that emerged while she tried to sing. Heaving myself up like a man pulling himself onto a tree branch, I cut my forehead open. I could even bash my nose against her iron self, until I was swallowing blood and mucus.

But ah, untrue love. Yes I might as well have brought out a couple of clowns, with feet like a duck and triangular purple eyes, one playing a weepy violin and the other a cracked accordion. Because Ul ‘Lyu, I led you on. I never for a moment tried to damage my hands or arms. I kicked and flopped and shook, but I never risked losing my grip.

At last, however, I played the wrong trick.

“Ul ‘Lyu,” I asked her at last, “what attracts you to them?” I lay on my belly, then, along the top of another harsh butte she hadn’t wanted to visit. “What, Ul ‘Lyu?” My face was buried in my arms. She floated overhead. I gasped unnecessarily. “They can’t give you what I can.”

“No, my Baby. No they can’t.”

But from the sound of her voice, I knew her face had rotated away from me.

“Tell me!” I snapped back my head and then brought it down onto the rock, hard enough to start tears. “Tell me!”

“I…Baby, I don’t know.”

Oh, but part of her did. Something in her voice drew my head up from my elbow again. Half-stunned and weeping, I could nonetheless see that her iron surfaces were already beginning to emerge as she answered my question.

“I don’t ever know,” she said in a heartbreakingly familiar way, “why I‘m up there singing.”

Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu.

I should have realized. It’s no excuse that I myself can’t sing, that I heard music but no other form of communication from the trumpets’ playing. No excuse, because after all this time I should have known that whenever my Ul ‘Lyu strove to imagine, to give voice, she was driven by the same essential mystery.

“Tell me,” I asked with more control, my false tears drying fast, “tell me what you sing about.”

“Oh Baby. Oh let me tell you….”

Who can say? maybe the trumpet souls had once lived on Ul ‘Lyu’s planet or moon or whatever, but through some small difference in world-view the brass kind had gone to their mottled afterlife and the iron ones had come here, to turn jelly and forget. But now as the trumpets had continued to pass overhead in one direction or another, here, my lover and I had begun to see some additional members alongside the distant formations. We’d begun to see those few other round fellow-creatures with whom Ul ‘Lyu had shared these ivory badlands. They had turned, yes, from jelly to metal. And now no sooner had my jungle child started to get excited at describing her songs than the whole weight of our difference crashed down between Ul ‘Lyu and me. Her kind had rediscovered its element. What I heard simply as the pleasant loudness of brass, she experienced. To her these high creatures sang the whole ferocious opera of sensuality she’d always spoken of and searched for. They made a world from pure voice. And what world? What sensations did they draw on? The same as ever, of course: the same familiar, physical universe that Ul ‘Lyu had shared with me from the first. The trumpets’ yell echoed off mundane surfaces. They could remake in sound the challenge in the size of a father’s hands, the fright that ices over the back of the neck when a grandmother presses her sagging face close for a kiss, the awkward presence of a wedding ring hidden in a coat pocket. Ah, and those were only the small fry, the low-voltage contact points. Because like Ul ‘Lyu these trumpets made no distinction between the commonplace and the devastating. Into their music they put both the dial-tone drabness of a workweek afternoon and the foot-soldier’s first ringing spasm of despair after a wound in the throat. These instruments in fact wanted the bells of their horns to tremble with any shock experience offered, at any moment they chose. They wanted song. That was their principle, and my Ul ‘Lyu’s forgotten principle: the music careening full-throated.

So, on this last corner of her world I would ever know, I saw life and death for what it was. Though a given soul may be as different from us as the farther side of a cold planet, though indeed one lonesome, proud soul could stake out and inhabit a heaven all to himself, nonetheless the world was everywhere the same. This truth, this sameness, Ul ‘Lyu would never comprehend. Myself, I would never see another. Then of course we weren’t in love. No. We were a young couple deluding ourselves in a madhouse; we were two devils in a hell of our own making. Neither one of us had ever laid eyes on the other’s actual self.

On the butte, the blank slate, I took a moment longer. Ul ‘Lyu warbled on, just above me.

There had been love, I was thinking. There had been a stripe of sickness I could still make felt, running from the center of my chest down to my crotch. But then high overhead — couldn’t miss it — the sky started to bruise, blue and green.

“Ooo Baby,” Ul ‘Lyu called, her face away from mine, “can we please go there? Can we please, Baby?”

Sickness, sameness.

I can’t recall the little speech I gave her. Most of my energy was concentrated in keeping my voice even. My point, anyway, was simple. She should take me up and let me hear her sing.

Nor was I entirely brave about it, entirely good. As she carried me up I began weeping, and I’d intended to hide my true feelings. Another mask and another mask shattered: that’s the world for you. High as you go, the walls of sameness reach higher. But at least, as Ul ‘Lyu rose towards the trumpets, I could tuck my chin in my neck and pretend to sing along with “Ul ‘Lyu, ooo ooo ooo,” so that the squashed noises out of my throat wouldn’t be a distraction. And when I felt the hum within her solidify and take shape as individual notes, when I felt the coldness spreading against my fingertips, then I did find the courage for one good look up at her corrected self. I saw an iron instrument exploding with carnival reflections in the astral sun. And then, then at least, I could let go.

As for what would happen next, really I had no idea. I am not, after all, an elongated, particolored teardrop. It did cross my mind, too, that if I were crushed against the sheetrock, that would make a fine subject for a song. But of course these were delusions of grandeur, lies told to make myself feel better. Death is impossible.

I fell; I fell. A world alive or dead has its own specific gravity. Unconscious stars rose past me and I dropped until, with a soft whump that caused me no pain, I landed in my own smoke-filled depot of reassignment, where the gray stalls marked the horizon, with their shutters closed.

And since? The waiting? Ah, but one can live, on a dead world. One can wait, if one has something coming up. And I have something coming up. Yes. For when my name echoed across the depot (Ul ‘Lyu, I am the same creature I always was), I beat away the others who thought it had been their name called and approached the low booth alone. Then I learned what assignment the Powers had in mind for me next. Because I had deserted my kind, because my behavior in death had been so very wrong, during my forthcoming appearance — after the necessary forms were processed — I was to be punished. Severely punished, the voice from the stall said.

Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu, sing for me! In the chaos of midnight to noon to darkness once more, each touch our daily grind leaves on us can seem mysterious as the soul itself, and I have many, many touches in store. Find the music in them, Ul ‘Lyu. I won’t be there to hear. Will I talk? Will I move at all? Oh the stiff heaviness of our questions, the trapped small victim who lives in the answer. Yet…yet when I am punished, Ul ‘Lyu, when that child is dragged forward out of agony as every child is, dragged forward out of it and then shoved with the heel of a boot ahead into more, agony to agony kicked and scuffed, and when the fear enlarges his already enormous child’s eyes, when he’s slapped into a corner because his friend or his father betrayed him, when the belt squeaking in his father’s grip is raised high, high, and that haggard adult mask looming above offers no help, no mercy, no sympathy, only the mathematical tables of wrongdoing and punishment, and when in fact the infant’s world is a slum alley shrieking at him in languages he can’t understand, when among those sullen buildings and leering shouts he can learn only that there’s nothing for it, baby, but to knuckle under, nothing but to crawl, to ache in a new way at the growth of each additional cell in his growing, aching body, and then Ul ‘Lyu, then next, when they hand him the worst joke of all, when they strap down his arms and lock back his head and tell him, as they roll up their tray of instruments, that he must never let on that he’s in pain, little baby, no, he must never let the torture peek through his smile, his party chat, through the million brittle put-ons of growing up — no, you must never weep, my child, my self, no weeping here—when they tell him as they work him over once more that he must play hard, then it is my hope, Ul ‘Lyu, that he will open his broken mouth in song.

Content

John Domini
Bedlam and Other Stories

Bedlam: an Introduction After the Fact

Over 4000 Square Miles

The Return

Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be

Special Instructions, Special Instructions

Astral Projection

At the Dig

Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side

Chasing Names

An Encounter

Some Numb Commitment

Ul ‘Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo