BETWEEN US: A BREATHER STILL AT THE BEGINNING

All things to him she was.

But where, then, where, who, what was she?

What is this questionnaire form the report comes in, as if it weren’t her own heroic fault, whatever she thought she’s doing being all things to him? And she wasn’t getting any younger as the world turns, so your launch window gets smaller by the second until it’s maybe ten minutes wide if you want to launch to gain your desired orbit, because everything else is also moving in its directions and you won’t need a computer to process that stuff because women know. But whichever She it is that we relations raise into this window as a trial sacrifice, it was not consciousness alone we raised and targeted-for-Being, but the body she was becoming. Evolution of angel into human seemed illusion it seemed so slow at times. No easy fit, for hear it bump up ahead, grab, grope, grit—this body language we knew in their bones as Earth turned its windows in and out of line with the unknown aim of this evolutionary launch inclining toward undreamed potential. But can angels love inexperience enough to assume it. If build upward or inward, why not downward?

Did we want this grotesque marriage? Which one, even? And grotesque only in practice. And yet inner speech must needs get what it came for. So we relations angel or not will single her out: Grace Kimball—hear the noise. It’s the history of the restless window shade that’s now spent its spring and won’t go up. No matter, the history ignores the shade being broken and our sight-sacrifice in the window speaks for herself. And then we add, against her body’s effort to reject it, that the angel of today aspiring to Change—if that still is a thing in us—will claim the age-old human chance to sacrifice others as part of the package. And if you’re stuck in pecking orders or old coordinates, then along the curve of this new angel revolution (if it makes it), consciousness could make heroes of us all or feel like one more con, or raise or lower itself.

He, Lou, her one husband, medium height, could go to sleep for years to dream through the smoke of double signals all things she was to him: lover, co-breadwinner, co-coughing breakfast-nook-bar celebrant; calm, graceful swimmer to his mad, chugging lapper awash in his own potential; elbow at the movies; sister to him who’d been denied one, daughter-if-she-could-just-make-it to his would-be-power-vacuum-father-surrogate brotherhood; female pocket-billiards pardner once a month at a little West Side tavern with collectible red-and-green traffic light in the window; hostess to his growing problem, yet fair’s fair, both have drunk at length after the latish often not largish din-din of this working life (we hear them in American think, "But it works"—or her think—almost think—and all this awkward-sounding—was this sound their way of seeing things?) or if largish, oft not finished; and have brushed lower gums upward and uppers downward out of the shared tube, lest the proof from mouth to mouth not cancel whiskey-aura with vodka-wash along the route that lines the masses from stomach to gullet to mouth with the aroma smoke of spirits; that winds its fume up from the breadbasket but breath-broken and wind-gapped into old smoky signals blanketed soon out of your mind and to be lost in the next day’s blank; where also she was priestess of belongings and of the vacuum cleaner; mother of what have you (home, him, the object or ruled nucleus of daily life), and she’s daughter, too (throw in daughter with the bath salts); and recorder in scrapbooks (one the untouchable album white with gilt spinal lettering), and sometimes scrapper, scrimper, reminder like a co- or fellow sleeper who—look out!—wakes after twenty years (a "yore") of hours to tell him their dreams (twenty’s overdoing it)— a popular number in the Lincoln Van Winkle system if not quite his and her for it was just shy of ten years—(well, seven and a half)—they stayed together even it off e’en with jagged-jogged fibroid edge like your dream made you live an unnatural grotty voice not yours surely phase it out if you can’t even it out from ten and a half times per week to three and a half per month (or seven times one-half)—"from quantity to quality," she hears him laugh when her back is turned at a baby brunch—and "we" this, "we" that—and back to quantity in its preoccupied absence on the year-and-a-day anniversary of her hearing herself say during a long phone gab so unexpectedly that Lou, whom she was looking at across the living room now less crowded with wood and metal, looked dimly away from the eleven p.m. eyewitness news, "Well what you do," she said down the phone, "is you live with a friend," even it off, as we said, cut it off (ouch-ouch), we heard it said; clean break, hear the soundless snip, the lone hand clapped to the suddenly-not-there-for-you butt—the soundlessness of it wiping the noise and music and gross silence of those dreamable years out like a few late-model hours of our century that along its warp aged the grain of Grace and Lou. And scapegoat of him she also was.

Why "goat"? we many of us pick up the animal name—an animal posing as us?—then sense we asked a question, hovering, for we are not there in them even though they in us mayhap; yet (our) old descent from Insight stands us in good stead for did not we once hear ourselves adrift in the gut feelings of MacDune Scrotus centuries ago?—who really understood angels, defining them as not just Form but Matter too.

Why scapegoat? Because history through scapegoats turns Cruel to Fair, Revenge to Reciprocity, shifts windows to present a parallel sacrifice: so Jim Mayn’s father Mel (upon Sarah’s suicide) is your widowed scapegoat for his ignorance of life’s sweet mystery—when from his office where he’s known for saying, "Let’s look at the history," he came home, though homeward not quite to (and latish) Jim’s penetrating mother—ever late to her who seemed not to leave the house much (when did she? and when did lower Main Street see her? when did Jim’s grandmother up the street see her, her daughter? do we not know?)—and coming home, Mel is tired and yet threatening to bend someone’s ear (though never tweak), even hers, he wants to tell all at the end of the day: about reviewing Willkie’s One World (oh it was his lovely hair and Saint Bernard eyes—Sarah chilled her husband’s fervor—that made you think Willkie the Democrat’s Republican) but Sarah’s not political—never mind the newspaper in the family since long before even her mother Margaret’s continental adventures of the early nineties; or Mel wants to tell about Should we subscribe to the new wire service (i940-4i-ish)—or Mel’s telling (at the end of the day) all about old Pennsylvania cousin running for mayor "over there," for God’s sake, son of if-you-recall uncle who ran from restaurant to restaurant with the dynamite-tossing anarchists during his vacation in Paris, 1894):

. . . while she too is scapegoat—Sarah (if angelwise we many descend on her who one day around the end of the wars put her foot down—but on the sea, we hear added as if in poetry as if we didn’t know as if some additive from unknown within us)—and escaped at least that life: though wasn’t he the one who wasn’t there? (he left to go downtown! Jim’s father, the husband Mel Mayn, if not Grace’s Lou).

Yet some of him she kept. Some Lou. So did she throw away the wrong part? (asked our resident angel rabbi with honed wit resuscitating old MacDune’s athletic twist that the Matter angels are part made of is not really corporeal! —which is why angels can in great numbers occupy one place—whereas a human person) . . .

no Jew Lou, the name that Lou is short for’s, yes, Ripley)—her man, her one-time man with R.R. on the combo-lock (tho no more in it than in all the dumb stuff they employ telepathy to send) attache (maybe nuclear emergency) case who goes such a long time without breathing that maybe we expected him to evolve, easing us of our jittery distance which ‘mung angel relations is code for what went on between them, and on and on—just plain inertia—no crying-out-loud, no fistiquiff, ‘twas mystery why (pir-quoit) they stayed nor split. Man she had come east imagining: until, unseen till then, he materialized and filled the bill, who would be good-looking at a stand-up party and liked by those he told a quiet joke to about insurance that wound up anti-Irish, anti-Scottish, anti-race, anti-French (who cares)—but started not like that (because friendly, not like that at all, as Grace one day after a zingo of a clean-sweep wild energy-rising women-for-women’s sake workshop gently allowed to her dearest young friend Maureen) for Lou was pretty special, it’s what he stumbled into that was wrong, Grace’s homemade white bridal (record-) book gilt spined that would not chemically quite pour down the tube of Manhattan’s vertical Time, if you can wait through the awful mornings which, looking back, seem not so long a wait as the punchline of Lou’s joke when you already remembered it and forgot and remembered and forgot and remembered during the telling, yet really a man who alone with thee would make you an old-fashioned and be talking and/or singing when he came toward you timelessly across the carpeted room at the close of the day and you two were settled in until two hours later you rose to get ready to go out childless to a familiar restaurant—cowboy or Indian {Pir-Quoit-"Why" in Serio-pawn-akee) or fifties-early-sixties French of our latish enceinture-ee we’z find our way through any fog of being spirited to at least one of those restaurants, and as minutes wore on, still undeparted from the apartment (time lapsing into space) with your smoky, lovely fur-collared coat on and, at an ancient distance, the john cistern filling somewhere, you swooped, Grace swooped—and we stooped with her like air seeking incarnation in breath—she swooped, stooped at the coffee table remembering the luminous dividend in her glass, and suddenly a dream she had apart. The man, her what? {P or-quoit) her sleeping-and-swimming pardner, the amiable profile she watched lay out fresh greenbacks for their movie tickets and for a second kept his fingers down on the three dolla’ four dolla’ fi’-dolla’ bill guarding against a wind gusting (it felt) from within the glass booth of the trapped powerful ticket girl—the man (well, Grace loved him—’course she did) he must have been many things to her if, at the crunch when some went, some she kept—the man (he’s Lou: say "Lou, dear Lou") well he is also an elbow to her at one or two a.m. as she had been a scented elbow to him in the movies where a star interrogating another star says a second time but menacingly now, "Come on, you know—you know you know," for if here in their bed Lou’s rib floats her way or his sleeping forearm at that deep mid-time of bed and night seems (and is from his unknown distances determined to contact) that nourishing elbow—what’s its name?—on her side of bed, she can make her elbow be so still at his blind touch, his dragged palm, that her elbow is naked of motion, while she goes on listening with her thence wholly wrist-operated middle-finger pressing— of fingers pressing—down or in or both on the twice or thrice a month rush to meet herself secreting what she had discovered was love, but love in a bag she mustn’t deserve except as such sweet centers of blanketed guilt ambushing its faithful future where flow can no more interrupt flow, not even with angelic scorn conjured of relations sad, unsaid, and fallow-felt.

Yet in those only dark-night more and more slow near silences, she got better: and the months get together a code she takes time for so plain that— to get back to what in later life she kept—the gentle, fun-loving men (Enter, dieted, bearing clothes; Enter, already seated cross-legged) some freed: open as their bare, under-carpeted loins who in future (with firmed-up, ever young, well-swung near-myth) filled the shadow cast there by that part of Lou that Grace kept—the aborted son-of-Grace, the brotherly Son in Lou—loved (these new, light men) to sit around her furnitureless Body Room (these gentle, dieted men) and love to hear and like to do what she up-frontally asked including that they say right out what they wanted (that is, done) (that is, to them), sharing information, feeling good, and laugh how fantastic it was to let yourself just at last (you know) let go of marriage (yours; anyone’s!), a relationship, find a better way of doing things and laugh and once in a while cry over Grace once upon a really historic time interred beside her bonded husband whom she kept from getting the message month upon month as she kept a smaller and smaller chunk(-y) of herself (we knew but wouldn’t say) just listen and sniff the change brewing in her very forgetfulness of dreams such as where an old winged donkey nips at her digits where she holds on for dear life to a park bench on a high building as city life floods upward, while she stared into the lumped cosmos of her eyelids and softly rubbed off her own wrong upon parts of her she didn’t think about except in those days to think they’re rather inexpressibly (aren’t they?) too floppy, the pistil or the petals, or was it stamen, we already don’t recall, we been so busy knowing we have another body-matter someplace, seeing two places but not being. But how’d she get like that, like a warm soft-shelled clam thinking so hard ‘bout stiffening its will all it kin do is feel good, when twice (well, wzit once or wzit twice?) seen when in those driven days she did her rapid down-up toe touching with the mirror’s tranquil caress behind her, her legs divided (see "parted"), and her palms to the floor. But in the doubly bedded night-dark of not looking under the covers (not even moving, babe, except her trusty locked-in wrist) and because it was getting slower, is that longer?, and once upon the stroke of a thousand-and-one after she had let herself go for one luminous half hour, she’d observed sunspots by involuntarily celebrating making a widdle cry of true noise—was she just sex-mad?—went off like a clock radio and the sheet slipped up over her nose or was it her nose down under the sheet?—and it had come to me that I didn’t have to do it with my right hand—forever concerned—concerned? says the interrogator, what means "concerned"?—well, afraid—that Lou’d feel her arm moving—God! pick up the beat, maybe—I could do it with my left, although it took longer—and I still had to keep my whole right side from bucking. Well it came to her that this was quite insane: look what (por-quat-quaya) she had boiled herself down to—jerking (but is that quite it?) off—and she says this again (look what I’ve been reduced to) in the pause of having said it once. (You know what’s been going on, you’re no child, and you think just because you haven’t received your hairline fracture when you were scheduled to, and ‘cause you’ve stopped virtually breathing, you can get away without saying.) Reduced to this: so leave. So leave: words like a poke in the funny bone reviving their friend Sal’s fancy-dress divorce bash where they asked too many people (if you call those people real noise!) and Sal’s "husband" ‘s girlfriend and twelve other gals floated in in bustles and there was nearly room to move much less do anything. Which might relieve some percent of the guests. So leave: reduced to this: it’s insane: got to get out of this. It’s mutilation, she’s heard.

And so a few hours later Grace scuffs, stunned—or rather spunkily trots—into her kitchen’s awareness of her in a mind-burst zone of her that found history past and future in the middle of the night and now finds herself in the kitchen of her present like a home come back to after years of nights gray as her brother’s dreamed face but may lose what she found last night (for someone might say, Now that you’ve found it, it will be taken from you)—to wit, a whole account of what’s happened for two thousand years, that she has for Lou but in a decision too complete for words. For it’s tricky there for the skipper Grace Rhodes, nee Rhodes because born married, there at the controls of a changing kitchen where she’s turned on the burner to float under the pretty orange kettle (hers) without first (this momentous morning) reaching blindly through the invisible white door without opening it of the refrigerator (soon to be widely called, from the English, "fridge") for the two-quart family-size Florida orange juice carton substantial as a Monopoly hotel, and without reaching even now, she’s spooned coffee into the new glass cylinder with the plunger-piston purchased after seeing the Michael Caine thriller, ee-und . . .she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and dreaming at a great rate of history being both here and there yet knowing that in between is the act of decision (hold on to it! pin it down! a donkey’s nipping at her hand) that came to her, promised itself to her, alone last night abed beside Lou, who (through secret bond, the bond of a secret!) is such a known body that her act if she goes "thru" with it threatens her with incarnation (forget the re-, which she never believed in even when her grandmother quoting her friend in support of the poor (around the time of a so-called Panic in 1890-something) "time to quit raising corn and start raising hell," went along with that champion of the unemployed who held that at death the soul like the body spilling its organ chemicals back into the earth, returns to the gross stewpot of the soul reservoir from which children drew what they needed at birth, therefore, therefore, therefore, but)—she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and trying to recall all she must say to Lou now, who’s gon’ say, "Oh cool it, honey" and how hard to do it now—that is, to tell him, tell Lou (medium height upright, medium length in bed a widow’s width away, recall the Irish-Italian old pardner to end all pardners)—tell him without a fight, without a pretext in the convenient shadowy kitchen often so morning-comforted where the only light is the fire buoyant beneath the kettle but her body’s helping her out now so potently she doesn’t think to thank her mother’s God, except, evoking her mother’s word "waterworks" as if centuries of feminine crying were a branch of municipal plumbing planned, see, by (well you got your) managers distributing your monopolies where monopolies are due, she finds the miracle fluid of her morning tears breathing for her anew refueling her force with an angry humor for example that that very instant her face and heart and eyes came unsprung and she wept above the stove—did she hear a cough? the dream donkey ‘tween nips?—and of herself she flickered (watch!) some small communicating part back into the bedroom of these furnished aeons (which part?) that was suddenly certain her husband had been not breathing when she had left his side, or was he busy still being the donkey?, while here, buoyed as the kettle itself is by inexpensive flames, she on her side is breathing along the small, not unmusical up-beat of the gentle gasps that go with her tears. And this, in union with that experience of her other body inclining in the bedroom to touch her non- or minimally breathing man, puts her in (no, turns her into) her own picture and if she thinks about her being here at the stove (angry or not, weeping or dry) and being back in the bedroom examining a wife-poor husband worth not living with, she won’t say the one pure thing she is to say to him, only one thing no matter how you squeeze it, while the practically instant brewer pistons the hot water (which, she sees for the first time, the landlord pays for in property taxes) through the coffee a hair less easily than the languorous spy did it in the movie last month; while, recalling to one side of her memory’s decision Lou’s heartfelt "Ah" of wonder and thanksgiving finding the Way In, the entry that ducked once, twice (like another head coming the other way), against her bone only to cant its way in, third try, with gimme an Ah which she once would answer by voice contact relieved at his swift pang, she now reaches through the refrigerator resigned like a mistress (but tense) to not knowing how long they’d have together this time (why bother to open it like a slave) for Lou’s egg, and finds it with his other eggs (Ah, she’s just this second given up eggs; we know it’s so the future can get a purchase on her if only to hold her in its hand) and feeling it smooth and cool like a thing that ought to be hard and is to the lightest touch, she lets it fly toward the sink before she squeezes it into her hand and hears in the exhaled, absorbed cack of egg collapsing on steel what she saved by not holding on to it all gooky in the hand and in the coughing voice at her back what she gained by wasting it against cold steel conjuring a point of entry and departure for a sudden talk between the dry-throated transient who’s himself (!) materialized in a short, white terry-cloth bathrobe (a piece of him lowering notch by notch though not into position still sufficiently at the ready to be preceding him and to be called "it" though it’s him)—not destined to drink today’s juice eyeing the headlines of the paper that’s outside the front door we know through him and add (what Lou can’t hear but already about remembers) that it’s black-edged the morning—and, in front of Lou, his first wife Grace, heart breathing by itself for itself scaring not itself, only her, not quite ready to turn but ready to speak beyond the egg to Lou’s "What was that for?"

And while she’s for a second strung between overlapping views not to be confused with a whole history assembled and announced overnight in her heart at the whorled circuits of instinct interrogation, Genesis, Egypt, the brides of Christ whose soul was also in the fundamental American reincarnation reservoir—and she wasn’t sure if she wanted even a jigger of that, the bare mask of eyes in the all but covered face of woman—really beautiful woman—of girl grandmothers like her own who cared deeply for the poverty farmers and out-of-work marchers on Washington in ‘94 who’re men while still the women were equal to anything if not some Wide Load Grace feels in her shifting flesh reputed headed continentally our way, a pair of rooms (this and a next prob’ly not our style), maybe a mountain of stuff doubtless in a fair cubic shape not to wonder at because the girl grandmothers haven’t time though equal to their time itself but with all those kids, the creak of covered wagons instead of bed and prayer, their way west, their way east, into a kitchen that will collapse into history (let alone his-and-her history, indeed leave alone oh "What a view!" he’d often said, with a sky, an earth, a valley, a morning mountain, a car, a held hand what else canst give me: "Incredible," she agreed and wanted a story, then, anything so long as it’s a story)—she’s in a near future which she foresaw ten woman-and-man minutes from the kitchen, the man in the white robe now packing like an assembly line alternately two suitcases laid back neatly paneled on the undone bed, seeing the man put first in one case shirts in their soft-glass bags from the laundry, then in the other case two cashmere sweaters, pair of corduroys, an ex’s dozen sock balls; then seeing the man vomit into the first case, all this all at once for she sees all this from the kitchen stove ten minutes away thinking will he vomit into the second case too (not to be confused with the special hang-up case for suits that she doesn’t see yet) and when, entering the, yes, cluttered bedroom then in the future that she sees while still heart-throbbing, in the kitchen, she sees his white-robed back, bending away from her over the bad cough before again vomiting, she knows anxiously it was nothing he ate this morning or he "got" from her—she’s not the mother of his stomach—because he won’t eat a thing here in the kitchen as the interaction opens with Grace answering Lou before she turns, with words that she doesn’t feel she’s reduced to—and words that this time he won’t say (like, "Oh, skip it"): because although he didn’t know he knew that he too wanted out (and Grace by successfully not saying all that "needed saying" the fateful morning in the kitchen but creating a package statement delivered at once and yet again, their four bare calves insidiously communicating, will sometimes in future days go sit beside the phone because, with a pang as long as the space-time she’s gained from him by not saying all she might have, knows that he knew)—he too wanted out, for (!) she was now at last not all things to him and hey partly because she never was!—he couldn’t this time of all the times till now let near-silence speak as in the sound of the wide steel sink softly receiving the load of one egg; and he had his own hungover spunk to say, "What was that for? Why’d you do that?"

But he’s not alone in saying it, as don’t we many testify all here at this point? Future workshop women said it of themselves and of their spouses. And were urged to speak this language by Grace as she became.

The South American expatriate diva’s New York physician said it too, we already remember, arriving for a brunch he’d dreamed of after being demoted to it backstage the night before. He’s said it now on the threshold of her faintly disturbed living room, said it meaning last night’s backstage dismissal, seeing last night’s silver roses long dry of that drop of Persian rose-attar secreted by the silver rose of Act Two, for they’re strewn now all over the place, one by one along the blue and brown Andean rugs and as far as a corner of a kitchen counter dark and dim through a distant doorway, then back across the diva’s silver velvet divan (where once the doctor had been invited to bed down) which he sees over her shoulder to her left; then across to the grand piano’s music stand, where another silver, rose-bloom bends toward him as he sees it over her other shoulder to his right, where he stands on the threshold with a white paper bag—"Here"—that she with her other hand upon the sleeve of his camel’s-hair blazer takes from him oil-damped, so we see through almost to the brioches fresh from that miraculous bakery, and his eye zeroes in on one silver rose its stem cut short at the neck of the pale dressing gown that covers, he knows, three Chilean freckles.

"What was that for?" she echoes softly, noting his new jacket as if her own deep life could take its wool back to the source . . . "why for my father, for my family," she goes on, "for my country, for my sex," she laughs like there isn’t quite room for laughter, for she’s referring to the South American officer she went out with—Judith, he thinks, Judith, is she Judith?—and she adds, "For professional reasons—public relations"—and, irritated—"danger, curiosity; danger, comfort, fun," ignoring what her doctor-friend took as a snub last night backstage when she went off with the other man (as a stagehand-poet passed with a black-edged prop, a newspaper, only to return to interrogate the doctor as an afterthought), and she’s now referring, in all these unstable nothings—"my father took me to see a blast furnace once: where they make the copper?"—(then turning away with the bag of brioches in her hands) to what he with all his knowledge of her insides cannot know.

This is that the (as he senses infamously gifted) officer in mufti with a Romance name, introduced to him (a panting physician with a cone of silver roses) backstage last night by the diva may well have been asked by her (the doctor can guess) if the council will please ignore her frail father thousands of miles away along a South American coast, let him speak his mind louder and yet louder the older he gets (the doctor can guess this) but not that the officer asked the diva (at dawn in their walled duplex during some interval of (murmured) confidence or when she returned like a sleeping queen, a tranced priestess, from the kitchen her fine unstockinged flesh set off by the tumbler of imported seltzer she bore for them both) where in the world had he her night’s lover seen (did she have any idea?) the tall bald man seriously applauding near him in the orchestra and the fair-haired woman with the bald man "risueno" (smiling) but not clapping, not clapping, smiling but not clapping (was it at the embassy, a concert, a reception?).

Yet what the diva’s doctor does know—recalling the gap in which he fell as toward some unwanted horizon only to hear himself asked by a hungry-looking stagehand if the right brain works the same in a left-handed person —following her now beyond the piano past the stereo cabinet featuring on its top the record jacket of the Schwartzkopf eve-of-the-war Rosenkavalier (those wonderful Nazi singers, her father said with an empty laugh giving it to his daughter one Christmas hearing children caroling outside in the summer air), the libretto booklet containing a bald man with a flowered bow-tie, the composer, big ears, Strauss himself a smile over his face)—what the diva’s doctor does know, hearing her say she’ll put off the atabrine (if he remembered to bring it) she’s grown overnight so fond again of the food she was raised on that she abhors the very thought of that hunger diet she’ll be back on if she gets rid of this angelic worm: not to mention that she is going out for dinner tonight. But what the doctor, her doctor, does know (following her across a blue and brown Andean rug) is that the canal he dreamed last night in anger (getting a cold) or this morning before or upon waking, the canal with him in it, would recede so long as he must seek its end: for he was it, and he would like to tell her. And this canal boasted a queer force keeping just open the planned original hairline fracture of its bed. And along its length he is taking in, like a tapeworm, menus of nutriment but keeping his identity secret from all but his partner with whom he hangs out sinkerless lines with such still worms for hooks they’re then just baitless hooks bare as a sleeping fisherman’s but this partner (who?) alone knows his identity in the umber dawn of a nightmare spread with cashew beurre and local anchovies, turns on him, and it’s a waist narrowing to a silver rose below, yet it’s a squint— the diva and the Indian guide ogling the friendly doctor as if he is prescribed tapeworm so that, like the messenger who is the message, prescriber turns prescription, the tapeworm eats at length unmindful of the noise of waters, one thousand Minnesota lakes, since Minnesota’s only a map now, and this doctor-dreamer’s a live-in tapeworm fixed in a dear friend’s system free of Manhattan’s sea and of a cough crashing around him and taking in menus of nutriment and in return watering the dry earth, taking in from head to tail desert pike swimming terribly ahead; banks of rice goldenly upholding persimmon-freckled muscles stewed pear-soft, their skin basted to an Ojibway gloss; and a la carte a great vegetable deformed by peasant gourdists who give it two, three waists, just as divinity blows us hot and cold in alternate gravities to lopside our stomachs, coil our gut, thicken the neural tube of cousin fish a thousand sea-bottoms removed from our own tube-to-come that fattened all along its length, grew and grew until it grew its own bone around its growth to hold it, so we had nowhere to grow but where this mercurial but cramping spinal column left off at the top and our will’s way blew and swelled, doubling widthwise laying about itself right and left to take the sheathless end of the neural tube gourdward treble-bulbed to light the world to who knows what refracted recipes for mind and face, here craniums balloon at anchor, there chins retire before such seasonings of evolution that no double-sexed tapeworm shoveling it in, shoveling it out, evacuating week upon week can know the whole of it, nor Manhattan medicine man tracking a loved patient across her national rugs dream that on the noise of that nightmare he’d cruelly think maybe his diva is to find out that her father in Chile (having long since been moved from hacienda to apartment) has been or is to be tortured for speaking out or for the Masonic secrets of logia, famed liberation lodge—tortured, pray, how? melted down? first things first—deafened by the telephone treatment, juiced by the testicle generator, paddled on his formerly long-john-sheathed puckered behind with the olde wooden thing with the little holes, and, as if that were not already weird, is to be stood barefoot on open sardine tins holding a weight greater even than the weight of the world (which is called in the political branch of Chilean S. and M. torture circles "the Statue of Liberty") till either he drops or he succeeds in bleeding two exact half-tins-full of his own fish-scented blood pudding—then maybe the diva (read daughter) will so condemn her night’s companion this instrument of a murderous regime that she breaks her date with the mufti’d officer who plans to take her to a restaurant serving national food if the officer is not already here, hidden, muffled, coughing, snoring in some unit of this majestic flat established in what was farmland in Washington Irving’s day. But that coughing: who hears it? can we tell? is it some patience developing? It’s not the doctor, and he for one is alone here with the diva, who has tossed over her shoulder, "You’re taking yourself a bit seriously, darling," which he knows is right but only for him to really understand.

And for the second before she crosses into the duplex kitchen, flicking a wall switch like a priestess signaling angels, he all but voids this cruel plan for her father he’s imagined. For he who is much more than her doctor has followed his friend with his nose as well; and as the trail sandwiches now the toasty dough of brioche in the scented air she bears, he skirts his dream and finds the end of it: that other breakfast of his Boston childhood, his Boston adolescence; his Cambridge studies, when he crossed the Charles River for weekends home, his "Hiawatha studies" his no-nonsense mother cursed his passion for archaeology—he now a distinguished tapeworm, distinguished means to the mere end of his diva’s weight reduction, being dreamed out of another’s systemic din, double-ended means not now useful to its slim host, oh right then a gypsy fortune teller out of a book he never actually read told him, "Fair lady cast a spell on thee—Fair lady’s hand shall set thee free."

But seeing the kitchen light and the glass trapdoor in the duplex ceiling and the swirling skirt of the lady’s lone garment, he finds in the pocket of his new soft cashmere blazer the medicine he mans and with it a thought still dumber than his "What was that for?" a minute ago—he’ll slip it to her this atabrine evacuator in her juice, there’s a bug going round, delayed dysentery from our last international adventure kept alive in the guts of the veteran unemployed, in unemployment itself in the widening abstract.

Slip it to her in her juice? That’s how men make their dreams come true! says a voice preferably female and male. You might slip her a visitor at least! Because, that’s atabrine for God’s sake! But of course the physician’s not that dumb, with his income. He of course was a dream tapeworm being got rid of by her, since whoever it was who provided the atabrine, she’s the one who took it, if we look ahead. But now, with appetite stirred up, she changed her mind which means that even if one reason was to eat a poignantly garnished national dinner with her new South American mufti (former compatriot only in the narrow sense that her passport is now Swiss), the other reason must be to avoid detaching from her old intimate the doctor (so he thinks); but what’s a tapeworm after all, it’s what Jim Mayn’s grandmother Margaret said he had, passing through her kitchen appropriating a fresh cruller on his way to the chill New Jersey winesap apples in a bushel basket on the back porch only to halt at the threshold of the porch and backpedal, like thinking, like football practice, to the table where the large glass jar of crullers is as full before and after he hooked another toasty twisted cruller as it was a moment ago, when, on the way through from the dining room, he lifted the glass top by its knob and took his first as if he never once stopped moving toward the back-porch door, but this second cruller that he backed up for—"Jimmy, you must have a tapeworm"—he examined for a pure instant to see which soft, sugar-sanded end to bite—’Tor a boy with a sore throat . . ."—only to turn to the tall lady at the deep white sink with her back to him, and put a hand on her shoulder and whistle like a bird into her prehistoric ear half covered by her hair she’s combed brightly back tight, near wispless, into a bun, the ear that has a nose for a kid’s occasional cigarette.

Upon which—like the wind—he was not there. A boy propelled by what? By boydom. Propelled like Mercury, like Andrew Jackson horsing through woodland or Raritan brave returning through woods to his hidden canoe already as clear in his mind’s eye as the birch branch his eye missed by an inch— propelled through the kitchen threshold’s doorway to the back porch, but— hold it! thunders the interrogator, do you mean Andrew was propelled like an Indian? Where’s he headed?, past the apples all but the two which he takes in one hand, the leafed stems hard in the fork of his fingers, out over his grandparents’ back steps—Yea, me!—touching always the same two, propelled by where he’s going, not to be winded for years and years, if then, nor to know that if he’s running like the wind home or downtown or between, he is making his own breeze until someday he comes right up to one of these receding obstacles and beyond it a wind more real: runs down Main Street during a world war and is, he knows, seen by his somewhat unloved father from the newspaper office and Jim’s hard breathing holds in the body of its heartbeaten deep gasps the future sounds of words working underground un-sequenced in his mind.

I know what’s going on, the diva’s personal doctor refrained from saying, hearing again the coughing going on nearby. The coughing, locally quite ordinary but more largely odd, was either the multiple child from some earlier hope (breakfasting here, being born there; building, explaining; crawling toward glassen screens at either end of an apartment; leaning against a smoking grownup; doing its Rotation homework), calling out the window (or’d we say falling?), or the coughing was our late, if central, century’s very air going the signal Indians one better and thickening its own devolution so far and away as to precipitate the very throats without which it could not be coughed. The coughing as heard by the doctor with its way of acquiring in his mind heads of hair, chins, narrowed mustachioed eyes with each successful cough (if we understand aright) is yet so hard to hear that, is someone else doing the hearing? and the physician’s personal current has got crossed with that other actual experience?

—which? asks the interrogator in a next room—

—why, of a child somewhere at night, a contemporary child in its sleep with a contact hack caused by too much prescribed breathing.

He knows he almost knew himself on waking in the early morning and oh! if and when you had a body (to use the grandmother’s word) to tell that to at once, you didn’t have to tell yourself at times that you’re taking yourself too seriously (yet he doesn’t need an intimate to tell him, oh guess he’s really asking for it) when he’s strangely huffy and doesn’t think why except that the more beckoning feels the reckless anger of woe, of huffy mumbler, the less he reckons and the closer-up he comes to the wall but never the door of that next room where he is known for what he is. And sometimes at his moments of early-morning waking much alone taking the bait of another day he doesn’t go on with what he’s found waiting for him, the daydream, taking it from there, a horde of folk but there’s just one of him, at most two, two sons while we’re at it, for the horde aren’t him but are all others that he’s like, and waking he finds them waiting and knows how he’s like them, yet he does have a brother elsewhere in the house—

—two sons, two sons of a bitch, was what Jim for one heard his father through walls and years slowly say to Jim’s mother Sarah in the middle of the New Jersey night, meaning—what? to go right up to her? or meaning what he had said into the office phone one day when Jim was leaving with a printing job: "she’s everything to me"—yet

who are we bespeaking of? demands our late-century all-purpose interrogator in a second language, ours, turning away while quick-whipping us with the end of his unseen plated tail which refuses to fall off, while our adopted language if it gets away from him can’t go far in this next room where the door is somewhere closeted in the wall and we have no time for breaks except those clean breaks with self when light leaves us shed from us into the waters of other lives till those relations we see tongue-in-wing and mercurial mirror that we reflect, return us to a curve of angels or a prospect whose mere form we are.

But answer the first question: who we bespeaking of? And then: what’s meant by our adopted language? is it ours thrown quoit by quoit on the wing at moving necks and reaching hands—is it our tongue transplanted by the interrogator? or a language adopted by us on getting up first thing in the morning?

He saw it two ways, and turned back and forth. (Wait—who is this He you are implicating? inquires the interrogator with patience in some deadly proportion or, we almost remember, inverse width to whatever he is doing behind us—and breathes in our direction, from all over the room we could swear though even he knows he could never be all things to us, though from his kind we hope and know it couldn’t be one of the eight sacred genres of breathing the no longer dusty correspondent-woman, we already recall, will study long after she tape-recorded a load of slow-burning Buddhist monk and we now know came from that scene in Southeast Asia direct to Grace Kimball’s loosely structured workshop in New York, but the one kind of breathing that they say can be felt everywhere in the room—because by this cool specialist it couldn’t be—although we have only heard, or heard of, these eight special breathings and can we prorate them over, say, five earning years?, we’ve now got the hardware to do it with)—as we sit literally riveted to a chair brass-anchored to a deck, while on twin screens, miles separate from each other but overlapping, we can conceive of the cosm our brass anchors float in.

He saw it two ways, and later these were enough apart that if he had gone to a tennis stadium instead of an opera he’d have been like a fan following the ball during a women’s match, the court-length ground strokes woven for a minute at a time (read woven gracefully) (read artfully) cat’s cradle where if you look down from above each wondrous taut drive threads baseline to baseline (walloped nurturingly, nurturing the moment’s nature, read) to fade like a radar blip not instantly, across a tropical storm’s heavens that seem possible. Yes, two ways he saw it, looking there, then back to here, and so on, following; but now was different; he stayed at his grandmother Margaret’s down the street. Years, a few short years passed in the night; and he woke and soon reported to her some fully illustrated idea he had in his head but now he was too old to go into the next room and jump into her bed where he had once learned to whistle, so he listened to the gray doves until, still one-third asleep, it came to him that they were the doves he always listened to, and listened if it was a Sunday to red-round-faced Mr. Barcalow’s trotter pass down the wide street, the sandy roll of the high wheels of the sulky and no doubt a flash of a white carnation in the brown velvet tab of his checked sport jacket’s lapel; and Jim didn’t know how he leaned into his future, certainly that he (as we who contain him by being held inside him hardly know) one day might stand outdoors among thousands (he never minded crowds, didn’t have to stand out among them) and listen to the black man King who had a dream he called out into the amplified air of the nation’s capital, that he had a dream, hear the noise, quick, it went right through you: similarly with Margaret’s senior grandson, as, inclining through a dream that made the talk of liquid doves bubbling under the roof at dawn and within his body seem to have borne his daydream across the whole of the night when he’d in reality started "doing" it (as we later came to say) as he woke up—in this waking dream he’d seen into the narrow barrel of a Colt revolver, early Colt (early as Hartford but not Paterson), held and looked at so long he could identify the spiraling dark inside the barrel, that belonged "by inheritance" to his grandmother ("But it’s not really mine") down the wrong end of which, we greedily conceive (yet is it the wrong end?), to a capsuled space thirty years later than this boyhood dream beyond Alaska over the Straits if you want to go that route where many men looked down at the papers and numbers before them, acknowledging that the numbers were on the papers and thus the two could be held in the mind together, and, whatever their legs independently arrived at under the table, these men were able above the table, sometimes fulminating but on paper, to agree on some Upper Limits—boundaries as credible as the bound our Rotating, home working, testable child knew to be that Earthly halo the tropopause where the temperature stops falling, jet winds hollo by at 200 MPH, and the new Everests that have cast off from Earth and have grown like the aftermath of explosion reach their limits which are not your mountain-type peaks but broad mesas in the sky, and, upwards of eight miles from Earth one may pass, masked and well, into these mesas downward like a force aimed at discharging from these cumulo-nimbus clouds mountainous rainstorms which Earth takes in return and not personally.

And finding himself inside the blued barrel’s bore spiraled by its rifling, the boy had rather look at the Colt outside—this is the pistol he knows—that works effectively for God’s sake mside but is a magic weight built of metal like rock and, lying personal in the open palm, was so made for the living hand it seems a growth evolved by the evolved choice of the armed hand in which it has appeared not down a sleeve but from necessities of war— that’s it!

And this "growth" in the hand is, in the mood of some foresight that threatens memory, never absolutely unloaded (his memory told him, as it went beyond his grandfather and grandmother’s warning about loaded guns thrill-ingly to see that between your last look at the chamber and now, a minute or a second later, it might have got loaded again) while at the same time he recalled checking out each chamber, never (a voice in the daydream said) for sure empty as soon as the cylinder had turned that next chamber up into firing alignment. How many guns did his grandfather Alexander mean? This one? Two guns? All guns?

Did he dream one night? He’s sleeping downstreet at his grandmother and grandfather’s and his dream doesn’t matter, might’s well be the Saturday afternoon, as it soon will be, the screen of the Walter Reade theater downtown, a good Indian saying with craft at the corners of the eyes, "Me Jim"—don’t matter partly because he always had this core feeling that he didn’t dream— that is, asleep at night—and his grandmother said it was all right not to— though she had never known an Indian who didn’t and it did help you to know what you wanted to do, but if Jim didn’t, he didn’t—and it’s what the dream leads to in the morning first thing that matters.

Yet before his grandmother Margaret, her gray hair down her back in a loose plait, her eyes soft and aged with sleep, takes inspiration for a story she tells him while they get breakfast on the table that he never thinks of as, you know, competition on top of the dream (early-day dream likely, or daybreak but non-sleep), there was once upon a time in the lighted dark his (whatever it was) dream that provides the inspiration for her story he guesses was made up and thirty years later as late as 1970 and later that old dream came back maintained by the one of her stories it apparently inspired. In the long barrel of the night the boy Jim was ahead of the horse he gripped, a horse sort of made headless by the dark heavens and the mesa of the western night though unquestionably there with him, like a wild friend sharing in no language but that of intense speed some aim of the boy’s to get away to another place which was a place of rescue without losing the place between which he and the heart-lunging horse were leaving miles that no one knew about and you would never prove in the grandfather’s travel books, which were South American anyhow {Tschijfely’s Ride skimmed from half-finished chapter to chapter, from up here clear down to the big turtles with backs like original blank face masks facing down the sky’s blank fiesta, the dust jacket picturing Mr. Tschiffely atop his horse), and miles unprovable principally because you couldn’t isolate where you’d started from—until he and the stolen pony (it was always stolen) were running with their own speed yet, too, of light from the fires glittering all around them smelting the desert mesa with unheard talk where an internecine conference was in progress, and awaited them in a shore of campfires he had to take one by one, wouldn’t he?, except he was being held where he was so all he could see was all of them around him, a great circle, see?, or horseshoe, what they would do, but being the center he and the pony wouldn’t know where to go among these lights and had the impression that they need not run run run because by now the ground under them and the sky over them were their wings and they were the hinge. But the hinge, then, for a circling voice—he had words for it later but not then at thirteen that came at him from the campfires, in Indian that he knew he understood, but what were the American words that said the same thing?, he had heard them often at home but knew them only by memory, as he did in later years when memory told him he never dreamt.

His grandmother, who no longer read to him, knew how to appreciate what happened next, all that was going on, she really saw it. "Why, that’s almost what happened to the Far East Princess"—Margaret looked up from the steaming frying pan into the ventilator over the range and gave a laugh as if she couldn’t help it till it began to come out: and in those days, she said— as if Jim’s maybe just waking daydream was of that time too—it got dark faster than the bird with its lunchtime horse tasty and warm under its wing could fly, though urged on by the Eastern Princess whom the bird would not land until they had reached the flower-shaped mountain which her father the king of the Long White Country thousands of air miles away (since his daughter was determined to travel anyway) had asked them to make an inspection tour of in order to learn all there was to know about the Indian way of doing things. So the great bird went without the lunch held captive under its wing and partly because it already held in its beak another horse, the white-and-black pony the Navajo Prince from a cliff, a crag, far ahead had called out to the Eastern Princess up in the sky on her bird was hers as a gift from all the fast ponies in the pack of wild, royal, and vanishing horses that traveled with him this day that a great sing was to be held, the ceremonial Night Way to heal a hole in the head of the Prince’s mother who sang her own song saying she would let the hole in her head be while, visible to others, spirits of many shapes flew in and out of this demon den in the upper middle of her forehead and her son the Prince had gone away to consult a Sioux cousin in the Northeast, get his thinking on the subject since he had twenty daughters and the Prince had been coming back over the plains and among the sheer canyons when he had seen the giant bird and the Eastern Princess, and, seeing the bird dive and take one horse under its wing and aim at another that was swinging wildly off back to the pack, the fastest and most beautiful, had called out over the miles from his lonely crag that that horse was hers, upon which the bird, swooping again, perhaps concerned that its mistress would find a new steed and desert the bird of the Long White Country, took the gift horse in its beak and flew on: which is all background to the twilight arrival at the flower-shaped mountain as preparations went on for the Night Sing to heal the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head where as night came you could see some of the demons settling down in there, not moving around any more, they liked it there. So when the Eastern Princess flew in on her giant pale-colored bird she was accepted as a harbinger of some change the Night Way chants might bring. And when asked if she saw the demons with winged heads and fat cheeks passing in and out of the Prince’s mother’s hole-in-the-head said only that she did not—but that she did find herself seeing into the thoughts of the young, handsome Indian Prince whom she had met on the way and who pointed to her now as an event he had brought to his people.

But as Jim—having spent the night down the street at his grandparents’ and having understood he was probably not alone—sat at the kitchen table that he had laid with plates and silver for three, and doodled drawings that weren’t drawings really but parts of drawings on a pad of his grandfather’s lined paper, he needed to know more before he could tell if his grandmother was correct that the woman in the mirror of his vision was almost the same as the Eastern Princess. For there were some differences, out there in that western territory. Here he was, now arrived in the center of the glittering internecine fires, they were telling him a thing in Indian he knew he understood and had more than once heard in American words but did not, there among the fires, recollect—

—because it was all one single language, said his grandmother, that’s what you forgot—but who was the person? she asked, if you know who, then you’ll know what . . .

—but he understood that the council fires had other fish to fry—heard a guffaw from the distant living room and the crackle of a newspaper—and the circling talk had told him and his stolen pony that he had to go back where he came from and tell his people their peace offer was not enough and they would have to send a hostage. But desiring to stay there in the burning dark of the ring of glittering campfires, he called to them. And it came out in their language. Which if he tried to understand, then he didn’t, but when he stopped trying he got the main idea that he could be the one to stay, he was volunteering because he was already there, why go back, he’d make the decision there and then and be the hostage.

But at that instant the fires were banked and seemed to retreat and he was left down the barrel of the family Colt revolver knowing that now behind him lay all that land and the other way, which was the only direction he could go because he was cramped, was a pale, nocturnal woman seeing him and he didn’t know if she was in a mirror or he was looking down the barrel at her until the American words of the Indian directive came silently from her to him and he knew she was a decision, a future decision, and he woke with the familiar words, words his mother down the street had spoken more than once but as he woke he heard only the bubbling doves, heard them until he knew that it was them.

"That woman was the Eastern Princess, probably," his grandmother had said, "or at least she reminds me of her," going on to the next step which was the familiar story of the Princess’s arrival among the Navajo the night of the Night Sing.

Jim’s grandfather came into the kitchen with last night’s Newark paper. "At it again," he said, admiring the strips of rationed bacon being lifted on a spatula out of a smoking pan onto a torn-open brown paper bag.

"At what again?" said Jim, who’d heard it before so it must mean this first-thing-in-the-morning get-together between an enthralled vision reporter and a true tale teller.

"Your grandfather’s mind is like a perfectly clear pool," said Margaret.

"Or you see to the bottom of it because it isn’t very deep," said Alexander.

"The Navajo Prince s grandfather," said Margaret—and Jim knew she said it to him—"when he taught him to spear fish showed him it was the clear waters of the stream that were always deeper than they looked."

"But for sheer sharpness," returned Jim’s grandfather, "few could match the East Far Eastern Princess who at a turning point in her life disarmed the Navajo Prince, acquired a Colt revolver, and with amazing foresight changed the course of history."

Jim wanted a canoe though he’d been in a canoe only once. He would never ask his grandparents for it. His mother in her way of seeming not to make noise when she spoke had said that if Jim could earn half she would dig up the rest—what later were known as matching funds. Was there only one Colt pistol out there, for God’s sake?

"You can’t imagine how poor they were," said Margaret of the Navajo. "It’s common knowledge and it’s getting worse."

Oh Alexander recalled her dispatches to the Windrow Democrat, it was 1893 because that’s why she went to Chicago, the World’s Fair, the New Jersey exposition, the crystal labyrinths. But then she went further west and her dad, then editor of the Democrat, was fit to be tied, but she sent back good copy, from Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. How did she do it? she was nineteen, a sensible girl in a long skirt and high neck, a hat with a brim you didn’t argue with though she changed her costume at some Dakotan point west-northwest of Chicago-Omaha, Jim Mayn for years never looked those articles up in the Democrat archives in the basement of the red brick Revolutionary home that housed the Historical Association (capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units).

"I was a tourist; that’s all I was."

"You were much more than that, Margaret," her husband said with a strength of accent that made the grandson stop chewing and look at these people he spent quite a lot of time with—well, much more than that—his grandmother had taught him to whistle when he was a small child coming into bed with her in the morning when he stayed over.

You know they gave the new Santa Fe Railroad the right of way forty miles either side of the tracks but they broke it into one-mile squares and the railroad got the odd-numbered squares like the grandfather’s checkerboard and some of those odd squares the People, the Navajo Nation, had been running their sheep on for the twenty years since they were allowed out of that mass internment-tomb Fort Sumner during the Civil War, and long before that, before that country through which they walked three hundred miles to captivity (people do that) beside the screak and shimmy of their wagon wheels had even conceived of the Santa Fe trackbed.

Jim heard some cowboys in a movie render the song "Wagon Wheels," he looked forward to Saturday matinee at one of the two movie houses, and his younger brother Brad, who occasionally cooked at home and wasn’t much of an athlete and come to think of it wasn’t very smart either though sensitive, was the one in the family who played checkers now and then with the grandfather who talked while playing, and Brad didn’t mind being beaten.

Well, they grew corn, those Indians, they had their fried bread, they had to go a ways to find water; seed mush they made; we saw squash, we saw melons, and the end-to-end pestles of a pony’s bones, and long after Margaret’s day we see pihon nuts like wampum growing on trees except salted and in jars and hear a goat chomping on a succulent fruit of some cactus in the middle of nowhere, which is a large loose place accommodating on a map a host of small-scale possibilities.

You couldn’t imagine how undernourishment makes fat, Margaret was saying. The railroad was liquor, the railroad was sickness shot straight into the system.

"No immunities, of course," added the grandfather.

Though it was the railroad that swelled Coxey’s Army of the unemployed in ‘94—the big contingents came from west of the Rockies—

A third of them were newspaper correspondents, Margaret laughed, and Jim didn’t right then but some time after did think (historically), so it wasn’t 1893 any more and she was still out there.

A thousand from Los Angeles, two thousand from San Francisco, Cant-well’s Army from Seattle, nine hundred came from Oregon but only fifty-eight marched from Boston.

One from New Jersey, said Margaret.

Oh I went out to meet you, said Alexander.

And missed us both, she said to him.

But got back home in time, said Alexander, so that Jim didn’t ask what he meant. Margaret recurred to the Navajo question. Kit Carson killed their sheep.

But at the time of the Civil War and Fort Defiance and’Fort Sumner and the eight thousand captivity, a rebel group hid out on Black Mesa, among them the very Navajo whose father’s cousin had taken the pistol in question from a Mexican who’d taken it off one of General John Wool’s young lieutenants at Buena Vista in 1847 an obviously communal pistol that Samuel Colt the original inventor was said to have manufactured in Hartford about the time the Mexican War revived his failed firearm business that had begun in Paterson, New Jersey, mind you.

Jim wasn’t much interested in Buena Vista and neither was his grandfather, who knew history but didn’t amplify on Buena Vista beyond some of the steps by which the military sidearm on the mantel in the study had passed into family life, steps which in the collective mind from the time that, back East, the Windrow Democrat was observing its tenth birthday, to a generation and a half later approaching the present century, this pistol that changed hands and belonged successively could appear to proliferate concurrently into many pistols.

"I was a tourist," said the grandmother.

"You were much more than that, Margaret, coming as well as going."

The boy stood up from the table drinking the last of his milk.

"I leave the history to you," she said.

He carried a plate and glass to the sink, grabbed a cruller from the jar whose top the grandfather had left off, but with the door knob in his hand on his way out to the kitchen porch he heard, "Whoa, mister," he had forgotten and was being told clearly what his first errand was before he set foot out of the house.

But whose child, and where, is this? asks the interrogator, and we can hear in the pounding, the noise, in our stereo earphones that he has said "we"—that is, in his statement, We cannot wait any longer for you to decide which you mean. And did the grandfather mean he went out to meet Margaret and someone else when she was returning from the West?

And, noting his "we," we see (but we see nothing—we hear. Hear) our own breathing from several parts of the room, breathing that is not that plural one of the eight sacred kinds of breathing but is literally more than one of him in the room, as if he’s all things to us, which he’s not—and the pounding in our ear is not just us but the telephone torture aforethought by our physician when we imagined what would deter his diva from going on with her fascist mufti, and which we now get without actually seeing, and if the telephone treatment is somebody clapping behind us so two hands never meet yet do meet cupped in the intermediating head—boop boop—whose bared ears they insufferably clap upon hearing us, in lieu of answering the interrogator’s demand we interpose the point "He’s not a child—by this time Jim’s probably thirteen going on fourteen!"

Yet the pain just isn’t quite here—you know?—that is, the pain in the sense of a weight of needing to be instantly not here; and the torturer’s clapping hands in this telephone treatment (if it’s not more than one torturer around us) crash through our head and hardly squash it except to the verge of being in the abstract, and, passing through, meet soundless so that we are threatened with having been already sacrificed to the void without living our death as did (unsedated) an occasional Pawnee maid, whose heart belonged (if not to Laughing Antler here tonight gone tomorrow to the high horizon’s ridge) to Morning Star, rising and dying god of vegetables, son of the Sun God and of Mother Earth, though of the four Pawnee groups the Tapage (or Noisy) went in hardly at all for human sacrifice and if you want to know about that kind of thing look south of the border because our Indians don’t carry on like that, as that original New Jersey explorer Zebulon Pike of Pike’s Peak certainly had at least the time to put it, who before being taken captive from Santa Fe to Chihuahua encountered Pawnee in his quest for the headwaters of the Arkansas; ate toasted spirals of pumpkin flesh (he s’posed they were) but never knowingly met with one of the then but not later (by historians) taken-for-granted sex surrogate aunts of the Pawnees and anyhow had hardly enough bare let alone red skin to pose as her traditional pupil-nephew (Yeah, yeah, yeah, good ol’ A-position P-V—read penis-vagina if you don’t read power-vac—a later Grace "Enters," punching into her single Self such programs of Change that, despite being that reliable mid-American one-thirty-second Pawnee, she is into habitually breaking Habit Patterns) nor did Zebulon ever personally see a girl’s heart cut out for Morning Star Mexican-style . . . Zebulon Pike, explorer, geographer, American, who, if he got the wrong lake thinking he had the source of the Mississippi in Minnesota, still came close.

Grace Kimball came east out of the West, hung high above the clouds, and for many moments pursuing the night with all of America around her, she wanted her brother, who wasn’t delivering milk any more, and had a job and was just married, so instead of him it was all of America she let herself desire to be in like a restless, pivoting (not yet unfaithful) spouse—from the wind-filled gorges of Wyoming where a hermit uncle lived, from the gusty Great Lake near overflowing into Minnesota where her brother had served on a cutter; from the herds and vast hot green of the Flint Hills near Wichita; from the school grandstands that she had once seen from a distance approaching an Oklahoma wheatfield as if the miles of pale brown grasses drew spectators with no football field in between, from town to town throw in the extreme southern Rockies of nearby New Mexico of all this sentimental continent, she loved it. She wanted anything but New York, anything flying in the opposite direction, anything but the New York she flew toward when she also felt but didn’t know she felt (right?) that New York was where everyone and no one would know her—didn’t know this any more than (she knew that) she might like to lie down with her brother beside the man-made lake they grew up swimming in, lie down with her brother another year, nor could have known then (could she?) that she would (in private with her intimates, at least, if not to her loosely structured Body-Self Workshop) preach incest if you feel like it for our post-marital era with its changed alliance systems: Came out of the West, she did, like—

Who now? butts in the interrogator with apparently food in his mouth, torturing our words, and wondering with a blink of his eye, a flick of his tail, what it might mean that the American President was learning to embrace other men in public—

For "Who now?" hears in itself sometimes "What now? what next?" (that is, will the god or once and future goddess think of): but if the Who is Grace, where did our knowledge of her come from, for we are but relations: the answer is, "From her, from her," knowledge given up from her to us though power given’s pow’r received we learn she came one day to say because she knew it all her life and if, once in a Thorsday-afternoon kitchen (though not in that event legally penetrated, for history’s precision yields humor ‘bout it if no one else), or once by a Sunday-evening lake, she got enterred so against her will that for actual decades she ran her own industry of disseminating happy powers of herself among women like offspring of a brief but seminal fuck (you) times an organic friendly uncle (who styled himself itinerant, staked Yellowstone-ward either by National Parks Department or the Secretary of the Interior) who got inflamed by how a teenage girl alloyed a well-equipped (one-thirty-second) Pawnee-American kitchen, but soon after by a friend-of-the-family man in uniform lakeside to whom she did not have the heart, once locked onto, to holler the information that from a point of "no return" as was said of an innocent wartime bottle with the neck broken off, the power she was being given was a certificate certifying that she had been raped long before she saw a work of art that proved all that carrying-on called (scream it jokewise in the shower) rape didn’t have to be entry for whether there’s a difference between up-against-the-kitchen-sink Uncle Walter’s hand coming down behind to clamp around in front thanks to his extensible wrist-watched wrist and (hard by the shore of a manmade lake) that other man that soldier’s gentleness that just got going going and hurt only in (a) one lower vertebra where the experience was ever after permanently housed and (b) her heart that got scared into a death she years later knew had been given her by the goddess to come back from like end we know by seeing it from the far side in each event she got raped without the word "rape" luckily so she could only use it as a growing/learning experience (words, words, words, you can stuff ‘em) until one year she found herself a center of once many distances, now all one by fiat (hers), here in a defurnished apartment breathing tragedy out of the trapped women who came to her and life in—into such formal closets of unused amazement (nee resentment, nee goodness, nee unpaid labor divided by that unwritten chronicle of come-come—or cum-cum) that one day when the children are grown we could just as well come out of the closet and check it out if when we do we leave our gowns lay where Jesus hung them or was hung whether or not Grace could prove not just to the satisfaction of those lives she helped but to her own mysteriously distant satisfaction that Jesus could have enriched the incarnation by getting into being woman too— a thought she had on the plane east—an original thought till years later she recalled her grandmother (somehow, she was sure, not non-orgasmic) who heard a dime-museum orator in the nineties preach about money and economics and claim we were all compound reincarnations from the caldron of former souls—it stayed with Grace:

—came out of the West, never imagining that beyond the general shape of her future husband quickly filled by one Lou (his index finger in 1950 held down upon the tilted shaker’s silver cup) was a "starreen" role in the very history she sprung out of her own refrigerator one wonderful, scary morning some years later aforementioned, yes New York cliff dweller that she stayed (leaving Lou by kicking him out) but restructured, now noisily now quietly and gently, into what her idea of history told her had always been—before Mesopotamia (wherever in the brain’s zodiac that was) and the flattening of the goddess by all her consorts who rolled and positioned themselves into one economy-size husband—oh before all these and more, before American Indian Pakulpota, herself the nurturing world of her own sacred stories, got bloody fucked by the gore-horned Greek goat of Grace’s birthday sign—before all these flowed into the pregnant forms that, suddenly that breakthrough morning in the kitchen like her heart in her mouth, bulged into being—which was the matriarchal force that can bring together and bind and renew you (hear also, in song, "Shampoo you") come again upon the Earth to supplant Dad’s power vac (read P-V sex) through whose nervy dispersals and non-orgasmic romps the balling patriarchy (if we may speak for Grace) disarms all risks abutting Dad’s Pad.

Receptive mixed bloods, we nonetheless find not the siwash cheese smoked roe man-hour (-like) truth-surplus we’re logging every damn bastard day, drinking Kickapoo Juice to change toward human, something more doing our potatoes in Seneca Oil, chewing our peanut-spiked Chiclets, gargling with whole pineapples, barking our noses on Ponderosas to try their chocolate scent in the midnight divorce and marriage ceremony of the late century in question, and (far) above rich deposits of coal, steaming our peppers, our squash, our grasshoppers, our tobacco, and our beans upon a bed of long-fiber cotton, while to really understand this Indian meal, we bounce a rubber ball fifty times without thinking succotash, and watch our joint muscles relax with a curare aperiplus trying in the midst of our silence at day’s end to recall through saying the full name of a sacred laxative we meant to pry away from the Indians before they upped their prices (though we will break it down in the lab, name or no name). But think only of corn—if potatoes are your nemesis—think but of corn to remember what we didn’t know we knew, that half our world crops were tamed first by proven red-blooded American Indians. Think but of the vast reserves of reservation taming all but, say, barbed bulbs of cactus whose babies, it stands to reason, are baby cactus (if the Indians, who like the technologists and the economists feeling technological/economical problems require technological economical solutions, feel Indian problems require Indian solutions, would only export these baby cactuses to the diva’s favorite Mexican restaurant in New York, pricklies depilitated! There it is possible for a small, once-dusty, highly metabolized correspondent-woman to sit at a nearby table thinking she actually hears all that half-conscious Navajo landscape dreaming of great planted fields out of the letter Flick read her—and she has shared a veritable granary of information at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop (where she’s found that all the women who stayed at home while she was in South Vietnam bear with her nonetheless strange kinships) and while she doesn’t know that James Mayn (personally unknown to her) in the line of work Stateside took a story off her flown-in tape of a self-incinerating Buddhist monk with commentary (hers), she does know this very newsman’s daughter Flick, and hears his voice in Flick’s quiet, ironic, loving one reading Dad’s letter, and . . . women, she is starting to think, have seemed in ordinary social contacts lately more substantial than men by and large.

Flick works in Washington, boards her absent boyfriend’s motorcycle, but drives reluctantly (and parks) a great old white sedan given her by her father. She read to the correspondent-woman a letter her father wrote her from The Future (as he headed it) postmarked Farmington, New Mexico, claiming for that landscape this very dream of great planted fields, as if—as if—and our small but growing woman ignoring the well-known mezzo at a nearby table talking Spanish with a broad-faced, dark-mustached, elegant-lapeled male who listens to the diva beyond her words and into her following silence, lovers without question—the correspondent-woman chews a moist, slick baby cactus, moving it around with her tongue, and suddenly she has it! The way Flick’s father talks about that western landscape it’s as if he were—but she has lost it ... he were what? She can’t think?, is this being a woman? can only recall his written words in their imagined sounds read by his daughter Flick who found "kind of irrelevant" his response to what she had written him (God they had a good relationship, didn’t they?) about that strangely sophisticated South American country most distinct for us for being almost not there—2,500 miles long from Peru to the Pole and a quarter of an inch wide, though a thousand feet deep and now most "tragic," the daughter had written—what "we" did to Chile (cut off spare parts for trucks, paid the truck owners’ confederation per diem to strike, and then reported it as a workers’ strike): to which her father rather rambled on (yet not long-windedly—how was that?) about ‘69 and asking a well-heeled German-Chilean beekeeper in Temuco what was going to happen. Answer: if Nixon could be elected last year, Allende the good medical doctor can be elected next year. (You mean . . . ?) That both have been working toward their presidencies for years. (But what will happen if Allende squeaks in?) Listen, the only way for Washington to win this one is for Chile as a whole to win. The beekeeper whose parents came from Germany in ‘45 asked if Mayn was CIA but figured the CIA had other interests than a beekeeper’s father years ago. The beekeeper, whose money came from lumber and brewing, now has just the bees down here in the South, two houses, two hundred acres, two cows, a huge, exact, and green vegetable garden. (What will Dr. Allende do if he gets in, and are you for him?) The only Alliance for Progress will be Chileans with Chileans. (And will he stand his enemies up against a wall?) Is that what doctors do in the United States? (But he is an economist as well.) Allende has said what he will do.

O.K., we know how vulnerable we are to the interrogator and his or her questions; but now, in whatever garb, reverse-collar clerical asking us to confess, or mufti, or period, or (ostensibly to infiltrate certain groups in the big cities) nude, he now does not after all ask if by "kinships" the correspondent-woman means that the other workshop women have bodies like hers or in the local or non-statutory sense are governed at some distance by their mothers’ own trapped dominance and will be until they become their mothers; but instead, the interrogator asks verbatim: "The so-called newsman Mayn coded an eastbound message to his daughter ‘The Future’; she works in an agency in Washington; he has been observed watching the Manhattan apartment house if not the very windows of a former national in whom we too are interested, while Mayn’s people in New Jersey we know accumulated if not proliferated a standard military sidearm at least from the early 1890s on, but possibly since the Mexican War a decade after the founding of the family’s weekly newspaper now defunct—so, is Mayn armed?"

We found we counted on our bodies to tell us even what words we were to know. Until we learned too late (which is our life’s apparent time), that the bodies had not been ours and that we some of us were mainly metabolism mapping live the processing of foods and their absorption into time in persons who now had gone! Leaving us a metabolism working away with violent good cheer but with no body to prove it was our thing—our thing to change. For which—O.K.—Let’s change our things (we suddenly recall our mother said as we all came in in the days when metabolism was relatively unknown and we called our bodies our own and they came running until now).

But now, with no breath because no breather since the breather had gone away, we went on metabolizing; yet found limbs for our curves, fresh eyes for our would-be heads to gather round. Yet this had always gone on and was life’s answer to growth and we would hang in there separately or together, a thrust without an Eiffel to throw it, sometimes a will to stow book and torch in a backpack to keep our hands free for the road—yet with only great, locked-pelvis Lady Liberty available to us for body at the time.

From behind us, the question earmarked for us resonates and—whung —bends, so that, as sound, it acquires a shadow, a sound shadow resembling to angels a very ear, though an ear lighted by such inward sources the unknown brain deep buried there weighs its own visiting angels right as they shed from it yet to busy people imperceptibly imprinted; so comes that old lack or gap between what we’re experiencing and us it’s sad to say now that we have said it.

So that if the question with its overstress on Mayn as a belligerent warrior finds a way around us, the very way so hugs our shape that it threatens to describe us. But abstraction already introduced through the new painlessness of torture into us by the undivided labor of our questioner doubling as persuader opens up in us more than we knew existed yet no more than what we didn’t know we had in us. But comes a new problem: the torture of dividing right down to the bone our collective member (with its memberhood): a torture aimed at making unforgettable the information that comes with the torture, as when the slitting and splitting from root to bulb, vein to internally (urethrally) splinted stalk, of the youthful Indian penis (or peenis) followed by enforced blood-squatting above a fire was meant to make the male never ever forget whatever the point of it all was—his puberty, his father’s rivalry, his own unguessed vagina-envy—whereas our torture in the painlessness of its abstraction receives the interrogator’s question about Mayn only to drop the words through us first in the form of a question about a man or Man’s proliferated arms then into a dozen other questions negotiating the passage of what we might have known we had in us. Passage? (read wormhole, read wind-tunnel, read zero gravity chamber, read time baffle, so long as you kids read).

Questions we mean such as Why does anyone, woman or man, wish to go armed? or take the question of suicide in general, for instance sending or leaving an irate message in the form of suicide to the effect that for years, damn you, messages have not gotten through. Yet whadda you know, the abstracting of our collective member falling pain-proof through the shadow of the sound we would have made if we would suffer conventionally finds in its very thought a breakthrough as real as "the future we already remember we’re in, babe," said Grace Kimball some years beyond her divorced marriage in the month of a thousand reasons and one unrehearsed rhyme given the women who came to know her why first and foremost they had themselves, and not to blame.

Yet thus our demon interrogator has given his torture that old mnemonic twist after all, so we, wishing to be free of the new torture of painlessness, find we absolutely cannot forget Grace’s lanternslides (as they would have been called in her parents’ day) projected now in the eighth decade of the century in question up onto a screen for five hundred women to believe. The message of these slides paired side by side so it looks like two screens, is that—in this hotbed of biology and cure (the auditorium of a hospital)—see for yourself, sisters, the hard-on you’re getting right now proves it, look at the penis then look at the clit, trace your vagina and that scrotum is it, these are the same organs, ladies, which is why you knew you had balls and why men in business and men in bed forget they evolved from Our life.

She didn’t hear the rhyme till later. She didn’t ask whence came it. She said the goddess sent it to her, though if she’s a myth in her own time Grace (who for a time is all things to her intimate Maureen, who calls her Kimball) would not find in any rhyme we carried into her the answer to Where, who, what was she?

Who and what was she?—that sounds like a Lesbian question, she says—heavy duty, heavee—’cause Lesbians (if there are Lesbians) some of them her best friends, are into Romance, the Devotion Trip, and Relationships, though Grace will call herself bisensual and at an orgy good-naturedly swing both ways getting bulletins, my dear, against the warm inner thigh of Other space in her days of swings which one newspaper with her in its mind called group sex, which swingers of her acquaintance might some of them call "orgies," and where in the clean, deviant funs of three-on-one almond oils, laurel incense, pear or apple juice, a supple supply (and friendly!) of small-of-the-backs and hips and supportive parts, plus a less than at-large ratio of kissing to other acts other hugs other moists and ins, room could still be found at Grace’s for shy non-participant members who’d traded their underwear for Swedish blankets, their forethoughts for a fleshed-out evening with people, hear the noise, it is music from the wall, music to our rear, our vaunted groin—it’s breathing to music which drowns out history if you want—and across the openness of our frank rape-safe room see a bunched towel, two towels, yr prayer rug, yr bowl of apricots, yr plastic bag of grass fridge-fresh, a naked hand flat down on the carpet wrinkled at the wrist (a prop), freckles across a shoulder, a massage waiting for a back, all this across a thick and mirrored room-to-room carpet, a band of healthies, a party to fuck, kid to kid, even man to man, to swap experiences, to shed a good tear if it happened, to lay around, to reach, to reach and accept a No thanks if it comes—and to put peer bandhood before pair bonding in order to—to save us a chance: but a chance to do what? to demarry but keep it secret, or remarry our true friends with whom for too long we’ve been one times one, to make a bisexual capitalism to replace war?

She once learned, having said No (but this time not at a swing), that when it comes to real sleeping she likes to do it alone, and in those days she still maintained a bed (the bed), but found she had stopped crying, the little crying she ever had undertaken.

She learned what it was like to fuck someone before she knew him, to fuck on very first—and as the first—acquaintance, and much later, after playing with two or three others, find who this was when she left the easygoing orgy with him, and talk to him now sister to brother on the sidewalk. In a cab, beyond sex, and be properly introduced to each other and to a long talk in that diner that once existed—now mere history!—in the quickening and multiplying overlook of the century in question at Sixth and Twelfth, remember?

There he drank two heavy glasses of buttermilk and ate with magic speed (however slowly he chewed) two toasted BLTs; and she learned what he did and what he was coming off of and again what his last name was.

They had fucked around on a first-name basis back at the mutual friend’s swing and she had heard herself let go with all the regular party noise from her raucous years (high school and other) embedded in the West—"your infinite Southwest M/dwest," the guy drinking buttermilk softly said, who was very very quietly high on her or the night or the music or the imagination of a continent that’s not New York.

Upon which their laugh merged with her ongoing life story told like the wondrous confession of a once upon a time (if you believe it) inhibited American gal—or one of his confessions at his regular Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—well you can see they both of them laughed at his friendly three-o’clock-in-the-morning compass putting her on the map some lapsed, marginal map of mood-"infinite Southwest Midwest." And they held hands across the waitress’s Formica finding that in their respective marriages they had felt to blame and had assumed for ages that the about-once-a-month commemoration of their vows was like the way it was supposed to be even if there were better ways of doing things in poor urban Hispanic families or in Hollywood, Malibu Beach, or anthropologists’ tribes.

Until, like making love after breakfast, poached eggs, coffee, stacks of toast, cigarette smoke, apricot jam in the fridge, Grace and this guy’s long night’s swing wound down with a one-on-one at Grace’s place and such inflamed joy in him that, observing over his furry shoulder a Plains Indian print on her dusky bedroom wall, she might not have found her recently discovered No, had he wished at four a.m. to spend the night; but before she knew it he was gone and she was staring at the Kiowa baby carrier, its hooded purse on the wall a shape seen anew, until she didn’t know she was asleep and didn’t know and didn’t know she was asleep when in daylight she became aware of her hand reaching for the phone receiver to phone that guy with whom she was rehearsing her life and still in sleep laying out to him her new vista of sex-positive economic history.

But she had had this new vista in her anyway; but he got her started on the way home by quoting the philosopher who asked what would you do if you found you were going to repeat your life from start to finish, every fuck-up, with every pain, every downer you’ve endured already, what would you do? And so with a pang unusual in that it seemed to come also from someone else, she halted in mid-roll as she moved to extend her other hand to dial the number she’d anyway have had to get up on her elbow to see on the bedside pad where he’d written it: for she had learned this very little bit so far, which was as real as knowing—with a No—that she liked to go to sleep alone, and it was that this guy she’d gotten it on with at the party and later (harder to recall), here at home after her tea and peanut butter and English, and his buttermilk and BLTs at the diner, was doing that same old winged thing in her head that she knew so well, right? And her own leaden wrongness—she saw it from one half sleep to another—seemed to hold her hand back, that leaden wrongness, as the hand’s fingers went for the phone dial knowing his number after all without looking at the pad, until this leaden drag passed and she fell into a feeling like she’d had after she said No about sleeping and at once had seen that even more than she’d known it was what she had wanted just to say, and perhaps with all our help she found her younger brother absent from the life she had told that guy last night, and as she thought and thought and thought, and the bed drifted to where she recalled last night’s quite magical carpet, she caught herself hoping this two-way phone of hers would ring with the voice of the guy, who had not asked, "When can I see you?" but the phone silence got into her Sunday breathing and she was elsewhere—not (or not yet) Aphrodite dispersing herself far from where Emperor Theodosius’ temple-demolition crew could reach her—but in her very own breathing, which she’d discovered sometimes just stopped like her former husband Lou’s breath, and she would correct this.

And in that breathing with our help she heard her and her little brother’s silence amid the interrupted silences of their parents’ morning bicker. Her brother at that moment not so big as when we saw him previously. But now arising out of maternal fixity amid his parents’ purely verbal but sticky inquiry into whether the owner of a local auto-repair shop had taken up flying to get away from his wife who worked with him and answered the phone and did the paperwork. This issue between Grace’s parents was as outlandish as the earliness of the hour, for they were all of them too damn early that morning. As if by some accident of independently planning to do something private. Meet someone or something. But they must have made a mistake and communicated, and were in the kitchen, battling spouse-parent versus spouse-parent; and Grace’s little brother, when his mother saw the milkman out the window, got told to take two empties out before the man got away, bolted, but Gracie ran after him though mainly into the empty release her mother had created in saying to the boy, put on your jacket, mister!

And Grace imagined him with the empties soaring three steps at a time down the four-step front porch, dashing down the walk, calling to the motionless milkman and so she followed her brother out of the kitchen and through the living room the way he went, to the front door: so that he may have heard her—she never knew afterward to ask—but he turned his head as if to overhear a word of warning never uttered or some news behind him that then came between him and the milkman, whose elbow was on the edge of the delivery truck’s rolled-down window and he’s watching through the windshield what Grace saw from behind—namely, her little brother fall forward like tripping your skate over a rooty hump in the ice so at that instant of soft chipping you are leaving one element for another.

He was stretched out with flakes of one bottle under one outstretched hand unemployed and the other bottle in some form under him. She saw red, but before she saw it and before, with blood facing him, he lifted his backside painfully to get onto his knees, the picture on his little (what’s she saying, "his little"?) his little jacket, the design of the great superchief of the Cherokees on the back that he was proud of, it wrinkled like a slit across his back when the lower half of the jacket rode up skewed, and the legs and leggings of the awesome Indian were for an instant displaced sideward, these crazy legs, so they half came not from the glittering torso with the feathered face glint-boned in her memory but from the blue ground the Cherokee was stitched on.

Clean break, babe, the past is over, it’s history, don’t get drawn back in. Over there is the beaded baby carrier, the Indian papoose purse with the little hood-window blooming dark-pink-lined, standing on Grace’s New York wall one year, gone the next, though into a closet of memories, against the closet wall caged by the collapsible steel shopping cart she still uses even on her new food trip. Expensive, that papoose carrier, that authentic buckskin craftwork: was it women sewed those Kiowa babies up or was it craftsmen? no zippers no buttons no snaps so it must have been loops and pegs, hooks and eyes, but the shape Grace saw from her bed that Sunday morning having thought better of dialing her friend of the night before never revealed itself until she took it off the wall and stuck it in a closet and it had been so long in a closet that it had disappeared even from the closet eventually, the papoose carrier’s little hooded place at the top, the pursed closing down the front—while the evolution of the papoose carrier in her mind wasn’t single many of us could have told her, wasn’t only (since it looked like) the ancestral vagina that yields the future male member, it was the sun shining upon the middle of America where her kid brother and she lay by a public, a man-made lake across which as if on it three horses and riders could be seen passing one by one, and though he loved her he stopped talking and she in her two-piece bathing suit had to roll half-over toward him to look at him and say, listen, bud, demanding he answer her but what was the argument about? she recalls only the scene, their flesh, her orange bra, his bright brown, hairless chest, all told one night in New York like a huge laugh—told to Maureen or Norma, can’t recall, though Norma passes it all on to her husband, and then Grace told Sue perhaps too, whose husband listens and listens while their eighteen-year-old son hears.

"You see," the interrogator adds half-silently behind the potential apparatus, the charged vessel of our riveted chair, "you tried to non-answer our question re: Mayn’s being armed but you betrayed yourself."

Betray? we ask ourselves (betray?) into the area around our chair. Did you mean reveal ourselves or deceive ourselves? we ask, making allowances for his second language, ours, which gratefully lacks those no-no’s his has. And doesn’t the inquisitor who’s behind us pushing know what’s going to happen no matter how we answer?

We ask in the end ourselves, isn’t that our way?, and under this type of interrogation, as James Mayn himself said, we’re human, we’re a survivor.

But the interrogator (in uniform? in mufti?) speaks: This putative woman, he replies to our "Betray, reveal, deceive?"—this womanist nicknamed Grace Kimball has a younger brother, so does Mayn; she has or had parents who fought in private, so did Mayn; she’s divorced and so is Mayn; her genital apparatus is alleged to be in terms of evolution male-oriented; both had grandmas who supported Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marching on Washington Easter of 1894—plus (and our breath is taken away by how the interrogator has saved to spring on us however inaccurately now something largely said so very long ago that it’s just about believed) Kimball left her husband Lou yet he was the one who went: is not this like the mother long ago who sent her son away yet left him with the impression that it was she who’d left: plus the grandmother (breathes the voice behind us distinctly, and racing back over what we all have said, we hardly think but to condemn this totalitarian hireling who may have had the diva’s outspoken old father in the next room or in this very interrogation chair as recently for all we know as us but damn we are saddled as well with the suspicion that this after all non-native user of our language has so ignored the words of our query—"Betray, reveal, deceive?"—that he’s had humorous buttons created out of those words one for each day of his week, but we fight back). But that was Mayn’s grandmother what about her? we retort from our chair seeing nothing before us.

O.K. what about her? replies the interrogator closing in: it goes like this: Grace Kimball is one-thirty-second Pawnee, you said; and at her big turning point she flew east from Indian country to change her life; the grandmother likewise flew east from Indian country at a big turning point in her life and with the beloved Navajo Prince somewhere behind her on her track.

But the interrogator is going haywire perhaps because we have become everything to him—and, ‘ That was the East Far Eastern Princess," we mutely protest, our breath pounding, repelled by our heart—it’s not good—he’s so close now he’s breathing down our neck, what is he about to come up with? we’d like to set eyes on him but we’re riveted and his voice ahead of itself retorts in questions, Who and why was she?

Likewise somewhere behind the East Far Eastern Princess is that pivotal moment when she disarmed her awesome pursuer from the West, the still not entirely empty-handed Navajo Prince; conceived her vision of history to take back to her interested father the King of Choor; and according to Alexander —who is Alexander?—Mayn’s grandfather, but—according to him she acquired for future contingencies that common revolver that in all the hands Indian, Mexican, American that handled it, multiplied into perhaps a small arsenal in fact. While Grace Kimball, to turn to her as you did to avoid our question if Mayn is armed, also flew east having acquired already her vista of history: for it is obvious to anyone who knows women that whatever she felt some years later the dark morning she broke Lou’s egg against the sink and her heart came up—or was it his?—in her mouth—Kimball when she first fled east and well before she met her already imagined husband, already had her vista of history intact if only in essence and by intuition.

That is, without analytic thought, without the study of books which is known in women to bring on Bright’s disease, the interrogator jokes, we think (except to another voice submerged to the point of virtual disappearance in us it’s not a joke, and this voice, a woman, by historical convergence, sighs in recognition of someone whose words she knew so well she was like a friend to her, who died of Bright’s disease far away in another part of the country almost too far to make the trip until one day she elected to think only of herself and like a desperado covering his tracks did take that trip and went away).

So without study or research Kimball came to her vista of history when it came to her, that is to go ahead and be it, make it, because it was in her already in the form of an available space that needed only to be managed. But that doesn’t say how she saw it.

It had its funny side.

Funny? asks an unknown child, looking away from its homework screen but still reading—looking up to and from its home—an unknown child, a multiple child. Funny? it asks.

Well, a side beyond the triangle.

We’re doing rotation in class right now.

Well, there you are, honey, you rotate the triangle, never stop rotating it—that’s the funny side, like you go all around a statue so quietly the statue doesn’t see you move so it’s the statue that seems to be turning before your eyes.

I don’t see what’s funny.

Grace’s brother Saturday in the backyard where his mother in exasperation said he belongs, suddenly has nothing to do. (Except be watched by his sister from an upstairs window.) There’s a line drawn (Grace can just about see it) between his offer to help Dad change the oil and Dad’s gruff "You’re too late, I already started," and, at seven-thirty earlier this morning in the kitchen, Grace’s mother’s empty abstract feeling that she must go on to the end come hell or high water discussing a surprise postcard of a giant gorge—a dark cut in the earth—sent from Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by her brother whom her husband objects to because the man doesn’t drink, is unmarried, doesn’t vote, is a trouble-shooter running errands in the wilderness for the Department of the Interior, and probably (a man like that) doesn’t pay his taxes: the postcard said only, here we go again, love to all, Walter: the discussion in Grace’s mother’s kitchen went on beyond breakfast when Grace’s mother interrupted it to say she needed Dad to drive her to do the marketing and he said he would be busy changing the oil and didn’t know how long it would take: that’s one of many, many triangles, some with Grace, some with only one parent, talking about one thing like a postcard maybe meaning something else which like the unused message space around her uncle’s bulletin from Medicine Bow is both something and a nothing, a gap where you fill it in, you dream at night that you have only others to blame, but for what?—you’ll have to go back and dream again to find out for what and Grace is determined enough to and finds in the office in her hometown where she is a draftsman in 1949 that all the love ‘n romance people are getting where she works is in triangles that all depend on her and she wakes up sad, though hungover and rarin’ to go: you say through (by now) your own windshield one Sunday, approaching the municipal lake, that you will have it different and maybe you will send for your brother when you get where you are going, maybe not. But one week Grace sold her little red (for Rarin’) convertible, hugged and kissed everyone So long—

—The triangles you’re talking about were rotating, observes the serious child looking away from its homework; so didn’t they come all the way around?

But Kimball, like the grandmother, must look ahead, insists the interrogator; she would not look back at the communication gap fusing mother-centered and father-centered forms in one disturbing moment of transition, would not reflect upon the triangles coming full circle—

—because, we add, the family circle, less than fullness, boasted—

—boasted? demands the interrogator, boasted?—

—a circumference, chimes the child.

And inside was all that was inside.

Who spoke up then?

No one really.

Boasted? demands the interrogator; up? his voice above but so close his words sting the scalp.

Nobody ever spoke up and said, I’m angry because after your second drink after dinner you’re half asleep; or said, When you go out to fix the living-room shutter that’s banging in the wind that’s sweeping in from the winter fields outside of town and then come back in like you’re in the reading room of the library and sit slowly so slowly with a sigh down into your straight chair there and right away ask if anyone wants an apple, why don’t you never ask me to go out and fix the shutter? or said, What’s it matter if Uncle Walter just enjoys himself in Wyoming, in Utah, in Colorado, let’s eat breakfast for creep’s sake, or said, When did you two have a good laugh together, no strings attached? or said, Let’s get it out in the open, the power in this family derives from what is not quite said and the power resides primarily—

—in, continues the interrogator, the explosive potential of this confusion of two systems patriarchal and matriarchal, such that (says the interrogator acquiring in our language an uncertain seat he’ll damn well sit no matter what olden cities now rumbling and coming unstuck he’s sitting on top of which is definitely something big) from a matrilocal system appropriate to a women-controlled garden-agriculture where men are secondary and gardens are irrigated by the heavens, the exogamy or marrying out of the tribe was Kimball’s which, as she winged eastward, a true Pawnee in her visions, imitated on the contrary the movement of women to the husband’s home territory in a patrilocal hunting culture where the sons continue to live where they know the habits of the game and every inch of the terrain as the sky rotates over it; whereas, though also likewise, the East Far Eastern Princess renamed Rainbow Cloud at the crisis fled on her bird eastward home to her father’s country having disarmed the Navajo Prince and drawn him against her will away from the lands of his home where he later was abandoned doubly to a matrilocal people as strange to him as their multiple structure of small-scale dwelling units, and to the wilderness of her heart’s one-time errands where he could not help casting his shadow, as he moved on. So you see, recedes the interrogator inside one’s very head totaled hole by hole, the question remains, Is Mayn armed? and is dodged if you turn to Grace Kimball, no more an obstacle to our question than her decision that men (the weak sisters) would certainly dream of failure, can keep the power vac of her privately beaten (now late) Dad from taking us wormhole and all on the public horse we also sit to the power vac externalized and tabled (is it 1974, is it the talks in Vladivostok?) in the form of an accord holding numbers and the paper they’re printed on together in the mind—giving the legs under the table a good deal of latitude: frankly if in the preceding two years three thousand warheads have been added, we have to live after all, so we’ll grant ourselves increases in this area within reason while we still set definite upper bounds, which, early in the eighth decade of the century in question, Jim Mayn, for whom the story itself made an inflationary spiral, recorded as a middling-conscientious newsman who doesn’t go in for predictions while in suspecting that history made little sense even as random intermittence (some overheard economist’s phrase) found more to interest him in the margins, in old and new weather, in it, indeed, those real outer screens, spheres of magnetism, and molecules-turned-ions, and ozone, yes weathers that lid our radiance and in the grandeur of their checks upon us inspire our immortality.

Which prods us to recall what matrilocal-patrilocal adventures the interrogator-persuader, a gross outsider, reported of the grandmother and/or Princess between the two of whom we pivot our eyes back and forth as fast as he interrogation chair our eyes are riveted in lets them, and prods us to retort blindly, Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? (while we feel him behind us in the ballpoint vibes we’re getting from the ground up writing down enthusiastically as a local idiom new to him). But is it he or really us all now asking, Why did this grandmother-to-be, Margaret, turn out to be such a rather strict Victorian parent? And care less and less for that family paper? The answer is that this did not happen right away, but is that a good answer? And when her own daughter Sarah went to France the summer of 1920, why did she not let her stay the half-year she so longed for?

Yet the interrogator however internalized by us has said next to nothing so far about any Princess (nee born to be Mayn’s grandmother) winging back home East where the Inventor of New York her cranky, ingenious protector (though what was she to him?) turned her into a sun-drenched cloud so that she might escape for a time into the very statue the unassembled pieces of which she had once eight years previous in 1885 at the age of twelve or thirteen viewed with her father and an unknown photographer while behind her this older man she was about to meet who later sent her Longfellow’s Dante inscribed by the poet for her birthday muttered as they stared into the concave insides of the Statue’s face as tragic as it was dumb, "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will," having also given advice which eight years later she took, "Go west, young girl young woman."

So the torturer-interrogator betrayed himself. He forgot we had said nothing of the grandmother’s return adventures with the Hermit-Inventor of New York before she was restored both to her father the editor of a then thriving weekly newspaper in New Jersey and to an old friend and sometime beau Alexander to whom she soon gave her hand in marriage and indeed friendship and with it an authentic Colt revolver she herself by conflicting accounts had taken as a gift or stolen to use as a deterrent possibly with its possible former possessor in mind, the Navajo Prince who was never so much the obstacle she put behind her to coast the future wind’s inevitable road home as he was the love in her she passed on in her self and her stories to the one of her two grandsons who, then as later raised to the power of future, was in two places at once but not at one.

And one of these twos that he found himself so bound to he found them in himself like obstacles to be sought again and again was on one hand his grandparents’ house and on the other that other home down the street of Windrow, where a mother sent two sons away, at least one to live human and go on being animal, which, since these two were not just two but one, meant you might have it both ways, why Grace Kimball said so somewhere in the ongoing structure of her good works which accommodated a multiplicity of small-scale units, Redesign your life, cleanse that transverse colon you’ll feel like you’re flying on coke, while you’re at it, at it, at it.

But, Pawnee though she was one-thirty-second, other Indians meant something more actual by having it both ways of being human and animal, both your totem, hence you’re an eagle or you’re a coyote, say, and if the both of you are coyotes or you’re both eagles, you two can’t marry.

This the Ojibway medicine man with the diamond squint might still accept in this day and age matriculating thanks to the diva’s doctor with four of the diva’s own natal compatriots in a forward-looking aeronautics college within range of Lake Superior.

Can’t make a living shipping tapeworms to the opera stars even should she be reduced to the great Minnesota tapeworm as her personal totem softly singing in the entrails of a drifting, ever drifting Mille Lacs pike, "Fly me, fly me." But it was no joke to the diva’s doctor; words have weight; the past has weight, and so, as we have seen, have the diva’s multilingual dictates; just so, the doctor straggled for years to transplant his heart from the mother who called his true love Archaeology his "Hiawatha studies"; and he might relieve himself double-checking the god Morning Star though never at first hand confirm the published report that Navajo women think if you depart from the missionary position which gives you at least the vantage to see up through the teepee’s funneled smoke-hole (since they haven’t evolved ceiling mirrors beyond the mere sky in this culture as yet) your baby will come out feet first. Sediment info from a long-gone sea.

Like Mayn, who’s some of what by now we all have in us, we’re out here in the future but at the same time we’re not. This here is already past or gone and something of an illusion and as he lightly told his much-loved daughter he thought he was at times in future no kidding and was imagining our present as past; crazy, eh?

And why this should be he wouldn’t blame on anybody else which would be like seeking Power, or like seeing History as Seasons, or Upward (Yes!) Mobility, or Greed, or Consciousness Determines Being or Being Determines Consciousness, or some damn story to scrawl on a sheet of graph paper. Yet he knew he chose or "gravitated toward" unspectacular nuts-and-bolts subjects. He was curious how the nation made its living.

But that he was in future and, as we remember, covering a space or place known as a libration point, there’s little doubt, it’s ringed with gravity valleys and gravity wells, and it’s a place where you can stay put because the pulls of Earth and Moon equalize with another force they didn’t tell him what it was. And if he really went there along some declining curve, he did not imagine with enough vividness asking what dreams might come to citizen-settlers there after the thousandfold shock of being transmitted one for two.

But the point is that pairs of persons are lined up waiting to enter the bubble. They even eye one another smiling speaking in their travel excitement of that reckless rumor that they’ll become one person—but when?—and if so, who then? It’s like one of the old modern elevator-capsules and each pair when it’s their turn stand Indian-file on a plate inside this bubble composed of a million million chip-templates of perhaps electro-magnetism which, at the right moment, throng—we already remember, we’re repeating what was given us verbatim—throng two waiting bodies with non-visible radiance that brings out the cells in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin. Till the point when the million million collapse into one idea. And the two persons standing on the plate at Locus T are apparently dissolved to frequency here in order to be reconstituted elsewhere so as not to slog from here to there in an operational displacement of volume, but no they are instead subject to another change which Mayn finds in the altered meaning of T which was for "Transfer" but is now for "Transform," two to become one, a clean economy which may accommodate three, four, even five as soon as they improve the plate.

And he isn’t clear what the two transformed to one are transferred to, where do they wind up besides together?

His questions bury their own shadows and he is there in the past which being the century in question he’s got to get with, lest it seem unreal; he’s a decent guy (he sometimes thinks just in those words), and words have weight though sometimes giving light and sometimes not (and between him and others we have given ourselves those who are already angels flesh of ourselves so that entering a delivery room and looking at the faces of a woman and a man there, we might be light enough or too much to go around, for light as we become it has weight) and while he just as soon not know light weighs, Mayn’s going to see that disposable past (our present) as well as can be. Which helps us because we’re in it. Though then he’s in up to his ears, years deep, back to grandmother, who went ahead herself—odd—ordering a small granite grave-marker from Red Bank and saw that it was laid exactly where she said in the cemetery with, in retrospect, breath-taking soonness, so that for the grandson Jim (he wouldn’t know about his younger brother Brad whom he imagines he never knew very well) all these things are equal to each other long or brief, and falling far into the warped horizon of what he declined to foresee or made himself not think of, he drew with him like his grandmother’s stories also a throng of voices—call them Relations—such as his father, the cousin outsider from Pennsy who took over the Windrow Democrat when it was about to fail because no news was not good business—about to fail because it was still sort of old-fashioned political and small-town thoughtful and "passing parade-ish"—saying out loud to his wife, Jim’s mother, through walls and years slowly in the middle of the night, "Two sons of a bitch," which wasn’t as easy to say as his grandmother Margaret’s recitation of Henry Aldrich Long fellow’s "Seaweed," ending, God help us,

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting

On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;

Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart.

—for which once when she recited it spontaneously at Bedloe’s Island in 1885 among the uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty, she subsequaintly "here with" received in the mail on her birthday a marbled copy of Longfellow’s rendering of Dante’s Commedia inscribed to the uncle of the Inventor of New York by (as the Hermit always addressed our reverend apostle of a shaggy national literature) "Wadsworth," H.W.L. himself at his dining-room table in Boston, near where the diva’s doctor’s mother at Sunday breakfast once upon a time pooh-poohed his "Hiawatha studies" and nearer in time (but not place) to the table where a Unitarian sage momently adopting a shaman’s baritone wrote with the copacetic beat of a Hindu god that

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near

and so forth, words once recited by their mother to his younger brother Brad while Jim stood outside the music-room door listening and when there was silence looked through the wormhole. Which, with us probably in it, was flushed out after the diva’s doctor left and before her South American officer returned seeking not only her flesh but, as she, an anxious daughter, well knew, further information. The worm’s gone, and we’re behind the news because the diva has already sung another role and all we know, feeling about opera (grand, bel, comique, or other) as Grace Kimball and Jim Mayn do, is that at the crunch the priestess, torn as she was between love and anger, didn’t kill her two kids but instead disappeared into flame conveniently offstage.

We ask no more of her, and she’s followed by applause we hear without being told—not followed by the silence in Windrow, New Jersey, the silence in the next room, the music room, which made Jim secretly in the hall outside bend down and see what he could see through the keyhole because his mother had been sort of sick really months now but he saw only her bare elbow pleasantly at its inner angle puffed and creasy and then as she went on reciting or reading again her elbow moved out of sight and was instantaneously replaced on the chair arm by the fingers of Jim’s brother, the fingers were all he saw. Not long after that their mother’s death by drowning was reported in the Windrow Democrat. The report was incomplete, omitting reference to a suicide note one report said had been left impaled on a beach umbrella strut at Mantoloking, and as the days went on—and a day came when Margaret took Jim to the cemetery for the laying of a stone—he recognized that he did not want the body to come ashore because he would want to see it.

And so the weather and the sea made a secret familiar cover for the powers that be and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who disappeared where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap where, after that old silence, her voice would sometimes resume: "When me they fly, I am the wings." So she would pick up perhaps the vague memory of Emerson from her mother Margaret, if not the love of verse, which she had on her own.

And through this gap a future would always come, as she did not: except a breathing wind that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day. And hearing this wind, her long-lost son Jim found obstacles for it.