Joseph McElroy

Night Soul and Other Stories

NIGHT SOUL AND OTHER STORIES

NO MAN’S LAND

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn’t know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number, while Ali’s father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he’s only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven — so no one asked at first why the fourth-grade teacher at a Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.

What is your job? I ask myself, on the move.

In the small shopping plaza above the B & Q train stop, they posted a news photo of a patrolman killed in line of duty. This not far from Ali’s family’s apartment, which in turn is a walk from his morning bus stop on the way to school with a walk at the other end.

Nomad? Nomad? — just like that? What does she know? the uncle said at dinner.

In geography Ali had the answers and then some. Original was the only word for it. And when the teacher said a river takes us where we want to go and he put up his hand, the class became quiet. “Sometimes they take the river and they move the river,” Ali said. Class quietly laughs at the nerd terrorist, yet waiting for teacher. But Ali proves his point. “Once they moved a river to try and win a war, I think.” In the yard later someone would trip him up and he would fall and skin his cheek on the hard, black rubber surface by the jungle gym, but fall lightly.

The family wanted to know a little more about it, this “nomad” point because…because Ali’s an original boy, in need even of monitoring, of serious questioning — for what could happen? Unafraid, called “terrorist” and “Arab” by the boys in the school yard, what was he? A nine-year-old, a terrible asker of questions, small for his age.

Where is Mexico, where is Canada? asked the teacher, wondering at her own map hanging over the blackboard, where is California, the Arctic, the ice fields and polar bears, Brazil? Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea! What is the mouth of a river? Tigris River where they used to fish — no more. Where is Turkey? OK, where is Syria? See what country they have borders with. Borders? See the lines — one line is mostly river. “Sometimes—” she begins, but one question can interrupt another, the teacher was so quick with a question she interrupted herself, a happy person (and to have this Muslim child in her class who picks up her turns of speech), she and her map routes, a river is a moving road, she said, and was off. Caves, said Ali, the bell rang, he raised his hand too late.

Nomad can wait, we know. Because he moves in season. He and his people. Everyone busy. Nomad knows his job. Children quite safe. He may return next fall to where he was, even when things fall apart.

One day the boy would have to make a living, he would have a job to do, said the father. A dreamer, Ali’s head was in the clouds, you didn’t know what he was thinking — and then he told you. Imam passing through had said that the boy had mouths all over his body.

All over? she asked Ali (his teacher, one lunchtime, one-on-one, for she said he was better at math than even she…). Well, this imam was from Mosul, visited New York, got followed but not before he had trained his camera on the evil billboards and the great bridges, Ali told her. Did she know an entire bridge had been moved part by part from England to Arizona? His uncle had told him.

His uncle knew. His uncle got mad, not at him, stood up for him. (“Ali can crunch the numbers.”)

Who all were these nomads? We know roughly where they are. In olden times the Scythians would surprise the enemy, make some trouble and retreat. Let’s make a map of nomads, the teacher said. What is a map? she said. Anything that came into her mind, she would say it. The bald kid at the back who’d been sick but wasn’t anymore showed his notebook to the kid next to him.

Abbod wore a hunting jacket he’d picked up in Canada. He was bent on obtaining a New York driver’s license hopefully. What matter if it’s stamped third class not valid for U.S. government purposes? He’d always known, from birth, how to drive — what’s the problem? He had driven a white taxi from Beirut to Dimashq and when his uncle’s cousin had shown up to collect the fare at the post office by the train station, it was how things worked, which always came first. Didn’t he get paid? Ali asked. Post office next to a theater where you are too young to go, Abbod jigged his eyebrows.

Abbod knew how to take orders. It was how you learned to give them. Ali, age nine, thought if he didn’t ask for a camera he wouldn’t get one. But who could he ask?

What is my job? Ask no one but yourself, things falling apart some days like a song high above the street or in the distance.

Photos on the living room wall — a dark man, his eyes bugged at some awful thing about to happen. Next to it a picture of a gold-and-silver-threaded pharaonic tapestry with a band around it showing ducks flying and their wings like crowns, very pretty Islamic thing. And a tinted photo of, you’d guess, a rug and leaves growing all the way around it, and Ali would look at the leaves. Of what tree? A fruit tree, maybe existing someplace. Look, too, at their California calendar peeling the months up and back, with a hang glider or backpacking trail above each month of days, or high, bellying waves of surf, or a quake-proofed bridge.

Nomads, said Ali’s father, the way he said things. The big brother had left the table to make a phone call and Ali recounted only that teacher had a picture of a tent in the desert and had asked what a nomad was, and Ali had told about their sheepherder cousin. “Maybe a cousin, maybe not a cousin. A singer, we heard he was a singer,” said the father who had an attitude because big brother on the phone again or because Ali storytelling.

Forsythia, the surprise along Newkirk, its early yellow bearing in its very light a suspicion of green in a front yard next to Ali’s building. Late winter, early spring, seasons in question, a matter for the authorities.

And now big brother couldn’t drive legally without at least the third-class license Albany had promised if Governor would only stop changing his mind every other week on the three-tiered plan, what’s the matter with him? (Didn’t you get paid in Dimashq? said Ali remembering from two nights ago.) Cops see it, maybe they stop you maybe they don’t. Third category license was for driving, not I.D. except if you’re stopped with it you’re an immigrant in limbo, you could be on the BQE or Coney Island Avenue. Abbod had just arrived in New York Limbo? asked Ali. It means trouble, said Abbod. Did he fly from Canada in an airplane? How else you gonna fly? (Did Abbod answer Ali’s question?) Ali hopes he will stay. “What the dickens is the BQE?” “What’s the BQE?” laughs big brother. “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, man — what did you say, Ali, what the what?”

Father and uncle were looking into a storefront at the lower, better end of Foster Avenue across from the NYPD security camera mounted above the street and nice older brick and wood houses, and seeking a private source of financial backing which would save their violating Sharia by applying to a bank in Greenpoint where they had once lived and had a dog.

Canada nothing like Syria, Abbod told Ali. Mom told him to go to bed, Abbod can tell you all about it tomorrow, Sharah is waiting for you to read her a story. Abbod slept on the living room couch, gone early in the morning before Ali was up. Ali must have understood something. Was it the job that brother Abbod was looking for? Why did Ali feel he had found it? Abbod wouldn’t take the messenger job because he didn’t have a bike. That’s right, you don’t take a job you don’t want.

The bedtime story was his job, though only a boy, helping care for a female child in the family. Ali was interrupted three nights running — Mom, Dad, and, strangely, the third night big brother Abbod, angry after a phone call — and each time Ali got back into the story though he skipped a step or two of the tale but added some bits. Same fisherman pulled up in his net: first, a parcel holding a princess’s body all cut up into pieces that seemed more than pieces; second, a great talking stone which asked to be dragged onto dry land, a fallow field, and then heavily lifted to discover beneath it amazingly a hole that hadn’t been there and a narrow door; third, a jar and a genie plus interactive adventures to enlist the genie’s help or escape him and — and little sister Sharah, eyelids trembling with sleep, thought the genie was going to kill the fisherman, had he done so?

Nomads. A considerable tent dipping in the wind with a great flat oblong top. The teacher pointing, Anyone know what a nomad is? Ali spoke without putting up his hand, he had a cousin who was a nomad. He used to keep sheep, you know, but was herding also larger beasts now until he could come to America. Oh? said the teacher. The class laughed with relief, as if they didn’t believe in that cousin living out there on the borderland of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, but they did, for this cousin Zam-ma’jid often on the move who didn’t speak a word of English to his goats and even camels that might lie down exhausted — and why would he anyway? — he didn’t like America and that was final. So why come here? He had a horse to ride, too — the class became quiet at this — but it might be taken from him. Teacher more than sort of liked Ali and she looked at him and said, We’re all nomads.

Two boys jeered at the Muslim kid. Get Shorty. An airplane passed low overhead. Was it coming out of JFK? Was it bound for Atlanta, Washington D.C.? Ali might well know. His uncle would. And then a second plane.

Big brother Abbod with the camo fatigues you envied was supposed by the family to have come here by way of Istanbul, Warsaw, and then Quebec, where he had arrived with two Polish jazz players he knew from Lodz who had scholarships to McGill, and it was true. But Abbod had soon left Quebec to come here.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing. However long it takes? Time pounds the pavements and dissolves into a field of chances.

Teacher had two Band-Aids for Ali, he liked them. She heard the boys talking. What was this store on Coney Island Avenue near Foster Ave. the boys went to? she asked Ali. In Flatbush, she said. He shrugged, but she felt he had not known the location of the store.

The Catholic girls’ school near the projects the far side of Flatbush, of Newkirk — Sharah might go there next year. They had asked many questions and had been almost too friendly. It was better than a school where she would be singled out. And homeschooling was not possible, though when they came home every afternoon they studied Qur’an. (Ali’s teacher asked him what difference between Qur’an and other faiths — too much to ask.) Some echo here for me.

Air Canada to JFK? Apparently not. Over the border, then drive? Don’t ask. Abbod knows the city. Ali wants to know what his brother knows.

One day Ali was late getting home.

All but strangers to each other, the tall and the short, a child peering through the store window at video games, behind him like single file a man. We stand before the wares of the West, does he see me in the plate glass? — sees much that is not immediately visible very likely. What is my job? Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber’s school where I go for a $4.99 cut and an experience, the boy small for his age I’d guess, but in the Ocean Avenue game store’s plate glass unmistakable, somehow found — viewing a domain he must often have visited — seeing what is in front of him like a prince, subtle, mighty, and, hearing Green Day from the record store next door, he need not turn yet.

What is one’s job?

That I should have found myself here, to relearn a stretch of neighborhood once my father’s family’s never quite mine you know, but my memory’s, my city’s — and pavements and intersections guessed that morning from words of my wife implicitly like love locating it like a clue a couple of city miles at least from the brownstones of our Rutland Road, those long, turn-of-the-former-century’s blocks of evolving borderland though no stranger to great Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park lake/horses/grackles like iridescent crows owning the territory/lilacs on the way — to find myself here might prove worthwhile — a nomad thought more mine than hers, to a virtually unemployed male at 7:00 A.M.

Ali would do anything for Abbod. Ali was up against it in the playground when teacher came out and he was telling his enemies he had a big brother who had come to the U.S. to do a job and Abbod would chill them in a New York minute. “Half-brother,” Ali’s uncle said.

Green Day Ali hears like a message, a life, a promise — because he would like to learn to play bass like…

(Never misses school, never home sick, “like a chip off your old block” he will say two, three days later when I recited a Russian poet — in English—“But I love my unfortunate land / Because I’ve not seen any other.”)

And would like to be invited to play video games after school with…two kids, for it is them he now turns to see. Not yet the man standing behind him, in the corner of his eye in the store window reflection, but his classmates, one pale, strong, bald, the other a “carrot-top,” Ali will later call him (his given name Terry), who come sauntering forth jointly holding a single, targeted purchase. Engrossed in the picture on the small packaged game and maybe the fine print, they look up and see Ali and turn away laughing over their collective shoulder at the nerd whose cousin nomad was coming to America, he’d claimed. Knowing nothing of this as yet, the gentleman behind him — as if the Band-Aid on the cheek proves it — assumes Ali is a regular here.

That this proved to be not so seemed later at least as strange as what this boy, small for his age but of a certain stature, turning from the game store window to see two kids leaving the store turning down the block, then said surprisingly to the man standing behind him: “What they came for”—meaning (I realized) the LAB game postered in the window — though meaning to make the best of things by striking up a conversation.

So we’re walking down the block, not knowing quite what we’re doing — walking is a parallel support for secret hope, man and boy, the talk, the questions somewhere in there like the walking/waiting intersection. Each taking the other as of the neighborhood. Ali not quite answering the unsaid question, whatever it is. The black man we pass, and his hand—“been through the mill,” Ali says, finding in his pocket only a leaky ballpoint, so I find a quarter. “Money can be shared,” the boy says. “Hit the street, that’s what can happen,” I said. “Are you real estate?” “No, this is my father’s old neighborhood, his family.” “Gone away?” Ali asks, out of some depth his own. “Gone,” I find the word to answer him, a nine-year-old. He suddenly becomes my friend.

“I’m Mo,” I said, putting out my hand to shake.

Extreme caution marked Ali’s father’s late-night business meetings featuring a risk-benefit analysis for the new partnership, green-card immigrants ever vigilant, uncle so well-informed but irritable and hurried, on the run. Tax preparation, travel of course, maybe real estate though you need a license.

At breakfast my wife would want the best for me. She had taken a moonlighting job, mostly middleman home-based. From her day job, she brought work home too but was not a martyr, though she misses nothing that goes on, children alive, comparing notes, yak-king who likes who, an idea a second, my beauty.

Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen, would be a way of putting it.

“That game,” I began, “that Ali’s friends had bough—” “LAB!” “Labyrinth and laboratory?” Ali shook his head in awe meaning Yes. “—linked up (?),” I continue — with this other game he now outlines for me, enthusiastic about theft on a big, even regional scale—

“Friends?” I ask.

— thefts by agents of one caliph expanding until an entire city is stolen by another caliph towed away along with the weather by his agents and held for ransom down to parks and fish ponds and secret curving lanes with passerelles above like bridges or balconies looking north and south, borders shrunk, streams straightened, the price either a whole nation or inside a dusty vessel a minute horse that has swallowed a ring that brings genie-like military figure named da Vinci if the wearer unconsciously rubs the ring by bringing his hands suppliantly together, and so on, the trick being to find all the ways back “homeward,” to “get back home.”

Your family? I asked. Mother, father, uncle, big brother, Ali listed them, little sister Sharah, “me.” She is lucky, I find myself flattering Ali. “I am supposed to read to her but…” “What?” “At bedtime sometimes I tell her the story.” “Even better.” “Some nights we open a picture book we have and I make it up. Sometimes it is just words, no picture (?).” I’m nodding eagerly. Sometimes Sharah drew a picture for the story. “She is…” Ali shakes his head, grinning. “Sometimes I tell about the fisherman and the genie. My parents do not like them—” “They—?” “—those stories.” “They’re too…(?)” “I don’t think they mind,” says Ali, was he reversing himself? (I nod wisely.) Big brother Abbod he just came from Canada, Ali’s eyes wide and black, daring me to be with him. “What are you?” he asks.

Ali was calling me by my name another day when we returned to the record store window. He wished to be a drummer and his family would not hear of it. I might surprise him.

To go from thing to thing, unafraid — knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and unforeseen, than settled and…

What was the poem, who was the poet? Ali asked—“my unfortunate land”?

This kid.

“Mandelstam,” I said. (Should I buy Ali a used Green Day CD if they had one?)

A saying can be shared, Ali and I put together the thought — a name, a photo, a dispute, a war, but maybe not a special friend — as a cop on horseback stopped at the curb writing a ticket for a medium-size orange and brown RV. Some nomads drank horse milk, I said. Ali laughed, the cop knew him from Prospect Park.

Da Vinci those call him who think that was his name, said uncle, who confirmed that Leonardo had set out to move a river. Nomads would not do that. They would cross it.

Your father’s family, Ali was thinking — was I a spy, was I an agent? “Who are you?” They were good Christians, I told him. We saw a fat man almost get hit by a car. We laughed and Ali spoke further about games. Ali knew he could help his friends play and beat them too, though not a “gamer” himself — though only if they could call him a friend — because he had understood the game. He even told his Sharah bedtime stories out of that game (or truthfully that the designer had stolen).

How did Abbod make it down from Canada? Abbod has had adventures. A traveler, he told Ali. Say your prayers, you are always facing the desert. Was Abbod really and truly a praying man? How far is Canada? — wait…I know from the map in class — Quite a hike, said Abbod.

Winter had turned out unseasonably mild, the weather seemed to cling to you yourself. You wanted to know what was what. The heavens were pretty much a constant.

We have passed on down the block speaking of real bats, not those animation stills slick and inaccurate shown in the game store window, and Ali is reminded of the record store we’ve ignored, deep in conversation, when he himself, witness first and last, reported high-tweeter tones heard in the basement of a project on Foster Avenue the other side of Nostrand where his uncle had looked at an apartment (wanting his own place at last, having lived with the family in Astoria, where he had lost his dog, then in Greenpoint over a deli, now in Newkirk). Ali knew they were bats, bats find bugs by echoes he told me yet did I know that their fossil ancestors had ears too simple to do it like that? Though, wait, we had passed the record store and did I know Green Day?

A white Toyota with a sign like a file tab along its roof darted past a bus and a truck with antlers tied to the grill, and Ali said it was the automobile driving school. Was it near where he lived? He thought a moment. Did I know those cars had dual controls? Hey, my wife was in the business of selling dual-control used cars to driving schools part-time, I said (her second job, I did not say). That car had only one driver, I think, said Ali, again ignoring what I’d said, I thought. I want to get a camera, he said.

Proprietor of a moving company, Irish father of a classmate, heard from his son the story of Ali’s cousin the anti-American nomad coming here and wasn’t sure he liked it. And the big brother?

Genie, his head in the clouds, feet deep in the center of the earth, but he can become small enough to fit into a little lamp, said Sharah when Abbod came into the room to turn out the lights. What was he mad about? A phone call. Always on the phone. A dreamer, father said, when Ali brought in the red-blotched naan hot from the broiler. “Nomads drink horse milk,” said Ali.

But Abbod had dreams going on.

The record store window next to the game store seemed to remind Ali: telling me with a secret generosity in his eyebrows thick and blackly frowning that the imam when he had visited New York had said, “Walk where another has walked to see what he has seen.”

Astonished to hear these very words from my wife this morning over my coffee and oatmeal with raisins now repeated to me by some kid, I believe words circulate in our city like thoughts, contagiously. Though this boy would add his own.

And I — having heard those words spoken by my wife before she had to leave for work — was dumbfounded now, or as I looked into the record store window, destined, hearing words added on to hers by this foreign kid: Walk where another has walked…see what he has seen…but find… him.

Words of a nine-year-old more acute than trusting (though already calling me Mr. Mo). In himself, his fall-back plan (since he would not be accompanying the schoolmates home who had just cut him by noticing him) more trusting than in me, more a remarkable person or child in his own right than any stop-gap employment job I was to find even in this neighborhood that had been randomly clued for me at breakfast by a woman in her underwear.

Surprising or not, to learn as we found our way back to the game store window that Ali had never been here before today.

Another day Ali wanted a camera. He would take real pictures, I knew.

My wife turned a tidy profit dealing second-hand dual-pedal automobiles to driving schools. How could this be?

The times. A statement. We would go camping, my wife said. We? I said.

“I need a camera.” Two afternoons ago it was “want.” A clarity in the voice, a mission.

Where was the $3? Mom said, who’d given it to him on a morning forgetting that he had a student bus pass. She never forgets, so what is it? Her grown son Abbod hadn’t slept there last night. She had cooked special lamb with mint stalks that were Ali’s assignment.

What was my job?

The $3? Ali gave it away. To a poor person? she asked “a faquir?” No, a friend in his class.

“What is your job? You don’t work in the afternoon?” Ali asked. “I am a poet,” I said. We’re in a large deli with a small haul of apples, orange, bananas in a basket, bag of SunChips. “You are a poet!” He is interested and we will meet again. “I write poems — sometimes,” I caution, appreciating his verdict on what I am. And I add, “Either you are one or you’re not.” “I am one then,” he plucks a Balance Bar from a candy rack near the register and looks at it, as I weigh my sort-of lie. “I write advertising copy but I don’t have a job right now.” “My big brother — he has a job to do and he also does not have a job.” Showing a card at the checkout I address the girl by her tag, “Shakira,” adding, “You people have the greatest names.” “Debit or credit?” is the reply I deserve. “You ladies here at the register.”

I found the words to every thought I never had, but I wanted the person to speak them to. My wife half hears me, the other half knows me, she thinks.

What’s that name mean? I ask Ali aside, thinking, What is my job? I’ll be clocking in somewhere soon, hearing a man at the back call her, “Hey Shak.”

Outside something hit the pavement from two or three stories up. I laughed. What was it? asked Ali. Two men race past the deli. Three others gather. “Something my wife said.” What? said Ali, a dark flash of the eye. (News of another family?) “‘Pounding the pavements’ is what I said to her.” Ali pointed out the window, I shook my head. “No, looking for work is what it means.” “That’s what I told her I was doing today.” “Looking for work?”

“Yes, what she said was, when she left for work, ‘Try pavements that intersect. With the old, your father’s, with father neighborhood’—she’ll say anything — you have to listen, put it in context. ‘Coney Island,’ she said, but I thought Coney Island Avenue.” “Where you met me,” said the boy, delighted.

The rest I kept to myself, I could smell her, the jasmine and behind it some green tea and witch hazel message, “map your day, Mister Mo,” says my wife, “you ahead of someone else, someone there ahead of you.”

He knows percents. I will try him on decimals. He went to the store for his mother. He could “crunch the numbers” in his head, his pride, his old algebra.

I find in the leather-and-stacked-bath-towel-smelling closet one night the digital camera I’d been thinking about. I think that he should have it. I give it to him Monday. “This cost a whale of a lot of money,” he says, his face glowing darkly. “It’s yours.” Ali leafs through the little dog-eared pages, “In…structions in four languages.” My cell phone goes and I let it ring and Ali is cool with it. “Everything must go,” I say.

Kids didn’t invite Ali home.

I will save Ali, it comes to me. From what?

The game’s the thing, it’s another day, crossing against the red: Did he know the stories from his part of the world actually, like Noureddin and the beautiful Persian and the caliph who disguised himself as a fisherman, did he know Ali Baba and—“Forty Thieves,” Ali breaks in—“Ancient and interlocked—?” I went on but “Ah!” says the boy, a friend from some olden time. The two dreams of treasure? I said — and I’m explaining that the first dreamer follows his to Isfahan, is arrested among thieves by a man who dismisses the dream and tells his own, disbelieving it too, freeing the first dreamer, sending him back home to Cairo where amazingly he finds the second dreamer’s dream true — a treasure in your own backyard. The Arabian—? I began, or did Ali know The Thousand and One—?—looking over his shoulder at something behind us — tales broken off to be continued—“You bugging?” he interrupts — meaning Of course I know The Thousand and One Nights—that go on and on, always interrupted—Not always (Is the boy…? Had I gone too far?)…“They are not true,” said the boy. “Well they’re what could happen,” I said. “And bad things in them, I think,” Ali added. “Who said?”

Ali’s father. The imam, too, Ali thought. Your family, I said.

Not everyone. “Maybe not me,” the boy says huskily. “My big brother, he says I got to pray but—” “For what?” “He don’t say his prayers all the time.” “But sometimes he does, Ali.”

Mom asked why had Ali walked home. Abbod had spotted him on the sidewalk halfway from school waving to someone. The game store, was the answer. He knew she looked in his backpack.

Pray for what? again I ask. “America,” Ali chuckles. (Can he be nine?)

Abbod seems to have a license. Got it pretty quick.

“If you’d never visited our game store…”—Ali heh-hehs (Is it my our?)—“how come you were there?” “Oh I heard guys would be there that I knew.” “You heard?”

A tough young Arab never a day sick. My wife had a call, a guy wanting to know what driving schools she’d sold cars to but she thought quickly and answered she was only a middleman on the phone, and it was dual-control. Not quite true, she had a list.

That game store: the day we met was the first time, did he mean? Could it be true?

Ever been to the Brooklyn Bridge? “What do you take me for?” the boy replies, to say the words. “Ever walked across, I mean?”

When he saw Ali halfway home on the sidewalk, why didn’t big brother Abbod stop? Abbod was in a car. Questions came to me, like I’m being asked.

Seen it? Yeah. (You crossed the Manhattan. I think so, said Ali. Right onto Flatbush, I confirmed.) “Mister Mo? I like you like I like my uncle. He is tall. We go out for a run. Music helps you remember. You said that.” “I did?” We’re standing in front of the record store and, hearing a siren, turn to see a squad car racing north the wrong way. Ali’s life is not mine. “I hear a song, I remember where I listened to it,” I turn back to the window. “Or this store,” says the boy, “you hear Rap coming out of the speaker you recall Green Day bass, nothing like.” “Come here not knowing why, you could find a record you wanted,” I add. “I always know why,” I catch the child’s eye. Did he know Ska? Ska? The music…I will learn how he thinks.

What we might know between us. Our depth together.

He’s describing a game, a bus passes. Up the block another, the B8, crosses along Foster Avenue bound for Bay Ridge where I could gladly escape some intelligence that’s questioning mine, my city, my job (what is it?) — with a view there at the end of the bus line of the Narrows, the entrance to the harbor, a tanker, a huge, rusted hull at anchor, the winds across the water, the Verrazano Bridge, some responsibility to this boy at risk for whom I have begun to want what (?), some everything that he deserves, doesn’t care for the oranges here.

Ska? I explain — white California reggae, horns and a super drummer, well Jamaica to UK to Calif, the wife’s favorite sometimes. Ali is on his way. “White? I am late. I remember what you say.”

Ali plots out for me the new game LAB another day. The fighters exploding on being hit, bazookazillas trained on them by the players, everything a target, anything. So you seek and find in a labyrinth that is a laboratory a treasure that can become what you need only if you know where to take it. Fighters are exploding, you need to keep yours safe, you can move them in four directions but also, unique with this game, you can shrink them inward so they become some other thing they can be but only if they were about to get hit when you hit the shrink function.

She had a fine little boy in her class, she said. With an imagination. A little isolated, yet totally not. What an ear you would say. (A speaker?) Well, to the point. The boy said he was not afraid in the playground, he would take care of his enemies in a New York minute. Middle-Eastern — Syrian, Iraqi. (You don’t know which he—?) Yes of course, and the family — they’re Muslims — the imam said such things about the boy…

You want to get your guys into the lab and there the treasure can become what you…it’s becoming more than the game. They are fighting for you, I say, but Ali’s a step ahead multiplying force interactively within the exponential poem of it all.

“Fighting for you these fighters?” I try and understand; “and you are?” I ask—“but what if you lose,” I break into my own query. And “Do they ever blow up by themselves?” I ask—“it happens,” I add. I have said too much. I am sick at heart for a second, hearing a secret that’s been withheld but by no one particularly — maybe from me by me. Trips. Parts breaking up. “And you?” the boy asks.

“What am I?” I replied: “…gone / Quite underground” but to make me see again, I mouth another’s words but I mean them. Drawn into his family — at what risk? — do we teach each other some mystery?

We should take a quick trip to the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe tomorrow, I tell him. “Men died building that bridge. I know a man who slept there.” “A man?” “Yes, a man.” “A poet,” I add.

Nomad, the boy adds, his voice curious. And I, wandering no doubt: “Come to think of it, nomads used to be very regular in seasonal movements. Yet now the seasons themselves are moving. Which at first dislodged the old sense of their moving toward us as much as we toward them, yet we adjusted to the change.” The boy won’t admit he doesn’t understand.

Ali describes a photo taken when his father was arrested and released before they left to come here. They said he had Ali’s eyes. “We were safe and sound by pure luck”—the boy’s speech almost poetic—“one whale of a bomb.”

Ali has shown his teacher the camera. (She knew that camera, a good one, she told him, says the boy.) Told her he is going to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge. “She is a good teacher, I gave her a good review,” he tells me, “she gives a hundred and ten percent.”

The camera…what features…Four years old, adrift, the black case gathering dust.

“Say a poem,” Ali commands. “I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,” I quote. “It’s good.” “It’s someone else’s.” “Mister Mo?” He wants to say something to me but doesn’t.

Family would rather home-school Ali but they all work. Uncle had an atlas. An attitude — toward Ali — hopeful, linguistic, American, both of them runners — that this was the place for them. Uncle was funny. Uncle had taken a book from a book store, read it, and returned it. Didn’t get along with Abbod.

Teacher had been home-schooled herself. This Ali confided the day before the two men, certainly not parents of this school, were waiting when school was done and kids were visiting their cubbies before going home but Ali did not and turned a corner into a hall that led to auditorium, cafeteria, and side exit because he had seen the men show their wallets to Mrs. Molesworth and for a moment she looked across at Ali.

So it is she.

But still I ask him what school he attends and what grade. Still I want to protect him. There is too much information on the table already. It’s another job, not poetry.

His teacher is my wife.

She had been home-schooled in California long before she ever came east.

I was waiting for the right job. I told Ali that in 1982 we had achieved the highest unemployment rate since 1940. 10.4 % on November 5th. 10.8 % before the end of November.

With over eleven million unemployed. A dream like numbers odd and plain, and a song of crunching of teeth or a hand squeezing brown paper.

But out of work you can do what you like then, said Ali.

Today we could visit Brooklyn Bridge, he said one day. Big brother Abbod wanted to borrow his camera, so Ali would like to take some pictures first.

She tells me the questions. A kid went home and told about Mrs. Molesworth’s class. Her nomad class. We laughed, my wife and I, and almost loved it but loved each other. This mother has been given enough grief already by the hand she was dealt but her younger son made a nice comeback from lymphoma, and while he keeps an eye on the black kids in his class, picks up their jive and trash, this “dead presidents” stuff meaning folding money — city kids you know — he also hears that some crazy Arab cousin of a Muslim kid is headed for America? Hears Ali guarantee that a cockroach can help track bombs (?). “How do you know this?” the two men will ask Ali, the day after they’ve first questioned his teacher. He had read it.

No you didn’t.

Oh yes: in a magazine on teacher’s desk.

They know where the family lived previously, and that one son was thought to be living with them but has been seen leaving what was thought to be their former apartment house—“In Astoria,” the boy fills in. They’re about to go on but don’t.

Why did Ali come to school, having seen the men the day before?

“Welcome to Paradise,” a Green Day song he—

His family hadn’t yet been visited, I thought.

I found them in my wife’s address book plus lavash, flatbread recipe.

Ali’s teacher is my wife, has submitted to questions. Only then did she think to phone.

I know him, I tell my wife. The camera, she says. Of course, you gave him that old camera…Their minister said Ali has mouths all over his body. Their imam, I said. One of them, my wife corrects me.

On the Brooklyn side at first, the tiny park with the ducks — from under the Bridge shots of scale itself, pieces of it huge, mobile like history or dream, another piece, another like a ledge or barrier in midair, the Bridge in pieces, Ali an eye for the frame adjusting his aim by an inch or two, unaware of cops and others with the cops observing but not approaching, though aware that the man with Ali knew what was going on. They had us under surveillance when we were walking the Bridge and the boy taking the arch, the cables, the three-lane roadway below on each side coming and going, even the steel support structures one would be able to climb to get to or from the roadways but why? He was lending the camera to Abbod tomorrow and wanted…to…Wait, he murmurs…breathless…Wow — Absorbed, thoughtful of time, too — not of spectators behind us — they didn’t want us (or maybe me)—

My timing excellent. Seasons sometimes like minutes if you’re ready.

— then on the Manhattan side where the downslope bends around toward Chambers, police apparently waiting, a pale mist of rain adding its history to the boy’s. A regular hero? A fighter. For me to save?

Abbod? I said, surveying The Bridge I know pretty damn well.

Tomorrow you’re loaning him your camera…?

“Your big brother,” I say. American flag at top of a cathedral arch. Mmhmm, Ali half-acknowledges me as he focuses — I’m always an authority of some kind, I glance past the police a hundred yards away to a sign down on the roadway and its stream of cars: Dry Standpipe Valve for FD use only — while my boy up here on the pedestrian walkway is framing someone for a shot, or waiting for them to step away from a metal trap door in the stone underfoot for Repair Access. “Only half a brother, if you ask me,” I let fly.

“Know what he said? ‘You didn’t call on me when I was going to tell about caves along the river.’ He’s mad at me, my wife said. Next day he wasn’t in class. He knows how to cook. We should take him camping.”

Arriving at their block in Newkirk as if I didn’t know what else to do the day after he didn’t come to school — was he at large, was I? — before a guy in a windbreaker saw me down the street and spoke into his phone as the street door popped open like a lid and a man I felt I should know broke free of another and another and the cop phoning moved to intercept him like a strong safety between him and the goal line.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing.

Ali — I thought of him, if I could save him, but from what? And there he is in the doorway when his uncle — for how did I know it was that irritable, nephew-loving atlas of learning long-legged, a fugitive back home where life at noon like mission accomplished might cost nothing to cancel — swerving off the cement path toward a lone forsythia bush fell headlong tripped up it seemed by a pistol shot’s synchrony and slow-legged into silence as natural as anything?

Police officer killed in line of duty, a news photo of him posted near the B and Q trains, near Ali’s apartment house, near the bus stop. Ali took the bus home.

I waited at the game store.

Once he said, “What do you advertise, Mister Mo?”

MasterCard Glueguns, Digestive Bombs, little yellow plastic teardrop containers of lemon juice. A driving school concern with agencies in Jersey and Maryland.

Asked about his home-study Qur’an, “Jesus didn’t have a father,” Ali replied as if I had asked. Would I have saved him from running to his uncle? From his mother’s scream? From looking up from his uncle shot down to see me near and have to decide what to do even about me? Which was nothing but to ignore me, his friend who doubted Abbod was a good half-brother. When neither the officer who shot his uncle, nor the other with him, nor the plainclothes with the cell, tried to question me.

Abbod had ID in case he had to show it but never had to until he volunteered it at the driving school and was given training even before they checked him out.

Routinely suspect, these people work almost as hard as our Koreans.

“Faquir” (?) a poor person. I waited at the game store.

I had known this neighborhood as a child, a grandchild. Things you know, all over the place. I told you I wanted a poet, she replies, meaning me.

Who were these nomads? These Scythians and other ancient minds. A dual-control driver training car found parked in Astoria sniffed stem to stern by a police dog, a half-empty red Classic Coke can in back with a half-smoked cigarillo awash in it, but certain grains of unburnt powder evidently cleaned from nook and cranny of firearm with compressed-air spray gun commonly used to clean computer keyboards.

Rendezvous though with a wife who likes the things you know and half-know (mostly half) — the ocean weathers, the laughter of Herodotus at map makers who would make Ocean a river running round a circular earth — yet his praise for Solon’s rule that every man once a year should declare the source of his livelihood at risk of death if he can’t prove the source an honest one.

Winds across the water, which hardly gives way…the Narrows…the Verrazano…My head adrift with bridges, we dream along a reach to converge far out at sea where on station a Coast Guard weather ship will plunge onward in a twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square…

To go from thing to thing, not too afraid — knowing truth has a better chance to trespass sudden and interrupting…

The Bridge in pieces and angles of itself — adrift like our seasons.

“Mister Mo.”

Mo thinks of what it is his wife wants. To travel. More than anything. She pores over a map of Asia. We make decisions together, don’t we? What is a map? I think I actually asked her. We’re still young, she not yet thirty-seven. (Home-schooled in California, when she grew up she had understandably come east.)

I must read only children’s books (Mandelstam writes),

Cherish only children’s thoughts,

Scatter all big things far and wide,

Rise up from the deep-rooted sadness.

I know what he means, but…

Employment: that’s number one right now…

What is my job? The future. Helping this boy…

“I know who you are,” Ali said, standing at such a distance that I stopped trying to close it, his uncle bleeding at his feet, arms fallen apart, his mother joining Ali distraught and then seeing me, seeing me retreat.

…a poet who died in prison: to be scattered through this history.

To go from thing to thing unafraid, that’s all: knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and interrupting or may come round again.

…pasturing your life…

New nomad waiting for it to come to me…

For nomad is the movement of others from me as if it made little difference who was the mover.

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

Close, she said. She and I, she meant. She said Ali would speak without raising his hand — like you, my wife said. Has it come to that? — and once she failed to recognize him when he did raise his hand. She understood that I missed him.

He knows Ska, she informs me fondly.

Nomaderie nowadays. Did she get that from me? You could get into a state about it. You didn’t need to go anywhere anymore: it came to you, though nomaderie…A writer pausing at a village in Crete: “total absence of anything approaching a communal existence. We have become spiritual nomads; whatever pertains to the soul is derelict, tossed about by the winds like…”

A woman to whom I confessed comes back for more, having half-heard. For nomad is the movement of others from you as if it made little difference, if I could ever tell Ali this, who’s gone now.

Salat, five-times-a-day prayer.

We serviced the sites on a seasonal basis until the seasons began to come to us which would have made the job easier but the seasons changed in nature, pushing out from within: we were on the move but much more regular than our friends who stayed put; and the sites were everything you would have expected of a site, manned, unmanned.

Time we break into seasons briefer and briefer now like space where we are restless and think ourselves on the move. Until, having pulled the seasons along with us we turn to one long season its length no longer long or relative, no longer even length.

Seasons don’t wait for us but come along in us now and also speed away from us. I try, clocking in on my own (timeless, I hoped) job, to build on others’ work, John Clare’s “I Am”—“the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; / Even the dearest, that I love the best, / Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the rest.”

The nomad state: nomad nation.

Nomaderie, the form of “pieces.”

I believe the boy was in the end blamed for telling about his shepherd cousin.

I recalled my lost father largely self-taught reciting Emily Dickinson years before I knew who that was and as if she — for me now a foundling spirit, Founding Mother — were a card-carrying Christian: my father, a job printer on Vanderbilt Avenue near Grand Central, urging me to close the Arabian Nights, a tale of two unexpectedly linked dreams, as it happened, and open a book of fact, yet speaking to me as I to Ali like an equal.

Your God as a nomad.

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

A woman who knows what to overlook yet seems to have overlooked nothing, was my thought about my wife, her map of world foods she discussed with her children.

I thought I would move on. And the boy. Abbod’s photos of the Bridge may as well have been the American dream left in New York when he slipped back over the border into the Notre Dame mountains by canoe, the long, eastward slanting lac a minute flattened ellipse in uncle’s atlas. “Abbod,” the mother said. “Abbod.” Strapping specimen with a hernia needing attention and some overdue dental work.

I know you, don’t I? the proprietor greets the boy who appears in his store one day in May or early June — used to go to school around here. You’re Ali? The boy squints, uncertain. You’ve come for your…Here, your friend ordered this for you. Green Day? What friend? asks the man with him, his arm in a sling, a Band-Aid on his nose.

The boy had accepted his gift. What was mine? About music, he had said, “Go for the Gold…lots of dead presidents, man.”

And so as season tried to follow season, severaling a various year to leave us breathless with travel excitement, sinus tumors in the healthiest and temperamentally richest of our loose group, with a late-developing sixth-sense problem and far away Down Under cancer cells proving contagious in an animal the name of which we will recall…war ongoing, a shepherd arriving…

THE MAN WITH THE BAGFUL OF BOOMERANGS IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE

He was not to be confused with my new friends or my old. He was there before I found him and he did not care about being discovered. I knew him by a thing he did. He threw boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne. If he heard any of my questions, he kept them to himself. Perhaps we were there to be alone, I in Paris, he in the Bois that sometimes excludes the Paris it is part of.

But what makes you think Paris will still be there when you arrive? inquires a timeless brass plate embedded in the lunch table and engraved with an accented French name. Well, I’m in Paris, after all; that was obvious even before I sat down with my friend who invited me to meet him here, though the immortal name I put my finger on, that frankly I don’t quite place, might have been instead that of the burly American who’s also, I’m told, here somewhere staring in brass off a table — far-flung American name once commonly coupled with Paris itself. So now, like a memorial bench in a park, a table bears his name, that fighter who once clued us all in that you make it up out of what you know, or words to that effect. His pen (or sharpened pencil) had more clout even than his knuckles.

What is the name of that famous burly writer who lunched at this consequently famous restaurant? Out there past the brass plaques and dark wood surfaces and the warm glass and the conversation, the city doesn’t happen to answer. Not a student descending from a bus; not a woman hurrying by with two shopping bags like buckets; not a man in the street I’ve seen in many quarters carrying under his arm a very long loaf of bread and once or twice wearing a motorbike helmet. He is probably not the man my French friends patiently hear me describe, who is my man in the Bois whose very face suggests the projectiles he carries in a bag, a cloth bag I didn’t have to make up, to contain those projectiles in the settled November light of late afternoon in the Bois when I begin my run.

Which man? The man with the bagful of boomerangs, wooden boomerangs one by one, old and nicked and scraped and shaped smooth to the uses of their flight, one or two taped like the business end of a hockey stick. When I arrived, coming down the dirt path toward a great open green, and broke into my jog, he was there. And he was there when I wound my way back three or four miles later, in later light, around me the old cognates of trees, of dusk, of leaves, crackling under foot. Yet, veering down hedged paths, past thickets where dogs appear, and piney spaces with signs that say WALK, to surprise a parked car where no car can drive, and across the large, turned-over earth of bridle paths, and around an unexpected chilly pond they call a sea, a lake, that has hidden away for this year its water lilies, I could sometimes lose myself with the deliberateness of the pilgrim runner whose destination is unknown and known precisely as his sanctuary is the act of running itself. So I find I am beside the children’s zoo, or so close to some mute lawn girdled by traffic thinking its way home that I can plot my peripheral position sensing I am near both the Russian Embassy and the Counterfeit Museum. Or I can’t see Eiffel’s highly original wind-stressed “tree” anywhere, whereas here’s a racecourse that I know, so now I must be running in the other direction toward Boulevard Anatole France and the soccer stadium. But I am still meditating the famed water jumps of the other racecourse, and turning back in search of the Porte d’Auteuil Metro, I breathe the smoke of small fires men and boys feed near the great beech trees.

But most often, I ended where the boomerang-thrower was working his way into the declining light. And passed him, because that was my way back to the Metro. He began low, he aimed each of those bonelike, L-shaped, end-over-end handles along some plane of air as if with his exacting eyes he must pass it under a very low bridge out there before it could swoop upward and slice around and back, a tilted loop whose moving point he kept before him pivoting his body with grim wonder and familiarity. As I came near, I would not stop running but I might turn my head, my shoulders, my torso, to try to follow the flight of the boomerang. More than once I felt it behind me, palely revolving, silent as a glider and beyond needing light to cross the private sky of the Bois, which for all its clarity of slope and logical forest is its own shadow and contagion within a metropolis of illuminations balconied, reflected, glimmering, windowed in the frames of casements. More than once I saw the boomerang land near its intent owner, wood against earth. Sometimes he seemed to be launching the whole bagful before proceeding to retrieve. What was his method? He would pick one boomerang up with another or with his foot. One afternoon I must have been early, I was leaving as he arrived; I wanted to know how he started doing this, because we had boomerangs in Brooklyn Heights before the War in a dead-end street looking out from a city cliff to the docks and New York Harbor and the Statue, and we hurled our pre-plastic boomerangs out over the street that ran below that cliff and thought of nothing, not people below, not the windows of apartment houses. I looked this foreign boomerang-thrower in the eye, his the angular face of a hunter looking out for danger, a blue knitted cap, old blue sweatshirt with the hood back like mine. What was he doing off work at four? The things in the bag were alive, their imaginary kite strings resilient.

I come from a city also great, also both beautiful and dark, its people also both abrupt and not distant; and I wanted to (as Baudelaire says) “accost” this boomerang man. However, I could not find the French for what I had to say, remembering that at least in my own language I would know better what I had to say when I began to say it. I had lost one of his boomerangs in the dusk once, but the man himself seemed not to have lost it, although I never saw it land and I heard a sound in the trees near my head.

The French for all I wanted to say, I found in a dream, and there, I think, it stayed. I lived, during those first weeks, alone, consciously located between the light and darkness of living with someone. This person, sometimes mythical, later materialized as if she had never gone away, perhaps because I was the one who had gone. But in those weeks before American Thanksgiving, reaching toward Frost’s “darkest evening of the year,” dreams found their way to my new door and, unlike the daytime clients of the rare stamp dealer (though his metal plate ENTREZ SANS FRAPPER was all I knew of them or him, apart from what I knew of the subject matter of his business, not to mention a slow leak from a water-pressure valve in my kitchen which I heard nothing from him about), my dreams were by contrast both inside my apartment before I knew it and outside knocking like an unknown neighbor in the middle of the night.

At least once during my first dreams, the man with the boomerangs threw them all so that they did not come back. Two French friends of mine said he sounded a little crazy (the way in the United States they say that some poor person is “harmless”). A private citizen was how I took him, a survivor-craftsman testing the air. The boomerangs I dreamt were not some American dream’s disposable weapons; my twilight companion’s resources proved renewable, his boomerangs reusably old and known; this wasn’t some Apache spilling the blood of vowels F. Scott Fitzgerald rendered out of Rimbaud, but a native true to the wood from which the aboriginal implements were cut. I made him up out of what I knew, and I assumed he was too authentic to have time to make me up.

The phone rang and I went out to meet a friend. I checked the Mont-St.-Michel tides and saw a French child on a train wearing a University of Michigan sweatshirt. I came out of the Chartres cathedral and went back inside. I returned to the Jeu de Paume to hear American spoken without hesitation or apology and, from within that temple of light and color, to view through my favorite window the gray spirit of the riverbank — its founded harmonies of palace and avenue, whose foreground proved to be where those water lilies hang, safe-locked in the sister temple of this tennis court, where my three-dimensional fellow wanderers, refusing to disappear into the “Moulin de la Galette” we’re all admiring, crowd about me as if I were my mind. Here, what went up must come down — downstairs, I mean. “What gains admission must find exit,” they say with justice.

But what goes out — does it come back? I cannot help the signs and symbols; they are as actual as the knocking on my Montmartre door at the moment of my dream when at last I completed the invention of the man with the bagful of boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne. It was more urgent even than a phone ringing in the middle of the night, that knock at my front door — was it the concierge? — and I must wake from my dream just when I have at last found the French with which to accost the person I have made up. The stamp dealer went home eight hours ago. Who can it be at the door? Well, you can’t always choose your time to make the acquaintance of a neighbor. I’m out of bed, croaking, “J’arrive, j’arrive” (pleased to recall the more accurate English), walking half in my sleep through someone else’s curtain-insulated rooms to ask in French, “Who’s there? What is it?” only to realize I have heard no more knocks, and to suspect that they were not here upon this front door in the pitch-black hall but back in that bedroom where I left the dream. What a way to gain entrance to an apartment! Knock on the door at three in the morning until you rouse your prey, then express such concern over the nightmare yells and cries he did not even know were coming out of his sleep, that helplessly he opens the door to thank you.

But that was a New York dream. I found the light; I sat on my bed and remembered hearing the French I needed in order to address the boomerang-thrower, only in my dream fluency to pass to a stage in which he spoke to me. Till all the interference in my solitary situation left me in that empty apartment, and the sounds of knocking that had brought me stumbling through rooms I hardly knew faded from me with the French I had found but now lost, though not its sense.

For the boomerang man from the Bois had told me what I could not have learned had I not already known it: that if it was worth telling, it was worth keeping secret, how he shied those pieces of himself down into the late autumn, his aim at some distance from him, his boomerangs quarrying not prey but chance which was to cast that old and various loop beyond routine success, dreaming the while of a point where at its outward limit the path’s momentum paused upon a crest of stillness and by the logic of our lunatic hope did not return. In this way, although he will not hear me, he is still there when I go, and here when I come back.

Yet if this is unbelievable, I tried something more down-to-earth. One cold afternoon I spoke; I approached the man and said in French that I had not seen a boomerang thrown “since” thirty years. He answered. He had been throwing them that long and longer, he said. I asked if he had hunted with them. He looked me up and down, his eyebrows raised, his forehead wrinkled. He had not, he said. And were these the same old boomerangs he had always used? Only this one, he said, raising the one in his hand. Speaking for all of us, I asked if his aim was accurate, though not having the French noun for “aim” (which proves to be but), I asked if, when he threw (lancé) he was toujours exact. In English, then, he said, “American?” We smiled briefly; we nodded. “You jog,” he said slowly, “I throw boomerangs.”

“I used to throw a boomerang as a child,” I said in French.

He was looking downrange, shaking the boomerang in his hand downward at arm’s length, first one big shake, then a series of diminishing shakes. “Moi aussi,” I heard him say.

Like a knife-thrower pointing at his target, he launched his toy. Like a passerby, I continued on my way.

MISTER X

The rider coming off the North River bike path, at risk even at two in the morning cutting across the highway and into an old side street, must have been recognized. That was what he later believed summoning from memory the figure who had emerged almost from nowhere, a warehouse doorway, into the rain just as he could feel his rear tire go. Across slick cobblestones a man was making his way toward him as he bent to look down at his wheel, forgetting his back and straightening up in some pain. He’s in no doubt he can defend himself but the man’s slight but curious limp is a challenge, not some panhandling drifter but on home ground, street lamp out, steam escaping a manhole cover twenty yards down the block. It was late. A car speeding north along the highway flashed shadows, and then a car southbound. “You don’t want to ride on the rim,” the man said. He was younger. Behind him a crack of light where a warehouse door was propped open. “The bad news is I can’t get to it till morning.”

Each man wearing a camouflage jacket, trimmed beard, glasses, sneakers — some fool thing shared between them, you almost felt. “Street fails you, cut through the house,” said the younger man, leading the way. No joke exactly, it sounded like some tactic of the war encroaching that you might have to use yourself. “I’ve got a flight in the morning,” said the other wheeling his bike. What was he getting into? “You’ll make your flight.” “It’s a long one.” “Sleep on the plane.” The younger man stole a look at him.

“I missed my turn but I know this street,” said the bicyclist. “You don’t miss much, eh?” said the other.

Through a nomad’s door they left the street now for a space of overhead floodlights like a new outside or a shoot. Areas of dim dimension reached through to the back of the building and seemingly beyond it southward. Orange peel somewhere, paint thinner, the insidious metal burn of welding earlier in the day in a plan not yet realized, a loose rot of garbage needing to go out, warm scent of sawn lumber, pipe tobacco and sweat close as a thought, all building the flow here, the host muttering some welcome — what did he say? — deciding if he wanted you here setting foot in the place, but he did.

An alcove in progress of raw sheet rock framed up. Computer video units, old, facing off at a distance. Sander disks. Filled poly-prop bags like logs wound for strength in a spiral form. Manuals stacked, working drawings spread out, a convection heater on a yellow extension cord running under a swivel chair, reappearing near a futon, a brick wall half demolished taped to it a photograph of Bonaparte on horseback facing the Sphinx with its nose broken off. Stacked next to a barbell and two dumbbells were ten- and twenty-pound weights. Over here the teeth of a worm-gear assembly honorably glistening on layers of Sunday Classifieds and a brass binnacle compass gimbal-mounted with a healthy needle when you tripped on it. A mess, all this, of things in themselves to work with, sheets of plexiglass, two aluminum studs bent but usable, resin blocks, gray areas of litter, even a perfectionist buried in here somewhere in future space, an extension ladder going going. A cork bulletin board crammed with intelligence, a lighting plot tacked up, a clipping of a couple dancing, a drinking zebra taken by a crocodile jumping up out of the water, tracing-paper maps like overlays of riverfront with shots of two city bridges. How did the guy keep it all straight?

Materials, he was explaining — that was what he was doing for the visitor as if the flat tire had been a means to bring you in and tell you about this multi-use neighborhood project like the latest thing. Though then, “Smart materials,” he said, like a joke between the two of them but the visitor looked upward, to where the second floor had vanished or become a twenty-foot ceiling. Resist impulse to pull out cell and take a picture.

This person in the night who’d fix your flat — but when? — was he kidding? “Whey. Bob Whey, w-h-e-y?” he said. “No tools? No tube?”

“Just me and the bike.” The visitor’s back half out again. His host eyeing him, “It’s been a tough evening,” said the man. “Tough day,” was the reply.

A day getting ready to go away. Plus two weeks of talk ahead, mainly his but coming at him like night terrain to a paratrooper. And then tonight, dinner on his best behavior, and afterward his first flat in years by accident taking this route of three or four routes sometimes at night when the city belongs to him, redoing it in his head, his chest, arms, and butt. The end of a difficult evening — and now this guy, one more city sell with some point probably of value offered in the end. Fix your flat but step in here, see what we got goin’ on. Parking his visitor’s bike up against a table-saw this not uninteresting guy who, whoever he was with, didn’t like to be alone. Self-taught veteran you felt, wounded person (?), with one jagged half-broken tooth — partners (he said — but you wondered) in this and the building backing onto it — semi-raw space from two city decades ago, how had it escaped? — who would talk himself out of a job you would bet.

“Do it from the ground up human scale, human materials.” “The ground?” the visitor weary now, “the ground—?” thinking, Who’s we—? “Groundscraper not skyscraper,” the other broke in, who’d been so mysteriously prompt out in the street, almost before the tire had blown. Perhaps a little unbalanced, like his limp, but no. “Decentralized community unit if we could only buy — you know what I’m saying, you do, I feel you do — designed fer — shoot, use what you have. Aren’t we glad the Towers went down?” (the voice rising, the bridges on the bulletin board coming back in focus)—“get outta this damn strait-jacket everywhere you look architects asked to come in but no chance to preciate the situation, study it, honor it, put the neighbor back in the hood. When’s it going to be our turn? All they can talk about is uncured violations.” The voice asking you for approval, how familiar these thoughts at a stretch they could have been the older man’s own once that he cut his teeth on, imagining these connected insides, the bare spaces of this building and the next, and a third building backing on the next block south (?). Yet this came to you now more a room you could live in, that leads to another also with a window, a ceiling, some circulation. These words in the middle of the night told a story, the speaker’s own — what was he saying, this almost structure taking instruction from…the body, that old architect’s dead end? — not seriously lame, this guy stranded though in a wee-hours expanding burrow — but he was halfway interesting: “Try another city,” he said as if to himself. “Boston for godsake.”

The visitor looked about him needing to get home, but the man counted on him.

For what?

To speak? Wasn’t there a materials show coming up in ten days? said the stranded bicyclist offhandedly, picking up a magazine off a chair, wincing. Whey seemed not to hear. “See a whole goddamn city planned for where was it Borneo, and one for Lake Victoria (?) — Jesus Christ.”

Welcomed off the street, he felt competed with, disturbed by this man Whey, his overlarge glasses. Half wanting you here, half what? Some violence just setting foot in a building — had Whey said that? Well, when was any empty building complete? said the visitor. “Most buildings are a lie,” was the reply, bitter, private.

“It’s how your work gets used.”

“Oh,” said the host with feelings one could deeply grasp, “you know it. My stuff’s been — you smile? — appropriated, God knows.” Whey draped his jacket over the bike seat. “Yup, it hurts, your own materials, flesh and bone,” said visitor.

“Quit before they fired me. Blow them off, the lot of them. Travel light,” the gesture took in the space.

“Bonaparte will find his Leonardo,” said the visitor, and when his host challenged the dates but Thanks for the company, you could ride that two-wheeler back there, Whey pointed — clear through into the next space, prob’ly easier on your back that angle, million years of insane evolution — he was irritated at Whey as if with his limp, his weights, something of a loser, his work underfoot, clippings tacked over one another, dancers, bridges, he knew in advance what was communicating itself to the visitor about his lower back, this successful traveler who couldn’t spend another minute here and, on two tracks somehow, his gray-and-black helmet hung from the handlebar stem, thought only of how to hobble home yet for a split second also of architecture as clothes, or the body.

Violence, the man had said — to even set foot in a building, let alone this in-progress — his hand describing a shape — multi-cellular experiment, this nest that takes its instruction from the body, its cue and summons—“said I was kidding myself.”

“Who did?”

“Just now.” Whey pointed at the phone on the floor.

“Kidding yourself about…?”

“All this.”

“It’s only the phone.”

“Depends who it is for godsake—‘Go into another line of work, asshole,’ was what it meant. That’s the phone for you,” said Whey, “then they tell you go get a breath of fresh air. I hung up but I took the advice.”

So that was how he had come to be out in the street.

“So. Missed your turn?”

“Yeah’d you hear the—” the visitor cupped his ear.

“The boom? You heard it? Explosion, whatever.” Whey pinched the flat, ran a finger up the rim. “How long since these wheels were trued?” Want to siddown? How far ya got to go? an odd ring to it. Hey that’s ten, twelve blocks from us.

Who was us? Someone who could live with this strewn floor. Here’s to the late-night advice about lower back but—

“Home is home,” Whey swept his jacket off the bike seat, “a fix — a fix — if you can just come off it. You see what’s here. All out in the open.”

What did Whey want? The visitor, ready to wheel his devoted bike into the night — is he just someone off the street? Summoned into some building that might never get done. God, an installation virtually. Two citizens in theory in the middle of the night. And someone coming to join them here? Or phoning? One didn’t ask. What was the emergency? “Don’t know where your thoughts turn up these days,” the man exacting some price. “Far from home,” said the other, thinking of the morning’s flight. “Zactly,” said the host, “criminal—” he tripped, lunged, got his footing—

“The war you mean.”

“Criminal as war. As war criminals if you want to know. And all this, this architecture, city planning theory (?), the military’re using it now, operational you hear. Glad you missed your turn anyhow.”

“You heard that bang out in the River whatever it was?” Why did the visitor ask, when his host had already said.

Surly now, some story in his eyes, preoccupied, not answering. Was he ready for his guest to go? Yet in their Army jackets, host and visitor together shared then the oddest thing of all stepping out onto the old irregular slabs of sidewalk, where Whey like a workman in broad daylight let out a whistle ear-piercingly through his teeth, and the roof-light of a taxi slid into view at the corner. Like some secret but one that hardly matters, next to this meeting.

Now the cab paused as if to back into this odd street of unrenovated commercial buildings, begrimed and fine — old cobbles a bike tire’s mine field he had known. The host shook his head at the twenty-dollar bill, a corner torn. They looked at each other. Something: what was it? Luck that Whey had looked out when he did? “Yeah I heard it,” Whey said.

“Yeah, I was looking out at the River and I missed my turn,” said the other. “Well, I was on the phone, I got it in both ears, I thought it was my head splitting again,” said Whey.

“And then?” said the other, for now the phone was ringing.

“Person on the phone’s saying, ‘Not long for this place’—her place she meant, hearing the explosion, I think. Sometimes you want your life back. Sometimes you don’t.” He laughed and pulled a remote out of his jacket pocket. “You never lost it,” said the other. “Well, I need a break.” “Don’t get locked out…” (what was the guy’s name? — propping the door ajar).

“A pleasure I’m sure.” The cab came up the wrong way, U’d and pulled over. “An honor in fact.” The visitor had said so little. Why an honor? — his coming and going sandwiched between two phone calls. The steel door swung shut upon the light, upon the host, his body, its progress, the body you did violence to yet in adapting took bizarre instruction from point by point in building the building, locating this dark street that knew him and he had bumped along late at night yet never quite noticed. And now the cabdriver with baseball cap and ponytail gathered with a shiny clasp, Russian, was known to him.

Not a huge surprise for this city traveler, her hand on the wheel, her nearness, her shoulders. She seemed to remember him, waiting for him to notice. Russian, a moonlighter from some Union Square spa. They had compared notes one night, two hold-up stories; then (may I?) their own handguns (the range he went to in a downtown basement, hers across the river in Long Island City, keeping up to snuff, permits up to date). They had even compared hands. A bond. She reaching up, he forward just past the divider, their own hands extending with a quite separate and ancient intent off the stem of the arm knowingly, yes—“what does it know?” she’d said. Yet rider and driver — tonight they matched discretion, no questions, the smell of her coffee, a lifted sandwich, the mayo and meat aroma of her late lunch lessening and another sweeter smell bearing him along — no regret realizing after all that his bike with its tire would have gone in the trunk, and oddly that some current was live in him from that chance encounter.

So now he was inspired to tell her about tonight. Though he wondered out loud why the man wouldn’t let him pay for fixing the blow-out, it was a job to be paid for; while she replying, “He had something else from you, I think,” made him think again of what they could do with this block. His thinking ten, fifteen years ago, proportions came to him, two types of structure neither enough by itself, not just for a block, a neighborhood, a wider scheme, it came to him, some wholeness always unfolding — and that parting word “honor” from his host, a fugitive city voice and somebody calling him back, stretching. All forgotten, except his nameless back, which on the ride home in a veritable couch of a back seat moved him to speak of his daughter in her “older” boyfriend’s place tonight, their bland, unforgiving food. The driver’s laugh at this inspired him to ask her in for a rub by the fireplace he had rebuilt, rethought, but he must pack and perhaps sleep. Yet dream then of the dark person who’d rung Whey at that hour. To dream is to know you’ve slept.

He was in Tel Aviv next day, and a team of people among the audience the day after come to hear him speak of space improvised for strategic flow, unlocked and its urban perimeter multiplied — and speak he can. That done, Basra, added last minute by a shadow agency like one hand not letting the other hand know whatever, and a night walk through a zone, a rattle of shots and a dull explosion in the near distance, a detour of small streets absorbed in the sketchy warren of back pain that brought with him the dead their ears ringing like memory inverting memory so space became more space. Two more stops. Turkey. And it was more like three weeks before he came home and even then seeing his bike where Clea, for it had been her day, had parked it in the basement hallway, helmet secured, putting in a call to his daughter a week before Christmas (who told of the explosion out on the river they’d heard taking a walk after he had left them), he had all but forgotten another New York night, its feeling and map, and to have the bike picked up (but there it was, unmentioned by Clea), and near forgotten the thing or two said to him about his back, that night, though there would come a time when he would summon them and they would come.

He would sketch it for us on the restaurant tablecloth. A disk bulging between vertebrae — another disk, another vertebra, stairway to nowhere, that lower back. Late-night entertainment for his friends at Caesar’s. The correspondent, when he was in town. The philosopher, who wanted to talk about the war, and laughed a deep belly laugh. Eva, who had her close-up view of his back agonies — that it was all about his daughter he was on the outs with. The detective lieutenant if they were in luck. The portly actor who had landed a part. Recently, a computer chick with a nostril ring, one-time notorious hacker now a hot website designer, who said What about surgery for that back? And sometimes, sitting down with them, the owner, Bob Austrian, who’d been known to call for one last bottle from the devoted but rather remote waiter who by now was leaning on the shadowy little bar, head tilted into his cell phone that had just snugly rung — champagne on the house once in candlelight for someone’s birthday — the correspondent’s, his eye for history on the tablecloth. Spills, crumbs, a word or two scrawled in ballpoint, a phone number, a name, upon request a math equation for the two plane curves for units of disaster housing approaching each other on an axis like whales nose to nose — and, closing down the place, our revered regular’s spinal cartoon like a section of ladder. Words fail you, he’d take a drawing every time. The doctor had shown it to him with some new software. What next?

“What would you do for a lower back cure?” said the philosopher. Oh it wasn’t that bad, the sufferer broke in—“Would you—?” “Hey, whoa,” said correspondent, knowing what was coming. “—kill for it?” The actor had a fit of coughing. “Would you?” No problem, the offending disk was now said to be happily disintegrating, soon there wouldn’t be a problem any more. “Said by…?” asked the web girl, when others laughed. “Seriously though,” said the philosopher.

“It’s his back,” said the correspondent, who had tried to forestall that insinuating philosopher-question. Because he knew his friend, what he was capable of beyond a drawing on a tablecloth headed for the laundry, and had followed his career with curious eloquence. Originally an architect of office blocks light in look transferring a transparency and lift to a lower hovering balance as if to clear an added space below. A man known for unimagined problems and their solutions — an engineering and forestry college in Ontario that unleashed upon the architect six months later a physical attack by the benefactor with typical Canadian temper when the several buildings were said to be like parts of a disassembled ship. An original, known now for his thinking about cities, their perimeters porous with self-improvising and opportunity, “multiple” in the old sense of multiplying. A risk-taker known for the future, for humane blueprints, yet, in destroyed urban places abroad, seeing scars to be not structurally just erased but worked with. In advanced circles recognized for materials, green steel, uncanny glass and canny polymers layered for holding light in an expansible or contractible wall unit serving linked labs, auditorium, conservatory, municipal hearings. Known for materials that thought for themselves, it was somewhat inaccurately said, and he was sniped at, consulted, respected, known and subtly unknown, his résumé like a dam arched against some river force. Revolutionary would perhaps not be putting it too strongly, the correspondent believed (the correspondent would soon report on him again though rarely spoke of him to others) — a man alone but open to the right helper if he got lucky; also a mystery, amid lasting issues of design and engineering, also respectful of others, even philosophers busy with homework on war appropriations who knew his background in math; always alive to the potential of streets, light, water, the limbs of a structure, a sudden tensile stroke of invention. This the correspondent knew, who was his friend and sometimes envied him.

For he could work anywhere. Dictated while bike-riding, that best of all angles sitting the saddle of his wise hybrid. Here’s to the North River bike path, here’s to genes, women, good manners, work, massage. Here’s to cortisone (which gave you a headache); ibuprofen, death on the kidneys you heard (so one morning he stopped taking it). Stamina notorious. Anything was better than standing on his feet, walking a few blocks and stopping. Or flying. (He kept it to himself.) Worst was getting his legs out of bed to the stab in the back like a sickening alarm or the phone that actually had woken him ringing inside his head with some message — for he wasn’t in pain, the pain was in him, he would say. It didn’t quit thinking, he said. Kayaking on hold, the run at dawn too, which had absorbed him, for the River could make him forget. His lower back always behind him not that it knew to haunt him. There was a pretty good upright piano at Caesar’s. He sat at it more easily than his own. Which was not an upright but a baby grand. Never knew what he would play, until his fingers touched down, he’d had a wild man for a teacher, an uncle, a non-teacher really.

The new acupuncturist he kept to himself. But here’s to her as well. Sometimes the cool ones come closest. She hadn’t recognized his name when he’d phoned her one long afternoon. Yet then she did, he sensed. He spelled it for her, X-i-d-e-s (why did he?), Xides (as in my), and said it again, Zai-deez. Who had referred him? Well, a journalist friend who didn’t know her but…had been given her name by…someone he’d sat next to at a briefing (?). Another writer? No idea.

She was thinking, and you could hear the faintest pause. She was on the move. Doing things, he felt. He heard the little clack of the blinds being raised. They both knew there was more. But she would see him.

In fact his friend the correspondent had said leave him out of it, he’d run into this guy at a structural materials show, metal glomming onto bone came up in the conversation and orthopedists, and in this way a certain friend, no name dropped, of the correspondent’s with back trouble came up whom he’d expected to see here but remembered was out of town. Whereupon the guy recommended an acupuncturist. Extremely good, uncanny, though a gal bent on remaking you from the ground down, and a great little terrorist.

It was an interruption, Tuesday Friday appointments, though he doubled up an errand that needed doing in her neighborhood.

She dressed in black and stood very straight, a person, pale, compact, and, when he thought about it, smooth or learned in her body. What’re you gonna do? Maybe she knew something and could help. Swami healers could diagnose over the phone sight unseen. What was the truth? He left it to her. Her hair, so darkly un-reflecting, was caught up behind in a clasp at her neck yet in front combed tight back into her scalp like a Hispanic girl’s on the subway first thing in the morning. She saw the two dark tucks where stabs had found his rib cage years ago. She had him prone at first, hard for him so mostly she put him on his back which he eased down flat on the table.

Belly, ankle, nostril, groin, you let her go where she would, she’s licensed. It was the needles, wasn’t it? Longer than he had thought, flexible, thread-thin, sensitive to where they went. Earlobe or right inside the ear the cartilage (the heel of her palm brushing his beard), placing her needles. Fine steel planted like markers, not at all an inoculation, she might string two or three together, he told Eva.

Needles placed to free the flow along the channels. Methodical, yet more. He resented coming, didn’t he? He would surprise her. She told him what she was doing. What did she know? It multiplied. She came and held a small mirror to his face. “Look at our color.”

The flush prickled his forehead and cheeks, you’d think he’d taken too much of something, niacin high potency or a couple of real drinks on top of his pills. “See the difference?” The phone went once in the other room almost answering her — was it the third time he’d seen her? — and seemed to tell her she would pick up. He made a sound back in his throat, “Mmhmm,” lying there wondering if the darkening pink in his face was good for the lower back or would last when he left. The mirror lingered.

Peering into the glass held above his face like a photo in a cell-phone camera — like swollen material — Look what we’ve accomplished, he heard her say. More than pink; stupid-looking, he thought. Cooked, and the timer went off. The phone had answered her question before she asked it. It was the needles, where she stuck them in. Her intricate treatment took effect crudely.

She saw her patients where she lived. He would stretch out on the table in the treatment room. There was a long couch, too — an open-out daybed, he figured, from the clear front line of the frame just visible beneath the three seat cushions. At either end of it stood glass-front bookcases displaying selected volumes, leather-bound Materia Medica, racks of stoppered phials, small blue-and-white plastic dispensers containing white remedy pellets. He was actually tired of his back acting up. He wanted her to do something for him, and he told her this.

It was when she first had sat him down to tell her what had been going on. You came in through the front door and just beyond the foyer a desk came into view against the near wall, a small, neat, dark-lacquered table, no more than that; a chair for her, a chair for you. They reviewed what he was taking. Illnesses? Never. Work? He let it be vague — urban space, an idea person — (he did not say architect or planner). He traveled some (didn’t tell her that he was in demand). Exercise? Violent. Eating, alcohol, sex? Sure. Allergies, none. She was at home here with him. She was a thinker. She had a look at his tongue. He smiled, his cheekbone itched. He would write an account of himself, please, for next time, a page would do. He didn’t know what she knew. He had noticed a traveling clock somewhere. She didn’t wear a watch. He wanted to know nothing about her, he was fifty-two. He couldn’t help what he knew. His appointment times inscribed in her little book so little it made, like her minute handwriting, a statement that what mattered was elsewhere. And, among other things, it was him. Or some feminine economy. The chairs were of black maple, he thought, but spare and light to lift, a clarity to sit in, a sweet, unpainted smell or their making itself gave less weight, you could certainly stand on them. She led him away into the other room.

Her quick way of talking made you forget the silences. Or remember them, because when you started to say something, it reminded her, and she was off, almost. Yet quiet. A dominant person. You must listen. He could time her pauses. She belonged to him not quite for an hour. Prick the outside, change the in-. Leaving, he had a sensation of warmth circulating laterally across his back and belly.

A current they knew was there, she had said, but didn’t wholly grasp. How come? he said. She looked at him.

Young, she called him Mr. X the third time he saw her. Mr. X? It didn’t seem like her. A nickname was new for him yet was this one? It went unmentioned to his friends. Like her address, which surprised him yet with one of those familiar New York coincidences no more odd than meeting his daughter by chance on the subway one night. Now, who would say “Mr. X”? Some wife.

His Qi was pretty good, she thought. He had heard of it. A flow, a something, but that’s not quite it. He went to China but he’d heard about Qi here. Here it all seemed to make more sense, where chance was choice or freedom. He knew what it was, Qi, so long’s he didn’t have to say what it was. Qi was…“like us, the flow of it,” he said. “Let’s surprise old Qi.” He was taking a hand, maybe a little obnoxious, he said passing his eye over her. Like a stream, he went on. To be undammed…or electricity? Like magnetic water, a new highly classified material.

“Qi is what it does,” she lowered the elastic of his boxers. Qi, he said. Good, she said softly, at work. What if she were wounding him? She wouldn’t. She could. And where would such an unthinkable suspicion come from? Qi. He felt not even a jab but a response from inside him to the point. (If she would only scratch him there, he itched.) Did he breathe? she asked. God yes, he was a runner.

She had studied in China, his friend the correspondent happened to recall. Here’s to Chinese medicine, let’s not make too much of it. Acupuncture was pain-management was what you heard, migraine, arthritic knee, carpal tunnel, sciatica, pitcher’s elbow — and he had hired her. Snoring as well, he’d heard, someone else’s problem. Inoperable malignancy.

China, you do what the doctor says, if he doesn’t help you you fire him, she said. Was that true? he asked. She didn’t say. But she had a mentor somewhere she could run things by, he said. She had. She had a fine and prominent and private nose and he thought she was quite intelligent and was an early riser. He didn’t need to know her secrets. Valerie Skeen was her name. Her power given to her by you. In a way. The paths inside you that might cross with motion even when you were still. Chinese medicine, but he had been in China on other business. When he closed his eyes, she would sometimes say things. “So I gather you don’t exactly build buildings now but…” He let it go, it was their third or fourth time together. “…you make cities better? — that kind of thing?” she said. She waited a moment. “You think up cities, I believe,” she said, imagining it perhaps. She’d heard it somewhere obviously.

“Every architect I know has something that won’t get built up his sleeve,” he said. He opened his eyes. “A lie lies like a path through that commonplace,” he said. He was proud. “I’m a fool,” he said, and was proud of having said it to a woman. “But also something that will get built,” she said.

She didn’t yet say what it was, what was happening with him. She spoke of how we didn’t know why it worked. It was him in a way, so it touched him. Was it up to him, then, to do what would decide her? Was acupuncture like nothing else? Meridians came up. A map inside you but moving. Channels keeping the organs going. One way streets? he said. Maybe she thought he was stating not asking.

There were no words for it connecting inside with outside, if you believed it (or had to). It was Qi. He dreamt early in the morning. His lower back was on hold, dozing. What day was it? Her mouth was expressive in silence, it was alert. What was there for him to do at her place? He went there to lie down and have her treat him. Courtesy between them like fine lust. Appointments came and went.

He asked if these prescription drug bargains came in on her e-mail too with messages weirdly added on about Iraq, abuse, bizarre events (she didn’t exactly find it funny), he was about to give examples, the occasional genocide, often the war — cut-rate Lotrel, pain-killer Celebrex, many of them Canada cut-rate, Levitra, Xanax—

“For anxiety,” she said. He laughed, remembering an early morning dream.

She didn’t have e-mail. “So that’s one thing you won’t lose if they switch us off,” he said. “Us?” They could switch off a whole society. “Would we do it to ourselves?” Well, we wouldn’t do it to our own grid, we were hostages to electricity we had too much to lose — he’d been in Auckland in ’98. “Well, Auckland,” she said, and “If the phone fails you you can always…”—she removed a needle from his instep—

“Go knock on their door,” he said, he didn’t know why. He had dreamt early in the morning just at dawn of forgetting how to ride his bike, losing your own infrastructure. This woman probably didn’t even have TV.

He paid cash for these brown herb sticks of powerhouse moxa she gave him to take home like small incense cigars to light and hold as close as you could stand to the abdomen and hip points she identified. Was she making things worse? Homework, she called it. You want me, you get moxa, part of the package. It was her little joke. A little bit goes a long way, she said. The pain found itself diverted for now.

He could think, or maybe couldn’t not. One meridian had points independent of other meridians. But so close to Kidney Meridian you couldn’t tell unless you asked her. Conception Meridian it was called. Yes, from pregnancy but also Responsibility Meridian it was called, she said. It went down along middle pelvis very near Kidney Meridian then external genitals and anus. She hadn’t any plans to…? No.

What does she do? his friends had wanted to know. He was a good describer, more even than one would want to know. A pain-killer’s not a cure, we’ll have to see, he said. Frankly sometimes you drift off. This stuff was ancient. Adjust the balance was what she’d said. “Of limited value use with you,” said the correspondent. Actor had heard it was good for snoring. To Eva there wasn’t much to tell — who’d already traced the back pains to his daughter, a diagnosis a little sad coming from her.

How Valerie spun a needle, he would describe. But not the mirror. Not the phone ringing.

She brought him the mirror to see himself. Held between thumb and middle finger.

“Here, look at your face.” Showing off what she’d done. The phone rang uncomprehendingly in the other room and stopped, denied its path. It had rung at the same time Tuesday. Like eyes that can hear. But what?

She had the machine turned down but not the first ring and a half. He had closed his eyes and saw the ceiling. “They fire you, then they won’t leave you alone,” she said. To herself she said it. And for him. “Scared of you but,” he said. The needle in his heel ached, he’d resisted the needle. A reflex, she told him, how had he learned to do that? “Scared not of me,” she said. It was the fourth time he’d come to see her.

There was a red Buddha carved of wood quite massive-seeming on a polished wooden pedestal in the living room. The pedestal shaped like a cushion. Beside a stone pool grew two white flowering plants. How did they stand so tall in their pots without bending and how did she keep the water so still? In a corner stood all by itself a two-part shoji screen near the answering machine with the green light, no chair near the phone — and elsewhere, the distances finely maintained, a towering glass vase on the floor held stalks of grain, which struck him as beautiful or successful. A tiny alcove kitchen, a dark and silver shadow waiting that you could almost miss — where two knives hung magnetized.

She took time and she made it pass. He saw her. Where did the steep pain go? A weight, yet there poised with her. A delusion and real. They were getting somewhere. She was doing something. A route the needles plotted. He never saw the marks when he went home.

Back pain? she asked. Got worse. So the treatment…? It was kind of working Tuesday and Wednesday — (“What was that like?” she asked—“Like less gravity, a shot of ozone”) but then yesterday not. She studied the man extended before her in his shorts. It was Friday. She spun her point between finger and thumb. She wouldn’t say certain things. That she hadn’t liked him but had found him to be quite an OK patient. That she’d heard of him before he ever phoned her but he was nothing like that when you got to know him. Why had he found her? he wondered.

Had he used the moxa? Damn right, singed himself.

“Nobody fired you,” he said, hearing in his own words that she meant that person, a former patient, had also dumped her.

The needle jabbed his foot this time. Nothing she had done. Messaging soft tissue up to his hand, open for a needle between thumb and index. “Once burned, twice shy, my dad said.” Her authority was close. She was a healer. Or it was what she had always done. “You don’t go back there,” he said. “You don’t,” she said.

Later he remembered his back. It came to him that, yes, the caller who had fired Valerie had left her. She had been his girlfriend, it came to him. Unprofessional. The main thing seemed elsewhere. Shielded by perspective. Closeness. A secret that would come out and be less big a deal than what we knew already.

“Strong spleen,” she had said, it was a Tuesday, a March sleet storm snare-drumming down the window. Terrific, he had said. Yes, it helps. It’s better, he said. She nearly smiled. He’d almost ruptured it once. Lucky, she said. Yes, it was. Senior high, a car crash, he wasn’t driving.

“So who was?”

X’s uncle who was only three years older.

“Why was it lucky?” the acupuncturist asked.

“It got me into what I do.”

Was that true? she said.

Well, fear of spaces.

The phone rang and stopped. He explained that he had come out of anesthesia and seen the ceiling sliding open on the floor above which, listen, was a sky full of buildings turning and in motion mapped by someone he was sure, and then he couldn’t breathe gagging on mucus, or thought he couldn’t. Had she any idea what that was like? It was like a bleb he had ruptured once letting in air around the outside of one lung collapsing it. She asked how that had happened. He had stretched and wrenched himself at the end of a dive off a springboard to make the entry straight up. The lung healed itself. Scars in there. “We’ll never know,” she said.

Spleen? he said after a moment.

It got rid of impurities.

Was that a good thing? She ignored this. “They show up in the tongue moss. As smoke, what we call smoke.” “Sounds like a rough night, smoky tongue moss,” he said. She looked at him. Where was her secret? The guy kicking her out by leaving himself.

When Xides undressed he would take off his watch. Was he developing needle memory? When Valerie showed him his face it would be about thirty minutes and he lay there. This was when the phone decided to ring. You could do without it.

“Is it right there at the needle that you get into the Qi?” “Down here too.” She pointed to the groin area where he knew there was a needle but didn’t look below her hand, her face. It was like water in a bark canoe, he told her, the leak you see in the floor isn’t right over the break in the outer skin. Asked how his back was, he didn’t know today. Her hand was close and out of sight, she spun the needle, twiddled it, three or four seconds in his belly, he thought — could you work two meridians, he thought, did two cross? He would find out himself. “We don’t know how it works,” she said softly. “If it works,” he said. “It works.” “Unless it doesn’t.” “That’s right.”

“Your Qi…,” he persisted. “Yours,” she said. “Works on mine?” he said. (They didn’t yet think as one.) “Your technique I mean. You’re remote but you still do your work.” “I’m not remote,” she said.

He muscled himself down off the table when they were done, pulled on his pants, buttoned his shirt, tied his shoelaces, wrote a check. Felt like a warehouse. She wrote a remedy for him to do something about his sleep, handed him a slip of paper thin as onion-skin. He said he’d gone back to swimming, it was good for his back, the friend who’d recommended her was a great swimmer or had been—

It could chill your kidneys, she said.

— and good for his mind, he wanted her to know (as if he were fond of her), he had an idea for nested pools like the public place in Hong Kong but more stacked than tiered, did she know Hong Kong? On the way to someplace else, he thought she said quickly. — You need to regulate your bodily functions like drinking, eating, standing up straight. That’s indispensable. Otherwise — she was saying, looking at the paper in his hand… — he felt her like a hand inside his heated face, and wanted to speak of winter fishing in Wisconsin but he needed to pee yet still more to get out of here, it was the treatment.

Did he eat a lot of meat? she asked. He summoned up for her like an invitation a monster weekend night-hiking down into the Grand Canyon with a retired IRS supervisor now supermarket checkout buddy at the tourist center, thirteen hours South Rim to North watched by big white-tailed squirrels, next night (and day) sixteen hours back through Bright Angel and flashlighting rocks and a wild burro and, up above along the switchbacks to the car, cliff chipmunks you hardly knew were there, a tassel-eared squirrel, another shadow in the dark moving around behind him or nothing but a function of his own climb. IRS buddy cooked a fat king snake in its skin on a Coleman stove, what he’d been getting to, dead but it started wriggling again, like tossing a fish back or an eel with its head chopped off.

She said, “Your e-mails about prescription drugs? You don’t know what’s in them.” It was what came with them, he told her, news messages. “About?” He recalled it verbatim: an improvised explosive device not clear if 13-year-old boy knew he was carrying a bomb. Among the dead were 3 Iraqi civilians and a Kurdish soldier guarding an Iraqi police station, al-Herki said, decision came Monday after talks comprehensive and productive between Rice and Olmert went from casual conversation one hundred eighty degrees from that. Cut-rate Lotrel, Xanax, Celebrex, Retin A…Then he remembered a suicide bombing, a shrine in Samarra, and Iran’s nuclear plant — and a violent accident underscores the danger of working with wild animals, said a solitary message. It was only information, he said. Her smile faded. He was leaving.

“Those things you wrote me.”

“Showing off.”

She laughed, such a hard laugh, brief. “I thought the phone was going to ring,” she said. He was embarrassed. “The accident, you were what, eighteen?” “Sixteen.” “I guess it wasn’t your signature city you got drawn into in those days. But bridge houses on an old El, all that that…” Where did she get her information? he asked. “You knew at sixteen, looking at the ceiling.” He’d known nothing. He’d had an aunt who designed for Bucky Fuller, did the architect work actually but no one would ever know. She got no credit.

For her ideas? Valerie said.

The front door swung shut behind him. He had left her. The elevator in this well-appointed apartment house on its way up, a phone went, if it was hers. Her laugh a moment ago had been like someone else. The Chinese. He belonged to the city. What had she meant by bodily functions? He tried to straighten up. No one stepped out of the elevator. He never saw patients coming or going.

He thought about her when he was with his friends. And when he was thinking. Acupuncture as anesthesia. Patterns of disharmony. Sometimes she began with his tongue. Mossy. That mean green? — he was joking. No, it was the coating, the fur. After-a-rough-night fur? he interjected. Did he have rough nights? she said. He stared at her. No, she said, it was how the coating — he had it out again down over his lower lip — was implanted on the tongue material. His coating was thin, but OK.

Thank God for that.

She said it was his back but it was more his kidneys. “Oh is that all?” “A weakness there.” He asked if they were getting anywhere. Beyond pain management did he mean? she came back at him. She questioned him. Any unexplained fevers? Did he work regular hours? He was always working.

Call that regular hours?

People called him.

Who?

College president, consult on a “green” building. Do you get yourself into things? The college came to mind, he shut his eyes, students, self-defense. Sometimes he worked all night, he said.

When she got him on the table she stuck his right palm, which he didn’t like. “What is it?” Skin, he said. Yes, she murmured. Lucky he wasn’t on a serious blood-thinner, he said, he touched her. Not at your age, she said, and acupuncture did not cause bleeding, it could be used to stop it.

He was being touched but along a line that crossed another this time he was sure. “What is it?” he said. “You came in armored,” she said, “you should see yourself.” “I come here to see you.” It was less a needled point he felt now. She had been working two meridians, and we would see. Skin was elastic, he said, containing most of him openly. They thought about it. He found a growing warmth, an erection not only in his face, and welcomed not what was happening to him at this moment but in his shorts its embarrassment. She had paused to appreciate his look. His flush? Skin, he said out loud, remembering work and all this strange travel, always a stretch, and that the Chinese, who had thought up pasta, hadn’t they (?), though not all its shapes — had asked him to consult and they would have to talk about that. He and she.

But the phone rang — like clockwork. He didn’t feel flushed but she handed him the mirror and left him there, his face looked normal. An unusual second ring joined them, the machine wasn’t behaving.

Needles heel to arm, trajectories into the Qi marking targets all over his front, he listened to footsteps he knew quite well stop. She would be arrested before the shoji screen, its spiritual grid, the rosewood frame dyed black — and she was looking at the still water in the miniature pool, he could hear her thinking a divided thought under the eye of the caller, and his perspiring face in the mirror made him dizzy. It was a rival. She would be back. She was in the doorway.

“It was on,” said the man lying there in his underwear, feeling definitely something. “I’m back,” she said, unlike herself, “excuse the interruption.” “There are none.” “That’s a relief,” she said, attending to her needles (pelvis points not quite right for Kidney Meridian, he thought).

She’d forgotten and gone to answer the phone and something had changed. She was angry and this irritated her patient. No, it had never occurred to him, he said, fumbling over to her the mirror, closing his eyes—“but there are no pure interruptions.” “Your work,” she tried to say something, “your passion.” He could tell with his eyes closed as he felt a needle in his foot turn that she was trying (but why now?) to speak of him: “Aren’t you all about…?”

“Why does he call when I’m here?”

“At least it’s not one of those three-in-the morning jobs,” she said. Coarse for her.

Unlike her. Even a breach of something, but what? Keeping things separate. She hadn’t denied that it was him. But could the person know who was here? She had heard her caller in the phone ring. That was it.

The one who had fired her was what Xides suspected.

“No interruption,” he murmured, surprised. “Well, that’s one thing I’ve gotten out of this…what’s going on inside,” he said. “Cities that can access each of us?” she said, persisting.

“If we used what we had. Our materials.”

“Materials?” she said, fine-tuning a needle. “Cities,” she said. What was she doing? What was between them? “Yes, cities that can access—” (she had heard it somewhere)—

“I don’t love hearing myself.”

“People know who you are,” she said.

“But not what, God help me.” He was talking. What cities did she like?

She had a friend in Boston.

Xides had an idea, he told her, he needed to go back to where he’d had it first — something that needed a new material to build though it had been around a long time. An idea? she said. He despaired of it. What was the idea? she said. Yes, exactly, he said. “And someone takes what you thought up,” he said — changing the subject, seeing maybe vertigo was what the mirror had given him upside down—

“And turns it into something,” she said.

A schoolboy on a plane from Mozambique to Durban he would tell her about sometime, he said, whether he trusted her or not, he added meanly.

Me?

He’d said too much. A spasm in his being, he’d betrayed his own confidence. Her intelligence and courage were all he trusted. They seemed to talk fast. We had Kidney Meridian, what was the other one? Triple Burner?

Several, she was saying: Triple Burner a name only, more a relation, not a shape, between lungs, kidney…spleen, small intestine…organs that regulate water — old ideas, she said offhandedly like someone else, a person he could almost hear. (A mentor? The person in Boston?) They talked about China, Qi, the effect on it of organs it passed through. Passed near? Or through the neighborhood of? He needed somehow to see what we were talking about. He kept after her though because he had been mean about the African boy incident.

“Have you seen your internist?” she said.

He opened his eyes as she freed a needle, then another. His silence like gravity. What were his vertebrae to her? He knew some anatomy. (Did she really?) His disks, the tilt of his pelvic bone, his tail bone, his overly forward aiming neck bone. Yet his mind. He had seen forty operations, he thought.

“What materials?” she said, and he was off like a fool. A material he told her about strong as steel, yet warmer feeling, adapted at great expense for a war museum for ultra-light roofing and siding that might move in the wind like aspens up the slope of a valley he knew in New Mexico—

New Mexico—?

This metal, it was even an element — titanium.

“Titanium,” she said, recalling something. Why had he thought she would drop him? It was the phone. His mind she did take an interest in. Skin-deep, deeper still. She’d probably heard of titanium for implants? “That too,” she said. His own dentist, she used it he happened to know, who joined him in a half triathlon two years ago in Rhode Island that he finished in six and a half hours. Was he bragging? Valerie didn’t know — about what? She didn’t think so. She was holistic, he said. Cutting the swim time through keeping the body parallel — their coach called it vessel-shaping, he added. Parallel to what? Valerie asked, for she was a swimmer. To the water. Swimming at night, seeing less, knowing more, he said. Whose coach? she asked, his and the dentist’s?

Valerie sat him down at the desk one Tuesday. Why? He was ready with his tongue. She had her little book out, her thought marshalled. “No,” she changed her mind, “let’s go in there.” Later the phone rang and she came back from not answering it and spoke of his work as if the aborted call brought her these thoughts. What he’d spoken about abroad she seemed almost to know — a porous perimeter, structures at the edge of an outer neighborhood that you could pass through like a democracy field with unmarked lines of approach. Or wait, changing the subject for he didn’t trust himself — or her (though who would she tell — and how had she known?) — a rich family in Peking ages ago built a series of linked mansions, city within a city. He described it all — it stopped her — but the idea (for he hadn’t changed the subject after all) we could use and turn into its opposite, right here. For people. For city space might have no borders. It was all worked out, two sides of it, killer analysis. And would’ncha know, the military got hold of it. “So I’ve heard,” she said. (What had got him started? Her? Her call? A dim scrape of moving on the floor above, like furniture dragged?) “Think of all those floors in skyscrapers interrupting circulation or here in your own building even for privacy’s sake.”

“Privacy,” she said, doing something (but what had she meant, So I’ve heard—“Sky’s the limit on rent, I’m afraid — well, there was Leonardo,” she said. (Wasn’t she stabilized? Not this building.)

“Leonardo?” like a phone ringing a remark half recalled in his crowded life then gone. “His ideas got used,” she began.

“If you’re any good they do,” he said.

She would remember that, she said. “Pass it on,” he said, “if your ideas aren’t any good they get used just the same.” He mentioned a group down in — he was just talking — he stopped. Well, no, he would be talking to a bunch of — far from here — (“You have your fans,” she said almost like a bitch) and like a…like a…he would spot among the two hundred a clutch of military in the middle of the auditorium, a territory within, out of uniform but you knew. Had they come because of what they would do when they went back to civilian life (if ever)? “But no.”

“Like a what?” said the acupuncturist.

“A stain.” He was not just talking.

“You think war is life’s indispensable risk,” she said. (How did she know that?) His correspondent friend called it naïve of him—“what are you doing night-walking in a war zone?” his friend complained. Naïve? Xides at least knew he didn’t know what was going on. Naïve? It got him going. When he had heard an on-site American colonel swear that better bombing in Bosnia would have dropped the bridges into the river, dissolved the infra (coupled with serious offensive hacking) — war over.

Then you get into real self-defense structure, Xides told the surprised colonel.

Naïve? He was smarter than others who were embedded in the events, these operations against insurgents, and if he didn’t make himself clear…“You do,” said the woman between him and the light. Was it some dreary healing he heard in her listening voice? — “We must talk,” he remembered later she’d said. It disappointed him. But one thing he was not was naïve. So she could forget Naïve Meridian, if there was one. She made a sound, like the softest vanishing laughter.

Because here it was Tuesday again. In the dumb progress of his treatment, Could Qi flood you? he asked. It was not really like that — a river, she said. His eyes closed, he dismantled the adjacent daybed opening the damn thing stretching the material. (Was Qi a two-way street? And why “daybed”? Why Leonardo? And e-mail — was she too good for e-mail?)

“You said you were technically (?) — in what you wrote me—”

He knew what it was, her trick not in the needles only.

“—a widower (?)” she said. What he’d written for her had been all things he did, not was. He traveled, he spoke, went to the theater, because he thought performers had something (he’d written her). They were quick, crazy to be up there, foolish, quite true, gutsy. He kayaked in the North River, good upper-body technique he’d been told until his back acted up. Drank socially, and too much doubtless, but held it. He ate anything. Could manage no more than four and a half hours of sleep at best, made night rounds with a police lieutenant. He still grew miniature Asian trees in a small lighted space of his house — or they grew. His girlfriend had served as a naval officer and now painted large paintings of animals that sold. All this he had written down quite truthfully. He had killed a person once and did not recommend that mode of self-defense. He had his pride, didn’t let people do things for him for nothing, he’d written, and he reckoned all this didn’t tell his holistic healer much she could use. A lesson to him. He liked her, he’d added at the end.

“So you were technically still…?” Yes. “Married.” Yes, he had a daughter nineteen, away at college. “She makes you a widower?” “We were divorcing.” The logic popped his ears coming in for a landing, was it the acupuncture? Inside of right knee local-calling the heel or long-distancing collarbone? Limbs mixing from inside surprised at what got said.

“Getting unmarried,” said the young woman. “Oh boy,” he said. “Was it convenient this way?” “Not for my daughter.” His foot he realized later hurt. “Who exactly left who?” “Exactly.” “Were you lucky to be left?” One of them had the upper hand for a moment, was it because Valerie had gone too far?

“Was that it?” he said.

“You left but then she did it better?”

“It saved some money.”

The acupuncturist contemplated his belly like a thing. “You were lucky to be left I mean. But no going back.”

“That’s divorce. Like getting out of bed in the morning.”

“We know about that.”

That she would speak like an authority on this made you wary. “She was not interested,” he said.

“In?” “What I do.”

“Why should she be?”

“It’s your goddamn wife.” Xides reached for a needle in his belly to take it with his thumb and finger, Valerie intercepted, and he gripped her fingers like an animal biting. He expelled what was in him, all the needles and Qi and blood but here’s to the needles they were still in there helping him. He raised his knee to reach another needle but listened to her: “My partner’s knee, sinuses, headaches I could care about, aching back, his habits. Him.” “Him.” “Pain in the leg I can help, stomach, foot, head. I don’t have to imagine a city he is planning for Africa or down the street.”

“She was mending things at the last moment,” he said wondering who was the “he” planning the city. “Your wife mending things?” “My daughter more.”

“Between you and her mother.” “No, between them.” “That’s different.” Valerie had spoken.

“A floppy hat she wanted her to have. She was…”

Valerie reached out a book from the bookcase, female and professional in her single motion, so collected and expecting credit for it. “Your wife (?).” “Yes, she was graceful.” “And long after,” said the young woman, whatever that meant.

“I might sit us down and ask what was going on,” he said.

“You?”

“I felt cursed.”

“You believe in such things?”

“Saying them.”

Dismissing a city for Africa, was it Xides she meant? Would she know such a thing?

But “down the street”—who was that? Some small-scale chore he’d also undertaken once. What had he told her? She had said he had good teeth.

She put the book aside.

“Your own partner ignores your work, your acupuncture, and it wouldn’t matter to you? Your goddamn life.”

“Any more than you have to like the patient,” she said.

“You’re trying to impress me. Have you ever fired—?”

“It’d be me I fired.”

“—one here in your little home.”

“I like the windows. I look out into the street when I’m on the phone (?).”

It was always a lesson, he said.

“Like the rent,” said the young woman, at his side again. “You people want too much,” she said.

Well that was something, he said.

“No.” She laid her hand upon his forehead. Did she smooth his hair back? He couldn’t believe her. “Do you breathe?” she said, and as if she weren’t mad at him: “The gods have laid on him a restless heart that will not sleep,” was what she said.

It chilled him, it was pretty silly. Or was she, an unprotected tenant he happened to know (and maybe high-rent), meditating some parting of the ways? It was a mistake to think of her belonging to him for this hour twice a week, and he actually had not made that mistake. He was adjustable, even if his daughter knew his schedule and when he went to acupuncture. He breathed a droll breath out. He was real anyhow. Had Valerie changed the subject?

She asked his view of the Twin Towers. His view? He had been unable to think about them: that they were two was probably the thing, he said. Neither one worked by itself. Did they together? He’d never set foot inside. Had been invited to Windows on the World once, the restaurant, but couldn’t make it. Knew the part-time theater guy Jim Moore, who helped the French high-wire guy with the famous walk. He and the acupuncturist thought about this. “Travel light,” she said.

“Friday could you come at seven?” she asked presently, it was what she’d had in mind all along, a wavy needle going back into the white cardboard box unused, P.M. of course. Why the change? he asked. It was like her not to answer for a moment. The desk, the table in the other room, black maple structure, why had she sat him down there and then skipped this change and brought him into the treatment room. OK, seven. “Thank you,” she said, a frankness covering more than their next appointment. He had done something for her. What?

He would do his Friday errand in her neighborhood this time before seeing her. “Maybe I’ll come a different way,” he said. “Let’s see,” she said, “the bike path exits right over here, doesn’t it?” He could always stop seeing her.

“How is the back?” The actor pulled up a chair from the next table arriving after the show Wednesday night, needing a drink and the menu, which he knew by heart.

“Hearing’s improved,” said Xides. Everyone laughed. “That’s a beginning,” said the web designer, who was smart, had been in rehab, knew more about the war sometimes than the correspondent (who was out of the country), more about everything than anyone but was likable and somehow dark. The actor reached across for her hand. “He’s got a habit but you can’t see the needle marks,” Eva said. A painter of realistic animals, she had drawn on the tablecloth a picture of the notorious lower back. “Guy who recommended her called her a great little terrorist, according to Sam,” said Xides. The philosopher liked it. “He knows something.” “Whoever he is,” said Xides. “Didn’t have his name tag on.”

“Well he knows her.”

“She doesn’t know it but she’s getting me ready for my trip,” said Xides taking the whole thing lightly for his own reasons. “You should bring her here,” said the philosopher. “Why do you go?” said Eva, meaning China. The web girl made a sound. She knew a great acupuncturist in Chinatown, she could get his number. This was received in silence. “But he lost his odometer on the way up to see her,” said Eva. “How do you do that?” said the philosopher. “How do you know you lost it?” the detective raised his untrimmed Irish eyebrows, “maybe it was stolen.”

“On the bike path?” The actor bit into the last of someone’s baguette as the waiter brought his drink, and, his mouth full, had a good laugh with the philosopher, who said it was not the mileage.

“She only knows what she’s doing,” said the website girl then. Xides thought she was improving. He wondered why she came here. She felt at home. “Well, she’s holistic,” he said, dripping wine on Eva’s picture as he gave himself some more. “She’s professional,” said the girl offering her glass against his in a curious one-on-one.

Valerie had come back into the treatment room from the call she didn’t take. “Your regular’s after you,” he said, but she had spoken of Xides’ work. It was acute. It struck him. It was Leonardo she cited whose ideas got picked up. Xides had said that himself. He’d said these things more than once. Where? Like the matter with energy. Like Corbu at nineteen beginning with the rib-cage and maybe modular heart and see what cities became. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it something she had said? Maybe not.

What is pain? the philosopher was asking, but now said he’d heard Xides would be getting back to pure math. Xides joked that he still had that two-hole doughnut in mind he once cared to know could stretch into a sphere with two handles. The philosopher was nodding seriously. But Xides wondered what he carried around with him these days. Missing his friend the correspondent here at Caesar’s who knew his thinking but they would soon meet. Something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Night streets came to mind, like a cloud of gas swarms of citizenry spread between high-rises. Yesterday pausing halfway down the catwalk of a suspension bridge cable he saw not the city he was thinking about but, dizzyingly, his daughter in her stroller, her mere life. And bicycling the river path, he could see through the surviving trees, the neighborhoods all the way up to the sweatshirted picnickers in long basketball shorts one night on the riverside, aiming the red barrel of a telescope at, he could have sworn, the Palisades.

The odometer he let go, a clip-on, and replaced it erasing with it the proof — the credit in city miles for exercise and all that he’d glimpsed — all his regret about time, which you need not seek but will stretch at the expense of others.

It came to him later with Eva burning moxa close to his skin, close as he could stand, acrid, truthful, a pungency to get used to, that the calls thirty minutes — he said it out loud: “These calls she gets at thirty minutes into the appointment—”

“What about them?”

“I don’t hear them, the machine takes them, but I feel they’re—”

“From the same person?” Eva withdrew the moxa.

“That’s right.”

“Is this stuff doing you any earthly good?” She stretched to drop it in the ash tray (in the shape of a life preserver that had hardly been used in twenty years), and her dressing gown fell open. In her face fine shadows, in her eyes the acupuncturist perhaps, in her habits always prepared, semper paratus from her Navy days, Marines, Coast Guard, he didn’t have it quite right, semper was right. She was gone. Was that true, “Valerie” was just trying to fix him up for his next trip? he heard her ask, No, not true; long-term care. A laugh from the bedroom. “She better take care, a caller like that.”

A drawer pulled out, he got up to follow, content that they were going to the theater Thursday, a place he felt at home, the warehouse down under the Manhattan Bridge near the docks.

How did he know it was the guy who had left Valerie?

Eva flung her robe over his head and tumbled him onto the bed.

Her pale hair unpinned, he was telling her now, somehow a little falsely, that in some Asian tongue one syllable of the word for “moxa” meant “acupuncture.”

A pattern of disharmony was what the acupuncturist was after.

Had her kidney meridian patient shown up ever with a helmet in his hand, that Valerie should mention the bike exit? The once he’d biked to her she’d had no way of knowing. He’d gone without his helmet. (And lost his odometer.)

Was she taken with him? They must talk, she’d said the last time, he recalled, when she’d said he did make himself clear, he did. And he told her the scale of what she was working on inside him was scary. They might get to be friends, he had told the correspondent.

To Clea, his cleaning woman from Grenada whom he loved because she fixed the window shade in the bedroom and could cope with the breaker box in the basement (“down in the mines,” they called it) and found an empty pill bottle beside the kitchen phone and knew what they were for, he spoke of all this news coming in on Outlook Express piggybacked, sometimes attached, with ads for prescription meds, as if she would understand him. Plavix against heart attack and stroke (?). Canadian cut-rate meds, but why the bombing of a shrine in Samarra got sort of smuggled in with Levitra or Retin A and sort of tacked onto a family violence case and someone’s stepson a victim of bad fathering, the item said, and fed a diet of Trix cereal and Chicken McNuggets, you couldn’t figure the connection with cut-rate prescription meds, and personal messages cut short in the middle, with a plot in Basra to ship explosives into the Holland Tunnel and blow a hole into the river. Clea said people took too much medicine but maybe they have problems like we do. She didn’t know. She e-mailed her family with her friend’s laptop, that was it, except for her sister in Toronto. It saved on the phone. Items on a list, microwave timer off, how Mr. Xides was sleeping with his back — an intimacy between them, and at last, like some small action detected in a landscape, the man who’d returned the bike with the tire fixed having told him one night what was good for his back, materialized in conversation like a wake-up call with Clea just as Eva phoned about a bite to eat before the play, she was on her way, so he only later recalled Clea saying, Looking out for you, as she straightened the books on the night table.

Old Ibsen warehoused practically under the giant arch of a so-so bridge, they reviewed what they had just witnessed on stage: the mob hooting, yelling, Dr. Stockman thundering that the majority was always wrong — when someone among his hostile fellow citizens quite piercingly whistled. And now not a cab to be found at ten-twenty, a current of wind off the East River, a garbage can lid rattling down the sidewalk at them out of nowhere, they’d have to walk it to the Madison Street bus or the East Broadway F train. A taxi appeared, night yellow before they knew it, and he and Eva settled back behind a rangy old Haitian woman at the wheel. He turned to Eva and she felt the twinge in his mouth touching hers and knew the bike was good for his back only some of the time but she wasn’t challenging the pain-killer acupuncturist, while to him, his place vacuumed, bathroom scrubbed down but the basin faucet gasket leaking, it was the piercing working whistle that came back of the guy summoning a cab he must have known was around the corner that night near the other river as prompt as his appearance out on the cobblestones almost before X’s tire had blown.

A challenged rider these days, mostly giving the bike a rest, he felt the jarring cobbles like vertebrae, like abandoned code, at 6:15 Friday pedaling into that once-forgotten block. Its time has come. The street wet from a hydrant now shut, the bicyclist hardly sees a Fire Captain in his hat getting back in a car pointed the wrong way toward the highway. A gray construction veil drapes a six-story building, two buildings, screening the street from mortar and brick dust sprayed by grinding and repointing these warehouse façades, asbestos back in the seams. Heavily supported on the old sidewalk paving stones by giant steel legs, the second-floor-level pedestrian bridge is flagged on its spiraling razor fence against perimeter intruders by a sign vowing landmark condos next year. An area subtly exploding from old, disused commercial to residential, and on a steel door through which X had passed, two work permits, identical from here. And advice about your back sounding a night of routine New York emergency (was it three months gone by?) its signature the rhythm on these cobblestones of a Samaritan accosting him and leading the way indoors. Where work in progress could look less building than dismantling there in Bob Whey’s clutter of — his name came back in one piece and was gone — tools, materials, floorboards darkened by a century of use, fugitive photos like overlapping bulletins, vehement palaver, veiled compliment, that night, that hour.

But now the bicyclist rode up onto the sidewalk strewn with rubble, and his palms upon his handlebars sensed only space in there now where not even a phone waited on the gritty floor, you felt sure, or the two calls one knew of. The heavy-duty door shadowed by the scaffolding overhead did not know him when he pulled on the handle, hearing the car idling behind him and then a shot from its horn. “You got business here?” said the voice of the Fire Captain standing on the far side of his car, who recognized him when he turned. “As you were, Mr. Xides — you remember me from the Mayor’s—?” “Yes of course.” Was he in on this? Neighborhood renewal? No, just remembering. Well, onward and upward, Mister Xides. Captain? Captain? An explosion that night. What night? Bayonne or someplace out on the river weeks ago. Got me. Could be anything. A touch on the horn pulling out.

“Yer late,” said the young Parks person, when he came off the bike path at six-forty. “You too,” he said. In the bed of her utility vehicle parked like a toy lay two rakes. On a bench a couple of street kids who’d love to get their hands on the wheel. The one he recognized said, “Been to Africa lately?” This amused the boys. “Gotcha bike,” said the young woman, who lifted the fan-shaped leaf rake by its plastic handle and let it fall, she had a call on her cell, a piece of song. Slow-moving in her ample brown trousers, she liked him, or recognized him, he read her metal name-tag over her uniform shirt pocket. Late for what? For this. He would let the stone paths and old apartment houses, high also because of the River below, and people come to him. There passed an expensive dog, lanky, fragile, learning sort of flowingly to heel. He propped the bike behind a bench, and eased himself down. “You got back misery,” the girl said, starting up. “Well, I come here,” he said.

“You do. I see you.” She had a thought. “Sitting there like a…”

“An architect, sort of.”

“Never woulda guessed.”

“How many miles did you ride?” said the wise-guy boy.

“So long, Mahali.”

Two men in ties and jackets pedaled up the last stretch of exit ramp. The bald one in the lead spinning low gear at a great rate, trousers clipped, the elder, gaining on him, leaned into his un-shifted high and, stroke on stroke, rose up on the pedals like a kid to make it to the top. Scarred and patinaed old briefcases rat-trapped behind, Friday emotions of each man aimed homeward, inward, maybe berserk, if you knew these faces. A quiet sound coming, the electric moan of the Parks Department “off-road” easing by again. A back-fire down the street to the east. “I thought you lived around here…” “I did.” “Before my time?” “Before your time.” She liked him, she was observant. “Gotcha helmet.” Accommodating, this black girl, hospitable, precise. She could almost touch him.

The boys on their bench had something on their mind, Mahali gone. Seeing him muttering at a little mike was part of her day, or what had become an errand for him slipped into her job, him just sitting for a few minutes here. A tablecloth of wine spills, crumbs, equations, came before him, his late-night friends, actor, academic, artist; detective who never forgot a walk, like a dog a smell, and could identify a person in the corner of his eye; but most, the correspondent, who had asked how was it going with the little terrorist?

Just in time watched by early headlights of a car unparking, he locks the bike’s wheel and the diagonal down-tube of its frame to a stanchion, unclips the Cateye odometer, pockets it. The helmet under his arm eyed by the Cuban doorman who has seen it all bears a whole convex potential of races and demolitions, roller blades and training wheels and once a good lay in the countryside without ever taking it off: a future curving up over the mind, smuggling into the China trip, you hope, a look at both (rather than just the better known of) the two giant dams inland after the Beijing stop where Xides, professionally summoned, would shortly meet his friend the correspondent to inspect the 768-foot-high A tower, in essence less upward than a colossal frame through whose limbs, jogged and trapezoidal, circulate TV production studios, broadcasting, media, God knows what all allegedly non-hierarchical around the multi-D window cavity through which is to be seen depending where you are the more and the less, city, nation, a blank, the frame’s glazed skin of international sign language like the bracing wrapping in the façade plane holding the building up—

— yet waiting for him back over the polar cap a return flight he looked forward to already — a homecoming next month felt this evening against his arm and ribs, the helmet’s hard arc, cupped rim, and the hand of the acupuncturist whom he wanted, sometimes in friction, discord, mystery, to please, who yet had picked up from him cheap surely beyond what any healer, restored in some corner of her own seeking, might learn. Though why had she imagined him bicycling to her?

“Late today,” said Nuevo.

At Xides’ greeting — his stupid question “She there?”—did Nuevo roll his eyes letting you in on something that had happened? This building. People. An abyss above.

A knife missing from the magnetic strip in the dark kitchenette. A small black-and-white TV he didn’t recall on the living room floor next to the tall plants that had shed two white blooms waiting to be swept up. A Time Out magazine on his chair by the table near the foyer. A current in the apartment asking, asking — enfolding the voice that as he came in through a front door propped open with the Yellow Pages in the way yet letting him in, had directed him to go into the treatment room, a dresser drawer not perfectly closed, a ladder folded against her closet door, two couch pillows belonging to the day bed adrift against a book case. Though where was she as he took off his clothes and his glasses, as he tried to get his back to flatten down on the table pad and its sheet.

And the Yellow Pages?

After a time, a sound from the other room, of trust. His and Hers, a reverie while he awaited her steps.

The correspondent, interrupting him last week, had asked particularly about the acupuncturist, the little terrorist — Xides’ curiously lowered voice, once described in print by his friend as physically inside his thought, at that moment brainstorming disaster housing. These blue tarps the Commission pitched by the thousand “that looked like swimming pools from a chopper — refugees on the move inside their own borders nowadays—”

One outa three hundred homeless globally, the listener puts in for Xides (worked up) to add: “We can do better.” You’re sounding like a politician, the listener put in against his friend’s thoughts: “Afghan, Iraqi—” (Indonesia Colombia Bosnia, the listener put in, hearing some new trouble looking for words from years ago almost, this architect originally)—“superadobe would work better for godsake, Sam, local-earth with barbed wire for mortar.” These grain-storage bags of hemp they recycled as tents, the Jap firm — if conditions changed you could add on a little four-foot wing — post-explosion, post-quake, post-flood, post-contamination, post-epidemic, post-words, post — The correspondent would remember after “X” was gone — but who’s this “we” that could “do better”? the correspondent wanted to know — only kidding — leaving the next morning for China a few days ahead of Xides. Only to get thrown back at him by his old friend strangely exercised, “Where’s this X stuff coming from, Sam?”

“Unknown,” was the reply — Xides an intriguing unknown in the equation of our future together, the correspondent had written before and would again, moved by his old friend who, when asked about “the little terrorist” that acupuncturist “of yours”—had said the scale was getting to him. The scale? From inside. Ah. “My own.” Large?

And small.

X would mesh the fingers of one hand through those of the other, edgy, maybe just that everything you do eventually gets torn down, hearing lately coming back from the tactical jungle civil dreams of his own on urban circulation picked up only to be implemented by military listeners, that is to draw blood yet in terms of economy and political stability maybe improving in fact his original thoughts on horizontal stretch. How motion might, decentralized, shift the “syntax” of a city, this new breed had it, improvise access flows to open insurgents to penetration where even state-of-the-art defenses against nuclear ends are “architecture” nowadays, perhaps even the contemplation of de-spare-parted sewage plants, depowered to leave sewage pools in the streets and river levels low.

Neighborhood renewal where it’s the neighbors that get replaced. And who were the insurgents? Imam followers such as mutah believers in temporary marriage? Other Muslims who condemn festival dramas and art depicting humans? Suicide strategists or self-anointed Gospel free-enterprisers who knew the drill? He explained magnetic water as a material to the correspondent who confessed that “acu”puncture always suggested “aqua” to him though this was incorrect; but it told Xides that man to man the correspondent was thinking about what went on at those sessions.

His eyes shut to hear her steps. Did he almost place that old Sam-sung TV? A thing on the move in the other room as if it were near the ladder in this room, he thought, seeing double, keener then than an instrument an unholy scent of cut orange came with her hand and a faint rinse of detergent. She asked how he’d been. As if it were longer than this past Tuesday.

Did he want to take off his watch, was an order, not a question. How was the pain in the small of the back and did he feel it ever in his belly? They needed to talk. It was her breath he smelt orange on too.

Taking his watch, Any fever? Why did she ask, needling his ear now? She thought she’d seen a slight swelling in his right ankle last time.

Her nostrils, her tongue tip concentrating upon her upper lip, her color looking back at him so close, he put his fingers up to her cheek for a second (unprofessional of him): What were The Yellow Pages doing propping open the door? he wondered. “And a piece of newspaper keeping the place,” was all she said, seeming to agree. The magazine, the ladder, her dresser drawer out, the daybed pillows not put back he didn’t mention.

He reminded her he would be going away in a week. “Voyager,” she said.

And he would have to temporarily stop treatment but would take the moxa with him.

Back where it came from, she said.

He might need some more.

He could buy the sticks there, she said.

His blood metered a certain risk now where he lay, putting things together.

For a time, she tended her needles like a planner. She took her time with kidney points, splitting him down the middle. An ice fisherman. Who the hell knew what she did? Track him? A bulletin-boarder with push-pins. Today he never got the small of his back flat. “Who the hell knows what you’re doing?” Xides said, for she was speaking and barely paused to think and smile with him, there was something coming, a lie lay somewhere between them today, a good lie maybe.

The needles in him, body, face, and he didn’t know how to hear the compliment he knew was coming, and shut his eyes. A law bending his way unsummoned, and now she said, quite out of character, for he would always remember, “You had an impact on me.”

He’d been meaning to make up for that, he said.

“Why don’t you just unload that funny stuff,” she said, like that was what she wanted to say.

“Whether I trusted you or not, I said, which was mean. In fact, I needed to tell someone. Well, I did tell one person — about the African kid but—”

“No, no, I’d been meaning,” she began—

“I really wanted you to hear.”

“Someone who knows you—” she interrupted and he thanked her, thinking it was she disguised as “someone” when presently he would see what she’d said was someone whom he might not recall; while Xides didn’t catch between his own words what she’d tried to tell him at first. “I really meant to tell you. The flight from Mozambique? A boy on the plane.”

It didn’t matter, she said, at work now.

“On the plane a talk we had, this is four or five years ago, he was all worked up, God he was smart, what I’d said in Maputo that morning, all of fourteen, I could have adopted him, just challenging me on public nested structures in folded grids and a house I designed under a river (?), one flow making new flows interrelating rooms…but city planning, I thought.”

“…?”

When Xides described this Friday appointment to the correspondent a week later thousands of miles from New York, was it Valerie giving him like a massage while he talked, or his hair-cutter…? He didn’t think so. A presence he detected here not hers alone like small things slowing down — acceleration nearing a new state. Or just all she kept to herself, discretion of course.

And how the phone rang not in the middle but at the end.

A city fluxed of spaces renewable and dispensable, he had said in his speech, like a continuous outward-and-inward-breathing being — between flesh and liquid, both. “So if your house as you said, Mr. x-aydeez, is just somewhere on the way to somewhere else,” the boy later on the plane couldn’t contain himself, “the city you plan fluid from district to district, for those who live there to move and mingle — that is what you said, inventing a city for us that should be porous in its multiple perimeters, social, dynamic, made from our drought-sickened soil, sir, should I thank you?”

“It was hypothetical, not just for here,” the man protested—

“—and to be eem-pro-veesed each day, if memory serves,” said the boy, fourteen, who had swallowed an idea or two and taken them to points past what the visiting thinker himself might have foreseen — yet the boy himself unwary how he sounded in the presence of others, “—but multiple really means multiplying with you, sir, and you have done the math and maybe you would show me please.”

In his recollection she plucked a needle from his instep like a mistake he was sure or an experiment (oh he knew her), and in his ear cartilage he felt a fact that had always been there, like a pair of ears, counterpart hearings. Like why do you tell someone something?

To hear how it comes out.

He waited for the correspondent as their train wound through a steep and foggy valley to say something, but there was nothing to say at that moment, though Sam often knew what Xides thought.

That kid, singled out to travel with the distinguished visitor down to Durban not four but five years ago after a talk he had given — what a talker himself, that boy, with a couple of languages plus his own and Portuguese, though from a remote township — angular, disputatious, thin as a runner — over six feet tall in the aisle before he bent himself into his seat by the window in which though this was his first flight he had little interest, for it was Xides or what Xides had had to say that so exercised him. Valerie had seemed to pay little attention except to ask how the boy had been chosen.

“But your house it is your home you cannot treat it—” interrupted the Army officer, voice rising like no white person’s voice personally and richly who hung over the back of the seat ahead drawn by the talk as well as her job, which appeared to be escorting to Durban and back this boy with the mind and fierce charm and infrastructural impatience—“it is not just the city—” the Major smiled with her cheeks, her teeth—

— interrupted now in her turn by the round-headed interpreter in the aisle (whose services were not required) who leaned over to point out the famous gorge as the plane, banking to show the “1000 Hills,” began its approach pattern. The land coming up if it could only be left alive.

“If he had been my kid,” Xides added in his account of all this past and present to the correspondent…The distinguished visitor with this one last stop before he turned homeward, listened especially to the boy, and peered across him out the window at the tilt of the land as the boy completed his analysis, “So with all these thoughts you could plan your city, reinvent its corridors—d’accord—in a dynamic field locked into feedback operating a web without a weaver. But Mister “x-aydeez,” the long fingers tapping the man’s shirt sleeve, “with your city theory one could also move in and take over a city.” All the mileage spent for what — was it the look in the lovely eyes of the Major exclaiming, “Could they do” that produced in Xides an unprecedented spasm or was it a moment later? “Maybe you misunderstand me,” Xides had protested. “Structure is motion.” “What is that, to misunderstand?” said the boy.

“I would not forget this whatever he meant,” he told the acupuncturist engrossed in her work, who said, “He meant was he just to give you back what you wanted.”

“War is architecture, sir,” the boy had offered proudly, “it’s not only everything.”

The major had gotten up into the aisle, and when she was gone into the lav (to phone ahead, it turned out), the boy gripped his companion by the wrist and asked if Xides did not foresee America in ruins. And, yes, then came the back spasm, more like a radial artery jabbed to make the heart wince — or, further down, a quick kick to the kidney sustained even as you spun away chilled in the face, and the hand not on his wrist now but gripping his hand. “What is it?” the boy said.

“As if he had taken something from me and wanted to help,” said Xides to the acupuncturist, who drew the last needle. “A suspect, was the boy a suspect?” she said.

“Well-informed we now think.”

“We?” The word said as she had asked earlier how the boy was picked for this trip.

“You don’t think I set him up?”

“I know you, Mr. Xides. But what did he take from you?” That note of intimacy in her use of his name yet distance, and her words recalled what Xides had half-heard minutes before, someone who knew you—i.e., whom you might not recall—and a distinctly heard woman’s code, “We need to talk.”

The impact he’d had on her? “Mean of me, I’m not surprised it had an impact to say I might not trust you with the story.”

She made a sound. “You thought that was it?” A light of doubt in the voice, of faint contempt.

He looked her in the eye, those dark but he now saw gray and harboring eyes that saw he had spoken as another man setting a rule for her.

But the impact she had mentioned, he felt it now like a sound or a politeness. In his body, as in hers. Was it something that had been recognized by her through him? Or it had nothing to do with him at all. Like her saying she could just imagine and didn’t want to imagine what had happened in Durban when they landed.

The correspondent (hearing all about it the following week in China) would be surprisingly subdued at the account of the appointment with the acupuncturist and how it had bizarrely concluded. The story of the flight, this scene in a downward banking plane he knew from years ago, but, as Xides explained it in the train along the route to the dam, arched gravity mass like a bridge on its side convexed upriver in the notorious neighborhood of which half a million farmer families had lived, now, just before Valerie’s phone was to ring at around seven-fifty-five, Xides had found in the lost, now recollected, hand of the unlucky young fellow traveler to Durban (and back) or found in himself or — who knows? — the purr of Mahali’s electric vehicle, the answer to the missing first odometer. Why did the correspondent take it so seriously? — having heard of the loss from their friend the detective lieutenant after the night in the restaurant when the correspondent was out of the country — or was it the odometer that made him think? Now it came to Xides that the thief who had slipped the Cat Eye weeks ago out of its little two-track base fixed to the handlebar was almost certainly the boy in the park, only eleven or twelve but more at large than the African boy that day whose abrupt round-trip and subsequent detainment would prove less mysterious than whether he’d been set up and how.

“I’m moving my practice away from New York, we need to talk…”

“But not right away,” he said quickly.

She’d been meaning to tell him. He would get a referral of course.

The phone rang in the other room twice, and a voice, tentative, irritable, and, yes, familiar, of a strength vectored by years of opinionated speech, confirmed what Xides had guessed somehow. “He fixed my tire,” he said. Tonight at almost eight the call had found them, and as if to make sense of the Yellow Pages, the dresser drawer, daybed pillows not restored, ladder — was the guy staying here? — the voice had already, a moment before, though this was not really the important thing, been identified by the man lying in his undershorts, the small of his back now that he was about to get up at last comfortably flat like, more or less, his upper spine upon the sheet covering the table though how that obscure, mixed force, the voice on a machine not turned down unmistakable from weeks ago in camo jacket and sneakers, Bob Whey, had actually come to be out there that rainy night on the cobbles where he would recognize Xides, might alter what had happened here.

“He fixed my tire.” “He what?” Whey would hear only himself. Yet, softly to him, “Bob,” Valerie said, “Bob,” wanting to interrupt the message going on contagiously confusingly clear — the hybrid bike identified as Xides’ downstairs with Nuevo’s witness. It was eight o’clock, said the voice, “we have to talk, good stuff today — work to do.” “Bob,” she said, and, to Xides sitting up on the table, “I named you once, only a name, weeks ago, and he knew you, you had met” (though he can exaggerate), “and I had to go and mention your appointment times, that’s all”—softly not to interrupt the message, “He’s what he is.” The voice going on domestically—“…I can get a decent price for the compass…got a share on a storage downtown”—concluded, “You’re so…”

“You can do better than that,” Xides said when the message was done. He was into his trousers, then his shirt unbuttoned that needed to be tucked in after he unbuttoned the top button of his trousers, new black sneakers, his cell ringing, his checkbook, jacket, wallet.

“We can all do better maybe,” she said, taking his check—“I have some moxa somewhere, I’ll find it next time.”

Xides came back to her. He took her hand her left hand in his right (so much between them), he took her shoulder, he’d had it, angry the two of them, forgetting something her hand nearly reminded him of, and he said trivially he’d again forgotten to ask her about Qi being one-way or two-way he’d meant to ask her. She made a sound. It could wait, he said, and Does he know you’re moving? said in his chest silently for he had the answer.

Nuevo was down at the end of the block. As Xides coasted by and Nuevo called out, “Hey, hey—” Xides, seeing ahead half-stunned and careful, running a light, bound for the Hudson River bike path, feeling two drops of rain hit like ball bearings a magnet, did not look but was aware of Nuevo doing something with his lifted hand, speed, distance, future, loss, danger.

“You want to take a swim?” said one engineer; “it is five hundred feet deep,” said the other. “He was an Olympic swimmer,” said Xides elbowing the correspondent, who had asked what fraction of the 18G megawatts from the dam would serve the 2008 Olympics. No no, all for Yangtze cities.

What do you think about up here?

Despite crippling silt, this great upstream reservoir was green. Chemical green we are used to supposing. The two Chinese could not take the Americans to see the shafts and galleries networking the interior of the dam, this wall greatest since The Great Wall, but a diagram of a contraction joint was faithfully drawn on a pink pad showing how it and many others with a special grouting concrete would allow for routine cracks in future. “You are a writer,” the younger engineer said to the correspondent, who had a hundred catwalks in his memory.

When they handed in their helmets, Xides told of a plastic bag at his New York door containing the helmet he had left at the acupuncturist’s. Returned by?

Xides could only guess. Whey, said Sam, I would bet on it, what about you? he turned to the engineers, who nodded, smiling. A third Chinese had appeared.

The doorman had been tapping the top of his head of course, as if X were crazy. “You could have collected it Tuesday.” The engineers and the indelibly gray-haired security liaison in a button-down shirt listened to the Americans. “She had to cancel.”

“She doesn’t do that,” said the correspondent.

“You’re telling me?”

“I had it on good authority she doesn’t.”

“Well, I canceled the Friday.”

“You’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I could have used a session.”

The correspondent knew something was wrong. When something is wrong, a friend will sometimes know.

Also a rival. The Chinese had asked about “magnetic water,” said to be under test as a field insulator and lighting conveyer. “Invention or discovery, we understand it is yours Doktah Ex,” the elder engineer grinned. “But for which structure of this material we have yet to learn.”

“There is no telling. But it belongs to all of us,” said Xides, “and I would hope it might help the farmer. Also, I am not a doctor.” He asked about the other dam, the less well-known — was there a chance they could see it? Bows, not nods.

The structure of the water material itself was what the Chinese were angling for, the correspondent agreed with Xides. Xides thought of Bob Whey, the bare extent of him, ground plotted point by point, and speaking of a criminal war — of Xides’ contribution possibly. The other dam would wait.

Back in Beijing Xides purchased moxa on a rainy day with a state guide whose alternative occidental name was Grace. Meanwhile, the correspondent was getting as much as he could out of an interrogation of himself (on this seventh trip to the mainland) evidently inspired by documents he’d laid out neatly on his hotel bed when he left for breakfast regarding the diet pill Meridia the Chinese were allegedly competing with the Canadians to peddle a generic of.

What is wrong? Is it thinking? Or the back? Or is Xides back home already in his mind? Architect reflecting on the St. Louis-Arch-size (but taller) Central Chinese Television Tower window cavity: what’s it looking out on? “Media Park” for the people? Or cornered between adjacent “News” and “Production” limbs, the area named “Green Land” he didn’t need to revisit, you could see it from miles away like soaring Shanghai next to which New York is old, where buildings want to fall down. “What has architecture to do with anything?” he asked his friend. “No theory of bigness.” The correspondent said it sounded like Xides twenty years ago, “vacuum in front pushing from behind”: “Remember what you said about materials telling us what to do?”

Xides deposited a check for slightly more than eight thousand dollars American, a fee installment, in a Beijing branch of his bank. He was alone. Xides found the narrow enclosed lanes of the Hutong district. A statement, an idea like an act, was eluding him in a smell of peanut oil, of frying, a duck standing in a cage. Looking for a courtyard and house set back where he had once had an idea he couldn’t recall. Low warrens of wood structures, the privacy, an attraction for visitors to glimpse in Beijing and see as China. An observer. A nursery school with children at their nap — cells of a hive of hives, some new material that came to him. Grace of all people apprehended him here to the surprise of neither.

No problem, a university-trained guide. And in a nearby temple, with a great gong way upstairs, the correspondent joined them somehow. Xides made it easily up the stairs and later down the street. “I should have my head examined,” he said.

“That what the doorman meant?”

“She said you don’t have to like the patient, and I asked if she’d ever fired one. ‘It’d be me,’ she said.” “Valerie said that?” “Yes, she meant herself.” “Of course. You’re attached to her.” “Tougher things than that,” Xides said, turning to Grace, a tall girl with a fine sense of distance yet in touch with what was under discussion, what withheld. Though not going to be thought interested in what the men were going home to. “The moxa, it seems to have helped,” said the correspondent. Grace smiled her white, extraordinarily crooked teeth, two front ones grown in right in front of two others.

“I haven’t had a chance to use it.”

Their van was waiting. A bus and thickets of bikes on the move. Much to see out the window besides people in another bus. A bike mechanic plying his trade right out on a street corner, parts and tools strewn on the sidewalk. “You told her this same man had fixed your flat? The one who phoned her? A bike mechanic?” No, it was the middle of the night, he was just there in the street. “How strange,” said the correspondent.

On the plane coming back, the thought, his kidneys, that Valerie had left him to do what he would came to him instead of sleep and he thought he would go see his internist. He was alarmed to remember it, embedded in a dark capsule slipping past its own sound crossing the pole, stationary the cabin in time until he got up and went back to the galley to look out and see if he could see the Aleutians, the land bridge, some long-ago action down there. Looking to be surprised.

A door shut, a tight hatch seal in the ongoing plane’s invisible sound. “Something’s wrong,” the correspondent said, joining him. Aware of the radiant flight attendant, Xides was thinking, The guy that recommended Valerie, he didn’t know Sam.

Of course not, the correspondent had one of those badges on. They both laughed at this. Was it nonsensical? Well, at the materials show a badge came in handy, Xides mused. “You can tell from how they’ll glance at it,” the correspondent granted.

“And the guy wasn’t wearing one of course,” said Xides.

“Something else,” said the correspondent, but Xides said, “He spoke with authority?”

“He was more into titanium. He may have had…he may have…”

“May have had…?”

The flight attendant like a waitress interrupting a conversation asked Xides if he needed anything and he said he would like a bike to ride up and down the aisle. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“Why, taking someone up to the Acropolis.”

“You like Greece?”

“Which I myself once put off visiting though I was in Athens, I was scared of it.”

She had never been. Who was he taking? she asked surprisingly. She offered a bottle of water and he asked his friend again, “May have had…?”

“A chip on his shoulder, who knows.” The correspondent took the water himself. “A chip on his game leg, that’s right,” he said. “Looked at his watch, didn’t know why he was here, he said. I told him he did.” “Good for you.” “You say these things. Sometimes they’re true. Next thing he was talking about pins in joints, structural stuff, and I brought up a pretty well-known orthopedist whose name you know and then a friend with a bad back.”

“A ‘friend,’ you said.”

“‘An athlete?’ he said. ‘Architect,’ I did say. Then he said he could recommend someone, a regular little terrorist—” “What did he mean?”

“Strict.”

“That she saw through him maybe.” A Chinese woman emerged from the lavatory. “How undressed are you for the treatment?” “Shorts.” “Prone?” “On my back.” What had the guy been wearing? Army jacket camo. The correspondent didn’t like something. “Something else,” he said. “Where were you when you had that flat?”

A good reporter, the correspondent knew the street, the block, the highway. “Strange,” he said. The thought came to Xides again that he must have been recognized that night.

What was he doing there? said his friend.

“A breath of air?”

The correspondent set off into the aisle, touching a seat back with his free hand to steady himself, entering the shadowy sleep of the cabin, polite about what he hadn’t been told obviously. But how had the other man come to be out there in the dark street, the cobbles, the light rain, two in the morning?

Mother was half-Greek, Xides told the flight attendant, he had never been until he got married.

“Diana” produced from a metal drawer another bottle of water for him. So he was thinking of taking his wife up to the Acropolis?

Not exactly.

“You can see that,” she said.

The scene? he said with his eyes, frowning, wondering what she wanted.

So it was Bob Whey. Bob Whey had thought to run into Xides at the Materials show and had run into someone who’d written about him.

Bob Whey had recommended an acupuncturist, figuring it was Xides who would hear.

At Customs they asked Sam to open his case. “How ‘bout those other calls?” he said. “Same guy thirty minutes was it into the appointment?”

“You been talking to Eva.”

Starting to tap in a phone number at the airport, he stopped. If he were younger, she older. It had been three days shy of three weeks. At his doorstep, key in the lock, he still hadn’t phoned. How to see what was going on. Yellow Pages. Ladder. That difficult man she was back with who loved her. Loved something about her.

New life, new strategy inevitably developing. What was it, where was it? City not the site of, but the very medium of — what war this time?

It was another day and he phoned his internist and topped his bike tires up and got himself across the Bridge to Brooklyn to visit the compressed straw paneling in a new auditorium of his and the exposed recycled steel Smartbeams for one suspended mezzanine floor. His daughter at her college in Ohio did not take an interest in this old school she had commuted to as a child, cabbed and subwayed by him at seven-thirty in the beginning. A year later put on the bus, and as they pulled away at the window talking to her friend, her father standing out on the curb almost but not quite ignored. And now he had been consulted again about the sustainable “green” building at her college — which she kept her distance from — his part in it.

A sketch reformulating the position of a hundred and fifty sensors which were not even his job, constantly monitoring flows of energy, cyclings of matter. To reweave the human presence was how they put it that he had been asked to advise on, but later an equation had come to him like Nervi’s parabola and bare, sincere roofs, prefab beams, salt warehouse and Naval Academy swimming pool to beget another equation. Xides despaired of his own thoughts. When would she stop changing her major? It had been music; would it be again? He was tied up in double deadlines with cash value people were phoning about. The fish farming reservoir shapes networked for sluiced storm-water the filters didn’t yet quite track. Proud, though, of a high-end commune in eastern Washington, where his single-wall structures convey recycled light with this new water so far an industrial secret.

Warmed by the great skylight, she might have been clocking him, lap after lap, the Asian in the deck chair with next to nothing on, a passing plane aglint far away, when he stood up at the shallow end and felt her dark glasses at once beamed away from him. She was knitting — and young, her very thighs thinking at this moment; and not a resident, he felt. He placed her. Designer? Chemist? What was it coming to him, a movie theater lobby two nights ago he was certain; yet, now he thought of it, also lab offices at Einstein in the Bronx where, on his way to the caf in the next building over — a prolific little cactus, its pads and joints overflowing the pot and pausing to rest on a formica desk top to make their way along and rising like uncanny structure in motion, suppliant, stubborn, succulent — she’d been behind him as he left the Mag Res building with half the equation.

He pushed off for four more lengths of the pool, Sam not showing maybe, something happening here to Xides, Xides letting it, his back supple deep inside. Three schoolboys, two skinny, one fat, arrived from school here at a serene, serious mid-Manhattan rooftop club, were getting horsey at the edge as he made his turn at the far end. Until, halfway down, he was not moving but, face down, arms stretched like a diver’s, he might have been thought knocked dead by this explosion of plunging boys coming himself to rest eyes open into five feet of water luminous with particles, absorbing under the surface the violent ring of cries from the kids shoving and killing each other as he had felt their plunge shift the volumes about him, and his hearing; felt approach his eyes through refracted glimmer a saving lure but he saw it was also in his eyes too, atoms there stunned to note the water mobilizing certain thousands of those (sun-saving) bacteria (at his bidding even?) that make chains of crystals inside them into magnets to point themselves toward the pole, light’s very shadow.

A second explosion acoustical and dreamed by the water that filled his ears signaled in both of them not just the boys bombing the adjacent lane and the woman up on her feet (for in a corner of his eye he saw below her belly button her tiny bikini bottom’s waist and crotch practically converging — as his body the morning of Hutong could be subject to surveillance but not his half-lost vague thought of architect assembling solitary before Grace found him) before he himself brought his feet down now onto pool bottom like a tuck starting a back flip and reared, water pouring off his shoulders, startling the boys, surging over to hoist himself out, find his towel and flip open his cell five days home from China, though he had biked past Valerie’s early in the morning, run a red light hearing the doorman’s call behind him, and hoping the acupuncturist hadn’t been expecting his phone call, heard that thought given the lie now at poolside by, to his amazed dripping ear, the 617 number you were invited to leave messages at by a woman’s voice whose every word sounded like a beginning, as exact as an idea might be good and also vague, like low wood structures in the old courtyards of the Hutong, the settled strength of peanut oil frying, the half-baked idea he returned there for.

617 was Boston.

She had moved. He had been in China. His gaze reached that far but the Asian woman across the pool believed it was her he saw, and he said, above his cell, “Mag Res building” meaningless words above his cell for her to read or some bugger listening in to hear, water riding off his skin, his towel around his neck male and executive, several places at once, probing the woman in the glasses. And suspecting surveillance and hoping to see his friend at any moment, he recalled our own projection of the insides of the dam and almost regretted missing acupuncture the day before his flight to China because his daughter had needed him just at that hour.

To meet her at the bank (she was so busy). It wasn’t money. Was it just him she wanted? Though he brought money up. Which made her mad all over again. Really because the “older” boyfriend (whom she knew her father didn’t like — Hey, check it out) had decided that at twenty-seven he needed some space. It had started the night her dad had come to dinner, she told him. Then later they took a walk and bickered about the dinner and heard that explosion and had an argument about it, lights on in the windows of an apartment house they passed (“And it started to rain?” he said, and his daughter so fine in her wretchedness, which would pass, looked at him sharply — Yes, she had looked up into the rain, she liked rain, and people at their windows she took them in at that instant and for some reason wished she could have phoned her dad but by then he was somewhere on the bike path racing downtown and she had Mom’s hat that old floppy job in her hand and put it on, and her companion said, Your shoes (meaning, Why do you wear those heels?), and she stopped and had a look.

And giving her father a nice afternoon peck on the lips, a few words like all her little habits stayed with him as they parted after exactly (he could not bring himself to say it to her) forty-four minutes, “Not going back there,” was what Viv said with all that sweeping subtlety yet to be lived into, for he had heard himself saying those words once to someone.

So it was for his daughter that he had let the Friday acupuncture appointment go with a phone message. He would see Valerie when he came back from China but was on his way, she should know, to finding himself a Recycled Man. In which, as he recognized it at once as a lie, or an attempted one, there spread from chest to scalp, brain to instep its material truth as well.

Xides on the far side of the pool went to greet Sam in his street clothes with the palm of his free hand raised but the Asian woman had gathered up her magazines and vanished into the ladies’ locker room, leaving Xides with suddenly the full equation of how architecture out of your very body puts together times.

“You see that?” A shadowy band like a line drawn with a broad chisel-tip pencil enlarged with a cartoonist’s water brush was what the doctor pointed to on the luminous screen. “That’s a second lesion on top of the first which would have scared us with your back you now tell me about, if this second hadn’t appeared, but it looks like — (can you beat that?) no telling when, but…”

“Like what?” There’d been no reason to do the test, take these pictures, except the patient’s faith in some fly-by-night acupuncturist’s opinion, but…

“We’re seeing a second lesion which sets off this, this growth. That’s new organ we’re looking at. Kidney. Come back in four weeks. Damn.”

“Damn?”

“’Zif you’d had liver surgery.”

The correspondent knew the Asian woman but not from the pool. She was attached to the Chinese consulate.

Xides’ back seemed better. His daughter had long ago inherited his early rising. Now he had inherited her early-to-bed.

A couple passed. The woman on her cell.

Xides called the 617: “You were on the phone that night of the explosion, it was out on the North River, I could tell, and you were at the window looking down into the street, and a girl — a young woman — walking by looked up. It was raining and you were on the phone and she put on her hat. You said something to the guy on the other end of the phone, and he hung up on you. True?”

The correspondent did his homework. He remembered what you said. And he knew his man. The chemistry of materials and the melancholy wonder that they are us.

The metropolitan form in Africa (Xides would quote someone whose name he’d forgotten), reveals itself through its fugitive discontinuities. Look at Joburg. The unconscious of a city. Strata, residues, layers become provisional, precarious, in times of…what was the word?

“That boy who was arrested when you landed in Durban?”

“He was behind me, with the woman, the major who’d intervened to forestall something potentially incorrect the boy was on the way to saying.”

And on the tarmac you were welcomed.

“They took him in by another door while I was shaking hands with a couple of…I called to the major, who…the boy stopped and looked over his shoulder, people taking him by the arm, I hailed him, I don’t know what I said, I don’t know.”

And he?

“Words of mine. To the effect that—”

To the what?

“—‘urban design becomes repression,’ he cried out, I think, and was hustled away—‘architecture,’ I heard, ‘fantasy,’ I think, ‘the city becomes’—”

The acupuncturist had said a month ago she could imagine what came next.

Xides had made a fuss, been stunned, had inquired, and it was explained to him, and he wanted to cancel his appearance but didn’t.

In the evening Valerie’s return message was waiting for him, her voice more for him at first than the words: “It was a floppy hat…and she took it off right after she put it on and kicked one leg out as if to show her foot, and she looked up into the rain. At my building, I think. And she stopped and the guy she was with kept walking. And she stood there and turned and walked in the other direction.”

The metropolis becomes the place where, across warped space, the superfluity of objects is converted into a value in itself, the correspondent had put down. X he had called a “mystery man…interrogating self-doublingly”—a phrase cut by the editor at The Economist in favor of direct quoting.

Xides stopped to say Hi to Nuevo. What had Nuevo called out to him when he was on his bike day before yesterday?

“They left this.” A taped-closed shopping bag, double-bagged with XIDES in white gel ink on a black Post-it. “They did?” It was sort of heavy and you felt a subtle balance. He saw the green light of Valerie’s machine in the waiting eye of the doorman. The infinitely small appointment book with handwriting to match. Smaller and smaller, seeing then but a corner of it. This between them an angle an algorithm could turn back into the whole thing, like a sliver of kidney his whole body and more. Valerie would not have left the package.

Clea was there when he opened it. It was the binnacle compass, gimbal-mounted and of some value. You trip over it, you win it. He would not go back there. He could not think of another message to leave. He had told Valerie nobody had fired her. He had said, You don’t go back there, and she had said, You don’t. She had taken his advice in a form he now saw had always been there.

So was it he who had sent her back to Bob Whey?

Clea set the compass on a counter on newspaper and wiped it. It was greasy, it was filthy, she said. And then, “Do you need this?” she said, meaning want. A scrap of paper half-taped with a frayed strip of duct-tape to the bottom of the housing. “An honor,” it read, and Xides unpeeled it, and laughed at what he found on the other side, a piece torn from a photo he remembered, a broken nose of stone, the sphinx he knew Napoleon and his horse were looking at one day for the camera.

His companion for this moment, his cleaning woman, must have known him, his face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

CHARACTER

In the year 1990 I tell this to a woman who is on a job with me, and we share an issue of justice, I believe, but at that moment of first meeting, little more. A recollection of hers inspires mine, and she hears me out. She happens to be an expert on sound.

One summertime I dreamt of varnishes. I was a boy. “Dream” in the sense of eat, sleep, think varnish, thin, mix, and apply again. And varnish remover.

I carved a model whaleboat. Chiseled it, I hear the split and scrape, gouged it out of a slab of stained hardwood that had been lying on the toolshed floor for weeks — for years. A base, a stand for a trophy, I can’t imagine what. The wood had this deep and independent gravity to it, and the finish brought up a richer, plum band or stripe across the top side like the dark gap between the good creamy rings of Saturn in my book. And I — who knew where the rakes were, three trowels, the pink skull of (I think) a cat at the foot of the neighbor’s termite-ridden fence post, a rusted little handsaw, the tuning fork my mother had left beside the kitchen sink, the wintergreen-tasting twigs and dirty red bark of the woodpecker’s preferred tree on the far side of the house, my sister’s bike covered by me with a plastic tarp when she went to camp, and here behind a blue coffee can (kerosene-smelling) of nails (to be used as a target when my town friend brought his air rifle out) my sister’s zippered kit of bike tools and an unused train ticket on the shelf above the workbench in this shed where I had learned for myself the carpenter’s rule Measure twice, cut once — I who (as my father put it) kept track as much as anyone around this joint had left where I’d seen it the middle of June this eighteen-inch block of maple inherited like the tool shed itself from the previous owner. Part of something else. Noticing it now I took it up off the floor and felt it and was drawn to it by a force of ownership.

For the first time I thought vaguely, What is going on around here? In fact, I loathed myself as a boy, despised the balsa wood of my old-fashioned model kits — can you imagine? These had been procured for me by my great-uncle, a Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard, and they were specialty items even in those days. I don’t know where he found them. A heavy cruiser, an aircraft carrier, slim destroyers side by side, a buoy tender, an old scale-model 83-foot harbor patrol boat. Today it’s all pre-cut plastic, and was even then. Whereas my great-uncle thought plastic an abomination. Granted it repels “ship worms” on a real boat, but then you get chronic barnacles and you need to apply anti-fouling paint. Plastic come to think of it may have been just about all he felt himself in extreme opposition to — such a quaint objection it seems now. I could cut a hull from a length of balsa when I was nine. A double-ended Macao junk had my blood on it. Airy as cork, completely dispensable meringue-light balsa wood for kids to carve like cheese.

I’d had other kits that required no cutting to speak of. Old friend bass wood, for a Union Pacific locomotive, a Patton tank with treads that moved. But not to be compared to what I found on the floor of the toolshed, our toolshed now (for we had bought this place cheap after renting it the previous summer. Now what was that like?). I was almost twelve. In that instant, balsa seemed soft as styrofoam, the crust of a loaf, as flesh, I didn’t know what, an avocado, but I would try my hand upon this ill-advised hardwood maple — my knife and the dented chisel that I had come upon by chance striking it with my rake in a pile of rotten leaves. It said — this chisel, but more this curious dent or uncannily retooled minute trough in it, no more than a wicked little groove in the middle of the blade — Get started, get going.

You see my mood, humming all the time in fact.

Instead of breathing.

Remembering little things the way you can’t not remember some larger ones — now that’s confusing, the way I put it. Animal smell of the sun on the earth at the exposed root of an outstanding sweet white oak that now belonged to us; or on the other hand my mother and father’s parallel love of life, I suppose.

The woman I’m telling this to more clearly than it could have been told or thought twenty-five years before narrows her eyes, she has a look of attention and polite impatience, she wants to hear what’s coming, understanding that this isn’t a story maybe. How could there be passion in her interest, impertinence?

Kneeling among shingles, splintered shims, and hard rice grains and kernels of horse corn and preferring the bottom of a yellow milk crate to rest the block of maple on, I took the handsaw to its corners, and soon had a crude oval, kerosene-smelling because of the saw.

But not an oval. God! a many-sided mess on my hands to take me until I had to go back to school — the rest of the damn summer to finish the boat, the wood implacable — or until my sister got home from camp.

But not a mess, when I blinked and saw my crude cuts now as one sweep of gunwale either side and found my pencil in the clanking can of nails. This thing I made would be a model of an old double-ender whaleboat, not quite the flared, sea-steep prow and stern of a Portuguese fisherman’s “half-moon” but steadier and stronger. But maple?

Next morning I began to shape the gunwales and hollow out the hull on the ground outside. Holding my breath, and with awful slips and stops, holding the mad tool down one-handed with the whole half of me bearing down on the damnably minerally resistant block.

My gouge-marks looked like fingertips working another matter trying to get somewhere and there was a war on and I’m right here ensconced in a summertime state with no coastline. Jazz in my throat, my unconscious humming a frequency set to a secret future that was my own, and hoping to take up the saxophone. But ruining my fingers on the wood. Cutting myself on the blade. Muttering “Deeyum!” bringing to life this piece of a petrified forest which maybe remembered in my gougings the leafy tree it came from. By this time they were casting hulls out of cement, so here was hope for me, hollowing out my hull, holding (my great-uncle said) the line (for the Coast Guard had turned to steel and fiberglass).

Wood calms.

My sister at camp, perhaps I’m not like the people at this summer place — my parents — their mysterious routines: I was like the place itself I now think—that was what I was like — this close little toolshed and nine-and-a-half acres around the house to do with what we wanted.

And I was getting somewhere, because for some reason I didn’t have much time.

It was quiet there, said the woman I was telling this to; but that’s going to end. I touched her hand. It had no effect on her.

I worked the oval length of the thing deeper. I created a barrelly roominess. Gunwales flaring emerged from the inside out — and I had even carved (I can’t believe it today years later) a miniature cradle of passable gunwale ribs. Till one day (floorplanks maybe to come) I had nowhere to go almost yet kept faithfully sanding and finely shaving. Wanting to show the boat to Liz, the neighbor’s younger daughter whom I loved; and happy as a “free man” not to be interrupted by her, prizing the dark, plum vein straight through the block unplanable and of a natural weight. Quiet around here? Not always, as even the neighbors know. My father’s a famous talker, a public speaker, and he and my mother have a way of speaking to each other that’s very audible.

The toolshed, though, is conceded to me. At almost twelve I’m not your skilled woodworker. But I am taken for thirteen. Secret and determined — for I go into what I don’t know. I know enough to try, and am cruelly inspired some days, tall for my age, proud of the papery-tiered gray-plastered-cone hornet nest just outside the door up under the overhang of my shed roof, a generation of long brown wasps, a power I lived with and thought I could arouse from this nest to do some bidding I was not fiendish enough to yet know. I’m somebody. That was it.

Till one day, to music, the unwavering, final sound of a cello, taking you would swear something from my humming (or coming in on it) the rough-cut, gouged and gunwaled and resanded hull of my whaleboat with a tiny, carved, not-glued-on keel and stem and stern post, when I held it by the gunwales rose almost from my fingers it was now comparatively so light — though hardwood maple as I had learned from my mother appropriately, whose cello far away inside the house it was. It was a particular day, expectant, unwise; I knew this piece of wood, and we were expecting an important friend of my father’s in the late afternoon and my father had left for an appointment in town but was coming back, an embarrassment of riches as I saw it and saw it then, and I was not a person with ever nothing to do, though my father had an opinion on that score who himself thought being holed up in a tool shed or finding a weasel’s, probably a marten’s, little S-curved scat on the far side of the river was OK for a kid or some other types but not greatly thrilling. Or a question like my humming, sometimes loud, stood next to me if I could identify its appointment with me, this question. Which was, What did I know was going on, if anything?

My mother, doubtless alone but don’t assume anything around here, was not doing something silent but was practicing somewhere inside our land-embedded, landscape-lost cottage today, private in that wooded, stony-spined, hilly province of Vermont. Audible strangely in memory too, the faraway, heart-breaking throat-gripping authority of that instrument’s tone said, Listen, listen, bring the boat inside and test it in the bathtub. I saw it manned and rocking, I saw it passengered, did I hear music coming from it? — I was strung myself enough to concentrate so hard I might not hear tires on the driveway.

I ask as of a not quite real nightmare: and who was the woman under the bed telling a long, almost but I have to say not funny, frighteningly unrememberable story, and who were the much-decorated twin Marines adrift in slow-motion orbit about the Moon? Yet I kept scraping, and 80- and 150- and 220-sandpapering down to the rubbed-pale, somehow distinguished paper that had been coarse- and fine-sand. Now sounding an eerie thinness of bottom that I would rap proudly, and wishing my mother or someone would come here by chance and only for a minute and look at what I had to show. It was her college cello she was playing this July day we found ourselves apparently alone, she with a touch, a lostness and sweep of elbow enough to make you smile (I could see her), it was comical, a fineness of face I could see in the wood I worked never imagining that I was being watched; and “not a musician,” she said, for she “never” played her cello; dragged it up here (in the car) along with her high school clarinet, “the easiest reed to know” (though a weakie next to piano and sax), plus her plastic recorder from primary school. Why does she play only when she “has time”? I am told I said, because I would say things.

To my father this summer of 1966: If you could find a war you liked would you go fight in it?

Grownups laughed, so my sister I believe laughed too but didn’t like it. So what has changed? (For this has not.) Say things and people will hate you. Go to your enemies for the truth, for justice. Say things and many people will pretty much love you. My father with much political chatter both about American police state and freedom I recall didn’t seem to expect much of me. I am finding the words; they, really, me. He was for freedom. He saw you as being set for life with your abilities. I mean that you couldn’t do much, you were pretty ordinary but the struggle for freedom would make it OK. But what has changed?

The woman listening nods almost imperceptibly.

From that time, that day? I add.

My mother had a policy of more or less not going into town, whereas I had two friends there, one with a Buck air rifle that shot.177 BBs who had plans for us, and one with a real bow who fletched his own arrows, and a thick red blue and white target with a stand. My mother’s wariness became mine, I weighed her words. (Why don’t I think of the house as ours? Feeling like a lodge as you went foreignly through the front door — and who knew where you would wind up, is there an undiscovered annex? What was unfixed about it, if anything? We had bought the place after renting it one summer, and I was nearly twelve and believed in ownership down to the faintly harsh or peppery peppermint smell of my mother in the hall, “extremely independent” (my father described her but it didn’t sound right).

Until, this morning, on my knees on the shed floor, tapping the flat bottom of my boat, fighting it, pampering it, blowing on it, caressing it, and fine-sanding the inside, so that with proud unconcern I heard the ajar door creak and knew someone was in the doorway of this tool shed behind me (did I need a sweep-oar instead of a tiller?), I heard the faraway inside-the-house cello and turned with my sandpaper block in my hand to see a man in green perfectly familiar to me but unexpected, ambushed (both of us), so that I looked at his dark green workshirt, a tiny American flag pin in the pocket button-hole, and turned back to my work as if he visited me often or weren’t there, or I had contempt for him or respect.

I recall because perhaps from just about that time (because it came from this very man), I had learned that no one could touch me.

It was my friend’s, my playmate’s, father, our neighbor, and he asked me if I had seen Liz. (But why was he over here?) He came and stood. “Sand and varnish, varnish and sand,” he said. “Makin’ a boat?” he said. What can you say to that? “Where’d ya find the wood?” he asked, as if he knew. Right here on the floor he was standing on, I told him and he said my toolshed looked just like when the owner his friend had lived here. Former owner, I said. “Too bad he had to sell.” I didn’t mind, I said. “You don’t mind,” this man said methodically. “He was a nice fella. Not enough work around here, it’s gone down statewide.”

Continuing with my own work, I asked what work his friend, our last summer’s landlord, did. “Whatever needed doing,” Liz’s father said. “Somebody’s playin’ the violin,” he said. I looked up at him and I nodded, and in some way new to me smiled and continued my work. But I heard the distant cello’s throat-gripping, wide, biting, caressing (I believe), string-rubbing stroke of tune deep-drawn by the bow and hung along the layers of flattened day and absorbed midsummer color.

But succeeded suddenly this time by my mother’s voice, the way the cello gives itself over to the winds, for she was singing way inside that house, and I wondered if Rob was there, her bosom buddy — could I have missed the cutting sound of his tires in the driveway coming to keep her company? I looked up at Liz’s father — his name was Whelan — who had turned toward the door hearing the singer now. Was this why he had come, though I had never heard her do just this?

Women — I thought of her as women for the first time I believe — had a bodily distance from us that we are to accept; hence, to be importantly apart from: which gives you the distance to understand them and what they and you have to lose.

The woman listening to me laughs vulgarly.

Or, to bear this after all bodily reasoning still further, that this Vermont man (though Vermonters are more intelligent, my father had said) could not tell a cello from a violin because he was not from the city; and so he did things more slowly and painstakingly; that my father did not change the oil in our car himself like this man flat on his back; that city people controlled large things they did not need to understand.

I thought I did Liz’s father an injustice. But what?

Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though he was American, and that the man with me in this tool shed had had a flag July 4th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin whose son had come home wounded and sick — one was like a cut, the other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the war than city people because country people could do things but the things they could do kept them from seeing that the war was, according to my father and mother and their friends, wrong; and this morning Liz’s father (though he said, Don’t tell her I was looking for her, he squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or scout out my mother whom he hardly knew, or the place, because my father was not here. Though now he asked if I was going over to Montpelier with my father, burn some cloth (it sticks in my hearing much more than Whelan’s ugly, interesting face) — and I said my dad had already gone — Oh, Liz’s father knew that — and it wasn’t Montpelier, it was into town. “Oh, we know all about that too,” said my visitor, as if I were a free citizen — he was a builder, a local contractor, and there were some who disagreed with him about the war but not about flag burning, and my father was taking the briefest time out from a heavy schedule of rallies and raising money. He had been written up.

Yet this man, for some reason in my tool shed, was the father of Liz whose mother mine could never be. I leaned back on my heels and held up my boat, turned it over, ran my finger all over it, and I know the man with the much-too-pink face and positively golden pale crewcut said, “Taking justice into your own hands.” “Wartime,” I said. “How’d you know it was a boat?” I said.

“Keel.”

I said I had some work to do. I meant Still to do. “Varnishing, sanding,” I said.

“You just do your work,” said the man. He was not favorably disposed toward my father and was said to include him among flag burners. “You like to go fishing?” he said. I said we had fished the brook. He knew I meant with Liz. I bore down on my hunk of maple, which was how I suddenly saw it. “We go over t’the lake one night, got the outboard.” Liz’s father meant they would take me. I wondered how many in the boat. Liz’s older sister Naomi who was fourteen who I was sometimes preoccupied with. The mother…My country neighbors who knew all about my father having a little brush with another car in the covered bridge the other night that was not his fault.

My mother Claire’s elbow and shoulder bending across for the far A string, her wrist, the station of her knees, the amber-varnished belly of the cello inside which was a spruce patch she’d had me feel with my fingers — I witness her though I’m not there — and who cares about these little things that come with an entire day and night in one long blink of someone’s eyelids, these signs of Nothing? (I’m no musician!) but I have a reason to recall because the cellist broke off playing and for a second, as I stopped too at my woodwork (called that by my great-uncle who wrote me letters on USCG stationery) nothing came next. Yet now without missing a beat she was singing, but with no real, no fleshly severing from the long-drawn pressure across the string which hadn’t reached the end of the bow but passed it on to her voice. Funny or something, except it wasn’t — I heard it on my knees like sound meant for me, or someone. Mexican or what my dad called “south-of-the-border,” her song was inviting — not like the deep and aggravated solo I could hum that she’d been practicing so you couldn’t tell if the patient practicer were going back to get it right or Bach had written it like that. But now that I heard it, both voices against the presence of Liz’s father’s slightly threatening presence, I think the Mexican-sounding serenade was a lot like the Bach — who am I to say? — the way Caribbean Spanish from the Korean grocery or on the taxi radio follows syllable upon syllable so steadily, Liz’s father with me in my tool shed, then gone. Had I been rude? Yet having latched my door and turning the whaleboat over and over, I knew I could have approached my mother even with company if I had thought fit, my mother and her way of speaking.

I think it stimulates the woman I’m telling this to (it stopped her in the middle of a sentence she had to give it some thought, this natural relay from string to voice not missing a beat by someone inside a house unseen by me working outside — though inside my own tool shed). “I see, you sort of take off from one to the other — she was playing and suddenly she saw you—” “It wasn’t me she saw,” I said, “if it was anyone,” for the woman was almost flirting with me like a palmist, while I had been in the first place reminded of the cello-voice by something in her story.

“Your sister — she liked camp?” inquired the woman listening to me. Not especially.

Launched by its own lightness, my model my old boat for a second got fusilaged and decked kayak-like like smart materials responding to emergency signals, earthquake or ticking bomb, yet a second later wasn’t a boat any more. Varnished mellow under the layers of inland silence in which that person on vacation would make music: and so did the one bird out at that late morning hour extract such comfortable hollowness and morality from a tree trunk. It makes the tree a building, me inside coated with a mold of intrigue, boy inertia, flesh, hearing historically again and again a car on the ground, my dad an hour ago departing (as if he’d taken something) — the need for a plan.

But when she left off playing to sing and her hooded voice more true than the cello reached me, bending over my fingerprint gouges, boat-carver feeling the wood’s commanding depth that as there was less and less of it seemed less and less shallow, she was singing in the late-morning stillness crowded with small sounds in fact or the inner hum of that summertime day of 1966 to him—my father I felt — in my shoulders, at the root of my tongue, or literally my heart wanted it so — though he had gone to town. And Rob might be there with her visiting. In my palms I was making more than a boat. I think now, What could be more than a boat or more than me? I felt what I was making must be more than a boat. Or must turn into more. I was stuck, and responsible, and doomed, but excellent, no more than I deserved.

Sliding in behind the wheel, my father had said out the window, “The boat, now.” I didn’t know if it was a boat or what it was, I said, in despair. “You don’t?” my dad said; “well, if it’s something else, stay open, you owe it to yourself.” “I’ll keep it open,” it came to me to say, meaning the work I was finishing, and wondered if it was an open solution I was thinking about.

He knew how to look at me: that’s fairly stupid, his mystery look had said, or that’s incredible or dumb, you’re a fool — not a kid, a fool — I must have found in the wide thin lips of a rich face — or that’s a genius remark, go your way. How could you owe a thing to yourself? was in my mind to ask him. But I was the tooled, eight-to-five genius of the place and of departure; darkly separate and free and you’re free to kill me if you think I need it.

My father had had to show up at the town office that morning to explain a car-on-car meeting three nights ago in the covered bridge: you had to laugh seeing them disappear — one set of headlights off maybe (probably), the approach on one side straight, on the other looped like a hairpin — the collision muffled and comic stars shooting out of the bridge the middle of the night: which car had entered first? But the other driver was someone we knew well. I saw two cars disappear at opposite ends into the bridge and heard the rest, the overall, large structural impact in my mind. My dad hadn’t let me come along this morning, I had rested my elbow on the roof, it was nothing. Maybe it was being at his side. He thanked me, I was taking responsibility, he said, practically twelve and looked fourteen. It was only the town office, but they had a jail cell in the basement with a bunk. Car window rolled down to speak to me, “Should have seen the other guy,” my dad said, flipped the key: ignition, confirmation, blast-off Going Into Town.

“Never explain,” he said. Advice of high quality I have not been able to take. The other car, I imagined its front fender scraped with our “California Cream”—the grille maimed, door wouldn’t open, important leak underneath. My father said we would see. He widened his eyes out of their sockets almost, winked (more like a full facial squint or tic to close his eyes), blew out his cheeks — no problem. “Hey, you’re getting big”—as if he hadn’t been keeping an eye on me, “Haven’t seen you in weeks,” he goofed, he squeezed shut his eyelids and gunned the motor.

My mother had taken a her-side-of-the-family view of this, intrigued only by the chance that my father might get charged, an old story “coming true.”

“A risk of arrest?” asked the woman listening to me.

Only demonstrations.

The sweet song was to her absent husband or me or a friend. I couldn’t make out many words in the melody in this land-embedded, heat-hushed place softly grinding with subconscious insect existence, their soft parts, their hard parts, sharing supposedly with us their sanctuary wild life. It was some wit in the fathom and touch, the string note freeing the voice, I would say now. Though also a specialized risk all over me of my parents, and one between them that fixed my fair value alongside that of my currently absent sister—me, in the sense that in some way I couldn’t do anything about my existing, a pitch of light understanding between my parents. There was nothing much I needed to do—to fail or excel. It was all right. A value estimated swiftly — or destined — between them, those two intimate aliens; a level I was at, equality — but to what? I had a parent at all times. I took my own advice.

The woman I’m telling this to tells me, “But you did hear a car coming in the driveway.” “I did,” I said, surprised at her, for I could hear across twenty-five or so years the curve, the new tread on the left front of Rob’s old rebuilt 6. “You and those tires, you were a sentry, you were in a war with no one to report to.” The woman looks at her watch.

Maybe it wasn’t words at all sung by the person inside that summertime house, atheist sylph that she was. Singing she made it sound like words. How unusual for her, how alone and arrestingly mammal and limited and scented, time-bombish, and for my father, for that was how I’d link the wild, knowing tone, not any arc of performing, just little touches linked by instinct though with a terrible overall form to them, everything happening at once, inexorable to them, so that just before I heard car tires cut the driveway gravel out of nowhere I wondered if he had known how to spirit himself like a Sit-in, a Be-in, into the house a back way — by the field — past the woodpecker tree, My way I called it. Or he had never left, he was a residue left in her — as she knew how to not make words:

:till, taking a scrap of sandpaper to a still bothersome gouge to see what a finish brought up out of the grain, the old owner’s once coarse, often folded sandpaper, I was aware that she wasn’t singing now. When I had in a flash gotten used to it, like something I might ask for; and thinking what to cut a very small rudder and tiller from unless I went to a sweep oar, I saw maybe not a boat after all, this thing manufactured for many days (off and on) at a time when these lifeboats were being made out of plastic…plastic burning sticks in your throat like liquid metal fumes — and the car turning onto our driveway off the county road part hidden by dull drooping midsummer spruce boughs was of course not my father — and I needed to go in the house and tell “that woman,” as my father called her to me, or tell her music, what I had discovered in the gunwaled hull, in really the bottom, of my boat, until I heard someone or something outside my shed:

:till, hearing only an animal pressure upon the ground outside and, much further away, the house door stick shutting as if it had been left half open for a while having not been previously actively slammed by my mother—or Rob: and now, like a consequence of my thinking, Rob’s practiced, friendly singing voice damped by the house door shutting speaking with such a roundness of understanding more asking than commanding — silly, in even Rob my mentor (who was a nonpracticing minister who didn’t go to church who knew trees, clouds, wind direction, each herbal weed, bored to death with ferns, but “a passion for” local birds — that called our “pileated” woodpecker “sociable” and “frank” and “open, for all his crest”—(knows his shit, my father said) — I must answer what was nearby because I knew this animal pressure upon the ground outside.

Covering it in my mind — the whaleboat — like a kayak — an old World War II seaplane pontoon — but seeing that I hadn’t wasted time on a model boat because whatever was in it still belonged to me though I envisioned (hand-witnessed) some bent-necked lute, great African flutes or nameless anti-War zithers I saw played on the streets of Manhattan and Burlington, I heard my name called. And a dumb impression passed through me. It kept the far sound and the near one apart — about that exact watchful listening animal sound outside my tool shed, husky, firm, it was a girl against the outer wallboards of this tool shed house of mine as close as a hand on my shoulder saying my name, confident it was I inside, a waitingly modest first name but aimed devotedly by her.

“Your father was quite the speaker?” said the women listening to me.

“Public.”

The younger sister, Liz, my down-the-road or across-the-field neighbor, would I let her in? It was like good advice or my character, that closer noise outside my shed — Liz’s hands and bright, broad cheeks, a naïve lift in her walk, her devotion subtle — or some contemptible mistake I was going to make — thinking, What is it I deserve?

Working my boat, I said.

Their house with dark green tarpaper siding was weirdly incomplete, my father thought, for a guy in the construction business, and why the tarpaper? Liz and her sister and their parents lived there, slept, ate, went to the bathroom, undressed, and watched TV there, and left it empty when they went to town. Her father and uncle had added a platform pool in back. All year round Lisa and Naomi lived bodily in that house (which enabled me, for all my family, to rely on those girls, anyway Liz, who was almost my age).

I laid the hull down on the bench carefully and went to unlatch the door just as Liz’s knock came upon it.

The pig tails I was used to at her ears had joined and thickened to one great braid today, strange and of an intelligence and history that included me. I let her in and dropped the latch, the cork grip of her fishing pole swinging a little, why did she bring it in? Her chewing gum a gummy cinnamon closeness when she put her hand on the boat right away, we stood shoulder to shoulder, hand near hand, embarked on almost a project though what less than life? No need to say a thing, I was in my own place, and smelling in her hair bark or scalp or the ground between here and her house, her politeness in relation to the workbench and her taken for granted and, like schedules and habits and shared food, averagely authoritative knowledge of her older sister Naomi’s gait and sway and breasts so that, on my knees for a second before Liz came down beside me on the tool shed floor to see me sand a gunwale and spit on it, I smelled the new denim stiffness of her jeans — like sourdough bread or her body, her instinct I would now say; as if it could tell me what her older, harsh sister looked like dressing — as if that was the thing at stake — the accelerating unknown, or just a weather advisory.

Liz took the whaleboat from me and turned it over and ran her thumb across it. “It’s a whaleboat,” I said. “Who’s gonna catch a whale with this?” she said—“they had harpoons,” she said. She smelled it — unlike a country girl — and put it to her ear and made a face. I looked at her and took it back. “They use them in the Coast Guard,” I said. I could do anything on earth — no problem — or I could be here with Liz or tell her to go. She looked at this pretty amazing little hull as if she was looking at me and took it back into her hands and then gave it back to me, as if I should say something.

What? What did I know? That her dad had been looking for her and took a cello for a violin and the door creaked but I didn’t look around right away at him? I did him an injustice. It was me he came to see and Liz even that he looked for (visit his daughter at her friend’s?) — I saw she must have described my shed, my wood, my chisel work — though not my hands or their touch, my soothing height, my questions or puzzled pal’s love for her, but enough to stimulate her father; for, better than I, she must have known what you say and what you don’t, and today he’d come as an I didn’t know what, who had forgotten whatever it was he had to do and became a man with nothing to do but come over here. Interested in my mother, too. A country man, Liz’s dad could muster as much basic, staringly puzzled interest in another as any city hawk keeping in touch, pursuing a surprise conversation with an alien on the subway.

Learning to notice eyes, I saw Liz had practically black hair and blue eyes but no hair on her arms whereas Naomi had fine flax-white hair. My sister, who would trim her hair into the sink and leave it there, spent an hour brushing her hair looking thoughtfully or irritably elsewhere so that I would ask her anything at all in the way I had with words. Liz had taken my hand pulling me somewhere without looking at me when I went with her and her mother and father (he put his hand on my head) and her sister Naomi to the IGA (my father debriefed me later). Today she had said, “You busy?”

Naomi her sister is tall (“big-boned is what she is,” my father had said). I thought breasts, breasts either loved you or didn’t, and saw you always and waited, I liked all girls and all breasts, they were equally near. Naomi was always about to be a bully. Instead, she would say something funny — taking charge, though — so you thought you knew, but then you didn’t, as if her being nice was a coincidence or cut off from your hope that she would be. Last weekend she went with her mother and father and Liz quite happily to see her mother’s cousin and her cousin’s son who had won a Purple Heart, which I had Liz describe. I decided to call Whelan “Whelan,” the way Naomi did.

I told her this friend of my father’s was coming today from Vietnam, Frederick. Because she said, “Does he live there?” because I gave her a look. She asked what he was doing there, because I remember I said, “Prob’ly shooting gooks,” because I didn’t know honestly what he was doing, he wasn’t in the military but was against the war and had brought me a small, beautifully written-on thimble-size silver cup made by a Vietnamese once, and I had said “gooks” when Liz didn’t know what it meant, much less that we didn’t say that word, lest you be burned at the stake as a Hawk yet her father Whelan I found I couldn’t quite imagine saying it either, though I knew the word from my own father and his war against those who used it.

It is afternoon, nobody called me to lunch, Liz’s fishing pole is leaning in a corner, why did she leave it? Was she mad? I step out of my shed and look around.

The woman I am telling much of this to shakes her head, I see what you meant, that you were like the place. I laugh, but she does not. A pleasure in each of us.

Down near the brook, I devise an unheard-of canoe route across Vermont west to the Hudson like an early white trader along our rushing stream, often shallow or going nowhere, portaging where I had to, and thence down to New York where my dad’s at his rally if I’m asked on this past July 4th. The war was magical, if I’m honest in the warm, remembering woods on the river bank among poplars and elder bush. Hearing “Mekong” in the mercurial eddy around a rock where a dark trout waited suspended in gloom. Hearing in the near distances “Cao Dai, Tayninh” from a crow, two crows, three crows, somewhere low overhead. Somewhat as I, minor and privately American and not quite my father’s son, if I’m honest, sitting on the toilet at night conceived the war historically and technically and as a promise of curious successes in my later life as if government men or their deeds my father worked non-violently and violently against and rightly abhorred were some type of money in the bank for me. The war a magic of commuting copter gunships frowning down on a screen and field of sniper-infested jungle foliage, leaning, banking, sliding to shape at the controls virtually the space of the air just above what was never to be fully known below the trees and down in the famous VC tunnels which enthralled me in their construction laid out for us in detail by a visitor, the mined geography of a war without front lines. Control, a technique of control, doing things at a distance employing remote lighted panels like NASA’s in Florida and Texas. The tools and equipment of war my great-uncle liked. In particular, the sonar gear on his 311-foot Coast Guard cutter which they would test in northern waters in the vicinity of blackfish or “bigger fry” though sonar was pretty much saved for annual maneuvers with the Navy. I had my woodwork still, a boat or viol; and my town friend coming out — I wanted to get my hands on his air rifle and wondered what sudden death was like; and, as I can explain, though guilty of disloyalty, I was at the same time riveted and inspired, tall for almost twelve — looked thirteen at least, a more independent type of person. Where do crows go in the winter? Nowhere much, said Rob, friend of the family, intimate of my mother, sometime Nature mentor of mine:

:who knew two dozen mushrooms (not counting those that grew on a huge white ash in off the blacktop back near the covered bridge) — knew the scat of a dozen “critters,” had a moondial by his attic window at home and of the heavens had talked to me last summer and this at night trash astronomy I could tell he really felt though he offered me what would interest me and another evening brought his bronze sextant — the graduated “limb” a sixth of a circle (sex-tant, now more than a sixth) to teach me angular altitudes: the stars crowded and fixed, “astronomer, you’re always losing things,” a shooting star descending not as if overhead were the legendary canopy we hear of but a dark flat and deep field graphed briefly and laughably by this stroke fading across a screen — which took us to the summer triangle, Deneb to the left and Altair below and overhead to Vega and the tiny parallelogram harp above this island of Vermont a melancholy angle in his words and the voice, and how to bring the horizon up to the star.

Surprising how little music in the constellations. Harp, lyre, swooping eagle (you see Altair, the brightest), falcon, vulture. I opt for vulture, Rob said, at odds one night the summer previous but he did not fret in front of me. “Harp star, tortoise,” he said drily. “That cold blue glare”—did I know Lovecraft? — “yaller to Australian telescopes, I understand, isn’t it green, don’t you think it’s green?” The herd-boy and Vega — the weaving girl — more “trashy astronomy” (Rob called it) that night, but it was the Pole Star, North Star, Polaris twelve thousand years ago and in twelve thousand AD it will be again. Our sun, our solar system moving in the general direction of Vega at twelve miles a second — it would take it 450,000 years to reach Vega — twenty-seven light years to Vega might as well be infinity. The cosmos is in fact unthinkably big, let it go, let it go bang.

Of my boat, Rob said there was hard and soft maple, both of them hardwood. Mine was the soft variety. The woman to whom I tell these things can see the boy had a number of interests in those days. The boat…and the fishing pole…you and Liz went fishing.

Yes, but…how was I like the place? — you said you saw what I meant.

Yes. How were you like the place? You were there.

CANOE REPAIR

It was sunset and the boy was angry and wanted to be somewhere else. His father listened to him breathing. What did the boy expect? That’s the difference between you and I, Zanes’s fifteen-year-old son concluded cuttingly. And all Zanes had wanted to know was what was the use in soaring hundreds of feet above the granite hills and lakes in an expensive thing called a hang glider that might get you killed. Naturally Zanes would want to take a look at the contraption to see how it was made. What was so terrible about a father wanting to do that? The boy wanted to be somewhere else at this moment and at the same time he didn’t. Zanes saw dark lake water cooling the airs above so rapidly that, venturing into lake space, an airborne figure loses altitude and tilts steeply downward. They stood side by side staring at the lake. Zanes was glad of the lake and the long alien canoe passing along the far shore.

It came out of a cove as quiet as deer swimming. The canoe was moving and it was still. Of that Zanes was certain. He and his son watched it and were absorbed in what had passed between them. What in hell is that thing? Zanes said. Remote were the glowing forms of two men paddling upright in unison and a woman amidships leaning back. Where were they bound? They were taking a spin. The man in a flowered shirt paddling stern was a black man. That’s no fiberglass, said Zanes, unless — it’s not a fake birch bark, is it? That’s an Indian canoe, said Zanes’s son, who knew everything, and Zanes breathed easier. Well, that’s no Indian paddling stern, said the father. His son laughed and punched him on the arm. Dad, he complained. His son was trying.

I bet that boat can fly, the boy said. It looks, Zanes said—alive was what he nearly said — it looks like deer swimming. Deer? his son said. It would run rings around that old tub of ours.

Against pale poplar and dark pine along the far shore the canoe moved slick and straight, its motion simple as the lake, hidden and obvious and still. Two houses back in that cove had been built by a contractor for summer rental. One of them materialized at sunset, towels draped on the rail of the deck; at sunset a window beamed blindingly like one long flash.

I knew I would be called to give it up before I was ready. I think now that I have removed it in slow parts one after the other. Many a good canoe will have its thieves, though with the newer types of canoes it is harder to get the parts loose. Some don’t even seem to have parts. This was an old style, though quite new-made, one part bound to another.

Once when I lived in the city I took a trip into the country. I entered a village and saw a laundromat. An elderly lady with blackest-dyed hair watched through the plate glass window. She was not, somehow, doing her laundry. She was watching for someone. Her hands came to her hips, a panel truck pulled in at the curb. It was the dryer repair service. It had the same name as mine — Zanes. There was a barber shop next to the bakery, and I thought, I like this town, this village, and I will visit the lake. But first I will have a trim.

It was a drab midsummer afternoon and Zanes and his son came out of the barn where they had been making a space in which Zanes was determined to start from scratch and try to build a kitchen counter and sink unit. They were getting along. They had come out apparently to feel the faint rain swept across the lake by a southeast breeze. The unusual canoe was out there along the far shore, and the black man and the blond woman were paddling not quite at the same pace. They worked together with an uncertain sedateness. You felt they were talking. The canoe’s animal flanks and low length absorbed the two paddlers, who seemed to be sitting on seats below the level of the gunwales. The two Zaneses watched with pleasure as an outboard, with a man in the stern and a small child facing him, passed the canoe close and the canoe took the wake.

The woman shipped her paddle across the bowstem and twisted around to look at her companion. Her hand on the gunwale, she spoke until she was through. Something was happening. Hair to her waist, she had on a dark two-piece bathing suit. Her hair seemed too long. Hands on the gunwales, she raised herself and, her elbows shaky, listed a knee. This stabbed into the gunwales an un-watery force, the woman shrieked, the near gunwale dipped, and the black man muscled his paddle in over the blade to jump them forward as the woman’s paddle slid into the lake. His voice came across the water laughing or groaning. He snatched her paddle as it passed. They’re kneeling, the boy said, that’s how you paddle that canoe. Lower center of gravity, said his father. That’s a fast canoe, said Zanes’s son. His father laughed and clapped him on the back. It belongs to somebody, he said. You probably couldn’t sink ours, said the boy. Zanes followed his son’s eyes. The black man two hundred yards away had swung his canoe around and could see them.

My time device would not take me back to the early settlers fighting off the Mohawks and Malecites or up into the dazzling, state-of-the-art patents necessarily. One morning in our apartment whose days were numbered, I distinguished below me the sounds of small truck, taxi, large truck, sports car, motorcycle, and the peep of bicycle brakes; I was cleaning myself — as my father used to say — rinsing razor, answering the questions of the night. I was measuring the haircut I had bought from the proprietor of that village laundromat. And it came to me that we would go and settle there.

You could say that Zanes’s canoe was a good-enough canoe. A fourteen-foot light fiberglass molded with thwarts that would take your weight and with a bottom, according the in-all-probability-lying original owner, equal to any late-spring whitewater you would run, or any swift summer shallows. Such a trip outside the lake to begin with would require a car or pickup truck to get you to the river if that was what you felt it necessary to do with a canoe on the lake waters. At dawn when your wife and son are asleep. In the heat of the afternoon when you want to cool your feet over the side — swim off your canoe — capsize your canoe and that’s OK, too.

Rowing looks like work. Like exercise. A canoe on the other hand was to take out. To feel it greet you, hold you again and you it. To let the power of the water give against the blade like swimming. The lake was part of the canoe, it occurred to Zanes. A canoe was to look at as it passes. You don’t need one, unless you think you do.

Unemployed youths from the next town, or from Christian settlements in the hills, had found it useful to privately commandeer the orthopedist’s old green canvas and wood canoe a hundred yards down the shore from Zanes’s small dock once when the owner and his wife and seven or eight children were not around, though they did not damage it. An expenditure of energy is what you would call that. Or wait for the right night to borrow the lawyer’s glass-bottomed rowboat that belonged in the Caribbean, not up north. Again, an expenditure of effort, a response to stimuli. Or if experiment calls, wham some absent owner’s kayak with a two-by-four, imagining its highly resistant polyethylene to be fuselage.

Watch this man-made lake some weekday afternoon with no viable river exit, and one day you see them — two, three, four of them, in black in the hot sun with freeze-dyed hair. A shirt slashed down the back and over the shoulder, an oversized suit jacket with rips safety-pinned. Jammed-sounding music on a ghetto blaster the size of a small suitcase. A skull pendant, an iron cross from the war. Not fishing, not talking — what are they doing? The sleepy, lean one named Lung sits with the bird-hunting boomerang across his knees, he coughs hard, his face turned to the sky. They’re in a rowboat that looks familiar. Have we seen that skiff before, moored to the blue buoy in the south cove, or did they haul that from someplace with a hook-up behind their car and launch it at the public beach at the north end?

Alternative sportsmen, they will whack the soda dispenser at the laundromat even after the can drops. Will hang out on the sidewalk outside, chuckling at each other, will sit on their bikes, will lean against somebody’s car, rolling it an inch or two against the brakes. There is Lung, with at least one slanted eye and a huge suit over his T-shirt; for he will talk to you. The little, portly, shaved-headed one is called the Mayor. Outside on the hood of a great old automobile that belongs to someone are spread the fortune cards of the girl with all the lipstick. Why do they hang out here, and why do they leave in an instant as if they all suddenly know something? Again, an expenditure of effort. They will empty warm soda on the pavement. Zanes the owner said to Lung, Why don’t I mind you people. You’re not here most of the time, Lung said. Where am I then? Zanes said. Living the lakeside life, said Lung.

Your vehicles are uninspected, the wheels of that enormous vehicle are way out of line, you don’t work at anything, you smoke too much, you go in for fortune-telling when you could control your future, you don’t trouble the laundromat but what are you doing here? — look at how my son organizes his life — you let time which you think you’ve plenty of escape you, and I would like to catch the waste of your way with time or use you in the working-out of my time device: These things I would have said to Lung as the representative of that punk crew if I had found the words, for I think he would have listened. In any event he came back to my premises regularly; and, though he was scarcely older than my knowledgeable son, I felt that through some fellow feeling he would answer me sometime.

Zanes got his ideas shaving. He was looking at the stretch of upper jaw and cheek across which he drew his razor. He took care not to invade his goatee and mustache, but the mirror images of his eyes went their unseen way. Silent cars that generated power out of water was one of his ideas; underground energy-saving dwellings was another; that no idea was absolutely new but built on existing ideas was still another. When he took his canoe out, Zanes also thought.

The ideas knew how to get away sometimes. Opening a whole wheat pizza operation in the space vacated by a Lebanese bakery between the laundromat and the yarn shop was another idea. But Zanes’s wife, who loved him, pointed out that his reason for coming here had been to have time, because the laundromat, already surprisingly profitable in a rural community, would practically run itself. As it had for the elderly couple who had died in each other’s company of natural causes one afternoon during a visit by the dryer repairman to inspect malfunctioning pilots. She was right: Zanes had a restless mind, that was all. His father had always said, Retire early, look ahead, go into something else. Zanes thought of expanding to a second laundromat in a town nine miles away where there was a small college. He thought of a bookstore. But was it true what she said, that he was looking for work? She did not find him lazy, only unconscious. He woke in the night and looked at her and smelled her.

Fire flared in the far cove one summer night when Zanes and his wife were waiting for their son to return from hang gliding at Glyph Cliffs. The flames were above the beach and must be on the porch of the black man’s rented house. Zanes and his wife stood on the slope above their little dock. Figures leapt to the mutter and slide of music and in the light seemed to open and close, and a blank window was a dark, inchoate part. Voices were succeeded by the silent fire. They went at it again.

A light bulb shot on and off in the house with an afterglow in the mind. Three or was it four people were dancing or wrestling or arguing, the tones distinct yet not the words. Something was going on. Look, the fire’s calmed down, Zanes heard his wife say softly. They were squirting lighter fluid on their steaks probably, Zanes said. His wife elbowed him. He imagined her, and knew her words had reached some reservoir in his brain, where she was swimming at night, the luminous things like tiny muscular wakes lit up her thighs and the curve of her back. The sky’s upper air by contrast was so full of gravity.

Headlights flung into the woods behind them. High beams wobbled and swung in past the barn, and the boy was dropped off. That’s a relief, his mother said. He had said he was ready for his first cliff launch, he was doing ground runs with borrowed gear but it wasn’t so great yet. He was fifteen. A girl had driven him home. He told his parents what he had learned about the people across the lake. He always knew everything.

Zanes said they should install an anemometer next to the weather vane on the roof. His son put his hand on his father’s shoulder. His son asked less. Had he learned his winds yet? The boy said there was only one way to do that. Let me know when you want me to come to the cliffs, his father said with unwieldy affection. Angry voices rose across the lake, and someone was singing at the rented house.

I entered the village never thinking I would have a haircut today. The elderly man who kept the barbershop informed me that he and his wife ran the laundromat but that even with twenty washers it practically ran itself. I saw a used, heavier-than-average fiberglass canoe and bought it before I left town. I asked the former owner to look after it for me. I breathed deeply and felt the air filling the space of my chest to be measured by another lifetime. I learned the following week that the barber had died hours after he had cut my hair, and I began to look at my haircut. I thought of the work that the man had done on me. I grew a goatee.

Zanes’s son approached. The moon moved from behind a cloud, which was also moving. His hair was sticking up as if he had been asleep. He said that the black man who had the house across the lake and the canoe was the brother of a jazz musician from Boston named Conrad Clear and was a banker in Revere. The black man? his father said — where do you suppose he picked up that canoe? The blond woman was from New York. Her teenaged son had his own house in the mountains north of here. Where does a teenager get off having his own house in the mountains? said Zanes’s wife. But he was in China for the summer, said her son. Who was in China? asked Zanes. Her son was. And he has his own house? Zanes’s wife asked. Where do you get all this? said Zanes. It’s his canoe, said his son, he gave it to his mother to use. Doing other people’s business, thoughts get diluted by the days, the days empty out into the night — and some leisure was gone. The boy did not wish to talk hang gliding. Zanes asked what was the best put together of the hang gliding rigs. The boy said LITE DREAM was a good one. His mother wondered if many people came out. A few just parked and watched, was the reply.

My son approached and the moon came out and blanched the lake waters. He told us who we were looking at across the lake. He went into the house. My wife reported that she had emptied the coin receptacles at the laundromat, been to the bank, and returned to pay the part-time girl her wages, when the black man and the extremely long-haired blonde had driven up in that silver car of theirs. They were really quite nice, my wife said, but they came in with three loads, and the only two machines not in use were being occupied by two of those punk kids. You know, the stocky, broad one, and the tall, skinny, Asiatic-looking boy with the tiny blue star on this cheekbone. Well, they were leaning up against these two machines by the window and Lung was communicating by sign language with their friends loafing on the sidewalk outside. The black man asked if they were using the machines and the Mayor asked what did he think they were doing. The black man had an unpleasant worried look on his round face, and he spoke again and was ignored by the two kids who might as well have been outside instead of blocking the machines, one of which was later found to have a puddle extending from under it. They’re not exactly kids, I said. They’re kids, said my wife. Well, they don’t have enough to do, I said, and why am I hearing this now? I said. The shaved-headed pug they called the Mayor was talking with his hands to the girl outside with all the lipstick who had her cards laid out on the hood of that enormous old car, she’s Lung’s girl, my wife said. How do you know that? I asked, and where was everybody else? “Asiatic” didn’t describe Lung, I was thinking — though having thought this I saw my wife might be right, though my son had told me the father was German-Irish. That’s what I was getting to, said my wife. The black man had that awful worried look, and just then who do you think got up but Seemyon, who was reading, and came over and in that English of his told the boys to move it. Seemyon? said Zanes; it’s his second home. Well, he said he was the best friend of yours, said my wife, which surprised me, and the Mayor said, Luck-y guy (like that), and on the way out the door the Mayor said, Black mother, but the woman said over her shoulder emptying one load, What’s your problem, Sonny? and the Mayor looked in the door again and said, You’re the one with the problem, Blondie, and the black guy almost made a move but didn’t. But where was everyone else? I asked. I heard Lung outside say something, said my wife; then all the kids got into the car and left, said my wife. But I’ve spoken with Lung, I said. Aren’t you listening to me? my wife said.

Seemyon Stytchkin frequented the laundromat by day. He kept his bulging military pack neat and he read his book and talked to those using the machines. He welcomed those entering. Once he mopped up a woman’s emergency overflow while she was taking a long-distance call. A spring immigrant from Belarus and a trained marathon runner, Seemyon had been unwilling to take the exam for a taxi license in New York upon finding that the three hundred dollars he would have to raise to pay the taxi commission before he would take the exam was unrefundable should he fail. But at that moment in time, as these Americans said, he happened to see the motto “Live Free Or Die” on the license plate of a car being towed away from a No Standing zone one late winter day in Greenwich Village and noted that the state was New Hampshire. Having determined to go there, he purchased a small single-burner camping stove.

On the final leg of his foot journey north he was within running distance of the state capital and he began to jog. He entered a hilly town with arrows in all directions giving the mileage to lakes and ponds as yet unseen. He pulled up in front of a laundromat. He looked at his watch. He decided to end his two-month trip. A man with a goatee was grinning at him through the plate glass window. I was that man.

A silver sports car driven by a blond, not unRussian-looking woman had backed away from the laundromat and turned to accelerate down a steep hill, disappearing at speed into the dark one-car entrance of a narrow, shingle-roofed shelter built over the river, only to reappear on the far side. Seemyon had learned from his late father, the carpenter Vladimir, that one must have two good reasons for a major decision. As he was to tell me weeks later during the summer, arriving here, passing through New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, day turning to night, night to day, he had discerned in laundromats a closeness yet privacy between machine users, also a feedback here between machine and human occasioning acquaintanceships and time to read and think, a powerful collective motion within humming immobility. I said that to tell the truth our customers generally just sat and stared into space. Had I considered adding a dry cleaning operation to the laundromat, not to mention offering customers the option of leaving their laundry to be machined by the management? No, I liked the semi-automated, coin-operated integrity of our place. The second reason for Seemyon Vladimirovich’s decision had been the silver car, for this car with its unforgettable license plate motto was the car Seemyon had seen being towed away in New York a few weeks before.

Zanes, what did you expect when you put your hard-earned cash into this place? Seemyon said one day, indicating the laundromat and the machine users. That it would work for me, said I. Money has a leakage factor, Seemyon went on, holding his book against his chest. It must keep moving, he said. Take this laundromat, he said. Water flows into the machine and stops. It is useful only while it is in the machine. It is moved and it stops. It is used and becomes then used water. It must move on — just as the water that replaces it must move into the machine from someplace else. The machine must hold the water, as I have proved when a machine has overflowed; but it is necessary for the machine also to let the water go. It is all motion and the prevention of leakage. When you left your job last year you were taking what you had and making it flow into a new system rather than holding on to what had been used. It would have leaked away if you had not made it move into a new system. You want to rid sometimes the system of water for a certain cycle and not bring in new waters. I found that I had gotten hungry listening to Seemyon Vladimirovich. Come to think of it, I was thirsty.

Zanes had been unmindful of the recipe collection his wife had compiled. She had begun, it seemed, years ago. Now it was going to be printed as a book. She said it was arranged like a story and she said — he had heard her say it like a promise — that she was sure they wouldn’t make a dime on it. But now an astounding offer had come her way from New Hampshire TV.

Some days I liked Lung more than my own son. Sometimes I was unconscious of this. I told Lung of my wife’s TV pilot. Exposure, Lung said. That’ll fix her, I said. Coverage, he said. Tall in his huge-shouldered, otherwise unemployed suit, he joked, Do we get to come for a meal on camera? They were not even asking me, I said until my wife established herself enough to make viewers curious about her private life. Lung coughed and coughed, as if this was how laughing came out of him. We’ll look for you, he said. I said, Dawn is the time to see me. He coughed again and made some signs through the plate glass to the girl with the cards on the car hood, and she signed back. Lung said, She says you like the canoe, stick with the canoe. The mayor arrived on his dirt bike and surveyed the scene. He didn’t miss much. The black man and the blonde had recently eaten peaches while doing their laundry.

One airless morning the eve of Labor Day weekend, when Zanes’s wife was awaiting a visit from the New Hampshire television people to iron out details for the pilot cooking series she would host at home, Zanes found his plate glass window smashed in two places that now looked target-like. A pink swastika had appeared on the glass door of the laundromat and someone’s face also in pink with a grin.

The town cop agreed the perpetrators were a nuisance, but you could monitor just so many Yamahas and dual-exhaust wrecks passing through town. Zanes said he would talk to the visiting Russian to see what he knew. The son of the hardware store proprietor had done a hurry-up replacement on the window and by midafternoon the jeweler girl who worked for Zanes part-time had razor-bladed and Windexed the swastika and the face off the door. Zanes had been unable to persuade the unpredictable repair man to stop in on his way home to check an old and possibly failing Speed Queen dryer. Zanes thought of Glyph Hills, but his son had gone to the state capital to visit a sporting goods store with a college girl in the hang gliding group. Zanes went home himself, found a second car in the driveway, assumed it was the TV people, put on a pair of trunks he found in the barn, and took his canoe out. He bent to his work. But he wondered what that long bark canoe felt like. Its length and strong delicacy. Its secret speed. Its time.

They were extremely lean, my son and Lung. Never having seen them together, I had not compared their faces. A narrowing and angle of the eyes in Lung and perhaps in my son gave a hint of the steppes. My son was younger than he looked, and Lung, I thought, older, though in sleep an alien age crept over his forehead and mouth, some pinch of pained concentration. I had long since thought through the utility of my time device. I had only to assemble it. But of what materials? People had a right to it. Like water-driven cars. Like the surprise union of two thoughts. I named a river town in Connecticut where there was a well-known laundromat and asked Seemyon on what day he had arrived there. He knew that laundromat. Had he seen the silver sports car pause there that day traveling at far greater speed than he? Seemyon was a runner and a reader, a Russian and would-be American; he ran everywhere, ran out to Glyph Hills, reported back. A talker and a listener, he would make sense of the Zanes life story and tell back even what I did not want to remember. You have made up three thousand greeting cards and twice sold your apartment in the city, he reminded me. When did all this happen? I said.

Zanes bent to his work. He paddled on the right side and kept on course by turning the blade inward as he was finishing his stroke. But he needed no course, he aimed at a brown duck with a white circle around her eye, then at jazz music coming from the south cove, a thump and groan, a wail and persistent intimacy which would have drawn him and his leakless yellow fiberglass onward had not Zanes shipped his paddle on the floor in front of him. Straddling his gunwales he let the water cool his feet. An outboard passed containing the Mayor and a blond, very tanned, glowering fellow.

Seemyon Vladimirovich was pulling beans for a market gardener who permitted him to camp on her land. He had “a thing” about firm ground, he was respectful of boats and saw their use value but had no use for them himself. Zanes scanned the shore. His wife was shaking hands at great length with a man.

Zanes stood up and the bow of his canoe jutted out of the water. Why should that happen when his weight remained the same? He crouched and made his way forward. He heard the drone of an outboard; it did not seem to be closing on him. He stood up and put a foot on a gunwale and rocked his canoe. Equilibrium stubborn as a gyro seemed built into the seamless molded material, and he applied himself and rocked the gunwale lower. Now with both feet he brought the gunwale down into the water but, meaning to jump, he lost his footing. His heels slipped out from under him, and as the other gunwale rolled up behind him the canoe went over. Zanes sat down hard on the capsized bottom and, his arms circling for balance, he slid backwards into the lake. To the north, he heard a voice laughing.

Treading water, my hand upon the overturned canoe, I heard laughter to the north and recalled my paddle. Despairing very generally of my life, I went under and came up in the familiar darkness of the boat. It is as if the day has capsized and not you. A canoe is one boat you can find privacy under. You could adapt a boat for just this purpose. The fiberglass bottom sealed out the light of the sun but not the music from the cove — had it risen in volume? Was the sun graining its way through the fibers of my roof? Why should I not stay here? I could always work on my time device. A wind was coming up, and I heard a breathing sound of paddling.

He treaded water and in his mind smelled fish scales. A wind came up. Zanes felt a wash against his dome. A regular plash and churn approached, and, on a distressing day of smashed plate glass and the invasion of the TV people, he felt in the presence of some second reason he had come to be here — not habit, not comfort, not escape — a future voice that needed no words and was a return.

One bright mid-September afternoon, alerted to what he saw entering his woods, Zanes was not ignorant of the black man and what he brought. The canoe visibly shifting upon the diminutive roof of the silver sports car and overshadowing it, the black man had no right to drive in through the woods like that on a September afternoon. How do you drive with the front end of a canoe over your windshield? The bow like a beak closing down over the hood over-slung it a good three feet. The single length of clothesline securing the bow to the middle of the front bumper went taut and slack as one tire hit a pothole, and the back end of the canoe was raked by a dangling, half-split pine bough. If the red blanket protecting the car roof wasn’t actually slipping, a corner of it hung unevenly half over a window, and the clothesline around the broad belly of the canoe that passed through the windows was working loose so he was going to lose that canoe. The black man had no right even to ask to leave it “for the time being”—getting out of his car, its weird long load between them, and sauntering around the bow so he and Zanes could see each other. Not a tall man, he had a round African face. The bow had two yellow-green leaves stuck to it.

Mr. Zanes? the man asked, as if the name wasn’t on the mailbox out on the road; I believe you operate the laundromat in the village? What a lovely spot, how much frontage do you have? He was getting around to what he really had in mind, which was incredible coming from summer people who were practically complete strangers.

He treaded water. He heard the wind faraway. Zanes felt a wash against his dome. A regular plash and churn approached, and, on a distressing day of smashed plate glass and the invasion of the TV people, he felt in the presence of some second voice.

Did he hear it?

The voice said, Is anybody home? Alive inside the power of his pantings, he laughed out loud and felt his long dome bumped and a scratching as of sandpaper.

The Zanes’s fiberglass canoe had been rammed more than once. By a slow-moving outboard Chris Craft piloted by a priest and carrying a group of elderly Catholic ladies, and again by an inboard Chris Craft when its operator had become fascinated by two girls he was pulling each on one water ski and had seen Zanes in time to steer off, just shaving Zanes’s bow though putting Zanes himself in the path of the tow rope. Sideswiped also by an aluminum canoe swinging around on a tow rope behind an outboard; attacked twice by visiting freshwater wind surfers yelling commands at him right up to impact; and once, during an eclipse of the moon, rammed by his own dock. Almost imperceptibly nicked, the fiberglass hull kept its finish.

I knew the voice after all and ducked under the gunwale to come up and show myself to Conrad Clear’s brother. Oh, you’re all right, the black man said peering down as if my identity had not been at issue. I thought you might be — the black man did not finish. Balanced large-scale and old above me, the bark canoe up close seemed to touch my eyes.

He treaded water and felt the rusty drip-stain and snake mottle over the hull. Along the gunwale every few inches were bindings of some woody material. The birch had aged, it was interesting to examine, a mottled pale brown. Which side of the bark was the outside of the tree? On the outside a flap of bark the length of the canoe came down below the gunwale. The word “outwale” came to him. The outwale’s come loose in a couple of places, he said, and the black man said, The outwale? That’s not good. He leaned over to look and the canoe tipped with him.

You know these powerboats, they start polluting the environment around this time on a Friday, Clear said. Aren’t boats crazy? Swinging about, he backpaddled to say, Well, back to work. It was a joke. Work, I thought. What if my time device already exists? It might still need to be repaired from time to time.

Store a canoe complete with paddles and cushions “for the time being”? Now how would that be possible when at this point in time the Zanes’s garage was out of the question? — and as for the barn…

At least have a look at it, the black man said. He worked on his knots at the back bumper. He ran the clothesline out from stern to stem, where the slender bow thwart it was lashed to could have snapped considering how the bow had been bucking. You could feel his duty, he almost loved the canoe; it did not seem to be his. At last he and Zanes raised the canoe off the top of the silver car, gripping the gunwales at each tapering end of the canoe, feeling it try to turn over. Grass brushed against the bottom like a drum when they laid it down. The canoe creaked somewhere in the length and give of its gunwales, its ribs and grain and pegs. The men stood near each other, looking into the canoe. Its grand lines flared to a beam so wide it seemed low and was. Which end was which? Ribs curved with a beautiful singleness up to the gunwales, and, out of the bent tension in which they seemed to grip and bow the ribs, as you ran your eyes over it and felt it the canoe developed a force of tightness and actual lift, as if the noble forcing of the ribs into the oval narrow form turned the weight inward into lightness. Zanes ran his fingers along a carved rib that tapered just below the gunwale. I think the ribs are cedar, the black man said. He breathed and Zanes knew he was watching him. Yes, the man said. I suppose the thwarts are, too. Zanes knelt and drew his palm along the outside of the canoe, the weather-rusted, raw but not raw bark. The outwale, did you say? the man said. I guess I did, Zanes said. Seams, evidently covering vertical splits in the bark every couple of feet, were sealed or reinforced (if they were seams) with ridges of some hardened, pitchy-looking gum. Zanes went inside and ran his fingers down a rib to the floor where a damp green leaf was stuck. He stood up and the black man lowered his eyes to the canoe and nodded. You could take a trip in it, he said.

This long boat that was interesting as hell asked too much, it was a present to be shared and left you stupid on your home ground, outwitted but maybe not. Zanes could hear himself think as if his thought slipped out of him. Please use it, the black man said. It would be better if it were used. You probably know more about this thing than I do, the black man said. He looked at the lake. The Zaneses’ yellow fiberglass canoe was beached and overturned near the little dock. A paddle leaned across it. This one is a lot of fun, the man said. I almost didn’t make it here. It’s eighteen feet long. It’s tippy, but it’ll take four people if you’re not going far.

The paddles were on the small side as if for short strokes, and a moose carved in a burned-looking brown appeared on each narrow blade, a jaw behind the muzzle and no horns. I saw you out in it, said Zanes. Yes, said the black man. He glanced at his watch. Zanes looked at his. They had been standing here with the canoe for a good half hour. Have you ever tried paddling amidships when you’re alone in that long canoe? Zanes asked, you might get better control in windy conditions. Too late, said the black man. Where’s the blond lady? Zanes asked. She’s long gone, said Conrad Clear’s brother; she didn’t even stay through Labor Day. This belongs to her son. But who knows where he is — or cares. Zanes said, Not me, and, saying it, changed his mind. Why don’t you care, he asked the black man, if you love his mother? His father spoiled him, and now he’s eighteen, was the calm reply.

Cluttered as the barn was, the canoe could conceivably be slung from the rafters. Does it leak? Zanes asked, when he had meant to say no to the whole proposition, especially the fifty dollars. Not much. You splash a little, said Clear; I’ve heard a canoe like this will last about ten years. He looked at the lake. We have the house another ten days, but I have to go. This is one pretty man-made lake, he said. Zanes said, Come back, and the man laughed. It was interesting to see a black man out in this boat said Zanes, and Clear laughed sharply in an erupting way so Zanes felt uncomfortable and then didn’t. How’d he get hold of it? Zanes asked. Oh his father presented him with it, but he could care less, Clear said. Who could? asked Zanes. The man laughed. My canoe’s going to last fifty to a hundred years, Zanes said, yours you can recycle. The man laughed. Zanes remembered once seeing him come close inshore shortly after dawn.

One early morning in August before I drove in to the village to open the laundromat I checked our meteorological station for temperature and humidity, and for precipitation during the preceding twenty-four hours. At eye level upon a four-legged stand, this white-shingled box on the slope above our modest beach had come with the house. It had belonged to a veteran of the Coast Guard who had retired inland from Cape Cod.

I smelled the difference between grass and pine, between kerosene from the barn and the relatively new paint on the old shutters of our house, smelled the difference between a dewy asbestos shingle fallen from the barn roof which needed repair and some moldy residue close by, possibly the field mouse not quite left for dead by the cat watching at the foot of the sugar maple. I will smell at a distance. I will get down on my knees to prove to myself that this was what I smelled.

I looked down the shore. The herons feeding on the reflections in the lake shallows when I coasted near in my canoe were nowhere to be seen this morning. The early sky was like the lake; brisk ripples set by a northeast breeze came at me like sound. One day I would look up and see my son in the sky “boating” from one thermal up-draft to the next, hung in his tapered cocoon sack like an insect’s body below its red, green, and yellow LITE DREAM hang glider wings purchased for him probably quite soon by his father. Then the dark waters cooled the air above it as my winged son who in this noble new useless sport wished to invest his all, ventured into lake space, lost lift, tilted steeply downward as if to attack the lake, and dived at a bright trajectory only his father might intercept in his admittedly heavier-than-air fiberglass canoe.

I raised the door of the weather box to fasten it shut, and I heard the soft dive and gulp of a paddle and the following churn. Turning, I found the black man and his unusual canoe close inshore, and felt he was not yet a father. Why does anybody in a boat passing your trees, the windows of your house, your modest dock, trespass seemingly more than a person walking in your woods? I smelled coffee richly dripping and poppy seed blue corn muffins being lifted from the kitchen oven. The black man nodded at me and swept his paddle wide to bring his bow around. Was it a green boulder I had never seen? The boat answered instantly, its always surprising length unwieldy spun from the stern. The man flipped his paddle over to the other side and steadied his bow for the far cove. “Boat” is what you call a canoe if you are a serious canoeist. He had quite a considerable bald spot coming. He was taking his canoe out first thing before anyone was awake. That was a canoe. I smelled a shallot, a tablespoon of sweet butter frying, a yellow pepper in there. I thought, My wife’s cookbook, my time machine. All these words she was using!

The TV fellow was really extremely brown in his blue jeans and black crocodile T-shirt. He was saying goodbye in the driveway. His name was Guy. He told me I must be mistaken, there were no herons on a lake like this. You sure they weren’t flamingoes? the man joked. I must be imagining them, I said, maybe that’s why they’re so tame when I approach them at dawn in my bark canoe, have you ever eaten heron? He said, Oh you have a bark canoe. We’re boarding it for someone, my wife said. When he was gone, my wife acted embarrassed. We rolled the canoe over. She was admiring the canoe and I was standing right behind her.

You didn’t have to, you should have taken the fifty dollars just for the responsibility. It’s a very valuable canoe, she said. It’s strong, I said, and went and gave it a killer kick with my workshoe. One of those boys, the Oriental-looking one, told me it was a wild canoe. It was a trip, she said. It may be here forever, I said, you know these well-off city types, next year they’re island-hopping in Greece. Sounds like you’d like to go, she said. Yes I would, I said; but she shook her head, No you wouldn’t, she said. You might, I said, thoughtlessly, and she laughed. She realized I was right. Maybe you’ll tell me when the time comes, I said. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, she said undecided. He said it belonged here, I said. Now why did he say that?

The man had left a New Hampshire number that was not local.

I want to work on it, I said without thinking. You what? she softly demanded. How did those kids hear about it? I said. They’ve seen it, my wife said, I heard that nasty little punk the Mayor that the police wouldn’t arrest say to the fortune-telling girl with all the lipstick and one or two others standing there, Yeah, yeah, he said, they better take care of that weird canoe. I don’t think he’s dangerous, I said, just a learner. Nasty, she said, shitty-looking little resentful unemployed loafing big-talking window-smashing sex-retarded potbellied bully racist — she ran out of words — Mayor, I said, helping her out, and she nodded seriously, Yes, Mayor, she said. She put her hand on my shoulder. Guy said they will give us a new counter and sink unit.

He got his son to help sling it from two beams. But then Zanes had to examine the inside again, and they lifted it out of the slings and laid it down out on the grass. The boy had to meet his friends. A college girl from the hang gliders came and picked him up, it was her last day.

Zanes knelt and smelled the bark strips that bound each end of the tapered bow thwart to a gunwale. Five thwarts — shorter at bow and stern, longer amidships. How did you tell bow from stern? He sniffed the stitches, the lashings. What did cedar smell like? A cedar closet. But cedar? He didn’t think he had a cedar tree. One hairy, fraying lashing has loosened. He pulled at the loose binding and found he could unwrap and unthread it. Would the mid-gunwales spring if a short thwart at bow or stern gave way? He tried to understand how the bark flap along the outside of the canoe was attached. All this sort of at the same time. He turned the canoe over on the grass. It was clouding up. The canoe could be left where it was. It was a boat that liked cool weather. Not a living thing at all, so why was it alive? A red squirrel appeared on the overturned bottom and was sitting upright, looking like it was getting ready to chew on the canoe.

The hoodlum window-smashing energy-spenders who according to me had gotten the date of Halloween wrong, had been traced to the college town nine miles away through the license plate of a girl’s now unregistered but recently spottily repainted Toyota sedan in the trunk of which was found a paint brush wrapped in plastic wrap that smelled of thinner and betrayed specks of pink on the metal casing in which the bristles were fixed. The plot thickens, Seemyon Vladimirovich said. Why didn’t I care?

These youths were regular spectators at Glyph Cliffs. And had been pointed out to the police there by Seemyon as having hassled the black man and the blond woman at the laundromat. The evidence remained inconclusive. When I came to unlock the coin boxes that evening, Semyon pointed out the Mayor, Lung, and a California-looking fellow in the group on the pavement outside as if I had not seen them. Something in me had not. It was the canoe. It was racism pure and simple against the black man who had come in with the white woman, Seemyon said, pure and simple. He reached for his military pack, he was leaving. I believed he might one day soon break into a run and depart for the state capital. I said if they knew the black man was the brother of a well-known jazz player, they would feel different. They do know that, said Seemyon to my surprise. Who is this California-looking fellow? I said. They come and go — and the swastika? said Seemyon, staring into my face. I think they just don’t have enough to do, I said. Then hire them, said Seemyon, glancing at his watch. This place pretty much runs itself, I said. Tomorrow is another day, said Seemyon, you should visit Glyph Cliffs and check out the hang gliding technology, he said. The lumberyard owner who was also a contractor had obtained for me a four-foot cedar board. It had a soft, less sweet hue, a wood tinctured with a rose or purple shadow compared to the simpler brown of varnished plywood; and it was rippled with creamy, narrow white lengthways shapes of grain knotted with ovals tilted like galaxies. The canoe spent the night outside, and like a sleepwalker I went out once to touch it and saw a split of light in the cove across the lake. The next morning I noticed a thwart-lashing loose at one end.

His son paddled stern and they took the bark canoe over to the south cove. Zanes did not tell him where to go. The two summer houses were boarded up. We ought to take that overnight trip we always talked about, said Zanes. He didn’t know what his son was thinking. They swung around and in the October woods Zanes saw someone move. Yet this need not be unusual. He turned to speak to his son and got a look at someone whose head had a fleeting Indian look to it. He glanced back not quite far enough to meet his son’s eyes. You want to get your own hang gliding equipment, I want you to have it, he said. I have to pay for it, his son said. Well, I think you should pay for some of it, but it’s going to cost a few hundred dollars before you’re done.

His son held his paddle steering and Zanes scarcely looked again at the fellow watching them from the shore. He thought the head had been shaved, it caught the forest light. I’m going to pay for all of it, Zanes’s son said, if you can loan me the money. I was thinking that you might need someone to help run the other laundromat if you decide you want it. A twinkle of water appeared between the planks in front of Zanes’s knee — had he dripped the water in with his paddle? It came to him like common sense remembered that you patched a leak on the outside, and you would have to find it first. He would buy a hunk of roofing tar. His shoulder ached and he lifted his paddle blade over the bowstem to the left side. He dug in hard and the bow moved its knowing focus. Maybe his son had not even wanted to paddle stern. I’m not going to acquire a new operation just to give you a part-time job, Zanes said. The shaved Indian head in the south cove had not been the Mayor’s, at large and trespassing where nothing much was at risk, it hadn’t even been shaved but it had given off a light. Is there somebody over there? Zanes said. Probably, his son said.

All but one of the machines were in use that evening. A half-gallon milk container was on fire on the sidewalk and three youths watched it burn down. I adjusted the station band of my transistor to get the President’s eight o’clock message to the nation. I had been looking forward to listening to it with Seemyon. Semyon had already told me what the President would say. Seemyon was ruddy and thoughtful. He had heard the press release broadcast on the 4:00 P.M. news while taking a break with his employer. A woman came and I gave her two dollars in quarters, the change machine had broken down.

No one among the machine users seemed to be waiting for the President’s speech.

Seemyon glanced at his large, complex wristwatch. Zanes wanted to get home to the canoe. Zanes was both here and at the lake. What if space was time? Your ideas are ringing a bell, he told Seemyon, shall we listen to the President even though we know what he is going to say? Zanes turned up the volume. Yet he had had an idea that he really wished to broach with the Russian and now it was gone, and in its place was a split of light between the green boards upon a window of the rental house. Zanes had seen it when he had slipped out in the middle of the night to touch the bark canoe. How did the maker get the cedar strips to bend into ribs? He soaked them.

I had known since the city that the source of a leak is often not at the point where the leak is experienced. Used for his own purposes, the laundromat and village and I would soon be left by Seemyon, who was moving on.

But to conclude my point, said Seemyon: Your laundromat — these look-alike, top-loading, electrically linked machines — is engaging actually in automated thought, I believe. And—Seemyon glanced at his watch — you will be glad to know that I saw a jalopy with a pink swastika at the Glyph Cliffs an hour ago. I recognized the hooligans and I have their license plate by heart. You have helped me; I try to help you now.

The bark was turning darker; what happens to a tree with its bark peeled off, does it grow new skin? But of course! — the maker had cut down the birch tree first. I saw the rings, I felt the decades and felt for them.

The gunwales had been lashed to the bark hull through threading holes. These had evidently been made with an awl, they had widened and you could see the daylight through them. So in the unlikely event that you were that low in the water you would have almost a natural leak. Zanes looked for marks of birds’ beaks. The ribs held the bark, and the gunwales held the ribs — almost forty ribs. A body was what it was. Zanes got himself under the thwarts and lay down in the canoe. His wife called from no doubt the kitchen.

She did not call again. Her hair awake like a perfume over my cheeks, unconsciously I savored the fresh herbs in her hair, the scent of baking in the material of her dress and the moisture along her collarbone; and though she must raise herself a little to bring her knees forward rib by rib along the floor planks where the cradling gunwales were widest apart, with my hands like a gentle massaging shoehorn I made sure the small of her back and her strong, flaring behind did not exert pressure on the thwart and so she rubbed it only in passing.

If a thwart broke, then the other four would be under increased tension, and if another broke, the gunwales could begin to spring and the canoe would begin to open, undoing the maker’s work. Flat on his back but not quite flat, Zanes smelled the sharper, gamier cedar and the sweeter birch, he gripped a thwart like a ladder rung. Who made this boat? Who really owned it?

Inside the canoe his arms imagined themselves reaching out. Lengthways bark flaps along the inside of the gunwales as well as the outside were sewn in with bark and you had to believe with a tool made by the maker. Parts became distinct; the beautiful canoe could loosen in your mind. Zanes thought how you would begin, once you had skinned a great tree. Stake it out.

He had forgotten the cushions. He could see that her knees hurt as she drew her paddle blade back through its stroke and lifted it to bring it forward, she sat back on her behind and leaned her back a little against the bow thwart. Can you lean against there? she said, showing her her profile. I guess so, he said. She paddled once and held her paddle across the bow for a moment having earned what came next. Zanes, what are you going to do about the hang glider question? she inquired. She started paddling bravely, so Zanes had to bring them back on the blue buoy they were supposed to be making for. It was October time, a lovely bond of early chill, leaves small and preciously sharp among the pines. I want him to have the equipment, Zanes said. I can feel the water under me, his wife said, I can just feel it. You know, Zanes said, you better not lean back too hard on that thwart. She said, It feels like it’s vibrating right up my legs, you know?

She did not care what we did, we were there, she did not need to look around.

Zanes worked the slings toward each other along the beam. Now they could cradle the seventy-pound canoe upside down — so he could get in under it and raise it out himself. The beam he and his son had chosen put the canoe directly under a small leak in the roof. Zanes didn’t hesitate to leave the canoe outside on the grass if he would need it later, but he sensed that the bark hull didn’t like direct sun. He could go and look at it, the seam pitch softening on a warm October noon, and he would tuck for the time being a lashing that had come loose back into the awl hole.

They had an accident off Glyph Cliffs. The Californian-looking fellow had borrowed a rig and, launched, it had simply fallen as if there were big holes in the wings.

You have a canoe there, the voice said over the phone late at night. Which one are you talking about? I said, not thinking where I was. The good one, the young voice said cuttingly. I hung up on the insult, guessing it was the absent owner, it didn’t sound as nasal as the Mayor. It was certainly the middle of the night, I was in my time device probably and thought nothing of the interruptions to my sleep. I would speak to Lung in case the Mayor had some mischief in mind. I had perhaps not actually been asleep. I was taking the canoe apart. Opening it. I went back to bed. Would I put it back together?

Clear apologized for calling so late the following night. I was asleep. The blond woman had asked Clear to phone me, but she, then, would not get off the phone with him. Her son was coming to collect his canoe the day after tomorrow. He said you didn’t want to give it to him, Clear said, and I told her you were right. It’s his turn, I said, and Clear laughed.

He woke to the window, a darkly single, ghastly or friendly, occupied light lifting the maple from below, but it faded and moonlight from the lake came down, as he came awake. He listened to his hair rub and pull between the pillow and his scalp and he laid his fingers upon his wife’s hunched shoulder. He listened with hearing as sharp as his mother’s the day she died. What was she listening for?

Along the cedar gunwale of the bark canoe, feeling the flaps of the inwale and the outwale and the bound stitchings which, he now believed, were of slit spruce root, somebody was running a hand. Running ahead all along the edge of the canoe fore and aft, both sides, foreseeing use, recollecting the method part by part of the maker. But who was the thief? And was it thievery? A night engine soft as an electric car would not have been able to mask tires mashing driveway gravel and dirt: and he had heard nothing, he had seen on the great canoe only hands. The canoe attracted others to it, they were in its future. It was not the Mayor making off with the bark canoe or taking a two-by-four to it in the middle of the night. Zanes felt only the silence of four in the morning near him on his way to the bathroom with his clothes. He would risk his wife’s waking, because he and the thief were going to take the canoe out.

Some forgetfulness softened the piney night air — was it humidity? — and the descending clarity of late October waited moonlit in the sky. In balance the bark canoe held by its gunwales above your shoulders might have lifted off above your head if you had given it the exact path it asked. You know your ground and where the spongy bank gives way toward the dim beach, the active little wash at the edge and the summer detergent froth. Water at the shins, and the long frame balanced is flipped over into the water, the paddles loosed from their coupled lashing at two thwarts amidships.

It’s light above but the canoe is dark, is it that the light of night at whatever distance needs extra speed to catch our canoe, or is it a clandestine humidity we turn upward in as the paddle lifts forward? There’s no one else in the canoe, it quivers slightly on the dark water feeling you with a sideways quickness that is a promise of forward speed. The paddle stroke gives heart to the boat. As if an hour has passed and you’re meeting yourself coming back, a cough comes from the north or from the shore. Pulling hard on the paddle with the hand just above the blade, you lean joyfully back against the thwart and it gives way and tears free.

Upright, you go on, you control it all with your torso and you find the water in its powerful give nearer than the skin of your knees, or is it water on the floor planks and if so where has it come from, China?

We have a serious leak. Is the leak like worry, no more than worry? Like a brief time, the split of light visible in the cove is between the boards of a window belonging to that house and you have already seen it, yet this may be the actual first time, and if you got right up next to it the lighted space inside would open to you.

Light rose to the surface of the lake and how long had this trip gone on? It’s a measure of its own leak — this canoe — but the inch of water around your knees, does it come from one leak, and at what rate? — there’s no wristwatch, it’s on the bed table near your wife, and this canoe needs to be repaired on home ground.

At a hundred yards your trees and the brick end of your house and the person standing on your bare, barely visible dock are beginning to take shape though it won’t be day yet. Is water itself pressing against the leak now, and is this another part of the bark canoe, this leak? The person dwarfing the dock second by second is certainly Lung, and it must be five-thirty. Why is there not much time?

Zanes beached the bark canoe and told Lung where to find the sawhorses. He told him to keep his voice down. Lung came from the barn with a sawhorse in each hand, his elbows back. There was actual work to be done. Why was Lung here? Zanes turned.

I saw through the sifting darkness of the shore across the lake, but I could not see the split of light in the summerhouse. The moon had gone on. If there was a car over there it would be silver.

They carried the canoe up the bank, an inch of water shifting fore and aft, and they set it on the sawhorses. The bottom was wet and they might need more water inside to show the leak. Zanes went to the barn and found the shiny rock of roofing tar inside a bucket. Would tar work? Every minute things showed more. Lung had on a jean jacket and green chinos. Then Zanes saw the bicycle. Find some dry wood, he said, I think I’ve got a pot in the garage, keep your voice down. He filled the bucket at the lake. Lung hadn’t said a word.

Over there the sky filled the trees out like growth and darkened them with a dawning darkness. I found the silver car, part hidden by house or trees or distance. Like the canoe, it had been used by others for the summer. The bark canoe waited above the ground. I poured in my water, a drip had appeared only near the stern between the seventh and eighth ribs.

Only one awl hole was broken, but the stitches were loose or ragged or out. Zanes pointed out the loose stern thwart. Lung moved it gently on the hinge of its one good binding at the other gunwale.

I took my sheath knife and I split, not too well, two slender lengths and we put them between the gunwales to check the span. Length of thwart is width of gunwale.

The whittling took time, the tapering and the shortening. I had no awl. It got light. A narrow bit did it even better. But the patch — the tar to tar the leak! I said we should have started the tar before cutting the wood because the patch would take time to dry. Lung said what was my rush. I went to the bank and looked at the cove and the silver car. Some tree gum had been used for one already existing patch, you could smell it. The patch takes time to dry. Like putting a potato in to bake long before the hamburger gets into the frying pan, we needed to do the patch.

Or one person can do one job and one can do the other. But Lung wants to be in on the patch.

That’s it for that pot, I said quietly. Turn it into your tar pot from now on, said Lung. He poked the fire in the barbecue. What were you doing here? I said. I was here before you, said Lung. I was here when you came down and got the canoe and took it out, he said. I didn’t have much time left, I said, unconsciously putting things together now. You busted that piece, Lung said. Better go back to the lashing, I said. How did I know that the owner of the canoe was coming soon? Was it my time device operating again?

A canoe is what it makes you do. In the dewy cool the patch was soft still. He had used a fraction of the tar he had broken off to heat, and it was receding now to glassy bituminous hardness. He had wiped the putty knife on the grass.

I felt my wife awake, but not my son. Have you seen my son at Glyph Cliffs? I asked. Lung drew a thong of bark taut from the thread hole and, holding the bottom of it, knotted the rough lashing as tightly as he could. He checks everything out, Lung said, he helps them get off.

I’d like to do this again, Lung said thoughtfully. I mean I didn’t get to go out in it. Maybe you’ll have to bust it again for us to repair it. Then again we could make one from scratch now that you see how it’s put together, it’s a very cool thing. I used to like to shoot birds you know but I was never that crazy about boats, I’d like to take a spin in this one but I got to go to work now.

Why didn’t you speak up when I came out here in the dark in the first place? Zanes asked. Felt stupid, said Lung. I guess I did say catch me early, Zanes said.

Across the lake the silver car moved and its length seemed to collapse. We had a smell of road work from the tar. We went and ran our hands over the tough skin of the hull and lost track for a minute. Lung got under it and looked at his handiwork. I thanked him. He didn’t look at me. We stared at the hull for a while.

This has to go back to the owner, Zanes said. You always have the other one, Lung said and laughed. Why are you called Lung? Zanes asked. It’s whatever you want, Lung said. Answer me, Zanes said, laughing.

What’s going on here? my wife occupying the moment in her blue robe said through the screen door that shone in the sun. I said, Lung, I don’t know where the time went. I’ll bet you didn’t even know I was here, my wife said. You weren’t, I said. My wife asked Lung if he would like some breakfast. He said he never ate in the morning.

Lung’s bike seat was too low and I offered to raise it, but Lung was on his way. So long, Lung, said my wife humorously. Let’s have dinner on camera, Lung called back. The patch was of course not dry, but the canoe could be moved. The alarm clock in my son’s room started distantly ringing. The patch was soft and the hull of the canoe was damp. The alarm got turned off. I think Lung likes you, my wife said, but he certainly picks an early hour for his visits. We had to work on the canoe before the owner came, I said. The owner? my wife said. Is he going to take it? thank goodness. Well, what do you know, she said — for just as Lung had pedaled out of sight onto the town road, the silver car had entered the woods. This particular canoe trip was over.

Low and slow it made its way among the potholes and ruts. The driver was a blond fellow. The clothesline was in the barn.

Who’s that driving? asked Zanes’s wife.

Don’t you remember? asked her husband.

Above me, I felt the presence of my son at his window. If I didn’t take down the screens, it would soon be summer again.

ANNALS OF PLAGIARY

It came to my attention that a person in the news had voiced a thought at her press conference as if it were hers, when the words that came to her were not her own but mine. Little enough to get exercised over. I reread the sentence (or was it two sentences?) quoted in the not normally sensational Post and it was she being quoted answering a question about the effect of some damn thing in, as she called her work, “my piece,” but her answering words were not hers but mine — my own written and printed words speaking at me. Still mine, though in her thirsting-for-attention mouth (caught curled and half-open in the photo of her) exposed and used by — stolen by — someone already so much in the news as activist, award-winner, artist and woman that I thought of my children, to tell the truth, who might be proud of their father. I had come upon the newspaper interview myself; nobody had phoned to tell me.

Why would they? The words were nothing much in a book small and distinctly technical of a lifelong water engineer, a hydrologist, we say — the one and only book he would ever write.

But the artist-woman quoting my thought as hers and as easily as if the words had come to her out of nowhere — from the wit and wisdom of her gift — kept only me in reserve.

The words? I recognized them at once, even from a book of 176 pages — my thought in the paper next to her picture, as if I were describing her. In my unmentioned work it had been sandwiched between two passages of analysis as a bridge, inspired or subtle, though probably an indulgence. I closed my eyes and saw a picture, and then another, as if the words of my book on the effect of two small dams and a converted tannery upon the gradient flow, solvent power, and erosive meander in a Delaware River tributary to the Water Gap had been absorbed or, yes, dissolved, yet now re-precipitated. So that I must open my eyes and look again at the newspaper column (that was all it was) and the photo of the dark-haired woman, my borrower both frowning and smiling — and my words, “Water is always water — above, below, in flood, trickle, rapid or sea, but the traces we leave in it last like our changing thoughts.” (I had said, “may last.” So to add negligence to offense, the artist had got my words wrong.) The article quoted others in praise of her.

The occasion of her press conference was an “installation” at an out-of-the-way site in the City. Her “piece.” Pieces, I would say, yet a site in itself, as a river I suppose is not itself apart from its banks, it struck me as I entered the place that afternoon where it had been installed both inside an open shed and outside in what was left of a vacant lot of a neighborhood known for abandoned, ragged-brick slums and a turf war among three articulate gangs. The work, though I am largely ignorant of such art, proved to be a flat stage set of at first apparently an antique shop furnished with crossbows and rusted lunch boxes, handbags and old blue willow-design dinner plates reflecting the light but not the observer; and passing on then into a long, battered topographic map of western China evidently the top half but including Tibet, indicating dozens of small, possibly (in dotted lines) projected bridges spanning valleys — the map torn, seismically it seemed, to admit windowed shots of young sweatshirted field-trippers (apparently American) grouped photographing waterfalls, monks, the New York skyline, whatever, or bungee-jumping into lush national chasms to an audio of slowed-way-down retro rock of I was almost certain the Stones folded into a Beethoven orchestral movement, along a loop of what you would call silence between two Asiatic cymbal clashes.

And here was I, some onlooker, while all above and below divided by a horizontal banister glass (when I took hold of it) rather than plastic through which swirled a sluggish aqueous suspension of mud particles, blood fabrics, flesh bytes (it came to me), torn name tags, and such. Yet then above and below this fluid banister rail were arrayed video screens and garish iconographical paintings (maybe otherwise unmarketable) by likely the artist herself but like a common history unsigned so far as one could tell. Mixed media, “found objects” I believe was the form (as if there could be visible objects unfound) which in this assemblage spawned a new use of the term “appropriation,” which had meant to this taxpayer the voting of funds by Congress but now, if I am honest with myself, the importing for personal re-use of almost anybody’s “work.”

How to say what I saw; or witnessed, for the work was an event in motion at best: and through this kinetic flood of, it had been said, information ran also a small theme of an identifiable boy or young man singled out in stills and video. I wanted to ask someone if they saw what I saw. Following me step by step were two companion visitors, a woman and man — I felt their close attention to the art, their silence, their city savvy, their remarkableness, their love, some damn thing — for the neighborhood was coming up somehow and they might do worse than find a home here — and I was on the point of understanding the pictured boy/young man/son, as I took him to be, when, as if viewer-activated, there broke from the somewhat dilapidated screen in front of me garbled or foggy though they were, yet spoken by a woman, those very words of mine that had brought me here.

So in the press conference it had been herself the artist was quoting.

“A lot goes into a thing like this,” I said. The woman (of the couple) shook her head in wonder at the man, her lover: “She’s a regular garbage collector,” she said to him.

Did she mean the artist turned work of others into garbage? I asked abruptly. “The opposite,” said the man speaking for his girlfriend but watching another screen, as from the screen before me my words sounded again.

“She’s a borrower,” I said.

“Then she will give back what she has borrowed,” said another voice, a woman, and I had the sensation of being photographed and that my deep-browed, fine-jawed, clear-lipped, wide-eyed brunette of the newspaper photo was nearby — here perhaps. Also that the boy could be hers — had he come to a bad end? I turned to look, but it wasn’t she. Two women had materialized at my elbow and they turned away. One of them had spoken.

“A wisdom work,” the installation had been called by a landscape architect I remembered my wife speaking of as well-known for his autobiographies—“one of the few truly autonomous imaginations in America,” his phrase for this artist clung to my memory. Yet indebtedness to an event possibly terrible in her life, the violent loss of this person her son, one felt, is hardly autonomy. To say nothing of those wanton appropriations: and so, to find voiced in public in this work before all of us after reading it in the paper this thought of mine targeting the unsuspecting visitor, who will nod, like the couple ahead of me and the two women behind me in recognition, must rub off onto me some grain of worth to make me glad.

I didn’t take it that way.

“She’s borrowed from me,” I said. We were inside the shed now and the young man at the desk caught my eye. “Stolen,” I said. “Who steals my purse steals trash,” he said just as we heard a breath of rain skitter across the corrugated roof.

Had the artist read my humdrum, if substantial, report? Why would she have? The thought that she could give back what she had borrowed I found moving, enraging, puzzling. For, as the young man left his desk and approached me, it came to me that my now-twice-a-minute-here-voiced thought had no business in my technical report standing between a passage measuring incremental increase of meander over a period of thirty years (which used to measure a generation) — half my life — and a preceding passage correlating, however aptly, the dam-effected decrease of my river’s gradient flow and the decrease in the water’s solvency due to silting and corrupt alien visitations. The traces we leave in water may or may not last; but they weren’t thoughts by a long shot, and what had I been thinking of to write such balderdash — or as it might be excused such wisdom in the wrong context?

I imagined my son, if I had had the correct address for him, ridiculing this transition, if he had gotten that far into the book; my older daughter nodding like the people in this site-generated “gallery” while ignoring the passages on either side of my little bridge. And what the devil did I mean saying water was always the same when in fact its chemical makeup had been shown to change at low temperatures not only in the old crystal-clear terms but now to become another kind of water, another substance.

I had seen and heard enough but the young man had apparently addressed me and I was embarrassed not to have paid him the courtesy of hearing him. Like an answer given in the absence of a question and with the eyes of the four other art lovers on me, “It’s just feedback,” I said, using the popular, inaccurate sense of the term. “Exactly,” said the young man, waving “Hi” to some newcomers, one of whom was heard to say, “Wow.”

I was gone. Or thought I was. The only phone number listed for the artist was an uptown dealer. Had I wanted this careless woman to acknowledge me? Persons put in or taken out in one form or another were already included in the piece, with its chaotic collage of feelings, the young, their apparent world, a banister filled with forces.

My children wouldn’t ask.

My children, who were they? A son in a much earlier time zone who would not have seen or looked to see the newspaper interview nor recognized the theft from a modest book he owned because his father had sent it to him. My older daughter, who liked to tell me she knew I was not just an engineer, had read it dutifully, swiftly, and wouldn’t remember the argument.

A week gone, and not a word from anyone about the borrowing. A story somehow shared by the water-encompassing, horizontal banister took shape and with it the installation. Plugged in, I must pay a second visit. Said to be a sensation the work’s clue of the lost son was nowhere mentioned. “Amazed” that I had visited the installation, my citizen daughters left a copy of the catalog in the kitchen. I didn’t touch it. My older teased me with water words she had glanced at in it. She did not know they were mine. I said she would be surprised, and the next morning, with the remark of the young man at the desk in mind and with guilty pride, I appeared at the gate of the lot just as a dark, phlegmatic young woman also in charge here arrived to unlock, to make me wait, turn the piece on, let me in so that I could make a bee line to my screen (noting that one screen had been cracked — vandalized possibly, overnight). There I waited for my “water…traces” to sound again in vain repetition.

When, instead, what should I hear like an audio corresponding to a face I had not seen on that screen I’d swear the day before — my own, my own brief face! — but new words, as I sensed the young man of yesterday approaching. For the screen whose image of (I thought) me had fleetingly given way to the boy of yesterday and a river in flood speaking more words I would have sworn were mine, to the effect that as an act of health one might cease worldly talk altogether — a sentence actually somewhere in my small book accompanying an account of how a state agency had in effect filibustered against an attack on a medium-range dam to kill the attack; and coupled with the statement as if following from it, another, suspiciously familiar, from my work if not from earlier — to wit, that speaking interrupts, whereas silence and work collect my halfling thoughts with all that’s needful and already available.

This last I could not verify as mine later that day because I had borrowed my wife and we drove a hundred miles to a river bend famous for its long eddy where we could watch “the stream,” as she called it—“sweet dead Silencer,” she said. Here she reminded me of an ancient lesson she had once as an innocent girl at Berkeley found in Yogavasitha: “troubled or still, water is always water…the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change.”

Then she said quite a remarkable thing: “I think you’ve been interested in water all your life.”

All this really happened, and I am trying to get it right.

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Our people will say if questioned that they found the trail and left it unmarked all the way to the wilderness clearing where the two rivals were apparently, unbeknownst to each other, to meet, less strange to each other than to this forty-by-fifty-mile parcel of land so recently annexed from our neighbor to the north. Was it a rest stop, a soul-restoring brief detour for the woman and the man our two warriors? Was it a sanctuary, wild or human, was it a thoughtful retreat? we asked, not quite knowing if what must surely have been an unplanned get-together betrayed in fact that they read each other to a t?

No question as to the later hours, we have those on record. The earlier we have had to infer, for these two acted almost independently of us. And ahead of our plans for them in these closing weeks of the struggle, the fight with tooth and claw to the finish, if we believed in the finish, of this hunt for victory, for the other’s inner flaw or failing, for some weakness in the jugular. Yet that they had arrived we do know at this targeted clearing of this new territory of ours along different routes, as if there might be two trails, two trials, as an Aussie correspondent said it, and must have made camp at the end of the day, these blood rivals, if in fact it was not, as scripture puts it, prepared for them.

What are they rivals for? we want still to see more surely. As if it were us. Two leaders at it and each other night and day to lead the nation and lead each other even? Until now, at the several centers of command, it had seemed in all honesty that they could use some time alone, in which to think, and in a beautiful, as yet unknown, untouched, in fact just annexed parcel of our nation ever young and growing. Quality time we dare say, the very term and concept cited as we will see elsewhere by the man.

A moment apart — from the public contest and its rigorous conventions: the great leap upward at start and finish of speech; a rolling and bulging of eyes to show the most white; extending the tongue wordlessly — what the people live for in their leaders. A need to know their feelings not their thoughts, their childhoods and formative years, hobbies, promises, significant relationships and favorite food groups, so the people wherever they are can decide which one they want not even so much to govern the nation as Be There for them. A burden for the man and the woman warriors this hunt for the people’s voice and to be that voice; yet more, to be believed.

The woman was coming from the southeast we know from one witness to her vehicle thirty miles down country; whereas the man, from the west and north and east it seemed, if that is possible, more forthright yet elusive. Each in some unspoken silence needing to be alone and, as it turned out, each armed. Deserving to be alone, we would hazard, though what they or we deserve became moot long before the rights on which our nation was founded proved a fiction to be remade moment upon moment as each of our rivals in words but more in deeds has revealed along the road, the endless pilgrimage, the trail, the way. For what right does any of us have to anything at the end of the day apart from what we claim to the death, if we believed in death. To know your target and set it free, we like to say. Yet lured they were, these rivals, and by curiosity, animal and mineral life, by well-advertised fossil wealth, history, silence, empty land ours before we were the land’s, and then by the very weather, forecast to be bad, threatening a hybrid storm never before seen if there be people in this freshly acquired real estate of ours to suffer it.

It was late when they arrived. Late by the clock, by the sky, by the voices of the trees, many-timed too by the delicate, reassuring stink of one deciduous burr oak leaf the woman crumbles to release a scent reminiscent of the potato trees she walked among with her great-grandfather, a preacher/farmer/hunter/small businessman, just those values she has often brought up in her speeches, a man who she once but only once had stunned her handlers and biographers by saying he had brought her up. Strangely like her rival’s childhood, the thin man of many ideal origins, dreams, races (if there be such a thing as race, he has added late one night in a university dorm — himself a veteran of reverse outsourcings that brought him and his facets to our shores).

“You,” she said, hearing a sound, a soft shoosh bird-sound and/or a syllable—“old”?—finding across the clearing before she knew it the figure in jeans and windbreaker and modest backpack. You was what she said, her voice unnaturally soft, in fact making no sound at all we think though he grasped her sense, the flaxen-haired woman as well-known to the man and the world as he now to the nation and to her stare across the clearing. “A piece of him,” he joked, and as often before, she strove to place his familiar and she hoped borderline inappropriate words. Though her dead reckoning of danger and opportunity at once in his unexpected presence fifty yards away was less clear than her suspicion why and how he’d come (for her, she thought). “I see you’re ready,” he said.

Good speakers, each, yet now even her own long-leveled aim was the issue she had come here almost by chance to worry with a dearly missed emotion all but unnameable, for she now thought this duel with herself was why she had slipped away from her handlers incredibly, her wardrobe friend, constant updates, and from her public obligatory feats of agility — the great leap five or seven feet vertically up into the air, arms outstretched, at the beginning and at the end of the address; the enlarged eyes required of her but not her male opponent, whose notorious concentration was expected in midspeech to change the color of his eyes from brown to blue to green and back, as too he must inimitably lean—toward the whole world which had him in its hand (why not hers? — though sometimes hers); and required of him and her, embraces gauged instantly to each person old, young, gendered, health insured, needy, sometime foreign; conferring a Christian thought through the sinew and ingenuity and virtually exposed bone of certain bodily exercises the tradition of our country and these damned transcontinental contests demanded of its would-be leaders and the endless speaking engagements and her factual preparedness and tongue for prophecy: today a scant hundred thirty-five miles to the south and east to set off here almost unrecognized in an old experimentally environmental vehicle she had found in a driveway and piloted here.

And so, while she heard herself say to this slender, tall, perhaps overeducated rival, “Do your people know?” (that is, that he was here — the overnight liability more his than hers) — he a person of color suddenly alone with her, equally famous now and able if not to read her mind, to guess her thoughts — to which his quick shake of the head, his wide, full lips pursed, worried her thoughts again of whether he, this brown man, her rival genetically she realized, had come from west or east, or even north, she thought — no law against it, no laws or rights anywhere except what you claimed, she privately knew. (And she had never had a ready read on compass bearings.)

While she smelled what? The trees, some rot, some real matter, him even though not from this distance surely—how black exactly were we talking about, while he, thinking of her instincts and recalling the émigré Pole’s tale of water and canoes and initiation in which if you really read the words you saw that the sun had to be coming up in the west, saw to her left as did she at the same moment through a distant aisleing thinning of the trees a sudden distance of aerial space a jump-off from what must be a cliff edge beyond which through gathering twilight stood a horizon not of events this time but of a conflagration as beautiful as the end of the world, a sunset she would not have to share, whatever direction she was looking, the sun dying in the east or north or upside, where lay the lands of our neighbors from whom we had a few short weeks ago annexed this small but valuable pocket of wooded, fossil-rich land fifty by forty miles but more than its sum of two thousand square miles of land with its great water table not horizontal but vertical down and down like a flumey flue an add-on destiny for the nation when we put it to work, the northern rim of this new territory now our rim and border, already manned by a border patrol the equal of any this side of China.

One trail to the clearing, it was said and therefore thought: so the man and the woman had arrived by their curious routes nonetheless of one same trail passing into and/or leaving the clearing, with in store for them a savage, never-documented animal in the woods, a stormy night, and a contrary denizen, a reputed man, an independent who came with the territory — but what did they first find? Embers of a campfire waiting in the light of the late late day, on the horizon below the cliff beyond which one heard the sound of still waters lifted by a wind itself the natural frontier our nation is about, final sunburst flooded by evening, while high above in the last light and airspace of our new territory an eagle circled for rodents, its white wing patches identified by the man — exclaiming softly before he’d seen the woman — as those of an “immature golden” (as American as we could have wished) — and then they, these two weary warriors, were surprised to see each other across the clearing appearing from out of nowhere, entering from the woods as we had planned — yet half a day ahead of us, as if they had known our plan and, if you will, stolen a march, in order to seize a solitary time, however brief, never imagining that the rival would arrive at the same moment, to say nothing of the same place.

He from the west, though mysteriously not only west; she from the southeast as we had foreseen after a series of engagements, the toll of casualties growing by the day — the fading but brave little (yet not little) campfire like an end of the ongoing trail — though we had lost track of them for a day unthinkably and by the time we were able to observe them many hours later in dark of night they had evidently survived together and kept alive this earlier discovered and soon to be legendary fire they had found flameless but for two pinkly twined tongues of blue jetting like signals or souls, the campfire waiting for someone to slide the long tree limb along, burned black only at one end, yet now with brush and caches of already hewn hardwood logs both campers had gathered even alert to what had previously, in the last of the light of the sun that seemed to have died in the north, appeared to be an abandoned den deeper into the first and second growth evergreen dark and a small curving sound or song from those woods that they had after all not been asked into, as the man observed to the woman, who pursed her lips skeptically at his useless thought.

No killer instinct, she had long since concluded.

And too thin. To be a leader of substance. To win (she thought). Too thin to win, this man with whom she might spend the night now virtually upon them — a man should have a certain…a capacity to…A man? she caught her temper in mid-flush, a male man? — well, he should cast a certain shadow, whether white or not, whatever certain breakdowns of the electorate who, bless them, don’t believe in evolution in their heart of hearts really and truly or feel comfortable with, you know, we know, about him or bottom line like…Though “white,” she answered the critics of her honesty, meant not “white wash” but beige or in fact pink like her own husband somewhere across the country keeping the home fires burning tonight. In fact any everyday white blue-collar worker from any of our red-zone American towns with blue and yellow soccer uniforms and green soda pop can see through your words — in fact you’re too thin to lead, she read him almost to the t yet quite liked his thinness like some vanishing point where she could have seen her life if she believed it could be relived.

But this man, knowing her strangely like some native who’d been here before her, this late-model backpack of his — she sensed him, smelled him — in another country she could almost like him, get accustomed to his face, use him. A distance between them, as they talked for the first time as…as what? Vacationers, prize-winning campers, hopeless humorists, make-believe comrades, ill-equipped spouses by some arranged marriage improvising some mutual decision-making technique near physical — a closeness contracting through the time itself of this clearing they had accidentally gained as representatives of their nation. He spoke of the fossil beds here, he was asking if the white race talk meant really the fossil subject — was that what was coming up in her mind? The fossil record? With its proof not so much of Darwin’s bleak rightness as of Charles being himself a child of, even incarnation of, the intelligent designer.

Smiling, perhaps somewhere in pain, she all but loved his vulnerable thought, this man. Yet now this opponent of hers, this man of color, he…he spread his arms to the trees, the sky, the nation, a mute speech all but sweeping away whatever truly had brought him here today. And her. With a new in-and-out, back-and-forth field of time whose very quality was to grasp a future.

Lured here, they half-knew, like prosperous but tired but happy tourists who at a tipping point had heard of this place unspoiled, this territory recently annexed by our nation for its own good from our northern neighbor. It was to have been an unplanned get-together, a tryst set up by us to give them some quality time, a rest from months of strife, talk, partial truth, ignorant armies. When all the time we had this trail to follow if we would, as the intimation came to meet us in our dream that this new territory just annexed might offer a special campsite to resolve or retool or half silence all this talk. No roaring camp, no big two-hearted river (though who knew?). Waiting maybe for a three-day blow…these two chatting quietly.

As God was their witness, their limbs loosened with the toilsome months along the trail, the campaign to turn the nation not just to words but with great leaps upward to health, wealth, sense.

Knowing each other curiously, negotiating their situation politely, gathering wood, reconnoitering the clearing. Negotiating the next few, well, hours in an exchange almost jocose at times, argued like two lawyers in cahoots across the hard ground. Though feeling each other out not undarkly, nonetheless, the still green branches of blow-down she found herself gathering into a pile upon which to place she knew not what cloth or fur to pillow the spirit from the night of trees, of animal life that would contemptibly dare to take advantage of her — attempted rape by the unknown that did not know it was already known by her even as also we are known as scripture will say in even such a place as this.

Did silence fall between them? He found his matches, she a personal flashlight in her bag; she complaining that the administration seemed unconscionably undecided whether to call this new region a territory or a district; he that a one hundred and some foot Coast Guard cutter had just been flown in — yes, she had heard that too — to close that part of the new northern border that was a huge kidney-shaped lake known for fifty-pound walleyes; she, that among multiple other things, it reminded her of a dangerous and ravaged part of Africa she had visited; he, that there were thirteen ways of looking at the lake — a charming word from him, an echo somehow for her, as he approached her now, and she said a storm was coming up and maybe they’d be among the first to help the survivors; he, that the weather coming here might well be artificially precipitated by the Administration. And just like that they sat down, they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, grounded, she remembering she’d wanted a vacation in Michigan for some reason, demographics, waterscape, no reason, and then they heard their stomachs growl, it reminded her of her husband…Yet it was the woods, wasn’t it? And they were up in a second standing back to back, buttock to buttock, for they were hearing more than their inner selves, but what?

We know they were in the woods soon afterward, where lingering music of late sunset layering its touch among the trees led beautifully beyond a huge hemlock to a bouldered den and a shock it held in store. Here the man, the woman a few yards behind him, had surprised an animal he had never seen, fangs tearing at the yellow-pink hams and inner thigh of a fawn caught in a trap like those sold in our country to tourists. About to come at him, gory teeth like eyes, this dark, bushy-coated, heavy-clawed wolverine-like creature (unlike what we’re familiar with along the northern borders of our nation) — longer-tailed yet almost bearlike, its claws disproportionately heavy for its body — turned back to feed a moment — yet that proved almost a ruse or a stark evolutionary vagary of the creature poised to spring. Yet as, suddenly, the man, always game himself, dodged its strike, and dodged again — and would have grappled fatally with it in a moment, had there not flashed into his hand a blade seemingly too long for the compact switch-blade unit housing it, a blade unfolding somehow out of lengths of itself — a shot now exploded from behind him in an instant smashing the wolverine’s head to blood, the animal already incredibly by two strokes of the man’s knife disemboweled.

The stuff of legends that moment when, seeing this angry glutton indigenous to our northern neighbor about to rake her rival’s arm shoulder neck rib groin, the woman had drawn from a side pocket of her tailored camouflage fatigues a pistol she liked the feel of, the heft, the history of freedoms in, though had never fired: a souvenir slipped her somehow in public by a forestry-and-marketing professor at a truck stop where she’d gone formica to formica, hand to hand, at midnight — liked her—as a woman—and admired her animal eye-color change from hazel to blue to green, one of her recent feats a feature of her no-holds-barred campaign answering her opponent’s own iris-pigment menu, still more his simultaneous look left and right embracing a range of people and what is in them.

How could the man have skinned and butchered and cooked their prey and left quality time before they settled down for the night? We may never know. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he mutters at his work. “I could taste him,” the woman said standing by as the man peeled away in a mess of harsh hair and fur a section of hide and flesh warm with then intestine that fell crawling around his wrist and as he reached the blade to grope for rib between rib and said, drily, “It’s a sow” (wondering if that was the right wolverine word for a female, if this thang was a wolverine), in the corner of his eye he saw the partly eaten fawn move, the dead wolverine’s prey, for the act of inhaling had slid its eye to one side, and its breath-out then was its last — and the woman, “An inch or two to the left and it would have been your head,” and he, “It was what it was,” and she (for the fawn did breathe once more), “Thanks, are we gonna eat the baby too?” yet he (meaning the pistol), “How did your handlers let you…where did you…?”

— as time, whose quality or qualities once upon a library table he had found for himself with science, philosophy, and international law all working together in his thesis — what was it? — extended audaciously our own look back into where we are, Time’s aspiration imagining we grasp what grasps us and our institutions. His knife does its work. “Getting some experience,” she murmurs, needing to defend herself now against who could quite say what. Experience is also the lack of it, experience is experience, he thinks, and cuts himself almost unnoticeably in the thick of his work, and what will happen next, he asks, eating and sleeping and in the sky and tomorrow? A boy’s thought, she replies. The lost sun speaks dark wind now. Well experience comes from you not just to you, he said. She gasps. “There you go again,” she cried suddenly and he looked over his shoulder to see her pocket’s cargo where it belonged, but it was the wind she had cried out upon, from the cliff, the cold grace that knows us in the sky, she recalled someone thinking. “Well I hope you can cook,” she said like a mind reading what a girlfriend — was it in college? — had said to a guy when he had done something…what was it?

Home again, the fire rises to the occasion, it is not angry at the meat, the lean, the gristle. The storm somewhere near the clearing but not here, the flames gnaw at the night. She has found a thinly surfacing spring running past a corner of their camp and brought him to wash his wound, water in a dented beer can left in the fire with other plausible litter provided by our advance team that traveled this trail of our future leaders, which was reopened after a racist sniper from our northern neighbor or a separatist, or both, shot two hikers a fortnight ago evidently tragically just as they turned, hand in hand, to look each other in the eye outdoors.

Yes, I can cook, he says. They exchange a look. Is the river its water or the banks that shape it, she thinks out loud, and she knows he is listening with those big ears of his and she doesn’t mind, for, in a gust of smoke coughing, he jokes, “Is that your Christian energy plan? You’re sounding like me.” “Can’t stand the smoke get out of the kitchen,” she says, time elapsing how, when — for she is like a woman who has agreed to spend the night with a man she hardly knows.

They were the land’s, the land vaguely realizing northward toward water. Something we were withholding from our land of the living. It comes out of nowhere but months of talk, what he says now, but out of nowhere still: they have no right to ask if and where and why you go to church, temple, or — it’s unconstitutional, he says to the fire. She pricks up her ears, some woods person’s instinct, something Out There, while with one part of her mind replies out loud, “Unconstitutional, eh?”—for in her heart of hearts she knows those founding fathers would have been astonished to find God in the three-person of our checks and balances laboring openly in our vineyards loving every minute of it.

“A piece of him,” it came to her, his words so self-effacing, she thought they were from the Avon Bard when some medieval noble, asked if he was ready, laid his neck upon the block, it moved her the more she remembered a play she had been in as Portia dropping mercy like rain upon a place of justice. “You have survived your experience,” he said. “I’m not so sure,” she said, and picked out a faint glint back in the trees and at the same moment a glint in the dark sky like a tonal frequency there then gone, and wondered if their privacy was breached. “What, though, is it we have survived?” he said to her, as she let her eyes seem to close but in thought not sleep. “If you have to ask that,” she murmured, “we don’t need some philosopher as king.”

Yet now far keener than a philosopher’s parse is detected suddenly the surveillance unmistakable, violently unsurprising after all these months in the public eye, the discovery simultaneous by the two of them as a couple, her hand suddenly on him, his forearm, his spare shoulder and rib, seeking his anger wherever in his body it might be found — our satellite listening system at last kicking in, thought both, now huddling, preparing for the night and acquainted with it, they now in some intimacy knew — beyond speech, the blank terrible chance — like a blanket absent but to be replaced by the not-too-wide, not at all thick, NASA mylar tarp the man unfolded from his pack — that she, still young, would not get what she deserved, nor even quite he, imagining how his government might work.

Just then in her reaction to the triple pop from vein of hardwood log — locust, she thought, recalling the man who had made her a gift of the pistol or her father or her child — though where were locust trees here in this tract of earth vaguely realizing outward or even inward toward and away from our northern neighbor? — the man with her saw her face as he might upon waking in the fresh damp of dawn, makeup-less, as formed as chiseled Presidential stone, her skin both fresh from the unknown of sleep and worn by the terrible campaign waged from war zone to war zone for weeks reflecting years of belief that what she ran for was hers already while her opponent elsewhere put it to a field of mystified but impressed migrant farm laborers, You would not seek me if you had not found me.

“Why did you come?” she says, her eyes closed. “Because you’d be here. Also the fossil beds.” “Why?” she said. “These very,” he said, “small Cambrian soft-bodied animals — the fittest don’t necessarily survive.” “But me?” “One of yours told one of mine you had a free day.”

We watch them really sleep — together sleep. She wakefuller than he for certain moments. A pallor in her heart. A new state of affairs in her mussed hair — while we prepared to defend the signed contract covering the use of these audio-visual tapes rolling far and near. She’s cold, he too, they may be dreaming now (of which they will later compare notes uncannily kindred, of the iron kettle, it sings on the stove, a time to plant tears the almanac says) yet dreams are pathless pathmaking.

Watched, however, even into their joined and interinanimate dreams not so much by our satellite in its synchronous earth orbit able to record only a dream’s visible signs, but in fact now by another, a third person, were their eyes open upon this creature standing over them with what looked like a chain-saw or a ghetto blaster, a denizen of our northern neighbor we had learned originally but a separatist at the very moment that our own nation had annexed this region? — and now and now and now — what was this language he spoke, picked up by our satellite like the images of these three people down to the very interlaced fingers of the two sleepers on the ground still adream, closer perhaps than ever, what did they, we, our technology, hear him say, this weird mountain person caped and overalled could he be speaking of our own election campaign — your stomach growls — a light from the very breath of the speaker: “I know you both, I’m here, I left the army, the country, the church, thrown out because I didn’t believe as you, though my belief is just as much a belief as your own knowledge in the absence of evidence and you share mine though you don’t know it and I would vote for you both had I the vote but I am here,” the wilderness man continued, his eyes under the killer-shaggiest of eyebrows turning into luminous mist, his time passing perhaps and his voice receding, until our man on the ground, letting go the woman’s hand yet gripping it again, now protectively aroused to eloquence spoke up to him, upward, still aware of the battery-operated chain-saw half swinging above them—“You are, you are, you’re saying why wait, aren’t you? Why I know you, you are Ahab on a stump speaking to all of us”—all of us the syllables seemed sucked upward and toward a glinting acoustic receiver out in the trees near the wolverine’s den — sounds of us like thoughts we have retracted, thinking better of them; and he was gone, the atheist deserter once a litigant suing our government, now a denizen of this new territory. Gone now from their awakening view, the woman and man on the ground, turning toward each other chilled, their stomachs growling, hands clasped in some fugitive and passing union, thinking almost one thought if that.

This might have been inferred by our extreme lenses from the position the next morning of the sleeping bodies — the embers ready for the next camper or campers, though this protected territory not yet legal for visitors. The two known tracks gave access to the clearing from the dense old growth woods of this new 40- by 50-mile tract just acquired by us from our northern neighbor, is all we need to know. The still frontier-like state of our union. Waiting the return of our rivals to the campaign reflecting as we with our endemic lens might too on the survival of the campaign trail in a new century.

THE LAST DISARMAMENT BUT ONE

It will not go away, this curious survival of ours. We tour the crater, contemplate its 1760-mile (though possibly immeasurable) perimeter. It is already in the atlases, where schoolchildren may trace it. It is history. It is where our neighbor used to be. We internalize this crater. We express it in other terms. That twist that left us so little to work with that it might be nothing but ourselves.

We see it again to grasp what happened to that distinguished member of the community of nations. Powerful out of all proportion to its landlocked size, it one night became in seconds this awful map of itself cut into the earth. What an unusual map, life-size, with a visible depth yet a height absent perhaps only to the eye. Instead of mountain peaks and moving rivers, factories and airports, teeming cities and calm old towns, now these cliffs like the receding coast independent of a vanished sea go far beyond the horizon perhaps to make the horizon us. We keep returning to the wonder of it. The crater proves to be the exact shape of that vanished nation. What had we here?

That terrible night, the bright blast spiked to a pale plume many miles high. Night collected into a pillar of day. But while we who were near enough to watch could not think why we were living through it, the read-outs on the quake-activated monitors were showing even more astonishingly that the firestorm kept exactly within that nation’s airspace. Air-samples taken during the following weeks uniformly said the same for fallout. Stranger still, within the perimeter of the crater no fallout either. The holocaust was clean.

We keep returning to the wonder of it. A seventy-mile-high blast that incredibly did not overflow their frontiers. Did they ever really want us with them? They had outdone themselves.

The blast had risen like a computer-generated mesa faithful at all points of the atlas outline any schoolchild might scan. Indeed, because of certain phenomena we mobilized schoolchildren to give us their thinking. The World Council set a zone around the new vacancy where only authorized persons might go. So we had what once was known in those days as a no-man’s-land, an incised micro-map of frontier embracing depth but within it now no mountains or river beds, no vales or unexpected cols. During those first weeks thousands came to look as they could. They saw of our former neighbor a crater outlined with infinite care and fractal fate. Adjacent nations that endured this tourism must needs control it.

The smoker’s smoke seeks any old lung, our roving Mach’monster machines spread bedlam on the still waters of untold semi-circular canals. Had a medium-size post-industrial state with a device that sealed off all other states from its explosive force achieved a technology downright self-containing? Yet self-reflective, it occurs to me. If so, why self-destroying? Was this holocaust a mistake? A folly of overreaching? If so, why the lack of contamination. Or would some new, unheard-of fallout follow in time? If not a mistake, was our vanished neighbor’s act suicide in some tradition ancient and modern of pride and refusal? A nation swallowing to the last-mega-drop the adventure of its own will, so swallower and responsibility went up as one.

We know a nation is one nation. But a nation, we have been told, of individuals and their powers. For population — a statistical, strange, perhaps incomprehensible term — is an intelligent resource poignant with human nuance and friction. Here, Us and Them. They had always said that in the light of their sovereignty they would never disarm. Had they at last been moved by us, the growing majority of unilateral disarmers? Yet never really wanted us with them. And when their power to outdo themselves found its last logic of undoing, they alone lived it. Was that annihilation, then, their way of respecting our convictions? A gift, and to us, if we’d take it, and at first we would. Yet if a gift, of what? Surely not the mere gross reduction in global numbers.

And the space. Whose was this new void? It repelled with some garden-variety inverse magnetism most winds and other air-currents, common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh. It repelled early test personnel who tried to install devices with which to descend the cliffs — and repelled at some frequencies light as well — beamed or in curious new forms of our naked sight. And if a gift from that now absent nation, who would we thank? Upwards of two thousand of their nationals traveling or residing outside the country at the moment of the event? Safely outside, we assumed — as with discretion in my laboratory circle we began to interview them, fission thinkers, architects, political scientists, artists, consultants, tourists, parents, many in near-amnesiac shock, some curiously alive unable still to think out loud about their home. One psycho-biologist who had been asked before he left not to make this trip somehow could not speak of research he had been engaged in or of what he might have lost; yet, chastened, he pointed out how many unimaginative ways our thus far unchastened species had found to gradually kill itself. He recommended patience, a strangely elusive man — what was it? — and seemed to have in him a palpable thing he could not locate. Yet he had no wish to return to his homeland. Was it legally still there to be his? Could you return to such a place? The floor of the crater three miles down? We kept returning to the event, a technological twist, a coup. A nation swallowing to the last drop, or becoming, some task of its will. We had dared think the event could not happen. Yet if in thinking such holocaust unthinkable we had in fact thought it, still it didn’t then happen to us, the unilateral disarmers. Was this a holocaust to end all such, the last disarmament?

What had held the blast within these frontiers?

The upward gust of the event had drawn after it itself. With it went the breakthrough thinking, the unprecedented originality it had sprung from, we concluded. Yet do not some thoughts need to forget the work they sprang from? Like childbirth, like hatred toward a friend, even the materials from which a formula is framed. The relief we felt that the one-man arms race was over gave way to a new drive toward understanding. This neighbor nation, reaching one end of its time line like an unusual music, had ventured so far that, in fascination, one might forget one’s good fortune that one had not oneself been incinerated.

Some of us needed to know how it had been done, hear that music, for in fact the literal vector of honest inquiry that confronts premises may have heard in the metaphor of our widespread thought that there was indeed an unusual music to be heard. Yet the relief we felt that the one-man arms race, as we used to call it, was over gave way to a suspicion that we had better know how the thing had been done.

Vanished yet still among us, that nation had been monitored; so in the event we had a wealth of data. They revealed an eerie scene that night. Micro-forces unique in our experience had barraged transparent interfaces along the risen ghost frontiers, yet both barrier and forces seemed there only at instants of collision, so the forces themselves appeared to at once create the transparencies they were rebuffed by. As best we could make out, the forces “shimmered.” They were shimmers, and appeared at first at all points of boundary. We guessed they kept some secret of what had been done and how.

When I heard people say the force gave off an aura of purpose, I said to myself, as usual, No: the forces captured or were captured by their own field of purpose. The forces were called Shimmer Emission Demonstration or, the alternative D word, Doubt. In either case SHED. Not only because acronymed from Shimmer Emission Demonstration (or Doubt), but because they shed, it seemed limitlessly, though, like the old Einsteinian light, weighably, an aim. Thus, it seemed to come to us as, in another sense, simultaneously it was lost or went somewhere. Theory agreed that each of the SHEDs felt unique, but split on whether SHEDs were clusters or individuals; also, whether they were only a “shimmer-function” of this miles-high-risen, roughly (or perhaps exactly) cylindrical envelope of presumed electro-magnetism, or had for some reason in their millions-fold net of points chosen to stop there. Shimmer Theory had its satisfactions, its elegance, but with the advent of the What and the How approaches, it began to be argued that the barrier did not exist except as an illusion propagated by the very forces it seemed to enclose.

How would we rethink this breakthrough? I felt my words change. Not at first so much in isotope, spike, chain reaction, as, on our globe with its own spherical endlessness now not shadowed by terminal ignition, how nonetheless the unthinkable came to mind afresh.

I took my child to school, went in to work as I always did, and I drew my own sketches from what instruments had recorded digitally along the perimeter during and after the blast. Not just a lab person but a participating father of a study group, I spoke up: How and What had somehow become alternative visions. Easy enough to say. A workman observed, “Process and Essence.” But when my child’s fourth-grade teacher agreed yet asked passionately if no matter How they’d pulled it off our vanished nation’s removal were not a What — the What was what mattered!

Which in turn, it came to her, asked a whole new How: How we could take advantage of the nuclear disarmament we had dreamed of (if this event wasn’t in fact beyond nuclear). She was a fine and strong and beautiful mentor for the young but she was asking for it, we thought.

Majority “Hows” kept to two central points. What had held the blast within the boundary of our fellow nation? And what system of waste disposal could have created this great vacancy — this void that for weeks actually pushed back currents of air and common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh and even repelled at some frequencies light as well, beamed, or in new, apparently thinking forms.

Minority “Whats” asked what new way we would think, free now of nuclear anxiety. But how had the people of that nation really thought? Had secret tests been tolerated even so much as they seemed to have been by their disarmament faction? And why so few exit-visa applications — somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hundred where there were so few restrictions anyhow, and when in the absence of unusual restrictions a healthy opposition had waxed so eloquent against arms development? The Hows jumped in here to ridicule the Whats on the visa question: why try to escape a thermonuclear event likely horizoning the entire globe? Unilateral disaster had been in the cards all along, Whats surprisingly concluded, so the anti’s would have had good reason to get out with their families, which mostly hadn’t happened.

Between me and my child’s teacher there came a thought. Well, she was a learner from the young. And their dreams, she said. Shimmer dreams, we were hearing. Future Shimmers in fact, promises lodging in you like both unknown insight and un-charted infection. The writing was on the wall and having originally chosen the civil service secondary school track which meant she had security, my child’s teacher must go where they told her. I made a friend of her. I loved her, I found. I would not own her. She was interested in my inclination to gather some of the Transitionals from the vanished nation and work with them, as in fact with some care I was already doing. Yet for dismissing the majority Hows and with them the riddle of this bold and heretofore inconceivable discrete holocaust, certain authorized persons suspected her both of starting a world movement against research and on the other hand of withholding information on the Shimmers along the boundary of the blast. And so it happened that she was given a much-sought-after administrative post in a distant sector known for its year-round fruits and vegetables and for the mineral from which was made a luminous stained glass of vivid and transparent color but little utility.

Films of the barrier force were aired worldwide and psychologists ascribed to its discovery a sadness which overtook many of us, Hows or Whats, though the World Council called it a low-level contagion emanating from a few of the especially uncommunicative Transitionals. Hard to define as a group across national, income, job, or age lines, these so much shared among themselves this sadness that it need hardly be voiced.

My child’s former teacher made much of it; she had become notorious. Those who had seen she was transferred to that remote region of endless produce and a population of hundreds of stained glass designers and their support cadres, waited for her to go too far. She had remarked that for her it was as if a raw gap at our heart where there had been some wonderful person must now in pain be either filled or narrowed and we could not tell which or how. She had gathered a group of children of all ages and they were studying Global Communication.

Three old friends of the transferred teacher not apparently in touch with her reported in themselves a heavy, hole-like place burning in the muscle interstices of the heart’s left ventricle usually occupied by phosphorus compounds. The burn did not hurt like a sore on a skinned knee or like normal chromosome damage in the urinary tract; it hurt more like a tiny interior lens magnifying perhaps sun at some point in the chest area. It was painful to describe. One of these friends told me I and our modest nation had turned up in his hands and feet, he was certain.

Hows or Whats, we found memorials being held somewhere on the globe every day. Thus we continued to feel the presence of our lost neighbor. The crown of its technology. Its generally calm polis. Its culture now ever with us in museums, concert domes, and conversations. All this grew compelling as if around some almost formulable belief. One reported child dreamed “up” (as the official phrase had it) a tale of refugee body-souls blasted so small they could not now be destroyed any more, nor resisted when they traveled out upon the globe finding space in each of us. Newspapers got hold of this, only then to retroactively erase from their pages a fiction that might spawn communal anxiety.

The mysterious atmospheric repellence in the Great Vacancy abated for some persons, not all. Now and then an overflight succeeded. Staring down upon the memory of our neighbor nation, a particle geologist reported that the crater down there had found some counter-crater in him. He was instantly scanned for feedback symptoms. Some step missing, he was asked if this crater had been in him before blast night. Maybe long before, maybe not, he said. Was he prone to an overproduction of future-predictive cells believed in though rarely isolated? On his return he was found to be more complex than measurably sad.

Whats urged Hows of all nations to let the event go, and get on with the job of living in a world free of thermonuclear threat and take the quantum jumps toward a polis free of national sovereignty. Yet quantum jumps are either-or and/or both-and, not some imagined rush to simple mastery. Needing to know how that nation had brought off its own disarmament, were not Hows thinking in a circle that would take them right back into some race for the technological lead? New exponential How mockups research actually saw How research itself as an ongoing chain reaction with no end in sight. The money was there, was the thing; and so was the desire, we seemed to be “seeing the ball well.” Surely some energy breakthrough was at hand, possibly feedback, in the technical and organic sense, of that perhaps not after all so self-contained explosion.

A super-inflatable device operated by a forgotten animal after a long communications blackout at an altitude of about seventy miles weighed in with data dating back to blast night. The upper reach of the blast had coincided almost exactly with this level of the troposphere. There, we have long left the frigid minus 200 degrees of the ionosphere floor to rise rapidly toward the high temperatures of that layer’s eighty-five-mile range. Yet, astoundingly, the heat increase recorded of blast night at just the other side of blast’s upper limit was absolutely normal for ionospheric gradation. Had the animal-operated meteorological inflatable been just beyond the blast’s upper margin, or on it? What about within it? jibed one maverick What.

For two things had happened: Shimmer Theory research had found on the monitor records for the top of the blast a quasi-emotional agitation in the SHED super-forces which here imaged-out not as mega-heat but as handfuls of light networking and veer-bending among one another so that for the first time light bent back through other light, which gave to these grid-warps some self-correcting aim intelligent as AI but less clear and more surprising; the other thing that happened was that, with the return of normal void to this already legendary airspace, the animal-operated inflatable began unbidden to descend.

What evidence was there of mega-heat elsewhere in the blast area on blast night? Heat had been assumed by my people because of the blast’s overwhelming glare. Shock waves after all had not penetrated the blast barrier, but the instruments inferred levels of heat; and now, in the absence of sure signs, heat itself came into question.

How research raced toward concepts of heatless incineration by light.

Leading Whats sensed that we had all over again the dynamics of the arms race without its content.

One How lab detected changes in SHED forces. They swirled and plotted some personal dance-like system no longer apparently reciprocals of barrier-function. Some SHEDs infra-flickered in the outer zone. But SHED forces were thinning out. One small swarm or “relationship” of SHEDs that had been observed faring forth across the frontier, easing back, faring forth, after a week suddenly burst and vanished. Hows claimed that as post-blast barrier faded, at least for some of the population, so must Shimmer function.

But one of my people argued that “containment” or barrier-formation capability in SHED forces might be decaying toward low-grade detonation. This shunted us, and competing labs, in a hurry back to waste compaction, which How thought had always held that “it” all basically came down to. Whats asked, Had there been any waste? Other Hows, too.

As the animal-operated meteorological device made its ultra-slow descent (though now commanded to do what it was already doing), debate arose (as it will about matters of fact) regarding what animal was in the inflatable. No Transitional came forward to say. Logs like strings of opaque code in the blast night monitor digitals were said to show that the project had placed aboard its craft an ancient, friendly reptile hybridized to bear its young alive yet post-fertile and of a peculiar maturity that had profiled it for this assignment.

No, said another group of project people known for the high humor of their problem-solving: “it” was an even more highly classified crypto-human “experiment,” a man-woman who had accidentally proved immune to lethal radioactive leakage at a fruit-and-vegetable processing plant. This, it was now pointed out, had been along the perimeter of the region where the exiled teacher, my child’s and, I will add, now almost mine, so belabored by her bosses but also indirectly the World Council, whose constitutional say in loco-national schooling remained a gray area, had thrown fresh light on the widespread sadness which itself was now changing. Blood signals from the meteorological vehicle’s occupant became an unknown code that yet seemed not alien.

How researchers formed a secret project group.

The inflatable device, inflating, had slowed its descent despite commands not to. One afternoon a schoolchild’s doodle reproduced exactly one of the Shimmer configurations that How labs had kept under wraps even from each other, and beneath the gifted doodle the label LOOMS must refer to a story which now appeared in print a thousand miles away the next day. Upon which its author had to admit her child had told it to her at breakfast.

It was of a type of planet called a “plagnet” where everyone had myriad beings inside them called Lumes; and if you understood this, you might live it by sharing some of those Lumes; and so, on that plagnet, people stopped wanting to be other people instead of themselves. Which the mother in question said she had never imagined her child could want.

Who was this mother? At a historic moment when unexpected developments daily crept up on us from behind like quantum alternatives which might yet be both/and, this story was more than itself. For, through code-homonym LOOMS / LUMES and the mother’s admission that her daughter confessed to “bees in her bonnet” when she had woken that morning of the story, a chain-link appeared, it was reported, with the Shimmer configuration doodle torn from the school notebook of that other child a thousand miles away.

For the World Council authorities, disturbed by a How hypothesis that a pattern of blood signals monitored from the descending vehicle’s occupant matched exactly the classified SHED “relationship” which the school notebook’s doodle had reproduced, now traced it to the suspect teacher-exile, who herself had recently announced that the widespread sadness needed to be redefined.

She got a message to me. Visit soon. While tending her bees on a fruit-and-vegetable farm overlooked by a hill on which was a church built entirely of stained glass, she had found the bees’ patterns of affection and general neighboring an exact repeat of new “brain-beans” (she called them) multiplying their light inside her so she was now able not just to receive things miles off but even to give light to what she contemplated, in broad daylight and in the dark. Also, her hands had on them often now a light like honey.

How Ologists proved she had been infected with grandiose themes by the luminosity of old magnesium blues used in the local glass, when in fact as I knew she had internalized them with the help of ancient metal-clay templates in each of us. Others thought her far from harmless, for she occupied a famous exile; and lately, among members of the worldwide Sadness group, there now arose more than a story, as if it were long known: a woman with blue hair, golden fingers, and beautiful webbed feet had been sent to the lone center of her land because she had a new offspring whenever she wanted, and could have one with wings and grass for fur one week and the next week full-grown twins with original sounds glowing from their skin that many people could hear, and a month later a new child that could be alone happily. And the woman had all the world in her like sun and strangely didn’t need company there where she had been put in the lonely center of that land. Another strain of this featured a man, and he had fine earthen feet and soft, porcupine-shaped hair and hands that changed color, and he too definitely gave birth. And in one faraway school six teenagers who fell asleep during bio-chem class woke with a cry and found that they had all dreamed this tale told by a woman who, though they had never seen her, proved to be my famed exile, who in the dream taught that the story-person was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, never both at once.

Not recently heard from, the once distinguished particle geologist with a crater in him turned to the harvesting of stained-glass minerals. Some How scientists became Whats overnight and claimed that the interesting work was now interdisciplinary. My own attachment to the great event, the loss of that neighbor nation, I one day saw confusingly and not clearly but chokingly, was like when I lost the mother of my child and heard her voice for months as on an interdisciplinary telephone or as only a function of my own deafness, and was glad I had spoken to her so often before she died.

For a week the meteorological inflatable stopped descending, and the World Council put out word that the vehicle had been commanded to pause for a period of re-entry observation. Ordinary citizens hundreds of miles apart were saying they felt now happily exiled—alone, yet self-contained, able to speak foreign languages and perceive what they didn’t need to talk about.

The notorious teacher, with whom I had corresponded and become attuned, said she knew what they meant; asked if she was propagating some new immortality, she said she did not believe in life after death. Admitting death was hard to prove, she was accused of such influence upon these many other, far-flung self-styled exiles that, to my alarm and even, I think, my child’s, she was further removed to a top-secret job at a remote mountain station whence nonetheless were now said to emanate a range of curious reports. Doublings it sometimes seemed. Like the dubious radiation-immune man-woman said to be replacing the reptile in the now again descending meteorological vehicle. Or my friend herself being that passenger. It might have been merely a religious era supplanting the pervasive emptiness wrongly inferred in the spread of SHED from the original blast. Yet the long-awaited data on Shimmer-function life at the ceiling of the original blast now half-neglected in the flurry of interest in these personality breakthroughs so rich yet, in their spread, so alarming, consolidated the thought of the How spokesmen to embrace the imaginative complexity of science so disquieting that they began to mention global personality malfunction. The force that modifies the thing becomes the thing itself, it was said.

An infra-scanner wrote a sonata for experimental lasar and unison mass-chorus. It was based on the identity of the schoolchild’s legendary doodle and the steady forms of occupant blood-signal transmitted from the descending vehicle. These patterns in turn matched one of the Shimmer configurations. Thus, doubts were reawakened as to whether the unilateral blast had really been contained.

One bio-hawk heard in the sonata not the Mass Mind the World Council warned of, but beam-mass equation in the solo laser that argued new particle uses for non-nuclear conflict once called “conventional.” Old line How funding accelerated the quest to isolate and capture a Shimmer-function, and in a few labs this acceleration caused time itself to narrow and condense a billion times more swiftly than a New Zealand canyon over unthinkable centuries. The particle geologist reported that the counter-crater inside him receded yet opened larger. He had found better terms for the post-blast sadness anyway, but when he told these terms, he was accused of being in touch with the doubly exiled teacher, who he then said he sensed was dead, though I, who loved her, knew she was not. His new names for the post-blast sadness had come to him during a dream of overflight: he was above the vanished nation which was visible as scaleless clusters of cities in the night. Hows, now in a race against time itself, bypassed such terms of his as “threshold” and “the alien New” to extract from his term “tension” a revived essence of “tensor.” This was a device to measure the invasors causing the so-called sadness that was really straight-out depression according to the World Council and chemically treatable though socially intolerable.

Among the global sadness group, if group it was, a new spirit arose overnight. In one region it was a power to cooperate in reshaping community economics so that people without a job or home, say, were seen as having blindly or unjustly given those things away to others who themselves were now possessed of too much, a risk signaled in awful dreams, queer pique at family members, and a need to show off by giving everything away. Cadres of us in our modest nation began somehow to build a land we could understand. On one small continent noted for its autobiographical literature and its undersea sports, people began to move more slowly and were filmed by news services. They were in the grip of a force called Transitional (after our new world citizens-without-a-country) which sought to be at rest. In one extreme northern country, original sadness people stopped wearing heavy clothing out of doors, and no single How answers such as Changing One’s Life or Muscle Memory Re-education covered every case of this. How Shimmer sensors were picking up nothing anywhere, and the World Council found more funding to develop a still finer sensor. Transitional People from the vanished nation were chosen from all over the world to be Tensor-tested. A news organ reported the blast frontier now “shorn of Shimmer forces.”

How science liaisons at the World Council announced new funding to prove the link between at-large Shimmer-invasors and actual brain change. The alarmed, now prospering mother-author of the story her child had told her called the doctor upon being visited in her kitchen one late, dark afternoon by, she was certain, the notorious exile-teacher. From that person’s hands came light, in her words the clear message, “It comes from you, not to you.” The mother went gladly into custody. Upon being interrogated she said she’d never had one of these experiences and would not know one if she had had. She went on record, as an author, in urging the repopulation of the crater country.

The weather vehicle slowed its descent. Descending evidently toward the center of the crater as the World Council monitor confidently predicted, more like an entire field sector or even Tropo-pause than a plottable object traversing such space, beginning to wait again as if it would take everything in its vicinity with it. Its meteorological inflatable inflated at an altitude of five miles and, slowly coming down on a dark, late afternoon, visible when I looked up at a plane far distant though seemingly next to the weather vehicle, I could have sworn my love was contemplating that plane wherever she was; and at that moment without benefit of instruments I became aware of a change in the weather vehicle’s course or angle less of position than of nature or a mode of evolution. Was it not descending now toward us?

Soon flanked round the clock by aircraft, it would land square in the middle of our modest nation, the World Council monitor predicted. This time the prediction was right, and the meteorological vehicle came to rest amid dust-storms from assisting aircraft at a point a How geometer found to be dead-center of our country. It was wrapped almost instantly by World Council advisors and flown from the scene. Competing Hows demanded to know why WC had picked one lab over others to evaluate the contents of the vehicle. Secrecy we could have predicted would end in confusion.

Tensor tests continued apace, and many Transitionals were on such a sharp and happy Alert High that world niacin-supply controls came under scrutiny. Other testees seemed too self-contained to respond to a classified new death-therapy exploring waste-disposal but also aiming to discredit the exile-teacher’s Death-hard-to-prove remark. Tensors could only isolate, not measure, Shimmer relationship in, say, some knee-joint, eye, hand, or inner duct. When delicate amputations failed to “corral” shimmers that the instruments and operational tensors had shown to be there, How labs again pursued Shimmers as fleeting functions of barrier event. The great crater had become almost instantly ancient in its own private time and venerable, standing out in a line of cliffs deep-mapping what atlases had shown for a thousand years.

We knew in our bones that a fallout sample is worth little without real people on the spot, their organisms protected only by their openness. This view was held by Hows to be a result of Shimmer-contamination. But the Council thought to take advantage of the spreading enthusiasm to venture into the crater. Seeing through the emptiness of that place to resources in ourselves, some of us as if we were Transitionals as we imagined they ought to feel, thought of exploring at least the sheer walls. Such élan was ascribed to Transitionals said now to desire relocation in our former neighbor nation, that the World Council hung fire on the project.

Some new resource at large went unspecified, but the WC’s preferred lab now reported on what had been aboard the meteorological inflatable upon touchdown. No Shimmers, no records, and only a few scraps of graph read-out singed as by the vanished stylus itself: but a section of an organism; a soft half-doughnut of seemingly brain still transmitting: musicking its perhaps simple signals to itself like nutriment. The hind-brain of the hybridized reptile! labs chorused coast to coast. An “unchewed slice” of male-female cerebellum maintaining its balance through a crisis, argued another. Authorized Hows classed the half-doughnut a potential contaminant, we were told.

A blue and gold substance as if mining itself had worked its way to the surface near the foundations of the first major dwelling complex we had begun; then this vein sometimes extended outward, like a spoke, surfacing gradually, yet in fact inward toward where the weather vehicle had touched down. Metal clay, earth flesh — was it food for a new species or the start of one? The substance had some milky fume belying its strength, but its fine, easy coming gave us hour by hour, day by day, ideas of its use which were like refinements released by an ore.

I told my child it was not the end of the world. No surprise, said my child.

Was the crater a resource? The cliffs grew translucent, mauve, dark green, orange before the sunset and the dawn as if to impart that color to the coming change of light. Along the escarpments scans had discerned a self-mining substance. WC advisers declared it a danger. It was here, from my point of view, when we wanted it; and we went about our work. I have said “here” meaning “there.” We would hear How labs a thousand miles off clamoring that the cells discovered in the vehicle must be tested before they worked some more terrible completion. Voices reported near the vehicle and near the cliffs would perhaps be subject to tensor tests as of a new faith possessed possibly of an energy-conserving, waste-dissolving secret “covered” by its claim that that original nation’s self-immolating bomb had contained itself by communal will, which formula compensated its citizens for the loss of former life and limb by giving them those Shimmer relations so seminal that to seal the border of their energy-splitting blast that awesome night was second nature and like the five-finger exercise of what I had heard called (with a capital G) Grace. Hardly my view. WC followed the logic of all this out and announced a competition among How labs for solution to the “problem” doubtless geomorphic and metallurgical arising in our new crater country.

Word came to us that at a buffet marking the progress of this competition, the WC accused us of unilaterally challenging the global federated union. A senior How said, “We have not yet disarmed,” and she was greeted with a thunder of applause of hands then disquietingly aware of having felt in their palms the senior How think the words, We have not yet begun to fight.

I have written this informal history of, I hope, my child as well as me: yet also of what became possible for me when I and my child joined the teacher at her mountain station and found a small group of grownups and children often easy to distinguish without being seen. The livelihood I found with the teacher, so different in her views from me, and with my child who, an instinctive astronomer, points out the constellations to me in broad daylight — the green freedom of our chores in short — has left time to put into these words, if not the formula, the materials covered by it as in a calculus that sums up increasingly smaller everyday things by an infinite process to reach a finite answer so you know where you are. At least some notes toward an understanding of what happened, the hopes arising, and the hope against hope — if that saying is ever clear — with which we stay here, determined to come down from the village one day in some time-frame, though remaining uncertain what is this human nature we possess.

Am I myself? Shimmer Theory I leave to others. It will come to me when it comes. Shimmers in my system, however, even my desire for this woman who beguiles me and my child, telling me I teach her (because somehow we need to thank and give credit for what may be more deeply and strangely ours from the first), show me night after night until I have brought them into day a future with my people and the new thoughts each day voiced and unvoiced of our colony: yet a future for myself, alternating like blinks, like particle with wave, risk with mere happiness, a pioneering exploration of the crater risky in the extreme, descending the very colors of the blast-bereft walls to the floor and what it promises and what it may cost.

SILK, OR THE WOMAN WITH THE BIKE

It was a job — a lab coworker at his elbow at first, he at hers, drop by drop of cell solution a thrill for her it seemed every time. He came as a surprise hire the lab thought could help out with commercial applications, of all things. But it was him they wanted, genius or journeyman.

It was a job, the new job the man went to by choice in the very late-afternoon rush hour by bike, subway, bike. He took his bike on the subway thinking ahead, to what he did yesterday, the day before, and the day before that, and what he again would do today adjusting ring clamps on tissue baths mounted to steel support rods. His pride was the bind that somehow got absorbed in these underground motions of vehicle within vehicle enclosing him. A bike in the subway car. Spinning wheels at rest for six stops inside the clamorous song of the train. Tracking the tunnel forgetting what his new job was not.

Yet now the doors burst open and it was another bicycle, a woman bringing it aboard, parking it up against the steel pole, the straight handlebar of a fancy hybrid tipping the man’s bike on the other side of the pole while a girl and boy, lovers realizing this was their stop, struggled to get by the bikes as the doors tried to close. He heard the woman with the bike say, harshly, distinctly, “What is it? I look like someone you know?” It was nothing, he tried to say with a look. Though then, “Probably,” he said, thinking hell she didn’t know who she was talking to. To hear her speak, she was quite unafraid. Or it was where she was coming from, a woman almost haggard, almost beautiful. Irritable. Short with him. Not just your blunt city person in passing, and not passing but arrived like a coincidence.

“No brakes?” she bobbed her head at his old bike. The seat was covered in a faded supermarket bag furled with a rubber band around the post just below the clamp assembly. Did she betray a smile looking away at the crowded car? Probably not, this woman in her beret and little scarf. He waited for her eyes. “Messenger?” she said. Was she looking through the open window at the dark tunnel wall in motion now? Her bike perhaps suited her, but she was not quite a bicyclist.

At the far end a space had opened where a man lay half-curled across several seats. Lost soul, his smell stained the air. His knobby head scarred, you could see stitches in the scalp raised and blue. A soda bottle and a can rolled across the floor and back at serious angles. “Not even a messenger,” the woman said out of the side of her mouth. “I’m overqualified,” he said. “You?” she said. In a subway train running north, their bike spokes glistened and the angry tunnel was a slow-stroke piston cylinder falling south. The derelict at the far end of the car woke violently staggering up onto his feet. His pants were half down, something dropping from under his thread-bare overcoat. What was it that dropped, a piece of him? He kicked a bottle which hit someone, a hawk-eyed woman in a windbreaker. He’s looking about him as if he doesn’t recognize this place though he is a veteran of the line surely. And would you believe this fellow bike-person, this woman going on about your bike: “What do you call that?” she pointed.

“It’s an old Schwinn.”

“Yeah, does it have brakes? I noticed it,” she was contemptuous but more than that.

“You did?”

She had nothing to say, but then, “Where did you get it?” she added. She was subtly tired, preoccupied. Why did he think she didn’t know bikes? “Out of work?” she said then.

“I’m going to work right now.”

“A messenger working nights?” she said, lost for a moment, he thought. “I’m in materials,” he said, “materials science—” “I hate science,” the woman said. “—on a good day,” he finished.

“On that bike?” she said; “on a good day? I’m not long for this one.” Did she mean the day? She patted her handlebar. “You unloading it?” he said. She looked at him then, like she knew him and was momentarily surprised to. The train slowed in the tunnel abruptly, stupidly, and a standee’s heavy bag swung into him like a rock. The unreal stench coming this way, homeward-bound travelers leaned to let the derelict by. “I like my bike, it’s better than the bus,” he said.

“You work nights,” she said.

“Not every night.”

“You can have it,” she said, gesturing. “But what do you do to justify your existence?”

“We grow bone in a lab, that’s what we’re doing right now.”

The woman smiled, she looked away at what was coming. “You don’t do any such thing,” he heard her say. How could she say this? It sounded true. As if he didn’t know what he was doing.

It was a plumber’s canvas tool bag that had swung into him on the shoulder of a guy who looked like a plumber, wiry with a drink bottle in a paper bag. The woman told him to watch his bag. An old thought came to mind and was gone about subway-floor bottles and cans, things here below, here was the foul homeless vagrant streaming sweat with a face of different colors and you leaned to dodge his hand as the woman in the hooded old windbreaker snatched the plastic bottle off the floor and flung it into the man’s back. His hand brushing your shoulder reached for the pole, missed, grasping at the bike-woman, who had said something to the plumber with a little sting to it. The perhaps quite able hands of the homeless man in their ragged coat cuffs reach the woman, her suede coat, her preoccupations, and her fellow bicyclist swiped the black man away and the plumber recoiled from the touch. The woman had let go her bike. She was her face then, the sweet olive cheeks, and under the skin a fine pallor today that would pass. Was she unwell? “I have a list of things rolling around on the subway floor,” he said. “More things,” she said.

A teenage girl was sizing up the bike, and now she had a hand on its top tube. She caught you looking. What she knew, she knew, to the beat of her earphones, the fine asymmetry of the nose ring, could she be fifteen? They were in the station. The plumber shoved the black man stumbling onto the platform this lost soul wearing a safety-pinned coat and something happening with the skin, genetic. A child screamed, the homeless man had fallen on top of her, one shoe off, sockless, and the woman, forgetting her bike, was out there pulling at him. The teenage girl was rolling the woman’s bike off the car, people getting on. He let go his bike, What had happened? He got a couple of fingers on the rear rack of the fancy bike to hold it against the girl, who had backed and turned it, and a man in a blue MTA uniform materialized and was guiding the bike out onto the platform. And there was its owner, but waiting for what?

He righted his bike as it tipped off the pole, the doors tried to close too soon and came together and he understood that the woman had gotten off but not he, and had said something about her bike — was it his? The homeless man was being yanked to his feet, which was like being thrown down.

The doors jolted open again. “Your bike,” he called. She laughed over her shoulder. “Yours if you want it,” she had certainly said. Persistent, the teenage girl tried to cock her leg over it, a man’s-frame top tube, but the MTA man held the handlebar, looking around him. The Service Exit gate opens and a woman pushes a stroller through, the bike woman following her. Call again, catch her eye, the MTA supervisor rolls the bike through the open gate, and the woman beyond the turnstiles thanks him but looks back startled at the train as the car doors jerk closed.

He had raised his voice against this interference with him. He had looked her in the eye, the heck with her he liked his bike he was telling her. And was this woman traveling just one stop? Confronting a woman in a vest inside the change booth now, she pointed back at the platform while the MTA supervisor held her bike handlebar at the stem.

Up against the glass of the car doors the homeless man’s bare face now, the black forehead and maculate tan across the nose and cheek and some pink skin as well where pigment had spilled, he was pointing to you or the floor, stepping back as the train moved yet pointing at something, and what was the woman with the bike doing on the other side of the turnstiles? And did it matter who he was, going to work when others are going home?

An eccentric woman with news for you. In the lab ahead racks of 200-ml tissue baths. Ultra-thin films of silk that may dress our wounds. Elsewhere lattices of silk on which bone cells like to grow. A red-haired college student who had boarded the car at the other end looked hard at the four emptied seats and then, behind him, finding someone he knew, reached into his shoulder bag to find a book for her which she opened with delight, talking to him, her friend, the two of them thrilled to meet while, sitting next to her, the older woman in the hooded windbreaker craned to get a look at the book too. She was the one who had thrown the bottle. The red-haired student stepped away from something underfoot.

“Nice bike she had there,” the plumber looked at you personally, even professionally, at your hand feeling in your pocket for a pencil and pad.

“Not for her.”

“Thought I recognized her. What’s her name?” The plumber looked like one. He’d spent time crouched, adjusting, threading into confined and challenging spaces. The plumber didn’t like him. They didn’t like each other.

“That’s not gonna do him any good,” the plumber kicked the lace-less shoe lying on its side on the floor, the sole coming loose from the upper.

“No?” was the quick reply.

He would talk about it a little at work, the woman with the bike.

She didn’t seem to want her bike, a high-end hybrid. Had she expected him to get off? Some city eccentric, though in the soft dark circles under her eyes, the brown and blue irises, experience lurked, and along the bones of her hands and around the mouth what she was made of, was it something there for a stranger? What had she seen? His bike. At his stop he would bear it downstairs from the platform, then upstairs to the street.

Speeding through the park the whirr of the wheels like wings, the late light, things in the air, a gossamer shine along a witch-hazel stem, a web, sparrows he had watched from the window of his bedroom. He saw the man sitting on a bench not as if he’d worked all day, not well-off looking at all, too old and yet not old enough to be doing whatever he was doing, And further along a woman he recognized reading the Classifieds. And then a bird’s yellow underside glimpsed, tail bobbing, Prairie Warbler upside down quickly foraging. But now a gray hint of smoke from leaves burning so close by that the boy rising suddenly from beside his friend’s experiment to dart in front of the man’s bike was part of the path itself, no time to brake, the bike wheel caught the kid’s ankle knocking it away. He heard the yelp, a curse, and did not stop, the boy had simply risen and darted into the path of the oncoming bike.

He asked his coworker at the lab why. She smiled, it was more of a smile not looking up from her work. “A boy,” she said. She commuted from an outlying area—“upstate” she called it — yet was early to work mornings and tonight had stayed late an hour. He thought he knew nothing about her but it wasn’t true. On his table under diagrams of insect anatomy and a couple of color snaps of orb-spinning spiders she had taken, he found some others produced by an electron microscope at a more specialized lab she called it, and from yet another lab copies of printout numbers he read at once showing stretches of gene code in silk material of unique strength containing certain other stretches lacking any genetic directions for the protein-making he and his coworker counted on. This was precisely where the unique elasticity came from, and at his previous job he had twice outwitted these intron gaps, he had a nose for them though he knew next to nothing about the orb-weaving spiders his coworker observed in her garden anchoring a dragline like a rock climber a safety rope.

Here he did his work. It was not him. On a collision course with a dozen commercial applications. Silk for tethering planes to a carrier. Body armor. Or practical scaffolding. He had been told they might soon be growing nerve cells for grafts. In the “dairy” in another building fierce ants, he was told, and a well-known golden spider were apparently milked to extract their silk, and he had a joke or two more bitter than his partner understood, who trusted his insight. Why exactly was spider silk sometimes stronger though less stretchable when milked against the spider’s will under anesthetic when we could just pull the stuff out? A sketchy thing to do even to an ant. Under CO2 was the animal asleep or just paralyzed? Meanwhile the silk lattice preoccupies his partner. How if we do our work right, later it biodegrades having done its job, leaving just bone. She listened to him and found occasion to ask about his work prior to this job. Chemistry on a monitor. Pattern at the root. Abstract. What could he tell her?

She was Dutch. “Will it be a good night?” she asked, the way she would ask if it would be a good day, when he sometimes worked days. He thought it would be. He had found himself speaking to her of the subway incident and she dismissed this woman who could say she hated science. “She doesn’t know anything. You have to do the work.” He said he thought the woman had been a little off, perhaps unwell. He wondered why she had thought he was out of work. “But it is true, you have been out of work, you know what that’s like,” said the woman at his side, and he thought that she was right as he sometimes thought there was probably very little work you could choose that was really worth it. “You were out of work, and then you have come here,” the woman was saying. A silk film is ready to come out of the tissue bath. They contemplated each other. “What you bring,” she said.

She was okay. He asked about her garden — though what did he mean, her at home, spider-silk draglines elastic with genes of genius? — and what was happening with the hives? It was polite of him. She had ordered two Russian queen bees that would be arriving in the mail, and again she suggested he come out for a visit one Saturday, bring his bike on the train. He must have had that bike a long time, she said. Ah, he had borrowed it, this at least thirty-five-year-old Schwinn one New Year’s Eve twenty something years ago where it had been left in the boisterous and cluttered basement hallway of the townhouse of the host — A New Year’s Eve party? she asked, her eyes alive — and he kept it till next day. Kept it? Oh my, she said, she caught a little intake of breath and was thinking about the story. It was the short form, he added. She left it at that. She must have only one bike up in Garrison, it occurred to him staring at photos supplied by her. Blowups of ants, puffy, monstrous, venerable showing among the folds the location of their spinning ducts. Another of a spider he didn’t know bringing the duct very close to the venom sac. Another, the ceramic gloss of a maroon and white, big-horned spider from Costa Rica, smaller than it looked, its spinning duct somewhat hidden. Spiders didn’t work well together. They ate each other.

It was late for her, though he’d just clocked in and was pondering ants again, if they unreel their silk like spiders, anchor it to something, then move away. A photo of a drab, earthen-hued garden spider showed its dragline silk for the outer rim of the web — insurance in case of a bungee bailout — strong as the golden spider’s silk but, with more amino, ten times stretchier when wet — so strong, so soft. Wasp silk they worked with, and bee. Now bee silk a real simple genes-and-protein setup — but nothing beats spider silk. She was leaving. He missed the electron microscope at the other job. Gene measurements on a screen, spectacular speculations and sure things — and now it was bacteria they could insert silk genes into and tobacco, of all things; and unlikely, unsuspecting animals. He felt her near him and turned to see her thinking. “I can see it all, what happened on the subway,” she said, her tone disturbingly new to him. He looked at her.

“She wanted to give you her bike.”

He shook his head, studying his work. A moment later, Why? he called out—why would she want to give him her bike? His coworker, gone for the night, didn’t stop or didn’t hear him call after her. He was alone tonight, as it happened. Lose your job, find one, was the philosophy. A better one than any job you could lose, though the new job doesn’t come with a certain eighty-thousand-dollar scanning device, failing which he must sometimes independently remember on his own what it was he actually already knew, or ask for help.

It was a job. Pedaling back through the park along the interior road at two in the morning, he found two kids from opposite curbs converging on him until, coasting as if to slow down, he rose and made a dash for it like a runner, his heart racing, before they could get to him, long-legged, ugly, and passed between them like prey in the deep, like a knife — he didn’t need a change of gears and didn’t have one. Out for a spin along the Meer, lamp light in the water — what is this experiment ahead, behind, around him? A tree in passing (long life and beautiful leaves, they breathe, we breathe) remembered minutes later when he hoisted the bike to clear the subway turnstile and raced carefully downstairs and up again to catch a downtown train ahead of the closing doors. He was alone in the car with one other person at this hour who watched him sit down, holding the bike before him.

Had he been drawn away from the deep shape of things into the bowels, multiple abdominal glands, ducts, dope, quaint feats of animals that supply silk for enzyme-solvent med capsules or stitch the leaves of the gingko tree he had just felt near him in the park? The train got under way. His fellow passenger stood up and came to sit opposite him. An Asian with a faded khaki knapsack on his back, he leaned forward, a bunch of brochures in one hand. He wore flip-flops showing his brown toes. His taut stare must be returned. “You ride bike on subway?” “It travels with me.” The man laughed a staccato Chinese laugh. “I give you backpack, you give me bike.” “Not a chance.”

The stations of the line seemed, afterward, when he got home, to have been contracted to one unexpected platform to come, as though what passed between the two men was too much for the actual track time.

“You have job, you wok, you study, get better job — what you study?” “I don’t know what I study. I study silk.” “Sirk!” (the man shakes his handful of brochures as if that’s what they’re about and laughs a laugh that is no laugh) “Sirk wom!” (Yes of course — the silk worm with its half-mile-long cocoon-winding.) “Sister wok in sirk factory!” “Does she make comforters? Bed covers?” “Factory!” “Good for her, good for your sister,” one adds, not feeling it, then feeling it—“in Suzhou?” Yes, yes (the brother, unsurprised, contemplating your rat trap with small black backpack clamped tight), you recall women in hygienic caps stretching an already arch-stretched square of cocoon silk across a queen-size bed — and a Dutch tour group, a few years ago now, three women among them with Chinese babies, it was pointed out to him by the woman he was with.

“We have some problems with silkworms.” “Sirkwom no pobrem.”

“We love the silkworm, but—” “No pobrem!”—“Spider silk’s more…” The Chinese traveler’s knapsack in his lap now, there is something about it. Sirkwom! (Its silk, the sutures, he’s learned plodding through surgical applications, regrettably provoke immune reaction, it’s the ancient glue that it wraps around a protein). “Your sister in Suzhou packs the silk inside the comforter.” There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe, a poet said.

Man doesn’t question the Suzhou coincidence but he is unpredictable, and where he’s coming from produces truth too. He points irritably at the bike with his brochure hand and the brochures scatter multiplying on the subway car floor, or did he fling them? Is he beside himself? His fellow passenger bad news? He would not inquire how this American in the leather jacket picking up a brochure asking him if he’s a messenger knows about his sister who packs great ropes of silk into duvets in Suzhou we’re quite sure. Americans travel but are not immigrants. The Chinese repeats his proposition, not quite a joke. Why should he not speak? The knapsack — something in it. “Messenger?” you ask again and the doors open at the station you now see you’ve been drawn to, the downtown platform this time.

The Chinese man stands, the rider rolls the bike toward the door. “Messenger,” he says, he reaches for the bike too late, the rear rack. “Messenger!” Of strewn brochures.

The station, a platform, has been imagined wrapped in a waiting memory where the woman and her bike left a train hours ago; but before the Chinese traveler in his ire can get his recyclables together, not that it’s his stop, doors do their job. And when, in the train’s empty, then humming, pause, wheeling the bike briskly alongside stopped cars finding across the tracks the uptown change booth now dark while on this side our conductor promising on the loud speaker we would be moving momentarily materializes at a cab window looking down this platform, a strange routineness now in his reply to the man with the wheels — the same MTA guy from five o’clock? — “Yeah the green bike, they told me over there — supervisor he—” “Supervisor?” For this is not quite the same guy. “She told me where she need to get off uptown like I’m a bus driver”—conductor looked at his palm, dignified—“I said just watch the station comin’ in. She goes, Don’t you know your job, how did you get your job?”

“She ill?”

“Ill you say.” Conductor frowns like a half grin. “Supervisor said she had like—” (Conductor’s personal like your friend for a second) “—she had two days.” “Two days?” “To give her bike to somebody, that’s it. She told him.” “What did she tell you?”

“Where she has her coffee in the morning seven o’clock, like we had it together and she’s reminding me.” The breakfast place uptown familiar after all by the subway where you used to catch the bus.

“Supervisor looks like you.” “He’s my brother.” “How you got your job?”

Checking a black and white monitor in the cab, “You know her,” the conductor said.

The doors? Much obliged.

It’s going to be two-thirty in a minute, the need to get to bed leaning back into the seat of the moving train, hands on the bike, the brochure in a coat pocket, still on the same train with the Chinese guy. But you’re looking at his brochure, a dark green hillside of tea bushes, a stage full of gymnasts balancing a stack of chairs, 212 phone numbers for evidently a travel agency, and a memory of cocoon, a shroud wrapped all from one thread, the caterpillar of the silk moth, hardly remembering a book or two in your backpack.

It will feel like the crack of dawn, not seven-twenty, when a figure in the coffee shop window observed him, he knew, whatever she knew of him as he walked his bike and locked it to a stanchion where the sound of a familiar bus exhaling told him the woman with the bike, brighter, slower than he recalled though dogged by a shadow, was not herself. The green hybrid not in evidence, it was not at stake — as if, at the café’s inner doorway, what was in the balance was what he took in — the shining Silex glass over-and-under pots, the murky, gleaming griddle and its smoke of sausage and piled hashbrowns, aluminum pitchers reflecting silver light, booths and the hiddenness of men and women in them, hunched shoulders at the counter, two cops, a table or two by the window. And an opened-up laptop lid she peered at, the small, fine scarf protecting her neck. Scents of coffee, sausage links, uncanny toast, a grease of some hunger his gift might take the structure of along with some life out of sight but right behind him as he held the inner door a second about to step across the threshold.

“You!” from the woman — a chair waited for him and all but spoke to him and then he was above her, the planes of her face alight with faint blame. “On my way to work,” he said.

He started to explain, but a bird had exploded into the restaurant, swooped in, a sparrow, flapping around the ceiling lights whirring less like a hummingbird than an out-of-sync fan, now flew at the window, cut past the woman, her face, and out again past two girls in school uniforms who’d run to push open the inner and outer doors. “Sparrows don’t do that,” said the tall one. “That’s a young song sparrow,” the man said. The cops had spun around at the counter. The woman undid her sheer scarf. She said, “The bike’s not here.”

“I have a bike.” He pointed. “It’s at home,” she said, meaning hers—“two blocks,” she bobbed her head westward. She recited the address off the laptop’s screen, he thought.

“It’s not a bike I need,” he said.

The tall girl asked how he knew it was a song sparrow. The young ones didn’t have the spot on the breast, he told her but she frowned. He was content to order. The other girl, the little, sturdy one, asked amazingly what it was he needed if it wasn’t a bike. “A daughter?” he joked. “You should have a daughter,” the woman said, “nowadays they can do that.” They all thought about that. Why had he ordered oatmeal, the raisins surviving above the milk? How much had she paid for that hybrid? he asked with his mouth full. Oh yes, someone had given her the bike, she said — her husband, wherever he was — if he was still or had ever been her husband — thinking it would help. The waitress smiled. The waitress knew her.

“Help toughen you up?” “Why, yes.”

The schoolgirls standing with their paper bags would miss their bus, he thought. “When you were already tough,” he said to the woman. “You understand me,” the woman said. A panel truck advertising “www.REPAIR” backed in and the driver came around and kicked the man’s bike locked at the very lip of the curb, and he stood up, and the schoolgirls in their pleated skirts started speaking, laughed, and started again. The little one said, “You had a right to be there.”

He had ignored the tall one, who was fretting about that bird — not cold, not hungry, certainly not crazy, was it the door opening that had pulled it in? she asked. The kids stood waiting, but for what? The waitress over at the counter sipped her coffee and watched.

“You understand me,” said the woman again. He understood nothing of the kind he said. He understood chains of molecules under an electron lens; he could see code fold into double-coil proteins of bulldog ant silk; bee silk was simpler, four genes, four proteins. Science was beautiful, the woman said and added something typical he almost understood but didn’t. “I’m quite well-known,” he said. He looked at her and she shook her head as if he were hopeless.

“How did you lose your job then?” she said. “I was cruel to someone.” The woman made a sound. “Is that all?” “She lost her job.” “She wasn’t thinking well.” “No.” “But you lost yours.” “I let it lose me.”

“What does that make you?”

She shut the laptop and stood up and spread a ten-dollar bill next to a slice of toast. “Working days now?” Time had lengthened around them overnight. He started to explain about today but it was none of her business. But then he did, about the message on his machine last night from his lab partner that they would need him early this morning.

“It’s you she wants.”

Were the schoolgirls about to leave? The little one alerted him, the man who’d kicked the bike was coming back.

“That stop you got off at,” he said. The bike had told her to, she said. The bike had not told her anything. “Or I let it tell me,” she said. No, that wasn’t the reason, the man said. “I was hysterical.” “You were not,” he said. “Where I was coming from yesterday.”

The waitress had her arm around the woman’s shoulders, asking her how she was doing. The woman added a five and took her bag and went thinly to the restroom. The waitress went with her. He dropped a quarter, it landed on end and rolled and the tall girl picked it up. “You leaving?” she said. She was irritated. Some shift had occurred simple as looking out his bedroom window one day and seeing what he hadn’t seen.

He was telling the tall girl that a song sparrow would never come in here for food, it foraged on the ground. It wouldn’t sing in here either, there was a sparrow with a song like it that began differently but you’d never see that bird in the city. He held the door for her, but she was waiting for her friend. The cops left with him.

In a dark hallway his partner took his arm. They came to a small room. On a table a transparent box lighted by a single UV. In the box a yellow spider, legs out front, legs behind, Alone here. His partner had remembered. An inlet tube from a cylinder evidently of CO2 outside the box. A contraption for reeling out the silk hooked somehow to an orifice point back along one side of the thorax was ingenious. Silk strong enough given a thickness of an inch to reel in a 747 from the sky. Strong enough to catch a careless finch. Stronger than Kevlar. Strong as steel. Good to go as parachute cord. The animal seemed absolutely still. A burly technician joined them and explained. Then the Dutch woman said this spidey was venomous but not seriously so and bites only if put next to your skin and bothered; it was her own, a female, and it had come from her garden. The males are so busy they forget to eat and can starve themselves.

“You’re silent,” said his partner when they were back in the main building where one of the silk lattices, slow as these things are, was degrading faster than the bone could grow and they had wanted him to look at something close up. “Thinking of a horror film we could go to,” he said. “Oh, the old one about the ants?” Yes, that was the one. “This weekend?” Not this weekend, but he thought he would take that bike woman up on her offer, though why him? “She’s dying,” said his partner.

“How would you know that for god’s sake, how do you people know any such thing?” He calmed down. “Science is beautiful now, she says; it lets you go so far.”

It was two days later, a Friday. It was the waitress who came to answer the door of the drab little townhouse near the river drive. She looked worn out. She indicated the bike in the hall. He made a sign with his hands. “She’s gone,” the woman said. He shook his head, “Where?” “She’s gone to join her husband. She’s sick.”

He had the green bike on the step outside. The woman touched the rear rack. “She said you were like family. I don’t know anything about it,” the woman said. “She said you were uncanny. You said something. That you probably knew her. She said you knew where she was coming from.” “Where?” “The doctor’s?” The woman seemed to come into focus. “We say things. People are affected by them.”

“Who knows why?”

“They’re true? I was the best friend she ever had,” said the woman, stepping back into the doorway. It was what she thought. A dark mole lingered about the corner of her expressive mouth. She’d drunk a lot of coffee. Close up, she did not look worn out, she looked English or French. They wanted to talk but were not going to, a risk rising in her breath and in her interested eyes drawn from her limitlessly, he thought.

“Will you return your old bike?” the Dutch woman asked him. Who would he return it to? The owner, only an acquaintance, had died that stormy New Year’s early morning coming home through the sleet in a cab.

A lab had transferred spider silk genes into the mammary glands of a goat, and his partner asked him to go with her one long weekend to Montana, paid for by the company. It took six hundred gallons of goat’s milk to produce the silk for one bullet-proof vest, so far. He decided to let her go alone; she would be back the Monday night. The following weekend he would be visiting her in Garrison.

THE UNKNOWN KID

“Then why did you bother to have me?” my daughter asks, and I think of funny answers, which she deserves. Her question isn’t a question. Her words aren’t to be taken seriously. But they stick, they linger and malinger, in the dreamwork that gets us from this day to the next.

She came rushing through the house, her friend Val close behind. What a rush, fast forward, pursuit of friendship.

So was that an emergency dance that just went by? An advance guard of a tribe to whom I am unknown? What a racket of final things between them: forget it, friendship’s off, finished! don’t you ever call me up again — rage rushing, falling headlong.

But into what? Discomfitingly into that gap which is an absence of anything remotely like not caring. I might say it better. I am back from three business trips in a row — tired, lagging, coming down. I mean, their fight will break up in an enchanted awkwardness. This I predict, having witnessed it and witnessed other absences between them. Half of July and all of August they didn’t see each other, and when they met in September they stood in front of each other, facing head on with a great deal to choose from, hands for the moment not busy doing things like the hands of inexperienced actors, but at rest at their sides: till they laughed and laughed again, like idiots.

But today at the age of eleven, rushing through the house — the apartment — they are on the move and if I try to keep up, there’s hardly time to tell about what’s happening.

“Liz!” her friend Val remonstrates — screams, they’d say nowadays—“Liz, I didn’t do anything!” Val is older by a few months, yet younger.

They trade skirts, mingle laundry, think like old lovers alike. A. A. Milne’s been on the shelf for years. They sit drawing for an hour — turn the box on, turn it off — then at one selfsame instant they get the idea to dress up out of a closet, dress up, dress up.

Used to be me who put the record on, not now. But who did? Because here they come high-kneeing past like the hoofers they are and the orchestra’s conducted not by quick fingers on a tone arm but by the real world which they take for granted will accompany them.

High-knee it, Folies Bergère, no less; and the music that no casual intruder at this moment could hear unless the girls pant it out half under their breath — for I’m wrong, the record’s not on, not really — is Offenbach’s stately hysteria and it’s in their mind because I have sometimes put it on for them, a record scratched and replaceable. They slide to my right, out of sight arm-in-arm, and I stare straight ahead at all this (which isn’t so interesting to an outsider as to me, home from a business trip, three business trips), and yet divorced as I am from everything but this moment, interesting’s not altogether what it is to me. (Is that so? Well, if you’re not interested, “then why did you bother to have me?”) They’re sliding back into my seat; they’ve used the entire room, the walls, the ceiling — so why don’t I, too?

Their grins giggle. But their silences — don’t their unspeaking tracks run on like mine? Like me? — for all that I know one day to overtake by surprise my own voice amid those inside conversations mouthless and runaway.

Tracked in circles like those of a marriage. And all at once we hear them talking above the undoubted uproar inside us, drawing together, threateningly selfsame, adults, children.

Hey great! (There’s a lot of greatness in the air these days.) Great idea! Let’s do it. Let’s.

(Yet who was this speaking? Do people speak like this? Surely, Liz’s mother and I do. Nine of an evening, say.)

Let’s have a drink around the corner; let’s do some backgammon, where’s the board? Call the Martins; what time is it out there? What day is it? The week, where has it gone? The court’s reserved anyway, and if the Darbins can’t make it, we’ll play singles.

Let’s bike up to the boat basin, it’s not so far, we’ll hear the subway underneath us. Norm rents his two-and-a-half-room houseboat from a traveling paper products salesman; Norm, our somewhat junior friend, loves the older lady Lucille (older by a little less than a decade — which has been inflated into fashion like racially-mixed love); and she loves him too much not to move onto his houseboat, while Norm for his part loves her too much to ask her to put up with the wear and tear of him and the houseboat he comes with, and so Norm may have to cast off and drift, if he can, downriver.

But with her, he sometimes means.

Why not decide?

Because he doesn’t have to.

New Jersey to starboard, historic cliffs and cooperatives. Those great New York towers to port: riding into that unknown harbor that laps the canyons of Manhattan’s gross memory — but is the river capable anymore of moving itself?

The question’s academic when Lucille’s on all fours. If leaks and plaster dropping constitute weather-as-usual for your apartment, consider a leak in a houseboat. Lucille would go down on her hands and knees to find that leak. Lucille we are probably going to hear more about here and in the next life, which is close and no longer beyond the grave unless we had incorrect information and, in fact, the grave never did stand between us and the next life. So Lucille, a bright singer with a heart-shaped face, sings on the boat-basin dock at twilight, waiting below the West Side Highway drones of fossil-fuel accelerators for Norm to make his weekday way uptown on the underground.

What do you know about women? a voice was heard in the gap of last month’s next thing — last decade’s (for by now, women and men, we’ve heard here if not out on our business junkets in the hinter-lands, are beyond all that unconscious exploitation and find themselves at the barricades together before the future that is no longer to come). Still, what do you know about women? a voice is heard. By which is meant, to know is to please.

Or let’s drop over to Tanto Bene, have a cappuccino; the froth will have to suffice — resist the crumbly Napoleons, you who can — imagine we’re already there; and a foursome waits smoking at the glass-cased banks of free-floating forms with names packed with stiff, sweetest cream, specks of citron jewelling the glue of our floured sugar.

But if we didn’t go, we did something else simultaneously. Meanwhile, the fact that I didn’t dance at the party in the mammoth loft last night hints to my wife that when tonight I say let’s bike over to the Unitarian church to catch Charles for a drink at the end of his organ practice (powerfully muscled, thick-necked, uproarious also-tenor Charles), I’m making up for last night standing around in the light of a furnace and not dancing.

The Unitarians believe in more than they need to or used to; they are said to practice Plains Indian dances. They see gods everywhere — on the hoof, in the weather, along the equal arms of the famous Cross or in the hot, rich subterranean rocks that make it shake with drama — plus, equidistant from that old sin thought to be primal and surrounded by global wisdom, a peace that passeth understanding so fast one’s not sure if it’s eastward or westward, though Charles in his music holds to the known March of Christianity.

Industrial screening in last night’s loft showered us with rivulets of darkness, and I did not know why (speaking for both of us) we were here. World falling away on all sides constant, if that’s the way you like it. Sieved through sheets of dry light — Welcomes Anonymous a high, no less — but young for me in my present form. I like to know someone at a party.

And thinking that by proposing this little jaunt the night after my danceless marathon to surprise Charles whom she loves, I might be taking up the slack of not having offered my body to society at last night’s dance, I discover her saying most quietly, No…she will listen to TV and sew patches on the knees of Liz’s jeans. They’re luminous, funny patches, and “we” are no longer four or five going off to work in the morning in overalls.

Last night’s industrial screening shredded a tape of noise — ignition, concussion, coalition. Rained fish and insect stuff out of the thundering shifts so that the long, long ceiling of the mammoth loft furnished by the unknown lessee of that blast area got sifted; rained bombs, fir, rotation, geometry, dreams, and (if you looked at how the moving, for-a-moment-apparently-counter-clockwise-spinning fold swung around) rained ants.

Moved, though, not with that aim and life when Liz and Val blow by and leave behind them a wake — only to pause stock-still, together thinking of what? — stranded navy looking for its whale-boats. Val older physically a little than Liz, but younger in the mettle of maturity’s magic. Could I say it better?

Maturity beyond question. I’ll always give her that. A rhetorical answer if there’s such a thing, coming home off a business trip. But no answer to the dreamwork’s rhetorical question, “Then why did you bother to have me?”

What she has had to put up with I’ve had bad dreams about. Daydreams that are the despairing, would-be insanity of my class. And when it builds and hurries between her mother and me, Liz stays the same. That’s strength.

So strong I might forget she’s eleven. So strong I can’t ever get over it, or won’t for years.

Glad and able to be left alone (in this city) should we go out. And able to see more than she needs or wants. A story of real life, a dose of her parents sometimes not seeing straight to launch salvos at each other’s doubled blurs, you might think it the middle of the night, and just as well, no one gets hurt if a few healthy salvos heard round the apartment aren’t just on target.

I’ve found too many words, I’ve found too few. For this kid has had an unknown (not hard to guess, these days) amount of wake to vector through. But is it love, then, that lets her see her parents as they are, or strange maturity? So let the light shine in, shine upon her mother’s short, dark curls. The light comes in one end of a bedroom, passes through to be augmented by diagonally opposing mirrors that at first divide the morning influx of sun which then pours itself together again when it fills the bathroom threshold and reaches these two largely naked people approaching each other in height, if not always in looks, having an impromptu hip-to-hip analysis in the bathroom mirror, me fixed some paces behind them across the threshold over their shoulders.

They’re talking hair, the long and the short. I’ve heard the subject in a song sung at twilight at the boat basin on the West River, yet here it’s braids and parts, oily and dry, washed (the one) and to-be-washed (the other). And one’s belongings, the care of. And skin. But then, beyond skin and teeth — homework. What do you expect if you never do any? (That’s a lie, a complete lie.)

But homework, as if I never existed to discuss it myself with my daughter twelve short hours ago. In front of another sink, a steel kitchen sink where I divided our shares (among dinner plates slipperily layered in the detergent dark, and three smaller cake plates that could have served for salad dressed and undressed, if we in our household when at home together served salad separately, now tonight whisked before washing, having been pressured by the frictional, sugar-spun essence of pound cake and quick-crumbed at supper’s end, plates so little smudged they could have been dry-wiped instead of wiped-dry) — so now I have divided and turned our attention between my soap-sponging and hot-rinsing, and urging (her) my glowing-haired (as advertised) daughter not to dry anything but the glasses while I question her on her current math — topology, topology. Only then twelve hours later to hear her mother’s homework question at another sink, while ten feet behind I look her mom in the eye in the mirror as Liz also looks her doubting mom in the eye in the bathroom mirror in order to shout (not unhappily), “Then why did you bother to have me!”

“We didn’t,” observes my wife, examining her face in the mirror with a glance my way. I am a madman with a pair of shapes at bay, snug contours of female approaching each other so I can’t see my ancient relations straight — the waists, the shoulders, the spines I’ve touched. And so I stop feeling her my wife over my reflected shoulder who’s in front of the mirror and me; and if my somewhat retired brain had hands or sharpened elbows, I’d type onto a keyboard a right-brain projection of a shot of this bedroom sunbeam in whose flow I approach with my eyes the mirror that is not denied me above the sacred basin that is — and above which echoes Mom’s dry “We didn’t bother.”

“Well here I am,” Liz says, as her mother starts to say, “I mean we didn’t go to any—” and shakes her head and falls apart out of the mirror, hugs Liz, who shouts, “I asked you a question,” and giggles, being virtually tickled. The collective style is Family Throwaway.

Well, one spring night when I heard, against a far verse of Stephen Foster sung three miles away by Lucille dockside, the language of the low-splaying copters reach toward the receptors on our high-rising apartment house and the language of all the dogs in the street below hounding some being in their midst, and I could hear the silence of a known displaced owl-hawk walking our terrace walls and parapets eyeing the city and eyeing the tiles for long-ago-eaten pet rodents while hardly twitching in response to the crying, through the horizon of the twilight time and through glass and brick, of a large-ish jungle cat belonging to our neighbor who is a one-handed actor who’s been enjoying a long run at the other edge of the continent (and has farmed out his flat rent-free in the meantime to an electronically oriented shadow of a college girl who’s seldom in), I found the opportunity upon me going by instinct from strength to strength to capitalize on a blinding point of energy that came between my wife and me as we, from above, watched our daughter on the carpet watch television and were substantially ignored by her.

Wasn’t there a strength in her, separating her from me?

Lengths of light brown hair grew to cascades in the light from the screen. America comes into your living room, your TV room, what have you.

You have Indians. I remember Indians. Real ones, because on the screen it wasn’t a western but a commercial. A serious, corporate progress-report commercial for a firm that makes digging machines. The biggest in the world and in the history of the world. Monumental earth-moving engines bright-painted and fine, that dig, lift, let go, tilt, turn, all in one curving act, and are, I was set up to think at a glance, run by Indians. Indians represented by the unknown personable one in a red shirt with sun-ray design like false eyelashes on the upper part of the sleeve, and the unknown personable one was right here concentrated in the screen with a grin of white teeth and strong wrinkles carved by heritage and fed by all the plump bloods of youth — a heritage of lines.

I’m really pretty sick of Indians, my wife murmured, or did I just know this was what she felt?

And this Indian’s hands, enriched by centuries of sun and of knowing who he was, gripped the controls of the giant earth-mover, and he spoke to us of this and other machines as if the firm that created them employed him to run them. Or sold them to itself.

How did we get here? I think I said.

You were moving away from me, while I was talking to you, my wife said; why don’t you sit down to watch TV since you’re here, instead of standing and making everyone else nervous?

What? said Liz, our child, as if she had heard someone say something important to her, facing the screen’s distance so her voice seemed distant, if there at all.

I wasn’t moving away from you yourself; I was just moving.

Wrong, said my wife, you didn’t want to hear about the wife of that black philosopher Chuck.

What? said Liz faintly.

I heard what you had to say, I said; I remember the party at the health club, the forty-third floor sunset, the banana daiquiri that spilt itself into the pool or was it an old-fashioned sea-breeze with true grapefruit juice, or vodka on the rocks that turned into a chlorine dawn? And I remember her leaving her drink on the brink of the pool while she swam some laps and it was gone when she reached for it again and she called Chuck but he was staring into the sun above the New Jersey cliffs and I remember him saying that the sun was exactly at the level of the pool, forty-third floor, and, come to think of it, he said something reassuring.

Listen, said my wife, in my brain—

What? said Liz from afar—

I was saying when you walked away that Chuck’s wife — she’s a scientist — was telling me in the sauna before we ate—

Until, I said, that other woman in the sauna started spitting on the floor, and then you left.

You remember all the bad things.

Nothing bad about spitting in the sauna: the heat brings out all that mucus.

The point, my wife said, as the commercial gave way to the news and Liz turned the set off and remained sitting cross-legged, seeming to look at the screen in a way she has when she, I believe, is thinking what to do next — the point was, this woman—

— Charlotte, I said.

Right. Charlotte. She’s a very interesting woman, you know.

And not just her career, I said.

You’re right all over the place, my wife said — she has two, three kids, and she’s a biochemist in a laboratory and somebody in her lab won the Nobel Prize, and she has the most beautiful hair, it’s like Liz’s when it’s all dry and brushed, only lighter, and when you walked away I was saying—

I didn’t walk away, I said so softly I seemed to emphasize what my wife knew anyway.

— that her husband’s a stay-at-home, that’s what she said, and she finally gave up on him and didn’t mention it but started, you know, seeing people on her own, nothing much.

Friends, I said.

Why not, said my wife.

How did we reach this point of agreement? I think I said.

You wouldn’t sit down.

The TV’s off, I said.

A real scientist, this Charlotte, said my wife, no lab technician, no lab assistant.

No guinea pig, I said.

Daddy! said Liz, that’s gross.

I moved around her.

And when she came home—

You know that any job you want to get—

What?

You know I rather like having a working wife to show off although it’s so old hat I hardly want to speak of it, it’s not just the money.

I was saying, my wife said, that when she came home, Chuck would not say a word.

Yes, I said, I remember that particular sunset when she called to him from the water asking where her drink was and he didn’t hear her. But at least he was in his trunks and said something generally reassuring to me I think.

And she wanted to say to him when she got home, Don’t you want to know who I’ve been with, and Chuck would smile and say, quietly, Yes — as if a discovery had just come from her; and you know she wouldn’t tell him after all; then she told him a couple of dreams instead.

Were they clever? I said, and I added, Were they good?

Liz looked at the TV.

What reassuring thing did Chuck say? my wife asked. You said he said something reassuring.

I try to block it out, I said, but it was this: the options for the planet are narrowing down to almost nothing and we will set fire to ourselves before we know it; but meanwhile the options for personal relationships between women and men are multiplying. Sure, I retorted, but those relationships you’re talking about are getting more and more superficial. Ah, said Chuck, a nice superficial relationship — that’s what we’re all looking for. It’s so soothing, so friendly.

But despite these interesting words that I hadn’t realized I remembered, my wife and I were still repeating our circular routines. I didn’t, therefore, know if we would all move on. It was time for Liz to go to bed.

You’ve done that a lot, said my wife. Walked out of the room when I was talking.

If I’d only been conscious of it, I said, I could have thought about it. My wife knew when I was reaching for a joke; she did not know that I had attained a thought — that marriage is putting two people face-to-face slightly off.

A last drink of water, my wife said. That was one dream. In the dream she brought Chuck a last drink of water as if he was her husband. She was a long time reaching it to him. He kept looking at her while he reached for the glass, and he was still looking into her eyes when he had it in his hands, his last drink of water, and brought it to his mouth so slowly she wanted to yell at him. But then she saw the water was all cloudy and she knew she was afraid he would get up and take a walk because it was his last drink of water and she saw the cloud was her, it was her in the glass, her exactly. He was about to drink the water with her in it. He had his eyes on her, not on the glass which was at his lips. She called to him not to drink. He didn’t hear, of course. He was looking into her eyes. He didn’t hear. We were sitting in the sauna. That was one dream she told him. But — not to wake up exactly, which would be crass — she wasn’t dreaming; and the dream was what really happened.

She made it up, I said.

There’s a remote possibility, my wife said, that she made it up as what really happened, but you are crazy, my wife said, did you know that? The woman is a scientist, she’s made it, what do you mean she made it up, you’re crazy. I mean it.

Mommy…, said Liz, staring at the TV, something in voice.

Well, I, I said, am not a stay-at-home like the black philosopher Chuck.

You’re not all that bad at it, my wife said, but why did you say “black”?

Why do you want to know? I said.

Daddy…, said Liz.

My wife’s eyes gazed at me.

I said, Sorry, kid, I thought we were getting somewhere.

Do not call me kid, said my wife.

I was addressing my daughter, I said.

Do not call me kid, said Liz, looking at the TV.

In one turning pull, she switched it on, turning off the sound.

If he drank her, did she wake up inside him? I said. The devouring male, I said.

The other way round, said my wife.

What? said our sly zombie of a kid whom I sometimes wonder if I reach or am like anymore.

She woke up outside him? I said.

No, she woke up and he was inside her.

Mommy! said Liz.

I mean, said my wife, I mean it was another dream.

This one, I said, you’re going to make up.

You don’t understand that I’m telling you something, said my wife, and left the room.

Hey, wait a second, I called, you’re still in the sauna, so these are communicating dreams, that’s good, look let’s go over to the church, oh no it’s Tuesday night, Charlie practices Mondays, let’s finish our game from last week, oh the board got put away, let’s tune up both our derailleurs and the action on your brake you said was stiff, let’s prepare Liz’s room for painting, oh no we’re out of spackling, Atlas Hardware closed three hours ago, let’s the three of us go out for ice cream — or do you have homework?

My wife materialized at another door. Have you left anything out? she asked, amused at last.

I did my homework at school, said Liz, her long, glossy hair turning its layers over as she turned.

I couldn’t begin to capture it all, I answered my wife.

Daddy…, said Liz, staring at the silent screen where a woman was, I knew, reporting news but now came to the end and smiled and then I saw that Liz sitting there on the floor had flung her head back and was looking up at me upside down, a welcome angle.

She is not in the habit of asking for information. That is, beyond what is normally supplied. I am backward. So many friends divorced ahead of me, questions low-flying in my direction, like the evening in Norm’s living room hearing the cars ashore above us on the West Side Highway but not the faintest wash of river water, and Lucille, returning to the room’s bright black-and-yellow-painted beams, said to Liz and me, I believe, “Sometimes I think, Which one of you is the nice one?” and when Norm said, “Both of them,” Lucille said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”

Once my wife and I went out on our bikes together, wrenches bagged, the folds of our spare tubes powdery-soft, a French pump in place along my frame — and came back separately. For it had not been a good afternoon in the beginning. At least I did not arrive home riding two bikes.

Liz and Val heard the front door hit my fender and when Liz came into the hall and the refrigerator shut with a sucking thud and she asked where was Mommy, I said that she would be along but I didn’t honestly know where she could be. Liz looked at me. I said, Whatever we do, you are you. Do you understand? Then I added, You are our daughter.

When is Mommy coming home? Liz answered. Is she having dinner out?

On her bike? I said.

Sure, said Liz.

I look up to her, everywhere I turn I guess I have seen her. A new breed of girl, her mother has persuaded me. Freed, I hear. Of old conditioning. So if chosen tomorrow for success, she would not be surprised.

I would hope — I would hope (as we preface things at a meeting in San Diego, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Columbus, Montpelier) — that down deep in her nervous system Liz believes she’s bereft of obligations except to herself — I’ve said it better than I know how. Thanks to her: who assumes much and nothing about her future, including that she is, or has been prepared to live it at an address entirely hers. Sees an adult in the evening who was wiped out first thing in the morning, and thinks, does Liz, not at all that she might have caused the depression (she knows well the word) that extends hollow and banal and lasting before that adult who shall be nameless and genuinely without regard to sex, while with calm before this spectacle she lets the adult get on with it. She does not cry except in anger, which gets exhaled and is gone. She falls into home-makerly locutions, such as asking if I will be in for dinner tonight as if she were planning the meal. Her future — what can I say? She has hidden powers. Gives good advice if approached in the right way, not as a simple adult but one to one.

I pass to and from one aerodrome or the other, promoting steel in major cities, my program mapped a month or two months in advance, yet nothing if not flexible. I wake up, having been awake deep-seated in the multiplied upholstery of a system that works, and correct my slouch, guarding my lower back as a thing, a being, a moral that could come true. I straighten up and then I squeeze back my shoulders and I arch my spine; time empties in front of me along its main, and its overhead and cupped sides pave my way beyond me with what you think’s an elusive new material, you see through it, so the main is known to be there and you to be in it but you don’t exactly see it, and that goes for the bends up ahead, the turns built into it tunneled into the mountainous field through which time never knows itself.

Or am I a new breed of man, hearing my lies yet clear that they are not — and believing them so very honest I then doubt.

Chuck the philosopher’s wife has her dream. She does well to share it. I have mine. Or, rather, Liz’s. Cupped in the middle of the night in my one unpillowed ear. Not like the answer I got at dinner when, just the two of us, I’d asked if she felt Val’s parents were different from her own, more strict, more together, that kind of thing; and she said, No, she didn’t think so, not much; and I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents?

You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth — what’s for dessert?

Yogurt on a stick, I said — raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious.

I was more than a father supporting a daughter’s research, taking an interest in her homework, suddenly last month’s, last week’s. She answered that it was a math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers, she remembered that much. She goes to a private school. I sensed that she might have more to say later. She said that she had a stomachache and excused herself. She does well in math, and so when I ascertained that she had received A-minus in topology yet in all honesty (her own) could not say what topology was, I decided topology was something you practiced more than thought about. I checked the dictionary and had something to think about then. What holds constant through the April showers and cloudy nights, through changes, through turnings, twistings, and stretchings. Rubber-sheet geometry, her math book says.

I kissed Liz goodnight, waiting. I went to bed early, so I must have been tired.

Somewhere in my sleep a phone began and began and began to ring. I strove to answer it and woke up on my feet hearing, “Liz! Liz! Liz!” and knew the words meant How could you! and heard them outside me like a set of real objects self-possessed; then, with the next words, I knew the speaker deep in the dark apartment was my daughter now crying, “I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!”

The phone was still ringing in my head. My back was cold.

“It’s OK, Liz,” I said firmly and half asleep. “It’s OK. I’m here.” This, I was glad to feel, was true.

But then, as if I had been running around doing things in the apartment, I knew what I’d stepped on back in the bedroom; for I heard another voice back there behind me say, “What?” and I turned around hearing again but quieter and muddled and now behind me the prior voice of Liz: “I didn’t.”

I went back to bed, remembering a warm place near my wife’s hip. I left her shoe where she had left it when she had come home. She was asleep, whatever she said.

Morality is a composed state of mind, said Chuck, the black philosopher, which seemed reassuring that health-club party-day of the forty-third-floor sunset. But now it seemed wrong, its wrongness reassuring.

Our organist friend put us on the Unitarian Universalist mailing list and the church’s weekly newsletter came and I found in it under the headline “Ultimate Questions,” this supposedly West African saying:

When you think how things are,

And you don’t know how they began,

And how they will go on,

And you don’t know whether they will end…

But rather than quote the rest, I’ll paraphrase it according to my own eclectic faith: “Complete it yourself.”

PARTICLE OF DIFFERENCE

One night it was late, father and son looking out into the street at the weather. Twelve years old, almost thirteen, the boy will sleep soundly but he has a theory or two of what is to be seen out their city window. “The rain has insomnia,” he said. The boy’s mother somewhere out there on her own knows not her limits, but father and son are finding theirs. Give her credit for work, thick skin, looks, getting out of the home and not coming back. There’s the door. The lock hasn’t been changed.

The man would hear the news from a distance, if it was news, like someone out on the landing, rain in the air, things going slow or is it fast? — music overheard. What the boy’s mother’s up to. A bird on the wing. Give her a hand, original-looking woman, pretty fair photographer, no telling how far she’ll go. The boy is beyond whose fault it is, isn’t he? He seems to know something. They named him Lang, and not such a long time ago.

What’s the worst thing that can happen? said an old acquaintance with a sense of humor, checking his watch at lunch one day. More power, dude, you got a day job to pay some bills, and as for her let’s say she’s a screaming success, which she probably isn’t, what’s the worst that can happen?

The man knew his limits and more than that, maybe didn’t. Hunched at the piano, on hold and counting, supper in the oven, on the burner, in the fridge, he wouldn’t bet against his gone wife. What about the kid he gets off to school in the morning who probably knew even these odds and did his own math?

The mother phoned after supper sometimes during homework. Lately something guessed-at from this end of phone calls which he believes she has conveyed but the boy doesn’t say — a new departure you have to feel and it’s not just work. Lang needs no help with homework but puts companionship to use. The living room table itself picks up the clamor of Lang’s mind. They think together, father and son, don’t they?

Jotted on blue graph paper the steps of a problem, a step skipped before you knew it.

“Wait a sec, she wants—”

“Dad—”

“—how you did it,” parent holds steady, who didn’t always get the advanced algebra himself, then did. Slowed down, Lang explained the new and improved denominator. Yet jumps into biology. (How does my child think?) Hydras with their tentacled mouths, cells so simple you could graft one hydra onto another — believe it. (Seems unfair to the hydras.)

The boy saw something in his father, he talked to him. Something’s happening in math. Physics sneaking in! (But math (?): in homework, the father cleaves to what has been asked.) Math is Mrs. Mukta (you can talk to her, smells good, her accent, her get-up, Indian, a transcendent lady, a star the father can tell, the kid’s doing her). Absent occasionally lately, something going on with Immigration, while in class the substitute’s sneaking some physics in. Mad smart, Dad, what T.P. knows. This substitute they know by his initials. Math’s not advanced enough for him, physics is cool, it’s, Sorry, can’t wait till eleventh grade — hey you all, it’s quantum time. The father gets it. Two different ways of same event happening simultaneously, everyone loved it. Can they be ready for it?

“String theory (?),” the boy gives Dad the benefit of the doubt. (Well who didn’t know about string theory, the man thought, nodding, but who did? The very small, you understood; too small.) “My great-aunt Ruth tied a string around her finger so she’d remember.”

“What?”

“Everything.”

“He subbed in Global, too.”

“Will he be at Parent-Teacher?”

“Why would he be at Parent-Teacher?”

The man puts up his fists — the kid throws a punch, a feint. They spar, they mean to buy some gloves.

The man lands a left hand, open, the boy a wild flurry laughing. “Shadow-boxing,” the father teases. The boy fists his father’s arm to the bone, “Did you drop chili powder in the macaroni?”

“Does he teach you chem?”

“He’s amazing. He says to e-mail him.” “Do you?” “Puts his equations up there so fast it all fits.”

Homework lingers after Lang’s down. So much left to do of your own at ten o’clock of a school night. Time off to think.

It gets late and when you sit down at the piano it’s a soft touch on the rather stiff action not to trouble the neighbors. What cost of neighboring, what gauge of nearness? It’s through their cooking smells they think of you if at all (the thought comes at the piano). Piano at midnight along paths cut by the beat you track. Onto something, he should jot chords on a jittery sheet of music paper in front of him.

The worst that can happen. It hits home where new work travels under his fingers at white keys his wife once tried Windex on. Your hands so close they’re exchanging fingers, tipping chords together for small changes an out-of-work jazz player will try, voicing what he sees he was getting at. Even yesterday can change. Who in this household calls this stuff daydreams now?

Yet on a Sunday, food on the table, a good half of who-knows-what is bringing up this boy who knows his dad has a job but is an unemployed musician who works at it every day — as an evening meal menus his son’s likes within a short-order range of ravs, chicken, green beans, the bud-like head of the Brussels sprout and beets in curious fact, the yam — in their colors, covert seasonings for the man, the music he and Lang listen to at the table.

A message discovered on his cell (Hey Vic, you still there?…) calls up in the very months and months since he’d heard from any club or tried Lou’s Corner. A business message the boy would know to be huge watching his dad try three times while they’re eating to get back to them out of politeness. Matte-black-painted sheetrock walls, three-foot-high painted photos of musicians. “How come they called you?” “What do you mean how come they called me?” But he would like to know himself almost. He hears scattered applause for a solo.

It’s the next night. He’s heard Lang’s Spanish. They’re on the bed sort of acknowledging the ceiling where a luminous galaxy might never be peeled off, long superseded by comix stored under the pillow. Lang down under the covers. “It’s all math, the planets,” the man said. His own tenth-grade math teacher, you know, went way back to music. Two strings, equal tension different lengths, but for the two notes to be in harmony — something (?). A question not nailed, more in it than the man knows. A thinking sound from the boy: “Mmm…ehh…” almost thirteen.

“What was that?” the father remembers these very sounds, and the lanky boy can feel his father’s amusement, his memory.

“If the lengths are proportional,” Lang stresses, his power beyond mere memory.

“Science.”

Eyes shut, what sees the boy? “You’re music, I’m science, Mom’s Mom, but Mom…” “Hey, Lang, the club date’s on.”

“Hey.” The news settles. “That’s great.” “Guess I got friends in—” “You do?” “—low places.” “Who?” “I didn’t ask.” “You sure you didn’t?”

What’s going to happen Wednesday? Right away they’re arguing a school night and the boy vetoes a baby sitter, and that’s good night. The man will leave him dinner.

Right over the keyboard, wrists low, hands where they belong cup the notes. Let them argue. After the long day at the day job branching and hopeless but not as jazz is.

The man had played for his wife, and could still. It’s her loss to have run out of time with him, a jump of memory answering answer, fighting it out, beyond fatherdom and standard love, the beat is all, left hand, right hand working our way along the edge. The keyboard could go its own way. Finding in the dozen bars to come waiting already with you the surprise (her loss) climbing down through doubt and a flat-seven ninth to turn upon a jabbed two-finger second that would sound like a mistake in someone else’s playing, to a major seventh in a cousin key somewhere still a standard spinning daydreams to tell a story if it could, escaping to one single coastline longer, more indented, longer still.

Redoing the tune in the backwards forwards truck or just incomprehensible or tune-dumb someone had said — furious you could call it, finicky, to crowd the keys to stumble on, the song somewhere surging above the rocky bite and interruption, give of sand, swirl of wind, rush of wave, of which, in spite of what his son asleep (he hopes) tells him, comes to not just equal and opposite reaction to these life forces so fine and off the map, though left by a woman one hundred ninety-nine days ago to lift your shoulders like a shrug. Walking on fingertips with soft claws — and watched, he would think — only to then lean back, wrists high and classical, never mind from time to time three felt hammers it will cost a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tuner to unstick. (“What did I say? Your work’s on hold but you’ll get back to it, was I right or what?” his lunchtime friend had said.)

With your hands you would hit out, hearing someone — at the door — overhead—no, it’s bare feet paused at the hall threshold awake, and Vic doesn’t miss a beat eye to eye with his son across the room never thinking You should be asleep—not looking at the keys. How he got the club call, who it was remembered him. That’s not it, but that he got the call at all. The boy’s listening in his pajamas, to a sudden untypical run of octaves up and down. “They’re doing themselves a favor,” he tells the boy, who doesn’t move, but will go back to bed.

Question what’s the worst was no question but shakes him in the morning, his son just out the door, leaving then himself, bumping into bearded super in elevator who grins knowingly, like there’s something to know; Vic simply falling away from the apartment into the train, the creeping noise of fact another slant on the question postponing itself which is asking itself in the supermarket that afternoon or finding the tubes at a place he knows, screws at the hardware, thinking to fix his Vector Research tuner-amp himself, and home again waiting for the elevator as cell goes and it’s Lou’s Corner — Hey you got a bass backup maybe, maybe not, said the woman’s voice in that asking tone as if it was up to him; drums, we hope. While the super opening his cell asks at Vic’s floor, “Workin’?”—Vic answering, “You?”

Anger even at the boy of the father trying to keep up, isn’t real but just giving the finger to the absent mother who’ll phone Lang apparently before the man got home, hear about the gig, but as if Lang, home from school, and with the phone in the bathroom because he didn’t like the toilets at school, half preoccupied with his things to do, half thinking basically that his father’s kind of always here, is half talking with her as Vic lets the front door fall shut behind him, — the kid correcting himself, “He just came in.”

At dinner, “What did you research today?” the kid makes conversation. Thinking about tomorrow, the answer.

Three sets was one too many on a Wednesday school night, he would be late. Though a sitter vetoed by the boy, about to be thirteen. You don’t get it, Dad. And he phoned home at nine-thirty, the place of homework, Lang busy; the woman now in front of him, happy, a kind of manager who’d introduced Vic, taking the phone back, surprised he didn’t know Bill Flyte, who had told them about him, Vic still wondering how he’d left his cell home.

The second set let him think what he was doing. A room longer than he recalled, stool-sitters at the bar, some standees, and a familiar face from Boston, Columbus, Philly, and in a white shirt and tie a great little timekeeper you used to see all business with his sticks. Photos of Herbie, his glasses mirroring his hands, and Chick (think of it) and Buddy Holly for some reason, Monk holding forth with a trumpeter, Bud Powell, who you’re pretty sure never played here, the wart on his forehead or whatever that was, and a woman behind him at a table; and Errol Garner seeming tall all by himself at the keyboard. A fugitive Cecil Taylor snapshot taken by a customer blown up.

“Vic.” Two women he didn’t know in skirts stood over him, and named some names and he nodded while he had a bite, lifted his face to the dark one with her hand on his shoulder for some reason who told how it was like a duet of the two hands and asked had he been out of New York for a while? “Always getting the hang of it,” he said. “With everything in between,” said the other, who was cooler, not so nice maybe, “but no tonal center (?),” she said, which was correct and he looked at her, her blue eyes still discernible in the light, and when she offered to buy him a drink and said she hadn’t heard the last number before, and received a call on her cell, “New work,” he said.

“Does it have a name?” said the first woman, who was a little wild, personal, but a man in a bow tie, gruff and grizzled, stopped by to say thanks for “Got the World on a String,” he could hardly make out the tune, he introduced himself, he had heard of Vic, and, asking if Vic could play “Dancing on the Ceiling,” seemed in his ironic enunciation to be testing you as if it was a business proposition. The second woman, closing her cell, who was not turned on to whatever, knew Annabella as it happened and this “thing” she was finishing (?), this book (?) (as he lifted his glass to drink his club soda). And something else the woman was saying he didn’t listen to at all, as the first one said, “I’ll give it a name.” “It’s not about anything,” Vic said, “it’s about time.” The first woman laughed and it touched him.

“We heard you were…”—the second woman shrugged—“but you don’t seem that way at all,” she finished.

Two or three men at the bar he knew but didn’t visit, though this was a mistake. All the instruments still packed under the hood of the best instrument of all, laughter behind him leaving well after midnight. A hand of applause.

Two blocks from home and no umbrella, there is their lighted window on the third floor. The worst thing that could happen was so small the rain gave crystalline distance-vision. The worst that could happen absolutely vibrated, yet for it to be so far off and at the same time in you you had to be vast.

The long table, once dining, finds itself strewn with mail, large and small nail clippers, Parent-Teacher notice, intermediate algebra like a coffee table book, and there a stranger at the edge a half-tumbler of coke, an ice cube surfacing. He heard Lang’s door click. A photo album open on the floor. “Who was here?” He knew the answer as he asked. Lang came out in boxers. “That guy Flyte (?).” “Flyte!” “He buzzed.” “You let him up?” “I thought you forgot your keys.” “You let him in?”

By a street window the recliner. On the piano a Post-it flagging the music stand.

“That’s what you do,” the boy faltered.

“You ask who it is,” the father a father who has to keep to the question yet now realizes his son did ask who it was. “I remembered him. He’s big. He knew where you were playing. He knows the owner.” “He got the photo album out. He knew Mom when she was a baby sitter.” “Not only.” “I got to get up in the morning.”

“He’s a session player.” “What’s that?” “Recording studio. I used to hate him.”

“Used to?” Lang hauled on the fridge door and looked inside to no avail. “…Dad?”

On the kitchen table an ice tray loitered.

“He’s not a father,” Vic said. Lang leaning to close the fridge, a snapshot slips its magnet, and his father asks if he remembers Flyte. Not somebody you let inside your house.

“A friend of Mom’s.”

“You knew that.” Lang knew more. “But nowadays he would never just visit.”

“He did.”

“We were rivals once.”

“He’s funny. Mom told me.” The father hears the visit remark passed over. The truth of it, Flyte’s coincidental visit. “Some woman he said came up once after a set ‘misty-eyed’ and asked you to play something and you’d just been playing it.” “He would remember that.” “He smelled.”

“What a boy needs a mom for.” “What’s that?” “Warn you ’bout the people you meet. Not somebody you let inside your house,” Vic said drily. The man has picked up the snapshot of Lang with his tennis racket in the park and tucked it under the magnet.

A silence in the joke bears them into the night sleep-shortened each. Father awake to the rain, some piano voicings, and actually the women at the club.

Is it the third night of an alternative picking up speed? The worst thing he could imagine keeps where it is. A set of nights is asked of him, music, rain, the street. Things others around him knew — that he would be out tonight — so don’t worry how, it doesn’t matter how, like the spit this pretty well-known session player shakes out of his horn when he’s done, who Vic doubts he’s still that close to Annabella Lang. Though in the morning at seven, in the same space light-shifted, half his cereal left, the boy will ask if he played great and who came. Lang had “really wanted to” (as if what stopped him was homework). Two sets, he’d have been there writing up his oral history project, speeding through his math shortcuts at a tablecloth, where they would bring him something to eat. But three sets. So Lang didn’t go. Unfortunately, as it turned out.

The album still open on the living room floor. And now, a New Yorker running late, Lang (whose given name the man had not originally favored) couldn’t stay to hear his dad ask about homework, describe the crowd.

While in his running-late out the door, an industrial-weight backpack looped over one shoulder, Lang mentioned this guy he was seeing after school. Though then the man could regret not telling Lang he’d be late after Parent-Teacher, divided by the boy, the phone, the face of his wristwatch which the hand, knuckles, fingers beyond it can blindly deny. Bent on asking what he and Flyte discussed; and this friend in an upper grade who wanted to meet Vic? — and the piano across the sunny room; the yellow Post-it with four, five named chords; and these broken rhythms that bear you through it all or bop you with doubt and music.

And now, as Vic will tell it at a New York lunch hour side by side with his unmarried friend at a counter that looks out the street window onto the sidewalk, having mentioned that he had to go for Parent-Teacher conferences today, he had taken the breakfast call, seeing “Anna Lang” on ID knowing he’ll be held up, the dishes sinked, framed photos tacking like sailboats on the long, strewn table, Lang’s room a disaster area — hearing that she’d be taking their son to the Cape Friday right after lunch, drive back next Wednesday—

Wednesday! quietly exclaims the lunch friend, entertained, thoughtful.

A hundred and twelve or thirteen hours at Truro, missing three days of school, it was news to the father. “He can get his assignments.” “Who from?” “He can play golf” (Golf? Vic’s lunch friend is appealed to) — miles of beach, the water, the air, fresh fish, great place to work. “Work?” Vic asks his friend, imagining that beautiful coast.

“We’ll pick him up… — hmm,” she goes.

“I don’t think so.” “You what?” “He’s not crazy about missing school.”

“It won’t make a particle of difference,” lips, tongue, teeth audible, a darkness of pomposity he loves her for still a little, “He can get his assignments,” she said in a different voice, partner annihilating partner… — “and what are you offering for the weekend?”

“More than a weekend.”

“What did you” (the friend speaking with his mouth full) “do?” who, not having been there, wouldn’t know what followed. “She said I left him alone last night.” “She knew about the gig?” “I think from Flyte; remember Flyte?” Vic gives back a look, knowing less than he implies. “Said I would ask him.”

“She already had,” the friend guesses, high-fives a mute laugh side by side at the narrow counter positioned up against the wide window like city choices. The view right on top of sidewalk passers-by, two women screaming with laughter, two men importantly grim.

And something else for this New York friend not to hear, who asks, “What’re you leaving out?” when Vic eyes his wristwatch and mentions Parent-Teacher again.

“Oh,” (for Vic’s cell vibrated against his leg groaning now under the counter below the remaining half of his sandwich) “she said we need to see a lawyer.”

“She’s right,” returns the other, easing off his stool, Lou’s Corner calling. Vic’s cell proffered — encore Saturday, this time drums and bass fer sure.

Already! You see? Friend would try to come. And nobody’s business the music now under way at lunch-break in your head persuading you that Flyte visited the apartment because he was sent. A lunchtime pang. “What are you leaving out?” the friend eyes the half a sandwich left on the open wrapper.

Scrolling up son’s e-mail, as a matter of fact, the wreck of Lang’s room this morning monitored by multi-gigabyte computer screening an ecstatic brunette her mouth and cell-phone open, DOWNLOAD THE HOTTEST RINGTONES. One attachment the father would not access beyond, that is, the beginning “Confessions of a Strung-out…”—(Hustler, he supplies) fool that he is to let his son’s mother in this far — who is said lately to tell her own real-life story smartened up (one understands) not only in photos but through some applied buzz thinking. This person who zooms in on science she knows measurably zero probably about.

“You done?” the lunch friend indicates the half a sandwich, and asks if Anna had Parent-Teacher today? Didn’t ask her. Didn’t ask her when? his friend echoed and slipped the unwanted sandwich-half into a Ziploc produced from his raincoat pocket. Well, a second phone call coming in on your way out you’re freed from — an after-thought he figured for Annabella Lang to ram home, left for the machine to sustain, while the neighbor’s bacon confidently frying was inhaled on the early morning landing and the boon of coffee smoking through floor and wall, embedded grain of somebody’s toast, could be enough…“You think my life is out of control,” Vic said. “The opposite,” said his lunch friend. Keep talking, his parting words to Vic.

Shuttering his day, a dark light from the remembered album. Abandoned open on the floor last night at the onset of rain by the owner of, as Vic recalled, a vintage Chrysler Le Baron convertible. Open to a twilight shot Flyte evidently had turned to of father holding baby witnessed by a cactus in bloom facing a page of Flyte in swim trunks bellying, his big mouth open, a weathered Cape Cod railing. Page after page, all equal for Vic, who recalls Flyte on a band stand, slotting his trumpet vibrato at the head of the pianist, who recalls now an emotional Japanese banger, out of the picture, but a New York tennis court or men playing dominoes Saturday on Columbus and somewhere a hook-and-ladder shot cornering an avenue. Carole King at a Christmas keyboard, smiling just huge. A drenched child, unmistakable, playing with the active sprinkler head in the park, his bare buddy shoving, hey not taking turns, and, accompanying the crystals of water light, unseen little girls remembered singing nearby. Lang tottered down a hall half out of focus; or in a high chair at the breakfast table fed spoonfuls of sweet potato. Filaments of light from the day saved. Vic and Anna ensconced on the couch paging each loaded sleeve of an album backward — when he got home he would have to find that shot — the photographer their son clicking just before a fight — over Vic’s piano “daydreams” but really over money, before she got up and left the room.

At school parents in line let past the security desk stride for the stairs to sign up outside class rooms, Global, English, Math (Mrs. Mukta regrettably absent) — Biology time falling into a three-minute hour-glass: the teacher when it’s your turn respectful, spectacles on a cord, tapping a laptop keyboard, granting that Lang “gets it very quickly”—staff-eyes blinking, a whole-face blink. “Then he…”

“Coasts?” from a smiling father.

“…Mmm…Yeah, ‘coasts.’” Why did father not believe teacher? Earring? Laptop? The sound of his yeah? His human mmm?

The boy’s depth is why.

Did this Global guy know the substitute, T.P.? Everyone knew T.P. A stained Mets mug recalls a lunchtime pang, a hunger.

Yet returning home late in the day, at the touch of the phone machine button expecting Anna’s voice and on the way to the piano across the room liking the bare floor better than the rug they used to have in front of the bookcase, hearing his own chords before a finger meets the keyboard, he must hear from not Anna but Flyte that morning message of, for Lang curiously, these weird little thoughts: Hey make a day of it if you’re around (?)… — the pool and diving board in Flyte’s building, some stuff he could show Lang uptown, a lab at Einstein open on the weekend, this world-class acoustic guitar maker, a recording studio, later hear some music at Déjà Blue (“gotta coupla—”).

Saturday with someone else’s kid? Did Déjà Blue print tickets? Would the piano tell you Flyte hasn’t been with Anna for a while, or do you tell the piano, hand over hand, a flock of nestings peeling off one after another? Tracing the music, putting off kitchen hunger. Two hands engrossed, he’s alone here.

Until the pianist hears one soaring gong from the church down the street — five-fifteen? when an aroma of beef roasting says it’s six-fifteen, a warmth of apples baking somewhere.

One hand before it has stopped advancing answers the other in reverse. This standard tune about “the world” knows actually the real music against his mingled steps, Bach to Bartók, before they’re gone. All the things felt like math not known till they are. Voicing he will use Saturday no matter what, with company on the bandstand this time, he’s been promised. The question lurking between three felt hammers that can stick keeps clear of the keys.

Lang is late, and this will be the third evening of the question The worst that could happen. Yet the worst has changed.

In the darkening flat, why you’re not alone after all.

“Coo-wul,” a stranger’s changed boy-raw voice sounds from the corner of the player’s eye, flattering him—“John Lewis b’hind the beat—” “Dad—” but Vic’s hands are on their own, what are they playing? “—unheard of, just when you get it, it’s gone it’s—”

The lock had turned almost without a key. “It’s gone you’re somewhere else, man—” “Dad, this is French,” “—Mister Wills, I mean,” the father standing to shake hands only to see the floor beyond the piano not noticed before, “Where’d the photo album get to?” “You see?” Lang aside, to his friend. “Gone, it tells you. Brubeck.” The man looks at the boy. “Nice crib,” this keg of a boy looks around olive-faced, a dyed blond way senior to the tall thin one performing the intro.

“Is it on the bookshelf?” Lang answers, but watching French, who hangs onto the man’s hand, “This kid’s so lucky” (the other hand on Lang’s arm) “doesn’t know how lucky.”

“You see?” says Lang to Vic.

French looking at the books, “You got a gig Saturday, Lang said. We’re planning a sleep-over, I think.”

But how could the photo album get to the bookshelf? It had lain open on the floor this morning. “Hey wait a minute,” Vic calls from the kitchen, unsure but only in a way. What is there to give the boys? — they’re hungry probably. Two-night sleep-over French seemed to be outlining this weekend that begins tomorrow afternoon. It seems to embrace the man, or is it his absence?

A calendar on the fridge door counts the days, two and a half cokes inside and a still-dark-blue broccoli, a yellow apple, green mango, peanut butter; while French — it must be him — is tapping at the piano in the other room, Lang speaking low in retort.

But what happens Saturday?

The one fingering a tune turned to some thirds and more one-fingering. Until French occupying the kitchen doorway seems to block access into the living room, like claiming something for his own, but softly, charmingly, “Gotta bounce,” he confides, “deal with parent-teacher fallout,” his mom will call Vic.

“I don’t know about this sleepover,” said Vic.

“Kid really knows how to handle his mom on the phone,” French waves bye turning out of the kitchen doorway. “You really do it,” is for the father, probably, though Vic hears three chords and it is Lang who breaks off.

A music unheard of, the strange boy had said.

“Dad isn’t he cool?” “Does he smoke?” “He gets you.” “What’s he want?” “The piano.” Was it this eleventh-grader arresting the pianist with praise? Or the pianist has just found a music that will go on all weekend? “He lives with his mom, he’s in T.P.’s senior physics, they love it…”

And it loves them? it comes to you at the keyboard, half-knowing what that means, like with the music you and Lang hear at dinner, musicians not just playing but hearing you.

“I don’t know about the sleepover.”

“Dad.”

“Friday and Saturday? We don’t know them.”

“What else is new?” Has the question changed? — third night, fourth night? “You could play an instrument.” “Like piano?” “Tuba.” Kid laughs, eyes blind shut, head on the pillow, needing a haircut, hanging with Dad, who wound up with this blond son. “Drums,” he offers. Sax. Flugelhorn. Marimba. Sitar. The organ. Stand-up bass, though that’s a lot to carry, the father knows. French’s mom will call Vic. The man will play Saturday what has come to him on a piano hearing it under his hands, wondering if he should have kept Lang home Friday night, which Lang would not hear of. This French, maker of deals, older and God knows what. The difference between the boys.

Chords startling in their direction peeling out among the tables. Work he has found by chance, by accident, word of mouth, he didn’t ask who’d given the manager the old tracks of him backing up the singer from Chicago and would not ask, but he figured he knew. What this Vic’s been up to for how long, the girl on mad drums ruminating seemingly this question, Where’s he been? — and now the old guy bent tall around his gut vibe reminds the pianist how a standup bass can sound stunned — where’s he been, man, L.A., K.C., Atlanta? What this off-the-radar piano player been thinking all alone did he even know? Winging through a first set Saturday he felt drums protecting the groove snaring the in-betweens, the support lifting him by each elbow, and for all the differences, one that is so particular, so slender it seems far from ever being known, a thought at large that could drain you like the gift of staying home all this time not out of town at all, and then middle of the first set a hard thought like a problem not even music would solve, gut-hard thing, and there, and temporarily done for in the second of silence split by a second of knowledge an instant comes before the serious applause for your turn, just your work some passing of yourself out into work and greed so inside the chords if you would call them that, pieces of mind glancing out along the bar against which Bill Flyte leaning back on his elbows is not looking good, and past the dim tables.

Then right as you hit three chords to start the second set and, quick pedaling, looked up at the drummer and just then the forgotten cell phone on Vibrate strong against the leg when two underage kids are stopped by Bianca in her beret at the lectern who heard the short one out who points to the tall one with him just as the bass solos like a velvet horn, and Bianca, shaking her head, consults the bandstand and the pianist, who keeps his left hand going grabbing a drink, while Flyte signaled her and isn’t it also that the kid French’s vibe’s weirder than even he knows in his brain that she lets them in. Tall kid, squat kid, drinker unshaven whose space welcomes them, it’s Flyte, his treat, the music’s all that matters, out of Vic’s hands.

And what follows up and down the keyboard so fractured inward on itself overheard among the tables and bar stools almost like what the player absorbs — turns the tune to chord, the man will think, frees the question into little bits if you let it later that has changed from where it was last week from what’s the worst, to what’s the best. French and Bill on their stools going at it and French on his cell phone and Lang in shadows seeing all the time seeing, and just at the end standing forward off his stool though how Vic could have seen Vic didn’t know; for then, in the deepening crackle of happiness and surprise that was the hand they got at the end of the great second set, Vic found his hand soon clasped by the woman from Wednesday in both of hers, his hand nearly kissed by her telling him the name of his piece in case he didn’t have one was “Coastline—Coastline,” wouldn’t that do? — and he was taken with her though felt it cost him when he looked up and the boys were gone and so was Flyte.

Ol’ bassplayer’s backing him up even during the little chat they’re having at the bar though Vic’s song keeps to himself against the stories from K.C., L.A., Baltimore, “You’re Cecil just round the edges but more ‘Speak Like a Child’ but it’s your own note, heah?” “Word,” Vic murmured. “Did I hear you in Paris?” the bassman looks at his glass.

And all he learned from Bianca, so discreet and kind of pretty shaking her head, before they eventually got up to play the third set was that Bill Flyte was taking the boys home and the short one had told her to tell Vic he would be in touch. (“Word.”) You almost wanted to confide in Bianca — a passing urge. Well, sometimes the piano player is here, and his hearers who may dislike him like the solitary Cecil Taylor or like him like the Converse-sneakered dwarf Michel Petrucciani are there; and what they know of you in your work need not include the absence of your son which makes you suddenly play for him, as if some limbo could equal with a power of three or three hundred the themes music imagines into us; still, there is the player and there are the listeners who even come and go during a set or, absorbed, forget to reach for their drinks,

And now words of a standard everyone knows sung without any warning suddenly by the hot young drummer but the sounds alone — so Bianca craned a mike to drummer’s bare shoulder who solos drums and voice like native of some neighboring world or sounds from before words so, the drum solo ending for Vic’s sparse accompanying chords and bassman’s drawing a bow you hadn’t noticed across the great strings backing the surprise singer up, the trio are all soloing at once and you had her still making those her-own-thing more-than-do-wops off mike now. And in the darkness of the house a clapping like rapids in a chasm of your fucked life, near at hand Vic’s fan the Wednesday woman is calling “Coastline, Coastline” for them to do next though already played in the last set.

So playing it again like something unheard-of this time until Vic could see it on the keys and hear it come and go, something to have accomplished completing the third set like a double encore. That’s it.

But where’s the still-nameless woman who’d asked for Coastline? Not where she was but at the bar. And Flyte’s just back, tipping back a fresh bottle of beer, his back against the bar, taking her aback, arguing her down almost.

Vic will lose the argument with his cool arriving to take the woman’s hand as Flyte took his beer with him and tossed back over his fat shoulder, “We heard that number — been there, done that. You don’t quit when you’re ahead. Your kid knows.” For others to hear still happy with the music, the trio, the evening. But personalities are always good to get into in this day and age no matter what the work was saying and Vic felt a strange audience and for just a second or two shares a blessed smile with the woman who has something to say to him but he has to go after Flyte, though then he heard his name called by Bianca as he’s out the street door and another voice.

Across the street the horn-player Flyte slid into his convertible. This itself seems to start the power roof, same old Chrysler. Pale canvas top risen reptilian against a wind-blown rain shower from the City. A cry of tires, headlamps swung right, then left but here sprung out of a tight space the car finds the narrow street when Vic steps off the curb slinging his arm like a send-off and slapping the rear fender to his surprise, safe by an inch, his onetime rival always present no more than what waits in the mostly potential trouble of the City. Yet the chassis wrenched into a skid braked backward to frame in the open window the driver’s face so you’ve forgotten the worst thought of all till the insulting words, “That’s a great kid. You don’t deserve him.”

Vic has already reached for Flyte for it was bound to be the wrong joke, and fists a handful of lapel and the door comes with him because Flyte, hand on handle, won’t be drug through the window. Let go, Flyte trying to stand up gets cuffed into the door frame. Then backhanded somehow back into the seat, cheek raked, banging his head on the door frame, he keeps talking, “You had a gig, look out it doesn’t get around.”

Convertible’s tail-lights gone down the street. Vic’s through with stories, not that there’s only music, though voices could help all alone. It is his son’s calling from the lighted double-doors of Lou’s Corner, which is not a corner and lacks any Lou anyone ever knew of. The boy was standing there and with him Bianca with all that make-up. Where can Lang have been? And now the Coastline woman.

“Who was that?” the boy said, looking back at the women on the sidewalk; “she knew you.” “She came the other night,” said the father, telling the cab driver where they’re going—“unknown to me,” Lang believes him. It’s not back to French’s tonight for Lang, but home, his call. He’d been in the Men’s Room, so Vic hadn’t seen him. “Bill Flyte hit it off with French, I guess,” said Lang. “So?” “One night was enough.” Tired, maybe gloomy, “He said he got you the gig,” said Lang to the window. “You hammered him.”

“’Fraid so. He was at a disadvantage. Especially him.”

“I know.”

Man makes a sound. “I was mad.”

What could the boy mean, I know?

“He try to run you down?” “You know he didn’t.” “He’s got a convertible.” “Anyway never open the door unless you know who it is.” “What was the number they asked you for once and didn’t know they just heard it?” “A Horace Silver oldie.” The boy knew it. Waking up a little describing the movie Tommy, watched Friday with French’s mom, who couldn’t stop talking. Did Lang take music lessons? Was Lang’s Mom at Parent-Teacher? Ever met Billy Joel’s daughter? Lang’s mom know Roger Daltrey? Her photographs were of movie people. French’s mom met Ray Manzarek once and he was surprisingly nice. Did Lang’s mother go to the West Coast a lot?

The cab has pulled over. “She phoned,” Vic adds. They know who they mean.

“I got back to her,” the father guards whatever he has won.

The man has scanned the bookcase. He’s fouled his nails on Flyte as Flyte would foul your family.

Lang’s still got his clothes on under the covers. Yet he almost won’t drop off. “Did I read what she sent, what did I think of—”

“Confessions I hear,” the man cuts in too quick.

“The science,” Lang continues methodically, battery low. “The story’s one thing, the…” the boy made that little funny thinking sound of his.

“The science?”

“There was a vibraphone player in it who used to get mad.” Lang made his little sound, funny.

“In her…?”

“That’s when I kinda quit. She’s away this weekend.” The man was waiting.

“I mean how’re you gonna prove it?”

“True?”

“No, T.P. said they’re so small they’re like light years…a string.”

— he’s been meaning to bring up their three nights years ago, twelve years ago, Lang so newly named, sounds he heard coming from the crib three nights running. “Dad? See…string vibration isn’t a tone or anything. It’s…Dad?”

“So what did you tell her?”

“It’s not a hum or music or — at least I don’t think it is.”

“What is it?”

“A particle, each vibration, a particle is all I know. Infinitesimal literally.”

“Infinitesimal literally,” Dad makes a contribution.

“Some open, some closed, but they’re so small they’re light-years away.”

“But here at the same time.” “In matter. She tells it like it’s…vibes or something.” “Well, it’s amazing.” “What?”

The man didn’t know.

It was not a good theory anyhow.

T.P. said.

“But it brings all the forces together.”

It’s way past even the idea of bedtime.

“What did you tell her?”

“…Good?…T.P.’s maybe going to teach architecture in a junior math class if they give him the job. He drew these arrows on the board. Vectors (?).”

“Vector, yes.” “A force between—”

“Vector—” the boy, sleepy, liked the syllables—“the root idea…”

“Of what?” A sympathy between them. Tuned, with one dropping off.

“…Night, Vic.”

It will hang like the friend’s lunchtime question and its branches how many sleepless nights, this first name: a first for father, yet for some secret Vic the pianist too.

The man can see he’s missed his chance to bring up those sounds from the crib one night out in the country far from here very late, when he got up and went and listened and the baby was asleep or awake or in between. By the third night the man had learned the sounds—eh, ih… which finds a dee, and then a lah. Sounds attaching themselves. A nursing baby in its crib.

You wanted to know what this creature knew.

Then the sounds maddeningly changed. To ones he didn’t know at all. Twelve years ago. Lang is asleep. The question What would be the worst thing asks itself, now free of the passion and truth of work, for every night gets late: will the boy have to go and live with his mother? Like a difference between two parties that is the agreement. Is it the worst? And was it she who dropped by yesterday to more than borrow the photo album? That was it.

NIGHT SOUL

The first night, the man woke to a string of sounds, expelled, quite awful stabs of voice throat-rasped, deliberate, from the crib across the room. So that for a time he felt the person there to be his equal, and he feared for him. In trouble over there, in a small, accurate way the infant is possessed and on his own, and maybe the man can’t help his son, maybe he can’t do anything about it. It is even part of him out of control.

A shallow-sleeping family man who will wake in the middle of the night anyway, he woke to the woman breathing next to him, and to the room in the desert, his eyes opening on the window at the foot of the bed, where the screen was ripped, burst, jagged as a wave with an infinitesimal fire — like steel or flesh — telling him something has gotten in here, an animal, a hand. While the terrible sounds from the crib across the room—ah, ih, uh, eh—choked-out, cut-off, not asking for anything, were vowels, he realized. As if this is what you do waking alone: you speak, even if you are not talking yet; for anyhow the room is awake. So that getting out of bed beside the breathing of his wife, he would make a noise the baby would hear — who would want his company, or hers. But these vowels uncannily at work, the child is choking or being taken away or accosting whatever it is, so what’s his father doing here in bed? what is he waiting for?

Like a comrade he made his way across the cool bricks, he’s with his son in a moment—flowed there to him and stands above the crib in whose immaterial depths a blink of the mouth locates the face. Where are his eyes? Darkened, do they stare behind their lids? They’re asleep in some way and distinct from the child that is his, whose mouth moves as the moon in the window above the crib draws a cloud in front of it. The kid’s in one piece, thank God, thank the stars, thank the desert, but the sounds begin again, for they were no dream of the man’s zig-zagging away through low piñon pines and stunted, ancient-elbowed juniper the way the phone seems to have rung as you wake upon the waste of future and past which dreams are. But where are these sounds coming from if his son was not greeting a predator or giving a name to an intruder? Why, they’re just practical sounds the baby’s actually practicing which the father hears as if his own good depended on it and will try to answer.

And so it happens that he is learning these sounds, like letting them strike what hasn’t yet quite woken up in him: the ah, the ih. Squeezed off the palate hard, or choking, cut off, not hoarse at all in the dark but blunt, certain, and alone. The man’s no clawed intruder but the father here, a witness; ready for anything — to be his son’s equal, who is alone and launching these sounds, one that goes far, just the intent of it, while the next, you could swear, sends its breath at some near thing. Hearing is like answering him, even if they are no match for each other. He is to be answered. The man believes in it in the middle of the night. It’s what he will tell him one day: answer — not do what they say, but don’t not answer. If tongue-tied, at least make a noise. Go agh, go aiee. Come back at them in a whisper. But don’t not answer. Did the man just learn this, it feels so fresh? Seed planted in him in the middle of the night.

For the vowels are brave. They are things more right than words; but, as the man heard them, there and here are what they apparently say—ah and ih, a cast and a return; while the next, the uh, as in “mother,” accepts what belongs to you, to this basic person, it measures just this. So to the man it meant, what you found; while the next, the eh, as in “again,” stops what you found and holds it to what it is: accosts it; accosts what? the moon moving? a knife of reflected light cut by the ceiling beam? or a memory you can’t have all by yourself? As good as an owl whistling in the arroyo, hearing like this, or some fool — hearing there, here, found, accosting.

The infant whispered like thought, old things are what he whispers into his thinking. The time has come, vowel cries that are about to come again that the man standing around naked in the middle of the night is learning, they are not to him, they are only what woke him. This creature in the crib talks out loud and with something at stake, but in an order more raw and stately—“uh, ah, eh, ih, aw.” He knows what he’s doing — and to his father’s ear it is found, there, accosting, here, just between the two of them a seesaw sense more theirs now, less to be feared.

Though hearing the aw sound hard and creaking as a bird, foraging and unconsciously alert, the man made little or nothing of it, and felt free to. So he stepped back so as not to wake the child with his body or familiarity; for if the kid is asleep after all, he could open his eyes that seem hidden by their lids from the darkness and the breathing of the man, and see the man, who now thinks proudly where this is, where they live — a desert state, vast or actually weird—“beloved,” he likes to think, who, waking to the gash in the screen enhanced by the moonlight, forgot he already knew how it got ripped. Waking to these god-awful sounds and the damaged window screen which his eyes told his brain was part of it, he thought Animal, an animal had leapt in out of the desert. But no high-hipped bobcat far from its rock or lost bear cub or snouted coati with a taste for the fruits of the night that jumped out of somebody’s truck on the Interstate is going to try a stunt like this. And in his heart like what he knew all along it was of course the same mange- and sore-ridden half-blind dog of yesterday who couldn’t bear the noonday sky, the bright ground, and, wanting the shadow of the house, went for the open bedroom window while the family were having lunch.

His son’s blood is safe from that dog who wouldn’t drink or eat and didn’t even roll his eyes up when he brought two dishes in and then brought the baby in to show him this hounded creature, muzzle on the brick, too tired to have rabies or plague, where he had ended up collapsed with one hind leg out, the hide caked with adobe dirt.

A personal sigh has deepened the room, his wife’s, and it threatens them with her perspective. She turns. She hears with her body, her mind, declines to talk in her sleep, hears her husband if necessary, yet will sleep on until, toward dawn, hearing the baby burst out crying, she will probably get out of bed in one motion, go and take him, hold him and nurse him. So the man knows from her breathing she is not doing any serious hearing of these sounds right now. Which come again in the moonlight, vowels in a whole new order, called and attempted, or brave; not crying, but uttered.

Plus the o-ish aw-ish one the man hears as aw now — vowel five, it’s his.

They open to each other without at all getting mixed up together, to his ear like talk he hears in the kitchen of a Hopi farmer, a dog barking outside in the dusty wind of the mesa. Sounds coming your way, stopping short. What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it. At nine months and five days, is his son at it already in a tongue of his own? What does it take? only the breath cut off in his throat that primitively rasps its old use. It goes back into him, a spirit — a way that’s all his. That’s what it is: his son’s language under cover of night brought here from far away. But the man is the father, he’s got too much at stake to let himself believe such things any longer tonight. But has he ever believed them? The aw pushes the speaker’s lips, he knows them in his sleep. He pushes them across, so self-possessed by the nighttime vowels. There, here, found, accosting, was where the man came in. But then, found, there, accosting, here.

Are you all right? the woman murmurs more or less remote, as if she is thinking of him somewhere else. Mmhmm, he says, close to his son. Is it that his wife does so much, that she feeds the child? He does not envy her. What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it. Is it a madness in the infant’s voice which is only nature? And has the man ever believed such things as these coming to him in the baby’s voice? He is aware of a long, winding, affirmative answer but it is going out of him somewhere else and he does not get it. He is going to know his son’s language. It is a son’s language. You can do that much.

It’s changing, though, it’s “eh, uh”—accosting, found—yet the known sounds ih and ah after them have changed their feeling to if and dark, ih, ah—with once again that aw which is little more than a neighbor sound following from the “dark” ah that’s almost a stranger, an act. So what the man’s getting with accosting is: Only by accosting, you find — and only if dark.

Thinking it, he can understand it, the baby at nine months old years from such advice which comes best not from the father anyway but from elsewhere, from outside. Is it not from his son at all but through his son? — like how the man will speak to the baby (You’re ready for a nap) but be speaking to his wife, the real other person here? The baby’s mouth opening in the dark, or pursed; nursing the old life of these sounds, practicing it. But there’s a thing somewhere the man has to do. Is it the aw? On his breath almost more than his voice, he says back, eh, uh, ih, ah.

The moon widening from behind a map of clouds stands harsh. Well, the man might be wrong but it’s as if the mind of the probably sleeping infant thinks over what he just heard. There comes a startling new order, “uh” before “eh”—found; yet not accosting, but again. And ih, ah, but not with the feeling of here, there or if dark, but of a reaching, a stem. And aw. Which he thought was him, the father, taken down into what he might once have been — it shows him that these sounds might be not feelings or meanings. Does this baby blink at the moon, squint, not know the man leaning over the crib rail looking into the crib at him and the kicked-off blankets; or is he asleep?

The man crossing the room to go back to bed has his theory. It’s his way of being crazy about his son, of not completely waking when he’s hardly been asleep. The idea is that all this is coming from his son — it’s not the child waiting to have something to imitate. It’s late and not much of a theory, it helps the man hang onto the sounds.

Sleeping or waking he will go along with his son, who was asleep surely and the man heard him talk in his sleep as if it were himself for years and years. While during the next day the man didn’t think of it much at all. For during the day, in overalls, the child watches.

You were up and around last night, she says. The man tells her he might have been sleepwalking the way it felt. You were standing at the crib, she says, did you cover him up? He doesn’t think so. She tells him just how tired she was. Go on, he says, for she’ll hear what he means, they accept her stamina and will try not to waste it. Go on? she says, but they agree, she will go on being what she is. You were talking again, she adds, meaning in his sleep. Are you sure? he inquires. Closing in on baby as if there’s no difference between what she does and what the man does is the light of their attention powered by this chosen desert light let in by windows that belong to them embedded cave-like in huge, sandy-surfaced swells of adobe stucco. The baby, to whom the parents talk, sees them as if they’re just talking. The man goes grrr, and, suddenly airborne out there at a height of six feet above the ground, the road-runner, their rare, most serious and elusive, long, violently shy, narrow-bodied road-runner, is seen to fly exposed thirty yards across the front of the house. While, closer, against the broad window sash of unfinished oak a zebratail lizard not supposed to be in the area comes into focus unseen by their son, who smiles, as if he’s forgotten last night, and brags with a measured Ha, ha.

Yet at bedtime you forget that all day you’ve waited for when he won’t be imitating his parents, but sharing a language of his own. And in the man’s sleep it is the second night, and at the same hour the baby speaks out, nine months, six days.

And he’s there for him in five seconds to find spread upon his son’s nose and mouth like a flame of milk the pale seal of night-light from a moon gone no higher than the broad southern sky but ready to go higher hauling indifferently this southwestern sea the desert, and the boy with it. Last night’s launched vowelish tries go into each other with a speed of going somewhere, it’s practice but it’s a new night, it’s not a thing he’s saying or some outcry, but soundings. So last night’s work is left behind with the man. Not as if he’s stuck with it. But as if the names his son needed have now been given — to the neighbor’s wolf, the high call of the pallid bat feeding on the ground, faces of parents, the hand he examines in the moonlight with his shadowed eyes, the mobile that sways above an intruder’s hand meeting the crib rail, the dog you expelled that the baby would not be surprised to see couched low on the brick floor. These names now made into raw orisons equal what’s outside him, and the father can tell from the uninterrupted tone that the speaker is right. Is that it?

And for the instant that the man adds to his theory that what his son learned by hearing himself voice last night he now puts to use, the man nearly sees what he and his wife were really talking about like almost recalling a dream he had on waking — but catches up with his son and with this old, direct way of doing things.

A joint tenderness of the parents — was that it? — the child who knows things from the very beginning? The man is not ashamed to hang onto it and to what he has heard in the night. Was he the intruder? Halfway to meet him he meets the baby’s glittering eyes, and he won’t back into the shadows. Nice person, he thought his wife murmured. Am I awake the way she is asleep? he thinks. He whispers his son’s name: it means that the child has at stake this awful, right way of putting things together. Mammal messages able to evolve privately between beings. The crib a little less dark tonight, his smile asks nothing, not that he be picked up. His eyes follow what he is uttering because it goes somewhere.

When did the vowels grow these lids, these frictions and touches of maturity expelled with them from his palate, almost a gh before the ah, almost an m before the eh? The aw comes by itself still, but then is gaw, terribly alone like a watchman’s warning, the uh has acquired an “m” after it, the ih finds a dee but the speaker is sticking onto the sounds the father learned and thought he knew, more than one sound, and the man hears lah, which he puts together with the dee to sing without song, and again this gaw, like another go.

The man, who’s keeping up — all he wants is to know what the child knows. The infant isn’t your equal, no matter how you try the strength of this talk. The infant is almost not there, dead you might say to this world, not a fit companion. Still, the man’s idea is that these sounds now mix for work, and the child has sent them to a place away from him, and they join what they name or get stored in animals or what-all. Confident they’ve gone, he returns to the man, knowing him. You find a grin in the dark, and no complaint, no retort of, “You started it; you can pick me up.” His baby son is unusual in that he has now closed his eyes, his night’s work done. What is the father to do? Touch his wife and wake her? He hears his name but just murmured at a considerable distance.

The brick floor cool as tiles is lower than the outside ground, and he stands at the window by the bed and looks through the ripped screen at the desert risen by another scale entirely. The man was closing in on the infant’s way of sounding the distances between here and the life indifferently around him, no matter what the infant thinks he’s doing. Aren’t these older sounds a power that his son might for now give into his father’s keeping?

It is the second afternoon when she says, You were whispering to him last night. He was whispering, the man replies. Well, you were, because it kept waking me up, she insists. But it was hard to hear, her husband goes on. But that’s why I kept waking up, I had to strain my ears to hear; it wasn’t like when you talk in your sleep, if I only got it all, the woman replies. Aw, you were asleep, the man tells her, never asking what she heard him say, though sometimes it sounds like predictions, according to her. You weren’t whistling to the owl — were you calling to the ground bat again? she asks in friendship, it didn’t sound like you what I heard in my sleep. It wasn’t, he says. Maybe you were thinking out loud, she says to her husband. I wish I could, the man laughs. She laughs and then so does the baby, who says, more than laughs, ah ah ah, a baby in daylight. When are you going to fix the screen? she gets in as if this was what she really had in mind — don’t do that in the middle of the night. Gah, he tells his son softly, guh; and la-dee, he practically whispers from memory.

The child won’t answer, it doesn’t work like that at this age — won’t answer at all for a while. But then the man hears, Mmuh mmuh—the two parts it’s made of. Is it word from the night shared by son and father now going toward day? You don’t want what you said parroted back. Did you hear that? the woman asks. The man says he believes the baby’s putting two things together. What things? she would like to know. This uh, he says. What uh?

Something he’s working on, the man reports. They contemplate each other, and contemplate the baby. Well, I thought it was “Mamma,” the woman says. Could be, her husband grants. Is it precocious? she wonders addressing him and only him. The man, who might be losing ground, picks his wristwatch off the kitchen table, remembering the screen. What do we really know, he replies. His son says a short “a,” as in man — a, a, a.

Three nights, three foolhardy nights he and his son almost spent together on this. Waking, the third night, to the now invisible screen by the bed, dogs to be heard from the ranch a mile and a half away, and, as if still further, the higher, thin-throated whoop of a coyote or two like answers of the land, the father doesn’t hear the son; and then he does. The man has slept way past the middle of the night. What has he missed?

The phone ringing? Would that be his talking in his sleep, predicting things according to his wife? He’s out of bed distracted for a second by a tiny fire a mile away, but it is his sleep still with him and with it names, a string of names. When did tonight’s soundings begin? He can hear the baby’s body. The woman breathes what sounds a little like Hi. Sure enough the moon’s in a new position (though why the man has seldom taken the trouble to learn, or remember), but through the crib bars the white-sleeved arms are pointing curiously and with that solitary power. Yet the man does not like what he hears so much. Less blunt, less certain. A nearly whispered “Da” does not mean the father, nor is it cut-off or terrible. The eyelids are illuminated by the moon. His child is beautiful. There is a meaningless gah with some rrr of the day caught inside it. An old eh that accosts nothing but itself and is less like breathing than like a willingness. An agh agh that is in the dark and neither there nor anywhere except dreaming maybe of day. And a slow ha ha ha, and the gaw that was alone but tentative. And, without the deh, another sound breathed with some prior seriousness the man’s heart hopes for or asks something of.

From his sleep names flood him, animals, places. Along the horizon of the Jemez Mountains dawn could look like this line of sky to the west below stratus and, he thinks, altostratus cloud lids. Two horses in the dark lift their muzzles and are shadowy friends of the house some nights so that you see them best by not looking right at them, the rump of the paler Appaloosa obscured by the thick, dark little quarter horse. The half moon passes among the clouds and his wife makes a curved shape asleep but readier than the man, who has never quite heard himself talking in his sleep — predicting, according to this woman — but has been dropping everything these last three nights to learn a language the speaker now may be letting go, or letting be, in favor of another. And what did the man drop, that went away through piñons and juniper like a snake that wanted no part of you. I tried, he says, and the child rolls to his knees and sits up waking. Yes? the man says — but the child is not talking, he’s getting set to cry and he cries terribly and piercingly, seeing the man: it means, You are not what I want, you are what I’m yelling at. The child, for the first time the man can recall, pulls up on the crib rail and stands screaming powerfully. And so it goes.

The man has seen the future and should find tomorrow night that his child has left him with elements no longer of much use and has gone on, although the man leaning down nakedly into the crib and lifting the child out now remembers when he dropped everything what it was he dropped. It was mountains far from here yet just out the window, a campfire, a dog, and two men talking. And he thought that if in his sleep he had put words to it he would see again who those men were.

So the three of them have been in bed for a while, the woman in the middle squeezing her breast from underneath to position the nipple maybe, the infant on the far side of the bed snorting quietly. He woke you up, she murmurs. We’re both talkers, he says, on his elbow, as if he could stay disturbed and awake for good or slip back into shallow sleep. You woke me before you woke up yourself, you said his name, she says, but then you said “uh”—I believe it was “uh”—you said it a couple of times, you were asleep, as if you were thinking something, getting ready to say it.

The man obviously wants to speak, and he covers her breast with his hand. What did you mean, “I tried”? she asks, I thought you were speaking to me.

That it could wait, he says. Oh, good, she sighs. I said his name? he asks. She breathes. Maybe she isn’t answering. Who on earth cares except the man? The child seems done.

The man might be angry, or talking to himself. Drop everything. Drop everything when he needs you, when he calls. And in return he grows up strong. If he needs you or speaks, if he does anything new, drop everything. It was what you were equal to. What did you get out of being equal to it? Well, you got the name of one of those men by a campfire. You’re not really a night person, his wife goes on as if she’s only half asleep, as if this answers what he asked.

Ask him, he replies. And with that he is out of bed and around to the far side and slides an arm and an elbow under the child and the other arm under the head so that his wife lifts her arm which was above the child’s head and he takes the child from her while she turns to face the other way, her husband’s side.

The desert bricks bring some later cold like a harbinger of daybreak against the soles of his feet, and beyond the window screen a scratching on the ground, a jackrabbit’s claw, a neighbor dog remembering, is unanswered by the earth. You have to lower the child, you have to make it seem like there’s no difference between your hands and arms and bones and the crib mattress, almost no motion from one to the other, these are the things that are necessary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSEPH McELROY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He is the author of eight novels and has written dozens of stories, essays, and reviews. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.