Yet a Wide Load—to pick up Mayn’s words—a Wide Load coming out is what Larry believes he was: because, though no hysterect Sue (unlike her friend Lucille who, perhaps since she rec’d her hysterectomy right after an abortion, never blamed her hysterectomy on the size of her by then eleven-year-old red-haired son’s given head at birth), Lar’ sure got the idea somewhere along the line that the parameters of his own capital (though maybe all that was inside his head) split his mother sorely enough to sever a faith years later acquired by her through a book, to wit that the mother ape (read baboon), while readily losing interest in a babe of hers if it die, loves and tends ye a live one for all the world by instinct to not remember the pain of childbirth as soon as it’s over yet as if that pain through some semen of amnesia remembers to beget mother love like an opposite of the pain, and so the Earth grows more rational.

Yet did she feel mother love just in order to neglect (read forget) the kill of Larry tearing headstrong through her? (We can’t blot out a sex flick of the late century in question, and the star stud’s creamy baritone advancing his own original pleasure-pain theory to the featured lady above him slowly centering down around his disappearing X-erected membership also baritone-arm cartridge.) For then Susan, if we now are even still with Susan alone, might after all not have felt truly mother love but only that the obstacle-pain was a presence to get past until she was sheets to the wind yonder and knew oh that she still loved her husband after all: but then only if she was still really she, like the century in question, there within our accommodating Us where many women prove to be like her with her very same problems to her relief at Grace’s Body-Self Workshops—and they prove to be like, but prove as well to like—for it’s Important, it’s Important, she found out and cried out after years of needing mothering more than to be liked by men, which was what she had thought it was all about, namely what she fell out of bed into each tense, dream-rewired morning of her one-time life, namely that ‘twas men she must needs be liked by, she had thought. And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world until some sweeter obstacle dropped away leaving her in another female presence and her within ours among other women she felt herself among, who had not seen the porn film aforementioned except for—in this wall-to-wall Body Room—the room’s "owner," proprietor, and presiding spirit Grace Kimball, who had, with her young, delicate, stern friend Maureen, who went with Grace to the film with a small party of Grace’s friends so that later Maureen and Grace in unison in Grace’s Body Room during a session of the women’s Body-Self Workshop in unison like an octave had the same things to say about the film—the absence in it of authentic one-on-one masturbation but in all fairness the goodly stress or indication through close-shot focus on her requests that a woman might Run the Fuck, though granted directorial close-shot she-focus isn’t necessarily acknowledging the goddess nor is it any substitute for, though also no obstacle to, that adjacent ideal of directorial play, and when you come down to it sex was viewed as bounty kindly deigned by the male.

Viewed upon the permanent screen also of a Manhattan movie theater at differing times by such others among us as further universalize our Sue, who is Larry’s mother but has or had the abundant dark hair of more than one other of ours changing from angel to human and had the occasional though not so lyric or so satin ("onstage") inclination of a known singer to dress now and again in men’s clothes: viewed, as has been said, on one screen at differing times, the now syntactically (tapeworm-?) digested anatomical film above mentioned lived a little in the minds of some of the current women we have bothered to respectfully discern within us, as if we were each of them looking back and forth multiplied by unresolved dreams between let’s say the inner, many-factd screen and the moving color cinema screen in the dark movie house of afternoon couples equal we see in number exactly to (two for one) the slouched, sporadic single men (no female singles) and all like communicants with the light they’re shadowed by, which is also the woman on the screen, a Miss "Jones," making up for (we’re asked to believe) her long-lost time and multiplying it with the support of a small cast of players coupling or even trebling always into her one.

The diva saw it with her lone physician one afternoon long before the naval mufti put in; and she dressed up for her escort in longish gray silk, her giant supply of hair up, her mother’s lace mantilla drawn across a high comb like a veil chaperoning her girlhood, and her annually leased amber Porsche glowing in the garage waiting to be driven to Connecticut for dinner at an inn (by her there, by her escort home). She was having an afternoon off apparently from some articulate structure such as Norma or Rosenddmmerung able to accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale acts but comfortable in another such accommodating structure, her relation with the doctor. This relation she suddenly risked later in the self-same eighth decade of the century in question. For, having always, in and out of costume/role/voice, seen herself rather comfortably as many women—not excluding the patient who treats her doctor to a feast of stethoscopic auscultation, she came one day to risk all that and without a supporting cast: pinned herself down to two, all by herself—though she was in bed with her officer (i.e., pinned down now to two women): the one who casts a quiet hand upon the military man-in-question’s tough and interesting inner thigh whose mufti lies otherwise draped upon a chaise as fealty to this woman who would later contemplate sauteing him the slick, pink, gland-like sea roe left by her brunchen-hearted physician of the brioche chamber the medicine man where medicine is the man who, like the French physician Piorry whom the diva’s doctor’s own idol Oliver Wendell Holmes extolled as poet and percussionist expert alike in rhymes and in the chest-tapped "resonances of the thoracic cavity," unites the dual languages of his love (does the diva’s doctor) in listening ever and ever for the breath of his diva’s heart in all its grown chambers now reduced or maybe grown (half-beknownst to him her friend who really cares for her) to two chambers— which are threatening to be (equally): the One who casts her fingertips upon the sense of his chamois-soft sac easier to know than what floats so unknown within it while the self-same sac she will presently use her very sex to find lightly arriving and kissing regularly and softly the edge of her love, his against her, sealing each time the lip of her; yet also be the other woman of her new two, who turns interrogator as if only that way can she ask what on earth she means taking up with an officer of the motherland regime that casts her father as a danger man and does his grocery shopping for him once a week so he must miss that flower honey he loves.

But what good could her presence do her old father? She’s a Swiss citizen, imagine! If she flew home to Chile and they let her in, it would be on condition she sing:

sing near the harbor that her voice teacher’s piano once reflected through a high casement window and, facing it across the old room, a single round mirror which was the pivotal depth turning the coastal brilliance to a sound of sweetest history upon the grand piano’s shaped black top large as Brazil, as the whole continent, or inanimate as the future and firm as the Latin her teacher had her study.

She could imagine her shoulder blades where his hands gripped her coming up along her back and over the top for a while, and, dislodging the flow, thinking of him for a moment where he now was, down below the deep breaths of her breasts to which his one blind hand goes passing back and forth—and with a delicacy of blindness brushes across. She thinks of him at her mercy, too—or of him being asked questions he could not but answer though he had heard if not them, something already, listening in on her thigh (what? some political infidelity)—she would then entirely take in this crossed cadence and the flow which after all hadn’t lessened!, so that she knew she had it in her power to be made to come: until, having once again hugged this power of hers with all of her legs and a brain in her belly that clapped its high slick pillows, she lay rolled now on her side, happy, and heard herself monstrously try him with questions. Power she all but handled while she swept aside her ignorance of facts that whispered with dangerous constancy while she it was who now asked and he answered, and all the time she feared and proudly feared what he might hear of what she’s thinking coming from inside her thigh.

Which is no more political than dear Clara’s exile-economist husband, just as English as a Chilean of his class can be, quoting Chaucer or Shakespeare, or the American Emily Dickinson who has music but frets so—that one might Waste—what? those Days we thought unwisely we could spare; or the dark kindness of the Scotsman Hume candled by love and such excellent amiability that that depth might some evenings find itself all alone emptying within covers of a small and economical tome, quoting others of that island and time from some vast anthology of English sound, so that one would never have thought Clara’s love an economist laughing his tall way through exile private more than incognito (and "I would I were a weaver," he was heard to say, with Falstaff, and Clara said, "I would you were, my love," because she knew he said a lot of things to entertain her: to which he retorted, "I am your love, my love, ‘And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, / When all the breathers of this world are dead,’ " upon which Clara laughed, no only smiled beyond laughter, thinking how far her children were from her upon a globe you might nowadays just fall off of—upon which her husband the exile-economist sang some American songs in a Hispanic-Oxford accent more poignant than authentic, more close to her than foreign—"Love O Love O Foolish Love," "False-Hearted Lover," "Irene"—that seemed no more out of place than English rock groups with the drive-shaft twang of the Bluegrass in their coke-cooled nose or the drawl of northwest Carobama or new Arkansoma.

Yet proudly the diva feared still more that her officer would hear some price upon his head in her soft interrogations of him, post-ecstatic, pre-prandial, so at ease in (as her widower father would say of her mother’s long convalescence) "a darkened room" that, asking the demufti’d paramour a fine thread of questions like Clio of all her Antonys floating past the Moon-implanted pyramids, the Manchoor Mountains, the roof tiles of Florence and Paris, and over the Nine Ten Eleven Bridges of Nueva York, Where were you a minute ago?—and where an hour ago? I have won you naked and dressed, have made you my body and made for you each charming accident and endearing blunder the art of love hath care of, and still what are you thinking?—if you don’t love me I will not love myself, she hears some other voice of powerful relations seeking at our expense improvement, say, and she repeats it dismayed that she is some kind of angel if he says so, but she knows, troubled, that her lover does love her and did ten days ago with lust and admiration when he was principally at that time in her view an officer of that regime that broke Victor Jara’s guitar hands so he could no longer accompany himself except down the runways of the sport stadium where Neruda had read poems in 1972—regime-officer-someone this young opera goer who might hurt or help her father. But now ten days later she’s flirting with one answer to two wants (how did any man ever kill two birds with one stone?), felt in the devious track coming out of her some evidence that she didn’t know after all this very body of hers she was so happy with here, pre-menstrual; so close with and so happy with that it and its cosmic environs of bed and chamber had forgotten each other easily for minutes and minutes upwards of an hour-and-three-quarters of such love!

The friends of mine who sat near you? she murmurs, you knew them? you recognized them?

He makes a sound—or is it a touch—upon her leg—that’s all.

At Norma, she adds.

At Norma?

You obviously knew them, the man and the woman.

At which performance was this? he asks with the soft humility of a killer who knows what he may be called on to do, and he specifically does not say Rosenkavalier, which they both know Clara and her husband were at.

Oh at both, she lies (and nothing happens, unless the tapeworm track way above the thigh his ear’s to reenacts the ghost worm itself in some notion that gives her away).

Which friends? he asks.

The only ones I know were there, she lies—near you at Norma, where do you know them from?

Norma is the opera, he mutters as if he is under a pillow of many years of marriage, Norma is the opera about the Druid priestess and the Roman soldier, with a modicum of suicide at the end, I think, he murmurs, jokingly double-checking that it wasn’t Rosenkavalier and the silver rose, and the satin breeches weren’t the sacred wood, the threatened kids, the funeral pyre, the hated Roman occupation.

The ones you mentioned, she persists—the man and the girl.

They were a mere socio-sexual phenomenon of older-younger seen in New York quite a lot, last season and this, comes the reply from his mouth but apparently from his ear into her thigh’s live bloodstream, and what she thinks of herself at this instant she would rather not think, and not even "lest he pick it up" down there against her.

And so he moves upward like waking, like remembering, seeking her up here where she’s a soft eye to kiss and a long, warm surface of neck, while she, a good She, gazes over his shoulder. And, blocking the thought of this as a political scene, she finds and describes better than she knew the man with the girl, though not the half-observed movements to and from seats, nor that the man’s bold, squarish, weighty face turning, with an older courtesy more than once to, she remembered now, the girl beside him, hove forth into mind emerging right out of the blank obstacle which is her refusal to think what the present scene with this Pinochet officer makes her, and she can’t think how she saw him that square-faced man in the orchestra so well, she didn’t know she was looking that hard—because she wasn’t.

Socio-sexual, she softly scoffs out of Spanish now into English—you know who I mean: the man with the heavy head of Spanish-gray hair, and heavy, broad shoulders, who seemed to look off over the audience.

I know only, says the man at her neck, that the two vacant seats near me were occupied only during the second act, and not by this man and the girl you are . . .

She sees those seats during Act One vacant of Clara and her husband, who after all didn’t use them; whereas in Act Two some seats are full of other vacancy . . . : two women?

Two young ladies with goggles.

Goggles? Surely not goggles.

Policeman’s smoked sunglasses, a bit big for their fine faces, maybe they had standing room for Act One.

But, she says insistently, her powerful lips at his ear, her eyes way past it, but she doesn’t see what she’s looking at for a second on the wall. Those two, the man and the girl, she begins again, they left after the first act: you made a point of asking about them: what do you want with them? I don’t know their names. I don’t even know their faces.

What would I want with people I don’t know? he sighs.

To know about them? continues the interrogatress.

You are making something up, he sighs; I thought you felt good.

But as she notes the poster, her poster with concentric squares that she was looking at over his shoulder, and actually bites into the upper rim of his ear, he cries out, and then he says, All right, then, they are important if you want, they are probably key figures in a master plot to infiltrate the opera.

And his interrogatress is so ready with her next question, But what do you want? that he lets her hear him think (and say), Not them, and adjusts his ear to her shoulder, dear that he’s willing to seem.

So she wonders what her relaxed neck and shoulders betray to his listening instinct when, fearing for Clara and her important husband and fearing for her own father (whose imported sweet cigars she can smell from here), she finds in the framed poster on the shadow-like wall only that same man—or his face—the man who was with the girl for Act One and left for some reason which is probably as plausible as she to herself (upset plus pre-menstrual interrogator of her suspect, close-up) is not plausible, and she must know why that man at the opera is behind each idling query of her breath against the blurred, gorgeous, close-up demufti’d young fascist admiral who’s less bent on landing a nuclear submarine for his country than in adding to the bank of its intelligence, which is not adding to him—and the sum of its vile subtractions (she works herself up), and has she dozed off into his ear for an instant?— she has—in order to needlessly say, I’m asking the questions—but he, at rest yet drawn by her words, asks (and it could have preceded her own words), How am I supposed to know these friends of yours? what are their names? maybe that will shed light.

Their names are no concern of yours. Or mine, for that matter.

Easy enough to find out, he says.

I’m sure it was, she says, but feels the exchange turning awful.

Can’t we be in love? he says.

I am asking the questions, she says with soft daring.

If not their names and faces, which I do not know, he insists, their connections—is that it?

That’s why you singled them out?

You, not I—and why did they walk out of Norma? Opera is the most democratic of art forms, he adds.

Rosenkavalier? she asks: personal preference, perhaps, she answers— and has made a mistake, forgetting to be true to her lie.

That was what you said. Therefore, it was my presence that drove them away from Norma after the first act—is that it? is that what you are suggesting?

But he doesn’t care; he draws his hands down her back and she is confused, not hopelessly, not hopefully, and what is democratic about opera here? the opera house is right smack in the Puerto Rican tenements you might say. She can’t ask him to arrange for her father to leave his home and come here because, even if the regime agreed, her father would prefer to stay and the regime would not agree, because her father would speak louder than any act except his silent murder some night here in the free world. And thinking of anything but this, she contemplates the absence of everyone, of the middle-aged man and the girl from the second act of Norma, the absence of Clara and her husband from Norma altogether, the absence during Act One of Norma in the two seats she’d given Clara and her husband, into which the two young women with glasses had moved for the second act: until, as he moves down her, letting go of her shoulders and she finds behind her closed eyes the bristle of his mustache on her hip, her rib, along her stomach until his mustache disappears, she finds emerging the face and long hair of the mere girl whom that broad-faced, middle-aged man with the rather harshly striking thick gray hair sat with and leaned toward, in the seats she left for her friend Clara and Clara’s husband—the girl who hadn’t mattered before with her broad forehead and fine cat face coming back to mind having never till now been seriously present, and the diva, left alone with her own abandoned neck, lips, ears while her lover nuzzles her, and softens his own aim gently to a fault where she is wet so that, pre-menstrual for what her desire might not hold back, she starts to say, "I wouldn’t if I were you," but supplies instead of the last four words that would warn him of blood the other words "be surprised if it was the girl you were after."

Whereupon, confounded by what she has called forth—a snapshot of Clara’s husband with three of the staff at the foundation in whose sanctuary for the time being he keeps "a certain profile" (he says), a snapshot—a snapshot that she’s sure includes that very girl, as if the diva onstage were ever absolutely sure of who is in the house, her sight flowing over and ignoring them like things in her when she is singing . . .

. . . confounded by all this somewhat as we are confounded of whom she is a part by her wholehearted breathing that starts up a little light of blind relation, even to the diamond squint of the Ojibway tapeworm trapper now matriculating in his aeronautics program within shooting distance of Lake Superior but she knows she had not the pain in the head and the pain in the belly and the throw-up sweating behind her tongue after all, but then, glad he’s where he is, and glad she is not him and need not close her chamber door, for no one else besides the two of them is here—no children, no old folks—she feels him breathing like his shoulders are inside the flesh of her legs, which they are, and knows that beyond her closed eyes he looks at her, because he chuckles, and takes a little swipe, and chuckles ancora, and rests his ear lovingly ‘gainst her leg to say—with a first trace of bright blood on his mustachioed teeth?— and perhaps he is here (in New York) only to discuss acquiring from the United States a submarine that she has heard spouts (and she sees it along their lone coast) like a whale (beloved, patient coast long enough to berth that U.S. aircraft carrier our Allende was urged to invite for a visit and inspired then to announce publicly the invitation to the aircraft carrier only to have it declined by the U.S. President whom her friends in Paris used to strangely respect for his support of the NATO alliance)—Is that girl (he asks) therefore a friend of your friend Clara? I know you are asking the questions and that is hardly a question, but—

No, she stops him, I hardly think the girl is a friend of Clara’s (and the diva finds his question is about to turn her off, and her stiff answer too could turn her off—which then has an opposite effect, for by an oracular chance she has heard again by memory or tapeworm track or co-female unconscious Clara’s brave remark down the thread of this last, turning mouth, to wit that Clara’s elegant exile husband (who can sing "The Midnight Special") does have a friend or two here—one a girl at the foundation who is devoted to him—and another thing or two Clara said about what’s going on hangs back in the diva’s remembrance like a real thing she forgot to do, or a face not her own).

Therefore, her lover murmurs, her fascist argonaut, her other body, murmurs muffled somewhere—therefore (he says unseriously or drowsing, or half-dreaming of her), your friend Clara and her husband . . . who likes music, and would have a box at the opera in another country ... do not see this foundation girl Amy ... are not in touch with her.

And the diva experiences a fixed shiver at these words of the man dreaming practically inside her. Well, her interrogation of him has brought them to a connection unforeseen, and saying, Amy? She is really feeling she may have endangered her friends—when all she wanted was to arrive at her father about whom she therefore now asks, What are you doing to him? tell me, what are you really doing to him?

She hears herself say not "they," which would mean the regime in general, but "you"; she might as well be proud she’s charged this naked man as part of it; she might as well, though all she will get from him is charm perhaps.

She rides the gentle shrug of his shoulders now in partial answer. She smells the vanilla smoke from his hair and she is nearly dispersed by some future feeding inside her but she smells dry, sharp unsmoked cigars, more acrid than their smoke, above the paternal hearth upon the mantel as many years ago as she once walked kilometres up a thorny, gravelly mountain behind a famous father who gave her a pair of black heavy hiking boots higher than the high shoes her anxious mother kept her in through the beginning years of her piano lessons though not a Sunday-afternoon song recital when she was no more than a child and her father nodded and smiled fifty feet away by a tall, ornate door, and later unseen by her disappeared leaving only a blank in her mind, disappeared with three tall men all about six inches taller than he, and handsome—one (it came back to her) a sewer architect and another a fiery-eyed, auburn-haired scientist, a Popular Front man of course who had been in the South when fifty thousand souls had perished in the earthquake, their heads emptied of the Front’s election slogan Bread, Roof, and Overcoat, so that, years later, though at this moment she, a goddess on a king-dolphin, can’t help seeing the great door ajar to the hallway that led to her father’s study, and finding an aroma of sweet cigar, and a door ajar where three men of her polite audience had been a moment ago—smoke rises from the vanilla of her present lover’s scalp and, in the midst of him with the violet of her own roof overhead meeting her vague, breathing eyes, she finds that whatever that unknown man in the orchestra at Norma (with the girl—Amy?—who works at Clara’s husband’s foundation sanctuary) means to the diva’s spiraling heart, she arrived at her hard-to-talk-about father only to see he was not the end of all her languidly irritable interrogation (no he was another obstacle sought, in the midst of these words of her naked admiral’s Your father is under house arrest and only he can hurt himself; he is fairly safe, he is a great man in his own way and he is, of course, old).

So she sees what she was about—though it too will change as she reaches it weightlessly, daughter, spy, counter-spy, counter-daughter, so totally at ease with her skin-and-bone-gripping arms and scrambling fingers and her neck and shoulder slopes as to prove the ease with which she does what she does so as to absorb the chambers of herself into one amorous whore just in time then to feel this role pass away with who but the broad-faced, broad-shouldered, unknown man in the orchestra who impressed her only upon his absence so that she thereupon became another woman whom the prostitute exploring some secret sign of her own celebrity inch by inch could never buy: and she suspected she might never tell this military man who was all over her like a boy overwhelming her in their joined breathing almost to the last, he was her other body known only for a couple of weeks growing two limbs onto her (his calves, she thinks, amused and clear) for her to plant the soles and heels of her bare feet on—of course they’re bare but what about that long-ago-felt "little swipe"? we remember we wanted to know and to be—never tell, never tell, never tell him that after their dementedly affectionate clasp ten days ago as naked inside as out, she was bound by bodily vow to miss her period and why the devil not?

Or telling him (for she has a reputation after all—and a trousseau beyond all need of a husband to go with it, yes telling) would be a thing she would think about when (and if!) she got to it among remembered phrases of his love—remembered, the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart rerouted via such doctored slick sea eggs as brunch is made for—for she doesn’t see him clearly in her future (not certainly as that We the young wife speaks for herself and her husband that takes on a wholeness sure enough to invade their dual humanity to appropriate it, is that it?, have we approached the fact?)— no, she sees him only as "a blank that will be in the way if we could but find it," some reasonable invading voices, mysterious We, angel perhaps if there were angels anyplace but inside us, saying the words she hears.

And now the diva, swaying generously toward a duplex kitchen and the light in order to rustle up a dish of roe, can be again less than a story in herself and once more part of a greater Breather capable of accommodating implicitly not just her mind but her body with its memorial maps where at least one tapeworm left its narrowing track converging unknown to it or its bearer upon a future point of self removed as soon as reached, flushed atabriney from the scene to show a possessive, solicitous, though friendly physician a thing or two (yet give a body a chance, as even this knowledgeable auscultocrat of the brunch board believes) with all his pharmacopoeiac chemistry floating in his head for his old Boston idol to walk on or—for such is the power of the great American doctor Holmes—to ride across in his wonderful one-horse shay discoursing on Ricord, "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" and (not to be mixed up with Tussaud, who was a madame) Rousseau the therapeutist who professed medicine as an art (read experience) as much like making or like love as history’s obstacle quest where an American Indian tapeworm (or Indian-processed tapeworm) gives way to another blind appetite or two beyond being "with" tapeworm or with father along an always narrowing future which— like the thing or two told her by Clara that hung back in her friend the diva’s mind about what’s going on with them (all these people illuminated by us quite possibly and perchance engendered by them, which includes Clara and her economist husband), their stranded, witty life—was not at the forefront of Jim Mayn’s, on an afternoon in New York when (for he was always thrown back shadow-like by the future he’d been in and so he’d actually witnessed and felt its narrowing) he tried to interview an old loner maverick with a beat-up face who talked about everything almost except what Mayn had been drawn to visit him for. This was a new coastline meteorology this man had made up which had unfrocked or unemployed him, hermit that he almost is, here in a quiet, multi-room "railroad" in a pretty high-rent neighborhood in the lower Village. How could Mayn, e’en with his non-position on history, not wonder that a maverick pressure-front analyst across Mayn’s path could prove also a hermit of New York who had done his share of invention? Was it that we were always thinking—we have to help each other out—of the next thing, not this?—like what is in the next room or apartment? And so because Mayn kept losing the skinny beat-up polymath’s name in favor of adjacent data, substitute epithets, and because this loner with the inventive mind don’t like to be interrupted—distinctly not!—Mayn can’t shift gears and backpedal but is aware of being after not just the elements of, well not just a new meteorology but a new weather new enough to have unfrocked this hermit crab when, as a weather specialist with a national service, he began introducing his own thing into reports and surprisingly was not picked up by the wire services, but stays busy and alive among the red-and-black diagrams drawn on areas of brown paper, split-open supermarket bags taped together on the wall of the final room of the railroad flat, diagrams of weather levels like coastlines and he’s talking about what came out (or went in) as, Mayn later told himself, "obstacle"(!) geometry but Mayn didn’t register it until hours later, having groped for a name he was renaming this old man as mottled and chipped as the fortified walls of his railroad flat until, with another word coming in his mind instead of "obstacle," he nonetheless voiced the term "obstacle geometry" to his phone mate this good crazy overintellectual kid Larry who is coping, he really is, at this transitional juncture of his life (though Jim Mayn hasn’t got the full story) coping with the busted-up marriage of his parents which he really as he says feels won’t last—that is, the bust-up—though he didn’t say where his mother was up to whatever she is up to, and Larry (all ten of him) was on the point of telling what felt like "all" (though Mayn isn’t receiving dossiers of that luridly commonplace sort because he knows enough about contemporary marriage to forget a great deal and still have a rich backlog and standing reserve), and so Larry at once picked up (before Mayn could find the word to replace "obstacle") the term "obstacle geometry." And Larry said he’d never heard of "obstacle geometry." "Oh well if you haven’t heard of it—" "I mean I can figure what it is, Jim, I can figure what it is—" "—//that’s what the man said" said Jim. "Who?" said Larry. "The old genius." "What’s his name?" "Is it the Hermit-Inventor of New York?" Mayn asks, but of whom?

But he hardly had time to be startled at that old monicker from grandma Margaret’s talk, it isn’t as if Mayn don’t know from his grandmother Margaret the Hermit-Inventor’s name—that is, the H.I. of N.Y.—still he is a hermit and he is an inventor, and "of New York," no getting around it, plus Mayn hardly thinks about his instinctive nickname for the frugal meteorologist whose unified-field weather got him tossed out of the government-funded concern that had put up with him for just so long, and when next Larry spoke to Mayn, Mayn found that obstacle geometry—"optical geometry?" Mayn hesitantly asked his young friend— "—well it would include optical," said Lar\ "which I have heard of, but it’s ‘obstacle’—" "Well, did you make it up since I last talked to you?"—"No sir, it was there in what you said," said Larry.

The kid’s in his own world, hermit of the pay phone booth, private even from his apartment when his folks aren’t there—but Obstacle Geometry, misheard from optical geometry, can find its own way from day to day and call to call. And it warn’t why Lar’ exited laterally rather than through the roof of the booth, gently taking and shaking the surprised hand of the amused young blonde woman, while she feels that his gentleness seems overconfident though all Lar’ can get through is the words "You were waiting for me?" to her "You want to come home with me? I live four blocks down—" to which he, still one line from what his offered hand had meant, replied, "You probably live in my building . . . four blocks?" But she laughs, shakes her head with very friendly authority; has a shopping bag in which he can see a bottle of wine with a red cap (of vino, his father would say) and a bunch of celery, leaves greener at the top, and the darker shoulder of an avocado—so she is not a prostitute; her clothes are a little mussed, she’s been working; she’s not a prostitute, he repeats to himself waiting for something to happen, for Larry then regretfully smiles friendly to the blonde whose bra shoulder strap under the loose knit of her dark sweater passes palely on its way—sweater or blouse or whatever it is, and says, "Really, thanks—I’ve got a girl and"—he shrugs with aeons of masculine understanding in his sensitive mouth but she says, "Oh," so softly, "whaddayameaj??" as if she uncannily knew that that other "older woman" (Amy) isn’t his girl but only would-bz.

As she surely won’t be if she hears Mayn mention that Larry cut short his call because of a ladyfriend, though, once more home at his desk amid the empty apartment because his father’s at a men’s group tonight over at Hudson Guild where they get info on loving their bodies and (Marv smiles) brushing their teeth, Larry thinks of the loaf of French bread sticking out of that girl-who-tried-to-pick-him-up’s shopping bag and he should laugh at this but all he can do is leave his mother-bought roll-top desk that he rolls down roughly every other night to cover up the neatness with which he leaves his books, pads, and a diary he hardly keeps and his father would never think of getting into—and wander to the phone to ring Amy’s ringing ringing ringing phone thinking Grace Kimball is entitled to her views and Larry is the last person to damn her new Open Marriage law that has had such consequences in his life, whether or not he would point out that she herself having first closed out her marriage never got engaged in Open Marriage except as extended sexual partner (ESP) no longer called Other Woman. But as for Larry, it’s the whole works or nothing, and, listening to not even a provocative busy signal off there at Amy’s number, he visualizes the blonde girl smoothly two-handing a record down onto her turntable and then removing from her shopping bag with those friendly hands of hers one avocado, one crisp loaf of bread, one long bunch of celery, one dark bottle with red cap, and he can’t think what except he is convinced with a rising mist of intense interest that there was a chicken in there, yah he is so clairvoyantly certain a roaster was waiting down in ye bottom of ye bag that he dials for a moment his mother’s new number on the Island and hangs up in mid-ring and dials Mayn’s and a woman answers with something heavy in her hand, he’s sure, and Lar’ presses his finger down on the cradle-bar rather than let her hear.

That is, what’s going on at his end. Which is not only but also marital bust-up (read single parents’ divided homes, read Susan’s got a [read] friend [read] going through a stage, take a book any book, book equals read, but equals equals means, and since read means means, clearly son-Larry means —hence, equals, hence reads . . . matter—read Mayn because Mayn is "good people" (his phrase that Larry now uses) and People R Matter.) And what Lar’ reads is something he’s got to settle, and before he knows it Lar’s over there only a six-minute walk at the apartment of the girl who, yes, woke him from the longish magic of his call with Mayn, and to Lar’s mind she has now changed out of her loco weed purple into what he can’t see because he in his mind is animatedly telling her this dream he had of waking in a moving house rumbling down a highway in the middle of somewhere almost definite but it’s March and everyone out here is asleep as he passes, although when he lets the shade up to see the moon there’s also a helicopter silvering in on this wide load of Larry’s house that he’s woken up to moving (for crying out tears, as his dad says) and Lar’ can’t object or even speak, which makes the blonde girl in her bathrobe (but you can’t make anyone do something) feel something and at her open fridge door nod to Larry happily. Yes, she agrees, that’s what happens, you want to cry out or something but you cain’t even request directions, like what state you’re in or where it’s going, because the house isn’t only your house now. Except what comes next’s too private ‘n crazy to tell the girl, and he loves her, but beyond her waist in the lighted inside of her fridgerator he sees a whole familiar two-part thing/amenity that fades the second he identifies it as a telephone, well you don’t know what other people like girls keep in their refrigerator (read icebox, as Lar’s dad calls it) but this fridge phone naturally isn’t a pay-type but a "home phone" and thinking to reach and call whoever it is that will come to him when he gets hold of the phone and is ready to poke out the number adding up to get a result at t’other end, he feels the phone lose mass, let it by modulus be a piece of angel cake fading through mouth water, into the night-white of the refrigerator’s ambience, for hasn’t the blonde closed the door? and how’s he going to make sense much less have her like him for telling her how, when randomly turning away from the parlor window of the moving house in his true dream whose wide load he has woken into in the middle of the night, he finds framed on the wall a digital sampler stitched with tracks of chickens crocheted from real fingers if not from the heart, and framed on the wall behind the davenport—all of which keeps constant (as our wide load like yr mob’l unit rumbles through any continental region) bedded upon the great wide-load (house) hitch trailer (itself a long ways from the slanting Indian travois dragging the horse)—the sampler says not home sweet folkroom home much less SHOULD MUSIC PROVE THE FUEL OF LOVE LAY ON OR IN GOD ‘A WE TRUST BUT PEOPLE R MATTER (hence ticklable! it comes to us): and the girl in purple and her home phone are gone just like that; and Lar’ is at least left with the current obstacle to their union, and he doesn’t want to tell about either the Two-on-One Quantum Regress, or the Dread Modulus by which one system can be turned like the tables to another, or about the individualized screens that tell Lar’ two things relatively at once; trouble is you can luck into them only by a mode he’s on’y dreamt, which, try as he will, he must know through refiguring it, while anyway what matters is that the two-thing-at-once is what Larry feels he’s been told in Mayn’s informations vouchsafed to Larry in a stream of talk.

What was this information? And told how?

for one thing the eight-hundred-unit, Mayn-mentioned, ancient Indian apartment house that was cut like its myriad portal shadows out of and into what’s already there under the sky that was hardly without would-be dust pollutants, if altogether less fragile in those days;

and for another thing, that hermit from the City of the East occupying one of those eight hundred units for a few months at a time in that ancient multiple dwelling in New Mexico, who befriended Mayn’s grandmother or the East Far Eastern Princess (who had been no doubt overly influenced by locoweed her horse consumed and her veins embraced through the softest of saddles), or both grandmother and Princess, for after all it was the grandmother that (Larry is well aware) the Princess saw herself distantly conjoined with in the glint of the hermit’s eye up there in his niche;

and for a third thing, the odd economical conjunction of changed patterns of rainfall evicting the cactus-tough Anasazi from the wondrous cliff they lived in as if it were a body, with the epic cycling through all the kinds of locoweed (plus one) by the botanist Marcus Jones roughly a decade before these events and roughly—with an approximation about as useful as the eleven-year paralleling of sunspots and economic cycles—roughly at the time of Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption mentioned by Mayn which opened up to scientists the night-shining mother-of-pearl clouds fifty miles up in fact and the twilight effects, and, behind the cosmic New Mexico sunsets, the stratospheric layers of aerosols whose infinitesimally particled optical properties became a central thrust of atmospheric research which, if it does not include Mayn emplaning to Colorado to the Weather Center or to a barren rock in New Mexico near three other states of the Union, does include Larry maybe someday going out there, having been propelled by his elder new friend Jim (who in such an easygoing warp unloads on Larry these scrambled matters for Larry) to refigure:

an eight-hundred-unit Indian cliff dwelling; the Hermit from the City of the East mellowing out high "upstairs" in one of those units marked only among the blanched sheer face of cliff and the portals of shadow by his glinting eye observing spiral wind playing with native snakes; then the rough intersection of Krakatoa’s upburst circa Marcus Jones’s botanical bicycling jaunt in those parts; and, in Mayn’s minimal maundering, the rain that did not come and did not come except in the pattern of its change spelling disaster to those Anasazi Indians who must quit their multiple dwelling and move elsewhere.

Was Mayn telling Larry something? Marcus Jones the epic-cycling botanist ran out of names for locoweed—a hermit in motion, he was like the plants he found, a navigator among driest shrines to wind and sky, the rain that came and was saved in memory of need, and, centuries before it, the rain that for one mere decade did not come, whose absence plus perhaps a few enemy Apache scaling ladders made the Anasazi by the hundreds vacate the premises not questioning this edict of Sky and Earth: Lar’ can see it, while he stands still in a room that may be no huger than a transparent phone booth and he feels like one messenger in the world who stays put, but can’t take the next step to account for this curiosity of the messenger who is borne down on by the message, but that’s not it—Larry sees the lone pedaling botanist content though running out of names; and Larry, for the purpose of hypothetically modeling whatever may prove to be there, creates a one-greater space frame that can appropriate territory south of Jones’s dry run of floral Utah thus take in a multiple dwelling looking out for rain, and Larry creates also a freer time frame to please find—in the same great elastic year—both Jones’s botany looking out for locoweed while looking inward for new names for it, and Krakatoa’s upburst with its long weather fallout—so, with these model space and time frames, Larry arrives at Mayn meaning a woman envisioned escaping via some reciprocal rotation of a distant mentor’s eye into another story: evidently Mayn’s grandmother, who entertained him, had been in this history and had escaped to or from the West with the aid of some male solitary or other, and the rain that an unthinking child will tell to go away, go away, come again some other day, could not be counted on to come again yet wasn’t gone either, not over and gone as if forever after but was elsewhere in a similar hemisphere, the rain that left the Anasazi high and dry found new forms in the rocketing riot of Krakatoa’s eruption that rained magnificent nuisance far and wide upon its island and the sea but rained also permanently upward arbitrarily to help create those twilight aerosol and mother-of-pearl clouds noctilucent as the dream’s wide load which then in later life newsman Mayn pursued in the form of upper-atmosphere meteorology he occasionally reported on, especially long-range decay factors though even with his own normal quota of two evolutionarily-rather-small-lungs (chest expansion be damned) he’s hardly on intimate terms, he said, with nitrogen-oxide-measuring instruments (he’ll let the air-flow cylinder do the driving, and the reaction volume and the purge volume) though he is sufficiently cozy with Savage’s gadget aboard the ‘75 U-2 and is on friendly terms with ERDA’s Ash Can program balloons.

Well, a little knowledge used to be a dangerous thing which is why we have always been in danger, as Larry’s economic mentor and interrogator said, always never out—but now a lot of knowledge is as much more dangerous as Larry’s twin-twain two-thingama-screen personal system matters more than where in the end this Mayn’s really coming from, or the true whereabouts of Krakatoa to whose foot Lar’ thought he should have come having imagined Hawaii’s leper colonists not wiped out so much as re-pondered by a record tidal wave gushed from the sky directed by Larry himself from a high, pastel sea-view balcon (corbelled out over the beach from an elegant dark hotel room behind him where his parents weren’t quite talking), or the actual position of ten-thousand-to-twenty-five-thousand-year-old Midland Woman lying patiently in Texas waiting to be discovered in 1953 under much younger Folsom Man and the remains of his half-wasted bison all of which Mayn had deleted from some New Mexico copy of his as a subtly irrelevant look southeastward from Ship Rock to that postwar oil-boom town (you guessed it), Midland, Texas, upwards of sixty miles east of the New Mexico border that in ‘53 made it onto the Digger’s Map of Ancient Time though all that Midland Woman gave was her good head, long and delicate, small-toothed so Lar’ imagined beneath the unthinkably deep-set eyes of her precious skull a glistening tongue that could do what his mother Susan could with hers—a big thing with Lar’!—fold it to a long-tubed music-flower yet flute the edges of this scrolled and folded pipe—what no one else in the world would do.

Yet why, then, does the little knowledge he has of Mayn get in the way of all that Lar’s, well, "got" on his mother Susan who has left her normal bigamouse-spous playing with Larry-son and Marv-el-housbond to live in the house on the Island?—so while she’s the one who went, Larry-son feels he is the one who is now successfully out of the way; he’s got no name for this except that in his active sadness that ("If I could be another person, she could be") his mother has split, no kidding his real sorrow, his black-with-brown-letter-and-trim Raleigh ten-speed bike’s sweetest (though deceptive) swiftest uphill gear catches—good, he’d been concerned about it—or the chain catches it, and, even against the wind, frees him of that transitional threatening clank (like some hideous thing wrong with your car) to vector between the united product of gravity raining invisibly down through his shoulders and the steep incline at the point of Tenth Avenue. But he’s not looking for locoweed in Utah, he’s just out on his bike thinking his way between double-parked trucks with potential open doors and sour pedestrians crossing ‘gainst the light until they run out of sotto-voce names for him gearing himself seventy blocks uptown, eighty blocks down like a hired messenger, then forty blocks uptown and several east to wind through the other dimensions of our Central Park with its labeled trees and so on, and nothing will stay still. For although your Mississippi catfish nine foot long with God knows what all in it contains, they say, the word we are waiting for of whether the fault from New York to Tokyo will divide and crack and bring the Earth to its knees and skyscrapers will scrape the ground and fire our well-rehearsed salute to the Sun, the two screens twain can’t bring a future Tokyo earthquake here to New York and Larry knows he’s pretty free and could be relieved if he would let himself be even if things won’t stay still: for he thinks for a moment of the woman his mother is staying with whom he likes and how she rides a bike bent way forward and now his mother Susan does—God, he can’t keep up with them any more; and he might like to think further upon this stumbling block in the way of his life but, on the contrary, here comes the gearless two-wheeler of the botanist Marcus Jones in 1883 bumping, jarring, careering, cutting his way through the living locoweed of all the names he could think of for new varieties, ten years before a Victorian-American girl Margaret of nineteen or twenty (secretly and premaritally at war from herself) exceeded her mandate to cover the 1893 Chicago Fair for her father’s Windrow Democrat, particularly the (as we remember it a century later, "low-key") New Jersey exhibition (plus twenty-seven nations and remcarnation a la Carl Browne the populist spellbinder who could not spell but peddled a breathtaking theory of our—as we might say it a century later—soul "bank" drawn upon by each newborn according to its incoming and ongoing needs), yet Margaret upon completion of her Chicago stint in summer ‘93 kept going as if she could not turn and return home to (her parents, her brothers, her implicitly betrothed) Alexander who, one score and one year later, went with his wife Margaret through the last dull glow of October trees in Englishtown, Red Bank, and Rah way to Carnegie Hall, New York, to hear the Pankhurst woman shock American suffragettes crying that Britain was fighting Germany partly "for you," and Germany "hacking her way through Belgium" was as much in the wrong as "we" were when "you fought us" on what proved to be the good suffragette claim of no taxation without representation, and Alexander carried the report of Christabel Pankhurst’s anti-neutrality speech back to Windrow where his father-in-law was even more reluctant to run it than Alexander to leave Margaret in New York to "cover" Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s pacifist pleas to America at Carnegie Hall five days later splitting the suffragettes and precipitating the Women’s Peace Party of New York and splitting, as Mayn hardly knew and his grandfather Alexander never would accept, a female wing of his own family, though Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s eventual mother, subtle in her own mild, needling jokes and pleasingly soft ‘n sweet upon the violin at the age of ten(-and-up) must have had deeper reasons for turning pacifist and vegetarian against her mother Margaret, who was a minor New Jersey celebrity-militant. Later, Sarah actually amused Mayn’s father her putative husband (who really and truly dreamed at night of owning a white Hispano-Suiza touring motorcar) by observing that the Vote was the least of the complaints of her sex and while votes for women might matter even to the point of electing women one day, suffrage was suffered to be a substitute for a lot of other things. Witness her own once-militant mother Margaret’s relief at not being returned state senator in one run that she had been coerced by a bunch of men into making in the days of Coolidge. Who’s Coolidge? Larry asked. Mayn said that without knowing the French or the English for the proverb Emmeline Pankhurst quoted in honor of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in hopes of joining younger women with older, Calvin Coolidge would have approved and would have said, "If youth could know; if age could do." And Larry, feeling he is not alone in this individualized history and doesn’t mind passing it on to other minds if it’s there already because he intends to squeak to a stop at, economically, a Tenth Avenue red light where there’s a transparent phone booth and phone the young woman of his dreams at her office in an area so different from the Tenth Avenue small Spanish shops and garages and a public school and a bar—weaves through a decade of Krakatoa’s debris dodging forward and backward in time to find Mayn’s grandma Margaret in her fifties in Windrow-town, not hitting the ceiling but waxing, if not quite flummoxed at least so fiercely angry at some electrical contractor Bob that Larry couldn’t help recalling that it was this Bob’s view that government without newspapers had much more to be said for it than the other way around because where would newspapers be without gov’ment to go on about, which Larry coupled with a wrong notion voiced by Mayn that if there had been newspapers the news of the 1815 peace would have saved hundreds of British soldiers in New Orleans from becoming mere material to be shaped into a mountainous monument to War as Fun by the sword of the very Jackson, Andrew, whom the Windrow Democrat was later founded to support—where what was lacking warn’t newspapers but rapid communication. Which in modern times we have but always had, as Larry thinks (shifting into a heavy-pedal gear) breasting a hill headed north through real-estate values inhabited by an active if not ever-prosperous Hispanic working class who are getting in his way thinking yes rapid communication we always had in order to take such assembled data as Mayn’s news of Fort Nightmare that you can pass through like a shadow or like a machine-gun spray shot and never feel that fort you’re passing through.

And such assembled data as the Navajo Prince’s mother for whom a ceremonial sing was being held in order to find a way into her head through a hole chock-full of demons, and this old all-purpose hermit, Margaret’s ally, who needed a break once in a while and went out West to occupy one of the ancient units of the Anasazi multiple dwelling but not necessarily a break from himself:

all of which super-rapid communication joins simultaneously as a tear of anger blinds Larry’s eyes as he shifts to low gear approaching a light that’s still his so that two lunchtime Riquenos (or who knows "what" they are?) slowed down if not quite on hold or the worse for wear join in Larry’s tear for him just as he half brakes then accelerates between their merged units and, clipping a coattail, an elbow, a hand, feels the merest swipe of a furious limb as little as a finger or two upon his shoulder as he passes and, heading through the intersection wondering how he could do such a thing yet seeing, as clank gives way to whirr, that Marcus Jones when he couldn’t think of yet another name to call a new variety of royal locoweed called it after himself, his legs so weary, his porous mind desperately interested which at this moment of near accident that wouldn’t make the papers Larry (who has grandparents only in California) finds the grandmother Margaret was as well—desperate—now where did he get that?—but on the locoweed breathing into her from her soft-saddled horse or from some horse or some prior anguish wherein, for sure, that hermit in his portal-shadowed high unit gave her his eye to pivot her from self to self.

So, as the two Hispanic pedestrians, lurching—nay, lunching—across against the light, close ranks behind Larry’s bike, he feels the two of them like one kindred gap he’s passed through when they weren’t concentrating, feels their flesh by way of, first, one cluttered storefront window (in the next block) with two TV sets angled toward each other, one off, one on, as a hand reaches over a partition and switches channels—and second, a couple of seconds later at the other end of this new block, another storefront and another TV set being watched from the sidewalk by a broad-shouldered woman with two loaded shopping bags that like buckets and for balance’ sake she hasn’t set down, while the same TV’s watched from inside by a man sitting in a corner of the storefront window beside a Messenger Service sign, the man for that moment as odd in himself (his dark hair thickly threatening to grow down his short forehead to join forces with the frontier of his stubborn black eyebrows) as Larry, seeing on the screen Grace Kimball in boots (one of them crossed, man-like, across the other trousered knee) and a broad-brimmed hat beneath which she talked, knows that the screen with entirely other contents that he’d seen barely a moment ago at the other end of the block was switched to the same channel. Now how did he know that?

Well, it might be important, he hears—it might be important, Larry, the words say, voicing a female presence that he had an appointment with twenty minutes ago, a motherly voice that catches up with his silences to irritatingly say, What are you feeling, Larry? it might be important—and to say later, You’re irritated, Larry, that every little thing matters—Yeah, that’s right, that does irritate me—that you’re one of these people that every little thing matters to you, it’s, it’s—What, Larry? can you say it?—Oh shit it’s heavy, it’s, it’s, well greedy—But we deserve it, Larry, we’re working together for it, we deserve it—Wait a minute: who said it’s both of us that every little thing matters to? who said that?—Maybe that’s what we find out, Larry, what we’re always finding out, that every little thing matters—Greed is what my father’s paying thirty bucks into, but you’re getting all this stuff you’re going to use, you’re using it already, it’s greed doubled if you ask me—O.K., Larry, what’s wrong with using it?—You’re so moral: that’s what’s wrong—Wait, Larry —Laying down the law—But I’m not an authority figure, don’t make me into one—That’s it, Martha, you’re greedy and you’re moral about it—That’s good, we can work with that, Larry—You go right ahead—But every little thing does matter to you, Larry . . . Larry? Breathe—What if I don’t?—and we hardly know each other and already we really have something to work on—But I don’t want to pay you my father’s money to attack you; after all who are you?—Why not?

The voice of Martha, in her ripe thirties, receded when he turned left; he rolled a block west, silently, fluently, and cut south down Eleventh Avenue (a narrower-feeling two-wayer with a divider), and the voice picked up when he turned north again until the moment when he cut between the two Hispanic lunchers threatening to be one who unanimously could offer him bilingual abuse, which helped to shift him recycled from between them and past the changing light into the new block, to be visited then by genius (I’ll be thinking of you, Larry, said Mayn, who also said that you wouldn’t get him on one of those things in today’s traffic)—genius? because now, at the very moment Larry’s wasting his black Raleigh bike (ouch) on the topographical feature length of Manhattan’s theoretic island, the ruts, crevasses, minor lakes dammed where a landmark sewer’s backed up out of sight and his naked tires can’t see beneath the surface the sharp mean trowels of broken glass (tooled from last week’s jettisoned boddles) he finds what he wouldn’t have if he’d kept this third date with (read the Electric Chair, read D-D-D-Destiny) Ma Therapist, Mahtha by name she’ll answer to ‘n come runnin’ while yet seem to stay where she was a minute ago at home curled stockin’ feet in her soft mobile chair who his father (who he wishes would stop thinking of him) has "brought in," though it’s Larry who’s being brought or biked in to the therapist but en route though receding from the therapist, has found, namely, the real action and Larry finds it is laid out for him somehow while the ground plan of it is half asleep there below him and his emotional bike dozing like only a city can doze, steady and gapped, like breath when it comes only faintly, don’ you know—

But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.

So saying, having been told to go ‘way yet retaining (like fluid) the stored (if irretrievable) impression that she had been the one to depart: and, thus, so saying, we betray in the best sense, that is to oneself (because we don’ need no one else to criticize us we can do it well enough alone), that we are we in two ways—a 2-folded we like him and I, and a all-type we (Do you mean, asks the interrogator all but forgotten except by our hellishly independent Pain, do you mean we all?).

But as soon, thinks Lar’, as that grand ground implied itself to him through the tight-sprung folds of a twenty-two-buck bike-saddle, it found itself obscured by the small tip of an elbow appearing just within the operative TV screen in the first storefront window of the block, before that silent screen was rechanneled to a segment of swarthy marchers flinging shouts, cries, arms, hands, bottles, one at the camera enabling it to pass to a revolutionary man or woman face down in the gutter one bent arm at rest along the curb. So, having registered the well-clothed host on the previous channel and the bright elbow resting on a talk-show chair arm right next to the host’s ribs, Lar’ could hear the broken English abuse projected bilingual rehearsed so often as to be now unrehearsed after him by the guys he’d nearly hit (hence distinguished for a moment one from the other). Which was an improvised audio for the swarthy marchers on the news channel especially since they were at once replaced on camera by the body holding its breath in the gutter. And a moment later, riding past the storefront TV displaying Grace Kimball like a message of wares within, Lar’ knows that the elbow was Grace’s elbow in the other TV in the first storefront where he now already recalls there were two TV’s angled half facing each other and one TV wasn’t on.

So that, coupling if not cubing the two operative storefront screens with the two different channels employed and the second, unemployed though not necessarily inoperative TV in the first storefront plus the man inside and woman outside the storefront both employed and unemployed, Larry turns away from the nice lovable therapist his dad fixed him up with who at this instant of her full day is "with" somebody else, not Larry and his wide and klutzish shitload of half-life dream which to tell the truth he isn’t bringing her because she would rather he told her his daydreams, some less in him than he’s at large in them who himself for all he does know doesn’t know that between him and the therapist (who’s on a high floor) is somebody at street level waiting to waylay Larry and bother him, a fact at least three people know but not Lar’.

Who now—as if his front wheel were his vehicle—turns away and must cleave to his own route, obstacle or no. For Mayn did half-know what he conveyed to Lar’. Such historic debris as might slip between the twin screens twain or just wipe them out: yet Krakatoa, from which arose stratospheric phenomena in which Mayn would one day find (if such a man—though ever off-handedly—ever found) cause for inspiration—Krakatoa 1883, which Larry not finding in Hawaii has quickly moved to Indonesia where it belongs, volcano and island near unto congruence, blew up and killed people married or unmarried on the shores of neighboring Java and Sumatra as if they were so much debris to be incorporated, were matter smashed by the continuum, sons, daughters, families of matter, Larry hears them in the shouts of the two men who left just gap enough between them for Larry and bike like the wind to startle them into spontaneous commands to do something to Lar’s mother; so that he with his running shoes stirruped in his pedals’ toe clips can see those People in the light of Krakatoa mattering, and angels, being in Larry, are shown what we cannot escape—such as the tip of the elbow, as they say: and that goes for when you can’t see those People well too—although an elbow that talks louder than words on one TV set turns into a Grace Kimball on a set down the block almost at the next corner where nearly causing an accident Mayn’s hermit’s blank gray ingot of an eye high in that Indian cliff dwelling returning young Margaret to the gaze of the East Far Eastern Princess (for one screen deserves another) takes Larry out of a tubeful of womb-men to his sole self for a time, he hopes, not being thought about by anyonel

Therefore, wishing to be Not Thought Of, Lar’ cut then as diagonally as the city let him back toward the East Side south, pumped so alertly through El Parque Central and beyond that everything he saw signified, and yet was, nothing, though the City’s dormant ground plan had begun to stir, to move Larry—ipero adonde?, but where?—well, clear to the busy image of Grace in flesh emerging punctually (it goes without saying) from their multiple dwelling strutting gaily out, her arms swinging as if powered by the small, red, water-resistant, mainly empty pack on her back, so that Larry gallantly risks running her down and brakes at the last second while she grins welcoming him ne’er doubting he will stop, and he understands through a channel-shaped elbow and with a happiness like unexpected basketball tickets or quiet praise from his mother that "frees him up," that the bright patch of cloth on one screen back there on Tenth Avenue was the funny bone of none other than, in the flesh, "Kimball" (as Larry’s Mom Sue called her sometimes), an elbow corner of a puzzle getting you to the other screen where, as TV talk-shows show (even with audio off or behind a storefront window) People Matter and the headless elbow traveling fast as a bicycle made of thought (or light that’s itself at rest) takes you simultaneously to both Grace’s hand and Grace’s face, the one lightly and joyfully slapping, the other telling host, audience, and tube of some mouth-watering surprise that came to her one day as she’s succeeded in living her life, fighting the Habit Patterns, ever making new friends, turning an audience on to how sex and drugs bound to go together in a guilt-ridden patriarchal society, how else can we bear to have sex (—But is there that much in sex, a devil’s deviate (southern) woman host asks) but we’ve got to take a break but we’ll be back even younger!

And Grace’s smile—suddenly, de repente—meets Larry’s in a kiss under the apartment overhang.

He’s home.

"You can really travel on that thing," she says, and "take me away from all this, darling," flinging her hand across the intersection but oops checking her wristwatch as Lar’ sees his handlebars are out of line and he’ll have to tighten the stem by loosening the expander bolts when he gets upstairs, and so (thinking, "If I could be another person . . .") he sees with one of his heads the neatly-zippered oblong black-leather tool kit on a shelf near his desk in the empty, the absent apartment, and with the other head catches in Grace’s interested eye an understanding question which ran from her hand flung to the winds across this city intersection to her wristwatch to her bright gray-eyed glance, and he feels for his wallet that may have worked its way up in his hip pocket—and for the first time thinks—so he smacks his cheek in ascetic alarm—that if you miss a certain appointment you pay anyway whether it’s the real you or not. And knows then as surely as that he’ll not ask her, that Grace emerging from their multiple dwelling a las uno y media or one-thirty p.m. also knows when his therapy appointment was.

Yet in her eye he finds himself liked and loved, what the hell!, and passing a meridian where all parallels imagine meeting with the speed of love which is beyond speed, why Lar’ unpenitent recalls what he never could have if he hadn’t run into Grace through veering away from the immovable obstacle of the nice therapist, who is west and north of here (and more than nice and more than pretty), a dream he had last night—"Breathe"—or this morning —"Breathe, honey!"—in which looking right at his mother he finds he can see his face and hers: but now with Grace’s hand upon his hand which is upon the upper part of his racing handlebar dynamically hard in its very bend and hanging temper, he opens his mouth and breathes like a sigh of relief: to know that Grace has a mother and so does Mayn, and so does Martha, who will charge Lar’s father Marv the thirty bucks (show or no show) and can be heard in one half of Lar’s old brain pushing pushing saying, "Sure the rest of us have mothers, Larry, but it’s your mother you’re talking about, give that all the dignity it deserves, it was your dream and it was about your mother" and a tear blinds the single, warmly clouded vision Larry-son gives back to the woman Grace who squeezes his arm and is off to market, for Martha in this daydream has after all shared his nightdream—which, for he gives in to us at last, means who knows what to Martha, who has or had a mother; or to Grace, whose mother she’s phoned urging her to rediscover masturbation— What do you mean "rediscover"? came back the answer hundreds of miles away—and promising to send her a Hitachi vibrator (change one letter and you’ve got a Japanese import on five thousand multiple-dwelling balconies on a June evening charcoaling what’s left of their buffalo as a seasoning for their veg kebabs) and, to continue to Mayn, whose grandmother’s East Far Eastern Princess’s Navajo Prince had a mother for whom the ceremonial "sing" was held the night the Princess arrived and in whose poor head were untold tiny holes but one greater hole full up with demons cramming the entrance so only a special sing might get past them, seeing through her head to all parts of her most real realm.

Well, Grace strides away, turns and blows (like speech) a kiss, strides on and rounds the corner of the building. She never would have asked "how it went" because she knew last night, when Larry’s mother’s new housemate in Long Island who met Sue through Grace talked to her on the phone, that Sue, who’s anti-therapy, was upset and was all set to meet Larry outside that shrink’s building when Larry arrived at one or thereabouts for his appointment with Martha {Martha, Martha), who through Grace’s funny bone and the two screens of one channel and the gray, blank hermit-screen which in the first storefront the funny bone’s screen turned half-toward in some angular reflection before being rechanneled by hand to violence in another hemisphere yet revealed in the next storefront to be colored matter became a person so familiar Larry felt encouraged to drop therapy. But O.K. let Marv his real father pay thirty inflated dollars (invested in ‘77 think what they’ll be worth in five man-years) for the inspiration of a detour round an appointed space of time—Larry damn well earned it. And as the doorman inside the large glass door’s wind-pocketed differential gravity turns away to seem to call to someone somewhere deep within the lobby as Larry therefore himself shoves open the door and draws his Raleigh swiftly through, missing the returning door with his rear wheel by a whisker, he is bound upstairs to work out the details of this Obstacle Geometry he has arrived at—by Obstacle Geometry itself. And hoping to be for a time not thought of by others, he can gladly quote his mother Sue quoting her own dear Grace voicing doubtless some farther sage: "To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it"—so the thirty bucks is nothing!—hold on to that, Lar’, hold on to it, fella, for aren’t sometimes people the matter, people not letting a day alone, fucking up a sunny bike ride that might as well be spring, as Marv and Sue once distantly sang off key from their closed (from the closed geometry of their) bedroom in the good old days.

He’s already there, although the broad, large-eyed female face like a dream come round again that comes toward him at the elevator only waits for him to come to (more’n halfway to) it, if not to woo, and he addresses her smoothly by the name of his mother’s consort Evelyn and walks his bike along the lobby’s tiles telling her not to hold the elevator, he has to check the mail, being as cool as he dares, till she, his mother’s live-in friend in the ol’ fambley man-shun in Port Adams, tells him glowingly that he missed Grace on TV, and thence Lar’ sees that athletic Evelyn is getting out of elevator, not in, and knowing Evelyn’s been in Grace’s apartment if not his, and conceiving how many many new walks of life taken by such ladies as Sue converge in reverse upon Grace (the genius of that place you are coming from) he abruptly asks, "Is my mother upstairs?"—meaning in Lar’s and Marv’s place (dere all-purpose batch-pad)—and then, ignoring the mailroom beyond the elevator, he angles his bicycle in past Ev’s arm pressing the button, who smilingly with the richest, generousest smile, tanned mouth, tanned gums, tanned tennis forehead, allows as how she thought Sue was downtown purchasing theater tickets but a shadow passes into the health of her face, no doubt Lar’s ambiguous karma that redounds to him in solar plexus as he arranges his wheels comfortably in the elevator car hearing her say inanely, "You look great, Larry" (to which he mutters, "I’m changing my life"); and thinking he can’t be absolutely sure she has like married his mother and murdered him or his father, he mutters, "Go to hell," as the door slides shut and Evelyn’s "Add-in" voice is heard outside and then below him at about blowjob level saying, "Say that again?" but ye lift can’t be anchored or reopened—he’s off—and all he knows is that, mother, non-mother, or no mother, there is a massive body that draws him independently two-headed and agreeably monstrous at high noon to the laboratory of his thought lensing it toward new conclusion if he can only for a while Be Not Thought Of and by the time the car stops at his floor have his real, if potential, privacy for this Obstacle Geometry— which posits that bending around the massive object yields the object itself. Yet something’s wrong, he’s overearned his father’s thirty bucks.

The city’s dormant ground plan stirred and now, even if it’s moving in its massive, historic sleep, it has raised him up floor by layer through Mayn’s hermit’s ingot eye: there lives his grandmother and Larry-son’s Sue-mom where no one can reach them, not even the Mayn quasar idling on quite interestingly about his detour from Albuquerque following Ship Rock but prior to New York, no one’s going to reach them not even the Apache ladders which aren’t exactly eloping with those ancient Anasazi cliff dwellers but have become distracted not by canyon dogs barking but by the seeds of a two-hundred-year-old bush whose triglyceride oil eased in-depth Indian tumors and childbirth and may before the end of the present "in-question century" yield such many uses (lubricant additive, transformer oil, protein feed supplement, acne clarifier, sedative chung gum) that this desert plant may supplant the sperm oil of the great wet whale grazing like buffalo the endangered deeps.

which leaves—oh wow!—Larry in the instant before the elevator car attains his motherless floor, free to formulate, doubtless prior to Obstacle Geometry yet secretly embracing it perhaps, Margaret and Sue’s eastward kinship by way of his painful, painful, oh god isn’t there another word?, painful strength to see his strength, to know Sue wouldn’t have left—would she?—did she? did she leave?—unless she knew him to be grown and moderately safe in himself; and so, because the elevator divides quasar-slow the space twain him and his floor as if some kids had pressured all the buttons, Lar’ have the rest of his life to reflect, which is longer in absolute terms than Marv—and so concludes:

if she was why I moved here into the City, then am I why she’s out there? am 1 why she left? did I a free man give her the spur to wing it?

And thinking that it was he who left, Larry yielded the floor to Obstacle Geometry, yet flash instanter Amy’s work phone; then with his floor still unachieved he thanks God for Mayn whose grandmother and the East Far Eastern Princess have drawn him parallel to Mayn, and to what’s lowering now toward him (and his patient bike), the threshold matrix of a unified O.G. theory that will comprehend how motion toward (obstacle) is motion around (it) but first how one obstacle gets dreamed up in order to lead to another, yield upon yield: where "People R Matter" is a reciprocal for "People Matter": and since Redreaming a Way that two screens can be viewed at once has already become identified or paralleled to Descrambling, it must also (in its fulsome bending) be parallel to O.G.; but the work for this afternoon is the thing whereon he’ll latch his real self-home; and yet we, while honoring Lar’s prodigal wish (to be for a while Not Thought About), cannot go along with his Jeffersonian creed that the inventor develops his idea himself in the Open Market (O.M.) system: rather, we hold that the reality of American profit is such that to implement such idea we need our incorporated articulate structure capable (as we have been sworn) of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units—you can’t go it alone—and "cant" equals "mustn’t"—in other word, don’t—and instanter flashes inside us (but outside Lar’ so he can about see it) a sharp green-water stretch or stripe made by a sandbar so that the surrounding sea becomes more blue—a vacation insight but slightly sad like the leaning of someone else’s long-time thought toward your own.

Until, at the moment that his floor arrives and Lar’ knows Mayn on a floor just passed won’t be home at this hour and, conceiving parallel impacts of Mayn and Grace on his life as a son, he knows or has heard those two lines of Mayn and Grace may converge all they want and still not necessarily meet, Larry hears music the new super rigged somewhere in the ceiling of the elevator for his grand opening as if Jefferson with his interest in enslaved women and pursuit of happiness had invented the elevator while playing on his violin, so our thought may turn to aria set to the catchy beat Lar’ only now is aware of as its absence filled like the ultimate empty obstacle instantly with a warmly rapid-fire Spanish-speaking voice machine-gunning a commercial which Lar’s brain pick up the musical flow (‘n that’s an order): and what’s the difference what phone Mayn’s at, if any?—he’s Mayn twenty-five hours a day.

But stepping onto his own floor and willing to be Not Thought Of for the time being, Lar’ looks down the astringent-smelling gleam of the hall past one apartment door with a brown airedale-bristly Welcome mat and further on across from it a second door with a New York Times in front of it and has to step back into the elevator and press Mayn’s floor, and upon being there he looks out to Mayn’s place at the end and there’s an envelope showing under the door.

Then back up on his own floor Lar’ looks to his right "close to home" at his own apartment door close to the elevator; and he is then so between histories (his parents’ and Mayn’s and Amy’s and others’—and his own— between his own history) that, unknowing, he passes himself and his bike through, into his and his father’s apartment and vanishes past his threshold unto himself like any practiced apartment dweller (even if with the slightest fore-flicker not coming to him but darting from him to find evolutionary evidences of his mother here in this free space where history is the story of libertad, but whose?)

Until, turning (his head) upon the axis of his bike he finds an envelope just inside the door with a diagonal postmark on it and, watching it, as he carefully props his bike, he isn’t angry at all and visualizes the handwriting inside the envelope and the handwriting outside on the other side, and reaching for it he identifies the postmark as his own bike-tire tread and, turning the envelope, he sees only his name, "Larry," in block caps, and feels inside the envelope a stiff oblong the size of a ticket and a slight complicand of paper doubtless doubled about the ticket, and he puts the past behind him and, with the envelope from Jim Mayn in hand, disappears once again.

We knew perfectly well that curiosity isn’t caring, and who’s home and who isn’t matters less than Shakespearean syllables rolling and trembling from the basso rotondo’s unmistakable voice not so far away accompanied by absent-minded music: or so it seems to us as a body and suddenly unplugs our ear to the unrhythm’d height of (is it?) "to your/ather (father father), But-you must know (you-must know, know-know) your father lost a feather (father father) and that father lost, lost his, and the survivor (the survivor) bound—" the title escapes because a door down the hall has opened the music to us at the instant the singer lapsed out of the words into the horn of his great cavity’s plenteous colorabuffa; and a young male spark backs out of that doorway hauling one end of what appears to be a loveseat but getting longer and longer, laughing and jibbering to someone who has the other end apparently not the pianist or the singer unless the singer served as his own pianist? Is anyway deeper back in the apartment since he has not cast off from the words and is tuning up, hence not moving furniture until now he breaks off his wordless melody to holler, "Roslein, dumb ducat, stubborn boy, you can’t get that thing through there like that"—for, be it exile or home-going, the choice ‘tween Wittenberg and L.A., Elsinore and Off-Broadway, isn’t easy; but has the basso rotondo given his power to be used by a very young man who bosses him? and who is called by him Roslein after the Schubert song if these details mesh.

And as through the peephole of Larry’s front door (which Lar’ himself is not the type to tiptoe to if he hears action in the hall especially now, when he would not see too well!) we see young Roslein amid laughter and many-tongued abuse stop backing and move forward now, ushering the both wise and unsuspecting loveseat (or what we have seen of it) back where it just came from—

Is it angels of sympathy in us or our community’s own mere power of relation that questions what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

And is the mere question here a power? For hearing Larry feel, it’s like us he feels, as if he could just up and leave his father’s house and live outside in the community he has heard peacefully at work inside him, witnessing meanwhile the aria tidbit (God it’s Hamlet, sort of!) sung by that large, unseen singer who does not know the man named Mayn (Lar’s new friend) who recently moved back into this building, bringing knowledge of sky-high windmills on electronic Wyoming pylons or of whirlwind-induced sickness brought on among the Navajo that only the singer with his ceremonial chemistry may cure, but was only half sure one morning in the apartment-house mailroom off the lobby (one man coming, the other going) that the bronzed bust-of-a-man beside him trying with a stammerer’s persistence to trick his relocktant(!) postbox open was the priest in that opera the other night—but he was (and a quick check of house-phone list, yah yah, that’s the man all right) the one in the first act draped in a robe-thing out there on the stage telling the assembled sacred and military arms that the great gong (well, Jim conceded to Lar’ he’s not much on opera, y’know) marks the rising of the moon and so his daughter, the star priestess, will come—to cut the missiletoe(!) Mayn’s young companion of the evening Amy had pointed out: while here in the apartment-house mail-room, Oroveso, the priest (right?) was decked out for the day like a native tycoon on his way to work, a portly ship-of-a-man in double-breasted camel’s-hair overcoat and wide-brimmed brown fedora (Lar’s seen him) plus to Mayn’s mind a corn-pollen sort of glaze upon his tan that (well Larry has gone back to his desk and could care less and is suddenly lost and envisions a Place of His Own out in the city so /mpatiently that relations otherwise proud of him feel more comfortable in the old humdrum company of the journalist Mayn, in whose helpless head is now being carried a cabaret tune locus’d from "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" to "I’ll Be Around" (by the man who gave us the instrumental "Sea Fugue Mama")—plus a scent Mayn couldn’t place except that its freedom, like an obstacle he skis to both sides of (ouch!) with his son or daughter or wife once upon a time behind him, takes him to the end of the world:

Which end was supposed to be when the People forget the Blessing Way that positions the Earth and the Moon, the mountains and the sky, the He and She rains, and lose power over the winds and lightning and over the great wolf we had rather not see and the nuclear coyote den-bound its entire first year waiting to be fed by its parents but quite competent to bring disease in a dream: this threat doubled, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York (whose own depth cared not a whit for Indian lore as lore), if besides the coyote you discern the deer the coyote runs at, at night where the mountain relative to the long plateau stirs unfelt by those who move around upon it— but what is doubled, the disease or the dream? for the Hermit-Inventor of New York and his other appearances in the century in question has it both ways and doesn’t answer questions except those posed by himself in what is left of his railroad flat in Manhattan which Mayn, a conservative newsman, keeps separate from grandmotherly fables of some last century and this current Hermit-Inventor isn’t available for comment to interrogators or their delegates who don’t even know they would like to ask if Margaret Mayne found the East Far Eastern Princess glinting in the ingot of the vacationing New York hermit’s eye in 1893 or the Princess passing on her new horse found in that eyrie glint Margaret.

For the interrogator like the diva’s officer betrays that special personal neatness of the police, and can seem our personal interrogator with the seared earphones bearing terrible frequencies in honor equally of lie or true. Still, like a breathless stammerer, he asks where we were coming from and what our thrust was when we reported that the diva whose tapeworm once just about obscured her its host is acquainted in all those opera cities with so many exiles better than herself. And we, who have sometime felt the burden of the interrogator’s thrust have gone out of our way to save Mayn when it was he who casually told Lar’ that this Hermit (in his 1893 manifestation) from the City of the East was remarkable single or plural.

Only listen to what comes out of you. Because Waste Can Be Recycled, this truth has made it onto afternoon TV even when no one is in the room to watch, although why can’t Mayn see how what he is takes him right off a bar napkin, that is right off the diagram he draws on it of wind-force in terms of length:

Which can’t express that one wind if it tried except by some second diagram (or sometime four-color map) of all the words that ever used to substitute in that family for feelings that were its history: where a mother unhappy but mysterious about it left, but had already left before she left.

Larry had pointed out that the Hermit-Inventor had, O.K., taken his five to six months’ vacation from New York but not necessarily from himself. But if you listen to what comes out of you—as if you knew much real history— you risk hearing not just breath, which is also spring air dividing around the man Jim’s father, the young man, dressed up (cutaway and mustache) for someone else’s vintage wedding and (on the running board of a vintage roadster coasting like a figure skater)—but you risk as well hearing your own voice which can contain incarnate that once-young best man five minutes before meeting and being introduced into the future of a young woman who was ever after thought to have wed him because of her family newspaper the Windrow Democrat (exactly nine months to the day before Jim, the first of that mother’s two sons, came two weeks early to light—but doesn’t that mean a whirlwind romance, or something?)

But your voice can contain also conglomerates of seemingly grandfather-generated facts: such as that William Heighton, editor of the Mechanics Free Press in the late 1820s and the founder of the Philadelphia Working Men’s Movement in Jackson’s time, had been a cordwainer, and, regardless of that, that cordovan itself (from that Spanish city of leather, Cordoba) was either goatskin or split horsehide and, unlike morocco, holds its natural grain (when tanned and dressed) and regardless of this, continued Mayn’s grandfather Alexander

(who went out in vain to wait for Margaret or seek her where she did not expect it when she returned in early 1894 from the West stopping, stooping, finding in Ohio and Pennsylvania detours from the myth of her journey near its end as if, fearing (which she really did not) her father’s reaction to her being months late coming home, she flew in on a wind only to target some penultimate capillaries by which, having blown in at last to the great City of the East, she took her strange time winding down to Windrow fifty miles away)

Hakluyt in his Voyages refers to that costly Spanish leather Cordoweyn cargoed with "figs, raisins, honey, dates, and salt"—

—and for a moment we who have stood back in invisible company with the interrogator and his ready whip must add through the thinking fingers of an unseen-composer-furniture-mover-part-time-boyfriend to the basso rotondo adding them in an aria central to the climax of his original soon-to-be-privately-showcased comic opera of Hamlet (with music so strangely derivative it might be from an undiscovered score of the Otello-Falstqff’master) nine rhymes, one for each year of wear that according to the gravedigger the unusually waterproof body of a tanner will last (like Shakespeare’s problem child through upwards of a score of different tragic operas) after and beyond burial but this time with one mystery-guest star-singer whom he (tough little unknown Roslein) has leaned on and maybe another star who would be the curious diva—

: an illustrious craft, cordwainery, added Jim Mayn’s grandfather, who knew good shoe leather and who kept a curiously successful Odds and Ends & Second-Hand (mainly American war) Books shop diagonally across (the Jersey Central tracks) from the firehouse—and we hear, he said, in England of the cordwainers’ craft guild in the City of Exeter suing for favor to the Lord Mayor—

"... who was sometimes a Yard," said Margaret—"Bob Yard’s father’s family, very important in Exeter before they came here, even if Bob’s more like a Spanish pirate with those wall eyes."

Which was neither here nor there, said Jim’s grandfather, who spoke facts like a tongue and as if he fancied them plucked free of causality’s warp or cured of any fleeting convergence with others.

Yet this was just his habit. For, by contrast, witness the Mayne family pistol, i.e., what Grandfather Alexander did with it by way of tracing it but never in Jim’s memory holding it along two alternative dumb courses: the ‘‘mantelpiece," he neatly called it before Jim knew "piece" was a word for a hand firearm—where it rested above the parlor hearth pointing at a couple of finger-like cigar containers that were monster fingers of course. The serial number on the left side of the cylinder supposedly dated its manufacture well prior to the 1847 run of one thousand Colts rushed down to Mexico for the Battle of Chapultepec, an order that had revived if not rejuvenated Samuel Colt’s business at its new factory in Hartford after it had failed in Paterson a few years previous.

Now, in 1894 the Navajo Prince told a blonde woman by a Pennsylvania river bank at dawn that he had found the pistol some two years ago in a cliff by the light of the double Moon upon that retired medicine man the last of the Anasazi people. He was so old he was likely beyond death or mere life and in weight as light as, according to Grandfather Alexander’s own estimate, those six-hundred-year-old Texans breathing the purest air there was, in the time when the guerrilla Charlie Quantrill with the lynx eyes preyed on Kansas abolitionists, killed twenty-eight (he said) of his brother’s murderers, and vanished into East Texas to be afterward the brains behind Jesse James whose appropriation of federal funds was to have enabled the redleg-Abolitionist-hating Quantrill to reopen the Civil War which would have been another effect of the Texas "pure" that kept some Lone Star elders alive six hundred years until they dried up and were wafted away eastward where they might have mingled, leaf-crumble-like, with the crude oil and snakeroot used as a last and Indian resort after emetics, cathartics, "cupping," and opium to bring round old General Harrison whose Inaugural Address of March 1841 though edited, expurgated, and violently abridged by Daniel Webster still ran too long (at one hour and forty minutes) for the brand-new President to survive without an overcoat or survive as a historical power (for unlike the body of the immortal Tecumseh the body of General Harrison was not at once secreted mysteriously away so that having never been seen to leave, it might be expected to return). A woman naturalist in the Southwest who was thought mad not because she, a Chilean far from home, claimed a blood bond with the Anasazi medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince had taken the pistol but because she had developed white lips exactly like those of the fierce javelina (or peccary), the only wild pig native to the Americas whose habits and in particular curious scent glands situated in the rump she had been studying on foot all the way north from some teeming point of the Chile-Argentine border, reported that the late medicine man had been given the pistol in question by a many-fingered mestizo spy who had coveted it but upon acquiring it had been uneasy with it precisely because he had been told he mustn’t "unload" it on (or divest himself of it to) anyone except a dark healer at least a century old. Or so he had been assured by the young Englishman with white or blond hair who had let himself be hoodwinked in a game of chance the night before the Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 in return for recovering his speech which he had lost when questioned some days before about a German visitor (perhaps a spy) who had left with him a map-like, abstract-chart-like thing executed on a square of paper and had then disappeared on a road north toward Guanajuato’s silver-veined hills—questioned the young English person had been by one Marion Hugo Mayne with an e usually, whose western diaries had come into his distant relative Alexander’s hands years ago (read years later) from a friend of Margaret’s, and, bound with them, an account in brown ink in a different hand but with a curiously similar manner and vocabulary, of President Jackson’s use of a safe widower Martin Van Buren in gaining some measure of social acceptance for Peggy O’Neill Eaton, a tavernkeeper’s daughter whose second husband, Jackson’s Secretary of War, she had had relations with prior, though, to marrying him, all of which irked Old Hickory up to and beyond his angry reaction to Henry Clay’s attack on his bank policy, which in turn pushed the President to shift large deposits from the Bank of the United States to "pet" banks just when these claims must be paid out in gold for western lands so that the banks were, so to speak, financially embarrassed when then forced to meet the sudden demands of English banks for repayment of short-term loans. And so it went, as Alexander’s grandson Jim Mayn more than once told a late-evening colleague in a bar of some American city—and Van Buren got stuck with the Panic of 1837.

But the year before the depressed winter of ‘37~’38 when Greeley wrote of "filth, squalor . . . want, and misery" in New York’s Sixth Ward, who but the cordwainers led the way toward federation of local craft unions convening leatherworkers from all over including Philadelphia whence notably the aforementioned editor Heighton, not to mention the Mayn family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat, a Mason who had been pressuring President Jackson to explain his interest in a village attorney’s daughter from upstate New York who had pursued her lover William Morgan all the way to New York and Philadelphia after he had been in a way expelled from that upstate village by being thrown into its local jail for promising to reveal Masonic secrets and had been then sprung secretly one morning by a supposed friend who had disappeared after having allegedly tried and failed to shoot Morgan on the road.

"Cleopatra’s Nose," Mayn’s grandfather would muse—the fine trivia that workaday Mayn and his "ilk" dumbly overlooked—but his grandfather had once mentioned it when Jim had asked about the wanderings of a pistol and there was a gun-control law somewhere in the speculations of his granddad’s memory, for Jim had never known him to hunt or target-shoot, or to touch that pistol on the mantel, and one day Jim might get back to figuring it out because who else was likely to trace the firearms of that earlier family history—unless it was one of his brother Brad’s kids back home in Windrow a million miles from those ancient rainfall fluctuations that may have converged upon the Anasazi cliff dwellers parallel with (and independent of) the Apaches climbing their lethal ladders (as the East Far Eastern Princess compassionately learned) up into those sun-annealed apartment-house honeycombs with not just rabid blood in their hearts but with undreamt knowledge of a magic oil that the Navajo Prince’s irritable though ventriloquially musical mother (for whom the ceremonial sing was in progress the night he arrived with his newfound Manchoor Anglo girl) would apply to restore if not her temper (good or bad!) but the hair to that part of her head where the appropriate people were chanting the Night Way to heal her head-hole in and out of which cream-colored demon-types moved and from moment to moment settled or not. That is, apply—apply, we said—an oil from a bean from a plant that survives only in the driest earth: water is sealed into its leaves by a film of wax, and its taproot goes down thirty feet—a waxy oil the Indians used as a coffee substitute before they knew coffee; as a wax for women’s eyelashes; and to bring on labor contractions plus halt skin cancer in its tracks.

"You mean," said a late-night colleague—"there was an Indian in your grandmother’s life?"

but Mayn himself, recalling his grandfather at least on this score less than what that gentle, well-shod browser actually said, had figured that in the larger sense—

"What sense?" came a neutral warrant of a voice (Spence’s) from the end of the bar like your own unnecessarily self-critical afterthought.

History (which also might turn fundamentally upon whether, at any crux in question, small talk had been possible) was accident pretty much—a bunch of haphazard collisions, and if you’ve got fortuitous stuff like that and little more than fortuitous, how can history be worthwhile?

"—Wait a minute?" came the same voice of a man Mayn didn’t like, who then and later, with his thin, curly sideburns, figured in the current ongoing (though questionable) century—"What’s this oil you’re talking about?"

"What’s it to you—a bean, a seed—going to be good for lubricating high-temperature high-speed machinery, anti-viral penicillin stabilizer, shampoo, sun screens, face oils, you name it, solvents for producing polyethylene—"

But not unhappy exactly in the multiracial structure is the very Ojibway, diamond-squinter, whose grandmother stored oil in a sturgeon bladder—but not the oil in question—nor is necessarily one all-purpose angel-unit asking, But whafs this seed?—a peek of a voice at the tip end of the bar (read time’s tilt) which Mayn seemed to ignore. As did his late-night old-friend journalist colleague Ted, who smoked unheard-of cigarettes and lived in a five-room half-furnished Washington apartment when he was not less solitary traveling; who did not tell stories, and who now said, "Cleopatra’s Nose."

"Which Cleopatra?" chimed in the itinerant photo-journalist Spence, hopeful of company.

Mayn did not acknowledge this leather-fringed man Spence, reared doubtless hydroponically or unconsciously out of the oil he was inquiring about like a scavenger, a Spence at the end of the bar and not even pleasantly unlikable. Mayn answered Spence that the bean had been named in the Lower California desert a century and a half ago by a naturalist named Link after a colleague botanist who had died eighteen years before—"but the breakthrough came in 1933 in Arizona."

"Which Cleopatra?" said Ted. "The one whose nose would have changed history if it had been a hair longer but wasn’t—anyone called Cleo in your family, Mayn?—that’s what your granddad must have meant!"

—while along a bond of humor joining the two colleagues in the same bar in Washington in the early seventies flashed a vacation-beach insight of green-water stripe made by sandbar so the surrounding sea mo’ blue thereby, which equals sad but we can’t tell why, we find only a collection of sunny bodies on a beach and add on two more bodies that are non-present but implicit—one the best man of (then, in 1944 or -5) thirteen or fourteen years ago (Jim’s father, Mel) who is at work back in town at the family newspaper which is soon to pass into history, for he doesn’t like the beach; the other, the grandfather Alexander, who is back across the road beyond the beachfront row of cottages and on the bay side peering (if he’s not snoozing) down into the water off the dock for crabs, for the slow, rich, helpless softies you eat it all.

What had been happening? For what did happen when she got sick later made him wonder what had been happening but all he could come up with was her and his father—people, what he felt they were like—but not events that proved so. Nor had this event that was scattered across the sand at still-unsullied Mantoloking on the Jersey shore maybe a forty-minute drive from Windrow shown itself so he could follow its start to its finish, which was elsewhere; and he hadn’t felt even it until long after: so that he couldn’t be sure, and so he felt dumb, and then, in this order, he thought maybe there’s nothing to understand; or if there is, it’ll come to him as time goes by, the way grandfather Alexander slowly travels the five-minute walk from the beach to the bayside cottage thinking for a time alone about a very fresh chowder for supper with unavoidably a couple three guests thrown in, the Bob Yards, and this old, coughing, until today unbelievable and basically non-existent sonofagun-figure of Margaret’s past weirdly materialized from New York— it’s ‘44 or ‘45—so ancient history has been only fifty miles away all these years.

and one of these, Bob’s wife, is suddenly in the bayside cottage with Alexander saying hello with quickness, familiarity, and anger not directed toward him but doubtless toward the beach, so that he turns his shoulder in order not to deflect it because he knows Bob Yard’s wife well, and their childless marriage filled by their good talk. And feels more than he can put intuition to, and thinks there is something going on on the beach and is told by Bob’s wife it is the old acquaintance of Margaret from the western days who has arrived in the Yards’ car, but Alexander has his chowder to consider, the boys will eat two bowls, Sarah none.

But the double Moon? What meant the double Moon upon the old medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince got his pistol? comes a voice or a unison of voices from the next room as a divider partition explodes lightly in the laughter unseen onlookers give either the reappearance of half a couch moving back into its apartment or Larry reflecting after a long, deflected bike ride.

Mayn recalled more than he told Ted his steady-eyed elder colleague, though the info-dealer-hunter Spence (who came to mind with some sheen of mold on his face) was not present and would not have heard; and besides, Jim liked Ted, yet before he got through telling what little he told, and remembering the larger thing of which the telling was a part while being told by a part of himself out ahead, not telling the larger matter affected the memory of it in a way quite different from a fact that he had withheld that night in 1969 just because the Spence character-sleazy-watchman-photo-journalist was present and he didn’t like the guy: to wit that in ‘33 a couple of researchers discovered that that desert seed oil bore amazing similarities to the legendary oil of the sperm whale whose sea-acres of flow could never have been thought expendable until now sperm whale oil twenty-five years afterward had been slapped with an import ban.

Call it an uncaused event, he heard himself say into his old-fashioned-glass low-ball to deep-jawed Ted smoking quietly beside him who had praised surprisingly (for humdrum work) his series of three articles on the Delaware River engineering, and from there they had digressed to family pistol which Ted said could seem like more than one, the way Jim outlined its provenances—and digressed to the State of New Jersey and what could and couldn’t be done taxwise, and to whales that were still to be seen from the Jersey shore, which had gotten ugly since his own late childhood much less since his grandmother Margaret’s day when they had a cottage in Mantoloking long since sold which brought them to the beach where you let yourself go, with your fishing pier and the long breakwater all on the sea side and a bright hilly beach where took place the phenomenon that belongs maybe not to the history of junior pickup baseball but of sand or angular gravity; and, come to think, it was several figures in the bright day walking, running, standing literally (we think) rooted, and one lying eyes closed though not silently. And the non-causal event—

—You mean "miracle"? the friend said, whose voice was sometimes in recall what Mayn got but not the face, with its deep jaw and its cigarette.

Yes, like Cleopatra’s Nose—arose from the well-known primarily beach game called "Bases" where two basemen throw the ball back and forth trying to tag the base runner who runs back and forth keeping away from the ball —and in which Jim was engaged with his friend Sammy who’d come with them that day from Windrow—and another guy who wore a green sateen racing-type bathing suit—Sammy and Jim thirteen, Sammy a bit tiltingly taller with a longer reach which he wouldn’t use on Jim because Jim would outshove him but could sometimes kick Sammy in sideways preview of the import of eastern modes of violent aggression a generation later, which made our western combat almost overnight more meditated—while Jim saved for the wintertime when they had their parkas on a punishing hook to the ribs which he had thrown maybe three or four times—and the guy in the sateen jockstrap-type bathing suit was running back and forth low to the ground between the "bases" and Jim, who could run, and Sammy, who could take a throw and run, were trying to get the kid out but he would skip sideways between them, and the ball would wing past his head and Sammy get it right back to Jim who’d run up to within a few feet of the guy and toss it to Sammy before the guy was safe and the guy would slide under Sammy’s tag or jump and go the other way and be past Jim before Jim got the ball back in his hand—a tennis ball, an old one, long before the yellows, and so napless and smooth you couldn’t tell if it had been the Pennsylvania ball belonging to a girlfriend of Jim’s who played tennis, and you could curve it.

But in the middle of all this, with Jim’s grandma Margaret walking down the beach and Jim’s half-pint brother over digging near their mother, who lay face up on a black towel with her arms exactly at her sides (ready to be launched elsewhere) and her very dark but sometimes very faintly (in memory) auburn hair still up and wearing a flowered but very dark bathing suit with a skirt—the guy in the middle stopped and walked away, didn’t seem to hear Sammy, who said, "You’re out, you went outside the baselines." And Brad, with the deep-socketed eyes as if he were digesting a great deal that he had recently learned, turned suddenly, small-shouldered, from what he had seriously been doing and yelled, ‘There are no baselines on the beach," and Jim said, "For Christ’s sake," as the guy in the green sateen suit walked obliviously up the beach—had someone summoned him?

So they had to use Brad, who had been trickling sand over his mother’s instep and had been piling sand in earnest over her shins.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice but for that moment not Sarah his mother’s, for she was as she had been, rigidly receiving the sun (if non-looks could kill) no doubt thinking her way through a sonata until a few notes of it came humming out of her, but how did you hear the sound with her mouth closed?—answer: through the nose (try humming, mouth closed, and just stop up your nostrils—then it’s out your ears or through your eyes)—

What are you looking at? came a voice again but now like little brother Brad’s but Jim was looking now off a hundred yards downbeach at his grandmother Margaret in conversation with a sort of old geezer, not decrepit but an oldster, who had materialized in beachcomber’s khakis and a white shirt, dark, dark glasses, and a white sailor hat opened out like an inverted bowl; but a familiar bawling greeting came from nearer by and, beyond his mother, who was now leaning back on her elbows and staring at Jim, Jim saw the fully clothed figure of Bob Yard the electrical contractor—evidently having driven over to the shore from Windrow—and then Brad came running over to run the bases, and Jim and Sammy lobbed the ball back and forth high enough so Brad scampered all the way to the other base, sliding in, though he didn’t have to, Jim told him.