What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice which we know Jim was correct to believe he heard as if down the road a future comment on Brad’s preliminary trans-mater excavation concepts were not being given grounds for utterance: ‘stead of digging down, youse cover the thing up; then level off and keep at it a few ages and my goodness you’ve d/seroded th’ Earth surface as much as several inches all around, which renews resources if anything.

What are you staring at? distinctly came Jim’s voice the eve of the U-2 press conference. But the strong hand on his arm counseling him not to bother about the Spence character who’s as good as lost at the end of the bar silenced him—or his voice—while his long-time colleague-friend Ted’s actual voice went armlessly on quoting the famed pilot of the Yankees in response to his interrogator right here in Washington a couple of years back:

... I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D. Class C ball, Class A ball.

How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?

But, what are you staring at?, said an all-purpose voice, a few short years later when Mayn and Ted (agreeing they needed a vacation) found themselves in the same hotel bar moderately amused by their light, disintegrating discussion of what was technically known as "hardening" a land-based missile by sinking it into an underground silo: lo, a process which (who knew?) the next century might extend to what the well-tanked thinkers down the street called "soft" targets such as cities, if there were such by then (i.e., either distinct from a densification along the seaboard, or after a "greenhouse effect" due to pollution-rich atmosphere above, lidding the healthy glow of our Earth breath below, till our destined glacier melted down and the ocean went up and swamped Philadelphia and its boating clubs along the river there and Venice-ized New York)—for the now western-wear photographer and infor-mation-transacter Spence had answered (for him pretty point-blank) Mayn’s this-time light query What are you staring at?, with the same words with the you stressed, and Mayn shrugged it off this time without the actually more irascible Ted’s help, Spence was so sleazy, well there was something about him that just wasn’t worth putting your finger on: but who cares if the Devil’s up-to-date barter-economics drew the line at making unrefusable offers here, because Spence was in another room downstairs making his own deals.

Yet again, What are you staring at? was Mayn’s line and as warped as his retroactive view of his mother—not worth talking about but if it ever came up, her tragedy, ununderstandable as it was, he talked of it naturally but said out loud that he knew nothing really about it, about the awkward marriage and the annihilatingly downplayed disappearance as if the war ending was what mattered like being strong, and hardly heard Spence say, "I never had a family to speak of—or maybe you just remember yours—you certainly got me guessing—I mean, I never had much in the way of family, O.K.?"

—You mean it was natural to talk of it, or he talked of it in a natural voice? we hear the multiple interrogator like a multiple child having to ask—

—Well "What are you staring at?" was what, long ago, ball in hand, he came back at his mother with:

... for his mother, the Sarah of his remembered moment, had been staring in Jim’s direction as Bob Yard, somewhere behind her, hallooed high falsetto cum deep feckless baritone brashing his way across the beach toward her and her alone, Jim understood, while she was really staring at Jim yet at the horizon over his shoulder too: oh shit, Jim knew she liked him even if in Windrow he stayed clear of the house most of the time "from sun to sun," though he lied when he joked about her practicing and even wanted to hear the interruption no the interrupted phrases of her violining cross slowly, backtracking in order to go ahead, halting upon a gap, her whole self or life, or just music, get it right, go back, go back, go back again and get it right not at all like voices in the evening bursting now and again through the pillowed atmosphere of the roomy house in Throckmorton Street only to disappear like hallucinated messages into what might as well be Jim’s mere thought process, which was like his grandmother’s house.

What are you staring at? said Bob Yard directly above her, a little bent over like in a cave. His charcoal eyebrows vanished under a straw hat as he looked down at the woman who laboriously sat up hunched and swung half round to look up at the noisy man in green chinos who was now not talking, unless he was humming words that Jim didn’t hear.

Up the beach Margaret and the old man were approaching in heated conversation—the oldster maybe not so much older than Margaret—and Bob Yard squatted beside the harshly pale woman—Sarah’s shoulders helplessly conversing with the profound sun, her dark hair defying his arrival, glossy hair, straight hair, her face bending kind of stupidly away from Bob, and her body—her body!—hunched like she didn’t have headroom—

—stupidly? or struck dumb?—

—so Jim knew what his mother was like: she was not just beautiful— and at the very moment when she was warped by an indifference, her look aimed—aimed at him?—so that with Brad and Sammy (who grew younger) and the endlessly plunging breakers pushing Jim to throw the goddamn ball and get the game going, he found himself to be a man:

a man twice told—(he wouldn’t voice that one to Ted no matter how close they were, in i960, 1963, 1972, or 1975, when Ted got sick)—but why Jim was this, he didn’t just know, but knew it was her looking both truly at him and yet around him, while Bob Yard raised his biting voice a notch, "He’s that crackpot Indian hustler-scientist from the old days or a relation maybe— isn’t he that old pal of Margie’s she talked about that helped her out when she was in that tight spot in the old days? He was sitting on the front steps like a veteran when I drove by"—which was why Bob Yard said he had driven down to the shore on impulse (nice day, here’s this old friend of Margaret’s—or is it a relative?—or the old friend, that is—looking for her because he took the train up from New York to Windrow, didn’t phone; said he doesnt)—while Sarah bestows on the man in chinos the intimacy of very cold indifference, but answers—but as if Bob wasn’t there: "Margaret’s romantic adventures are catching up with her"—Sarah’s plain words, but what did they mean? had the oldster appeared here to tell Margaret something? or maybe to ask her.

No wind to scatter the controversy, we add, to convey the potential lightness of the picture, and at that moment Jim had to shy the ball at wonderfully wall-eyed Bob Yard (who seemed like a north pole to Jim’s mother’s south, though not in direction, in some bump of touching and unpleasant barrier), but Jim didn’t throw it after all. The voices of the bathing-suited mother and her chance visitor rose tightly, but in their duet had only a funny sound (like strange vocal cords, not human maybe); and Jim imagined them to his chagrin fondling each other, to make up after this raising of voices. How could he? Because he could see that though his mother had been right here in his sight and, earlier, in the car on the way here—the dark blue Buick with the breezy straw upholstery and the knob on the steering wheel that when Jim was Brad’s age he would sit in the driver’s seat and grab—she had been "here" all the time: yet some scene between her and the principal Windrow electrician, Bob Yard, had come before what Jim was witnessing.

She turned away from Bob Yard who stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, and she looked past Jim, catching his eye so he knew he was part of that extent of sea that, when he turned to see what she was looking out at or looking off to, proved to have a slow freighter passing from right to left he could tell by the bow and stern (he had never seen a convoy, they must not come this close to shore); and facing what she was looking at, he let go a pure, healthy sigh, knowing that he hadn’t been breathing and he would breathe for both of them—live, play, eat; and the words of his grandmother and the old man in white sneakers she was with came to him like the target within the larger bull’s eye, and—

And he heard—he hears his half-pint brother Brad like he’s getting out of hand with a parent (which he never did) insult him and later he doesn’t recall how—that is, the words of the insult—except that they made Jim feel cornered.

Except no one can make you feel anything, says of all people the interrogator who has heard these words underwater in a health-club pool or during an intermission at an obscure tryout reading (pre-production) of a new opera, a private opera, pressed upon a major basso by his young beloved the composer where the interrogator had thought to find someone to interrogate after the show; or in a therapist’s anteroom, underwater or not—

—made, though, Jim feel transfixed by both couples, his grandma in her bathing suit raising her voice at the geezer from New York, and Sarah lowering hers to Bob. So Brad, having uttered his insult to his big brother who felt the sunburned sand tightening and dyeing his strong, contented arms with its dust, danced away a few steps toward Sammy and came back so close to Jim that Jim drew his hand back across his body to his opposite shoulder. Obviously he is about to back-hand his half-pint brother, but Sarah’s voice rings out saying Jim’s name. Whereupon our Brad snatches the tennis ball from his brother’s other hand and darts away with Jim after him angered, relieved.

No, Jim didn’t want to have a fight with Bob Yard, he liked him; no, he liked his mother taking care of herself, and the newspaper would fold one of these days, it wasn’t competitive with the Transcript’s advertising. No, he wasn’t just mad; he really didn’t like little Brad. So there they were, for a moment of four, five, or six steps—the baseman pursuing the ball and the base runner in the over-all picture of Mantoloking, New Jersey, the blistering landscape of beach, the horizon out where the water gave way to wind—and Jim, skidding into a little ridge of sand, snagged his brother by the waist of his trunks pulling them and him half-down but letting go just as his mother called his name again, and he knew—though he couldn’t tell Ted a generation later—that he at thirteen had missed some point before when he turned away from her to see what the heck she was looking at so he’d warped her and himself into a real fix he would never get out of, oh it was his future he’d have to go to and look back from, or be only a means of doing that—be used matter-of-factly by others who saw what he did not.

And at the instant his brother lay stretched out in front of him, Jim leaned over him so the shadow or human window fitted Brad exact, with no overlap onto the sand. And before Sarah’s angry voice cut through a tissue of his feeling, Don’t touch him, came her shout—Jim had already in fact stuck right there in the sand, and Brad screamed.

Jim said to his old professional friend Ted in the bar of a Washington hotel, "If you can beat that," knowing he’d rather be talking some second-hand factual matter to him about the Sprint missile (a favorite of his despite or on account of its mere twenty-five-mile range)—"ewioatmospheric" because it intercepted the enemy missile only after it reentered the atmosphere (last-minute stuff, twenty-five miles, highly personal!).

"What do you mean ‘stuck’?" said his friend.

"I mean I was at an angle sort of one-quarter leaning like the vertical of an L-shape over my little brother—

—a drunken L-shape—

—slanted, and I should have fallen but I didn’t, and my feet weren’t that deeply into the sand so nothing was holding me, I was operationally extra-gravitational."

"What were you leaning on?"

"My ankle, my shin, my stomach muscles, my own back."

"Something was holding you up. Didn’t you ever fall?"

"A moment or two later, Brad decided he wasn’t going to get killed, so he rolled away, and I pulled a foot free, I think, and backed to a standing position and I guess we played Bases."

"There’s an explanation somewhere," said Ted. "We need that little wise guy Spence."

Suddenly here was Margaret in her ample bathing costume, her hair loosely bunned, her face prepared to pass beyond whatever discussion she’d been having with the man she introduced them to: "Must be fifty years ago he told me to go west. I was at Bedloe’s Island looking at the inside of the Statue of Liberty’s face where they’d uncrated it." Jim didn’t recall much more except that Bob Yard seemed to be absent, perhaps receding toward the beach houses and the little road between them and the bayside cottages where Alexander was in conversation with Bob Yard’s wife. Margaret stared at her daughter Sarah on her large towel now again lying down looking up under her cupped hand—"Black and white and red all over" (for you wouldn’t yet see the burn emerging from her daughter)—and Sammy, who was sometimes but not now like a brother, in a rundown trying to tag Brad, had called out, "A newspaper!" "You had more clout if you didn’t beat up on him, seems to me," said Ted, in their bar in Washington, who had had "the most boring family, you know, in the world" except for his father who they all knew had wanted often to kill their mother but had never understood "how to have clout by not killing her," though in fact he had not killed her, not that he’d not exactly had the chance.

In war there was no substitute for victory, Jim Mayn supposed, paraphrasing General Mac Arthur—quoting him!

Good talking to you—good talking to Ted—well these historic moments, the Russians leaving Finland alone, Jim remaining suspended like a sundial pointer above his half-pint brother, is there a power vacuum to enter or isn’t there?, he was talking to his own child, his daughter Flick so grown-up now in the middle of the eighth decade of the century in question and unlike those of us who are angels of change and jump from relation into being to think Naturally he doesn’t know she saves his infrequent letters, a form of grace that never occurred to him with his wastebaskets all over, though he does genuinely want her to know him, wants to give himself (no Indian giver) so she’ll know such stuff about him as that he went to that ‘60 press conference the morning after having a drink with a man named Ted who next morning after Jim’s heavy steadfast non-dreaming he felt might after all be his best friend who by midnight of that precedingly bibulous eve had turned into a Scot for when drinking he turned toward argument not song (while it’s rank error to think either that newsmen are, like sailors, hard drinkers—much less sailors like newsmen—or that Jim and Ted would never set their views to music), though there had been song encouraged (come to think of it, maybe inspired) by a South American woman journalist Mayga, who had been listening:

that is, to Cold War history as self-fulfilling prophecy (if you want a theme to hang your lost anxiety on), you tell me what my global intentions are and sure enough they will be inspired to prove you right; or more likely you will be moved to prove yourself Rightly Responsive as the Silesian Conference and in particular Malenkov’s speech declared the Truman-Marshall plan part of a global putsch to enslave even remotest South America: after which remarks, it was inevitable that Stalin (who was the real speaker at the conference behind Malenkov and Zhdanov in this non-humorous "Can You Top This") would answer the provocation he dreamed on his giant’s self-fulfilling diet designed to make him mad topped betimes by a dessert of suckling satellite and be confirmed in his prediction when Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg signed "Western Union" the same day Congress was asked to breathe life into the draft, St. Patrick’s Day ‘48—

But, countered this lady Mayga from, as it happened, beautiful Chile (who was, as it turned out, ready to sing a bit), the enslavement of South America was true if you gentlemen would kindly recall how American business often moved their obsolete machines down to Chile and put them to work and depreciated them all over again— If they worked, they worked, said Mayn — Put millions in but take billions out, she went on without missing a syllable of his, and often in capital-intensive technology that does not exactly improve the unemployment in an underdeveloped nation unless to increase is to improve (Ted laughed some smoke out of his lungs) because for some belt-tightening programs it is.

Mayn had liked her fineness from the time he had known her and didn’t know how she did it, he was a male snob not to take how she was for granted, she did not overdo the power in her eyes and was quiet without seeming to be an Intelligent Woman Listening or a patient debater waiting to pounce when it came her turn. They had mad coincidences, too.

When you have your day, what will you do with it? said Ted, like an observation, and before long, having paused one moment over the nonetheless quiet lady’s gentle attack on the sentimental violence of which the nationalist imagination was capable as witness the poppycock voiced a few minutes ago by the man who has disappeared from the end of the bar to the effect that the altitude of that slender U-2 plane they were going to hear about tomorrow gave to the plane’s eye a multiple of extra destructive energy in the form of a light too potent to see with the naked eye unpeeled—the three of them here in the bar of a Washington hotel Ted, Jim, and the round-faced pretty woman Mayga slanting toward one another somewhat open-endedly as if the departure of the Scavenger Spence in his fringed deerskin from bar’s end had given them leave, drifted into song.

Such as?

"I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby," and "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and, in honor of the velvet-cheeked guest from the Southern Hemisphere, 4tAy, Ay, Ay, Ay! Canta y no llores, / Porque cantando se alegran cielito Undo los corazones," a border song known even to a young aunt of the Ojibway healer of the Mille Lacs region not far from Lake Superior (whose grandfather, the diva had told Clara at lunch who had mentioned it in Lincoln the correspondent’s presence at a workshop, had sewn with a needle fashioned from a marten’s penis-bone, and with thread that once helped make the back tendon of a moose)—for songs are audible over the greatest distances even like the greater abstractions, but songs especially, as James Mayn, asleep in a friend’s vacant apartment off Connecticut Avenue, may have sensed: but if from the distances of the resolute non-dream that he thought there’s therefore nothing to remember of (except for the challenging voice that asked what was this "double Moon" by which the Anasazi medicine man in possession of the family-pistol-to-be could be made out by the Navajo Prince?) or from the distances of the next day’s prospects opening out before Jim—beneath him, if we will, like the Pole below Admiral Byrd’s mysterious plane caught by a painter hovering glider-like with the American flag painted on the middle of its wing—why then he recalled what he had not witnessed his grandfather Alexander discussing, first, crab chowder (its prospect) with his unexpected visitor down at the bay side cottage, the wonderful red-faced blonde, Jane Yard (Mrs. Bob), and the quantities of softshell required for such a chowder should the three who had dropped in from Windrow elect to stay for supper, assuming, second, that his fair daughter Sarah and her old friend Bob the esteemed electrician husband of Alexander’s visitor made up their difference of yesterday whatever it was—

Oh dry up, Alexander, that’s blarney and you’re not Irish, said Jane mildly—

—were now speaking to each other, that is—having had words yesterday that must have spoilt her day and spoilt his if he was half as downhearted afterward as she—

—Oh come off it, Alexander, you and Margie always spoiled hell out of Sarah—

But the bald, white-haired, tall, paunchy man laughed abruptly as if after all he did know a little something more than the obvious, and he said he thought Margaret had been pretty strict with both girls and asked what had brought Jane and Bob down to the shore today.

Then she told him who they’d brought, feeling like relations.

Meanwhile, beyond the resumed Bases game where Braddie soon got tagged out only to become the middle of a Keep Away game that Sarah ignored, cupping her hand over her eyes to stare at the khaki-trousered ancient whom her mother Margaret had (at last) introduced her to, a new noise succeeded the disappearance of Bob Yard over the dune: "Did you see his face!" said both Yards in concert, for she had come up from the cottage toward the beach and met Bob—it was the childless Yards in concert—a childless couple either makes up for it with a lot of noise or talent or has trouble with other people’s noise—voices lifted somewhere between the beach and the path to the bayfront cottages with their stilt-supported little dock, Alexander making ready to commence to begin organizing a crab chowder for six or seven, not nine, a decision precipitated by Jane Yard when she heard of the recent to-do between Sarah and Bob and said she and Bob at least would not be staying.

Which like a historian of the early forties Jim’s daughter Flick put together like two and two with an evening in New York the next winter when Sarah had tickets for herself and Brad to go up to New York with Margaret to see Carmen, Brad’s first opera; and when Margaret got a cold and would not be seen in public, the unheard-of happened and Sarah’s unmusical husband announced he would tear himself away from the paper and make a third: then Bob Yard said he would drive them all, because he and his erstwhile wife Jane were going in to New York for dinner at Rockefeller Center ice rink and then were going dancing at the Hotel Taft, although Jane called it off at the last minute after speaking with Sarah, then changed her mind again as if in 399 order to have a hilarious argument in the front seat with her husband en route to New York with three Mayns in back.

Jim told Flick as little as she wanted to know, then left her to put it together; and once in the midst of these matters he wanted to ask if she planned to have a family—none of his business, but . . . but didn’t ask her. But then she knew of a philosopher who had said our way of being civilized individuals is to want children rather than ourselves, the future rather than life now: so she had, like her mother, rendered his question unnecessary. Then she had said, But what about you?

Like her mother?—the question poses itself apart from any interrogator. Well, her mother answered questions that way, too, that hadn’t been voiced. Flick his daughter stayed close to him for a time after the unraveling of the marriage, by being combative; unlike her brother Andrew, who was gentle and decent yet absent. Flick took her father up on two-thirds of what he said, though mostly over the phone. The marriage was fractured on a long-term basis, till death us do join: Well, are you joking or aren’t you, Daddy?

And when he told how the U-2 press conferences years ago in May of ‘60 had turned him on to weather but at the press conference was the lie to cover the prime issue which was illicit surveillance of Russia, there came Flick’s loved, sometimes husky voice on the phone, "Whaddaya mean?— meteorology? or that it was the lie? and I thought the newspaperman sticks to the subject."

He wanted to tell her he was half-kidding, that the weather reconnaissance was solid information, you knew where you were, it was history. He said, 4’No gray areas there—you don’t have to speculate if the man’s giving you a half-truth."

And when he was driving with Ted and Ted’s fifty-year-old girlfriend; or checking the street number of a house on a breezy corner of Brooklyn Heights within shooting distance of the harbor and the lighted Statue that turned its back on New Jersey when you drove in over the Jersey flats though the Statue was in New Jersey if in a separate United States of elegant debris; or when he just missed the bank one thirsty afternoon and thought he would cash a check at the athletic club (and it was the wrong time to phone Flick), he would so much want to phone her that it was all he could do to stop feeling a dumbbell more than a father-man, and might phone anyway although he knew he didn’t need to heal the pains of his and her mother’s separation (growth pains, our ass); he found he didn’t talk to her like that but made fairly good conversation into a credit-card pay phone to the intimate point of Flick then complaining (now from Washington) that sure she was interested in his routine work on the dioxin scandal, but less that it caused acne than what happened when we sprayed it in the sixties in Florida and dumped dioxin-contaminated waste oil to keep dust down at those Missouri horse farms, and this dioxin’s the cleverest poison ever synthesized and so unearthly good at what it does it’s more poisonous than the most poisonous person and has the brains to fool itself into waiting several weeks to kill you—than she was interested in his emergency bulletins about Thomas Jefferson (who might have been a casual relative as Mayn dropped the information) writing with his left hand to the Frenchman Le Roy accounting for why the east wind off the ocean having no obstacle penetrates the settled deforested Virginia coast more than does the inland wind from the hilly wooded west which, like the landward ocean wind, rushes into the heated coastal zone after the air there rises—and (he didn’t mind Flick’s rather exercised criticism confusing his conversation with his "priorities," he was proud enough of her!) she was—O.K.—well —very interested in how dioxin traveled freely through the food chains in the Vietnam ecosystem through to catfish and carp, but mobile as it is dioxin really settles into the cells and twelve years after spraying in northwest Florida where you get rain even during vacation time, it’s still as good as new in birds and insects (and your favorite eating-lizard) her father added—but she was less interested, she had to say, in Jefferson’s left-handed speculation on the chain reaction of the Gulf Stream to the east wind as a result of which— though "we know too little of the operations of nature in the physical world to assign causes with any degree of confidence"—let’s let the Gulf Stream, said T.J., finish biting its way through the continent and let’s just open a token cut in the Isthmus of Panama and let the Gulf Stream current do the work for us which would lessen pressure elsewhere from the once-dangerous Gulf Stream because calm and safe it would no longer throw vapors, as Franklin argued, northward to be turned by cold air into the fogs on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland which harass mariners from as far away no doubt as Russia. But, come to think of it, long ago in i960 on April Fool’s Day, a month before the U-2 press conference, Mayn had followed the first orbiting of a weather satellite, and for a time forgot he remembered the cloud photos, for where the clouds were was where you’d find the weather front—why, listen, the sky changed just while they drove down to the shore on a summer day—

Is it true a ring around the Moon means rain?

True in the forty to eighty percent range.

What, then, of our double Moon illuminating the Anasazi healer who passed the pistol on to the ill-fated Navajo Prince? asks an interrogator so familiar that if we know the magic words we may already have "internalized" him together with his ideal clarity never mind the healing effect of information.

We can reply that the double Moon was a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties visible in the Four Corners region where an unobstacled view of the sunset horizon was had during the brief years that housed nomad demons in and out of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head-hole which a visiting Anglo hermit advised the med’ciners not to cover with the government-issue muslin there seemed to be considerable supplies of, and at sunset the demons were visible if you knew how to look mto her head, demons dark-earth-colored, mobile-brown and glittering gray, but colorful, even creamy, as much as muscularly material, whereas she who could not stretch her eyes to see into the hole knew them to be most tumid blue and the sharp orange of those ancient volcanic apricots still visible every fourth August—except, on the nights of double-moon-rise, when the demons were another color—that is, when for a long stop like the original sunset that may last for years after a volcanic eruption one multiple demon flashed pale green to erase all others and their colors:

and on such nights when the green flash was seen at twi-set between "the history of the day and the history of the night," the Moon would double or twin in some regions of Sky or Earth or both. And so the ancient Anasazi healer whose real medicines had taken him for years away from his faithful wife and children so that he threatened to become a witchdoctor who parts, say, the husband from the wife if in luck so not even snake root helps the man, or instead of giving soapweed mixed with a special cactus to help the mother in labor when the baby won’t come, administers it much earlier and differently so the gal aborts and afterward is unable to know if she wanted to or not—the Anasazi healer felt the Moon double him with its light or be seen by each of his eyes individually.

Nevertheless, the white-lipped female zoologist Mena, studying the fierce javelina all the way up from the southern hemisphere, had met the botanist Marcus Jones (of whom no visual record remains within us) pedaling down through and beyond the monumental debris of Colorado seeking yet one more new type of locoweed—and she claimed that the doubled shadow he cast upon her when he got off his bike to greet her where the light of night brought the desert closer about them had before Jones was gone become hers to convey until her next human. This was the ancient Anasazi who, because her appearance at the top of his ladder caused the pistol in question to throw two shadows, had seen two Moons and thereupon had admitted he was not sure if the pistol had come from the mestizo spy years after the Mexican War or alternatively from a half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer (one of that clown elite who must act out their least-appealing dreams in public even to the point of turning themselves literally inside out) who claimed he had been given the pistol by a dying white settler prone among the wind grasses of southern Dakota as a charm to tame that religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance with which the Indians in despair hoped against hope to stop the increasing pain of invading bullets though in particular it was each individual’s transcendent guardian richly painted on the Ghost Dance shields on government-issue muslin that must memorably refract these currents of detonated daylight from their course, while the community on good days intuited through custom—long before law got round to firming it up—the difference between bullets and light, the sign that detours you off onto yet another course and the true way of the explorer that bends if need be to circumnavigate a route that may in the end prove more direct.

But what prisms of sight carried the mother and with her a divided son, left out yet asked along, from the active Mantoloking beachhead out to a horizon more northern than could be explained?—for our sailors tell of those high-latitude mirages whereby the land below the horizon levitates if it does not invert into sight, and we see where we are going before it sees us.

An explanation—little more than that—as that light entering a different medium promises to bend—or that a mother we already recalled before we had gone far enough in our research to reconstitute her was the one who left her sons with the promise that they were the ones going away, a mirage factor that keeps its distance no matter how we go on or go back, to tell us something past mere satisfaction as the shine of a distant desert lake meets the shade of some earthly substance over the hill of our New Jersey still-wartime sea.

Facts worth their weight in gravity if they can only carry a tune to get them to the noise the tune hides in case—ti-dum-whung-lu—it needs to be moved fast and be in not Sarah’s open case but Thomas Jefferson’s violin terminally cased while in a next room he wrote with his left hand to Le Roy in France about the weather (Seasonable in Monticello; how makes it at Mont-pellier?) if ‘twas the same Le Roy (in the history of rain, the "humid" Le Roy) the Le Roy who in the 1750s (so it couldn’t almost be the same one) discovered dew point by sealing damp air not in a painted can as we did 1950s New York City air for tourists and Paris air for the Clignancourt flea market, unless you could hold your breath for the lag of your homeward leg there to transfer it to the tunnel of a loved one’s mouth and system, but in a bottle where the temperature was falling, until drops formed like tunes to Le Roy’s eyes, and in measuring this degree of the air’s saturation he brought all of us closer to the causes of rain. And found, with his improvised hygrometer of goblets indoors and out, that where he was the dew point varied with the wind direction—further, that the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec are not so dry as the north wind, nor so moist as the south wind from the sea, and dry and moist are relative in air so that dry air on a summer’s day may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But (and we turn to the child speaking and rotate so’f we was in a Choosing Configuration we’d just go on spinning)—But he wasn’t the inventor of rain, right?

Right (we are so happy to give a Yes or No answer to a child, the slight smile upon its face or certain parts thereof)—No, my dears (for it’s a multiple child!) he wasn’t. Nor, fifty years later, was he likely to have been the Le Roy to whom Jefferson, having broken his right or violin wrist on a walk with a mere acquaintance wrote a rambling letter with his left hand and never had the strength to play again, though four days later he attended a concert and the following night went alone to the opera, our all-purpose Jefferson, and never once stopped taking notes, as witness less than two years later his observations in Europe both of windows that admit air but not rain, and sawmills that run on wind, not to mention his having instinctively grasped the modern dream of urban sprawl proposing a coastal Thru-Way from Nice to La Spezia, an Alps by-pass for travelers entering Italy whereby, as T.J. said, "all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village" ahead of its time along that route.

Which had been, to cite from Larry what Jefferson six generations or so earlier could not have termed it, his personal Modulus to give back to world civilization all the energy-to-burn that had fractured his wrist. And could have led to his discovering in Inner Choor with its long seacoast-like range proto-nomads landbridging to the Alkan-Yukon fields, had he the renowned polymath T.J. trusted his naturally swiveling instinct finding not just slender black-and-white solutions at any hour of his epic day/night but oceans to bestride with a compass whose points were out of sight of each other wading in the watery sphere; hence had T.J. surveyed on Euclid’s drowning angular shoulders such sunlight shed in Earth’s seas as to discern long before the synthesizing of uranium that flesh itself, beneath the skin but even in the varicolored skin with all its history of light, if barraged at its nucleus (take for example the seven hundred individuals that were the nucleus of the Georgia Colony), could blow sky-high, clouding the horizons of events themselves—and the whole shmeer turns upon how we (a natural senate maybe only in birth and potential) apply our knowledge of the light (for is the tune the secret force celled in the noise or is the noise what waits in the tune’s fine track to blow us away together on Independence Day?).

You mean, asks an internalized interrogator drawing through us like an un-snappable lanyard looking for a grommet to lash and presuming to be our Modulus when unbeknownst even to us sometimes we are it—you mean that young Jim, shunted back to his Bases game upon the white-hot beach, might have found upon the horizon what his mother, anguished at the man Bob Yard, had looked around Jim in order to see—if he had only been smart enough to see that it was her life she had somehow lost and not a son whom she divided into two that they not meet? For in lieu of deciding that it was that uncomfortable day at the beach that decided Sarah (no middle name) Mayn to disappear, in which case he might have stopped her from doing it, he ever after discounted the conjunction of all this with what proved to be the old New York City geezer’s farewell to Margaret, and fixed his memory on what he knew for sure, which was the miraculous fact of his violently rooting his feet in the sand leaning then suspended against all gravity or other explanation, which saved his little brother Brad from receiving violence.

Which would never "do," while Jefferson’s violin healthy in its case so appreciates in value by the warm sheen of its workmanship, as by the shaping into a constant future of all its remembered music, that we, who are only relation, let such parallels as deterrence and disarmament meet, like being in one place yet being at once in two, and put Euclid over Einstein for sanity’s sake and not to overanalyze the unspeakable of a mother’s absenting herself from her sons. Whereby Mayn could mention matter-of-factly to his daughter Flick, or, soon after she was born, to his friend Ted, the night before NASA’s director of public information Walt Bonney indicated that a faulty oxygen line probably caused the U-2 pilot to black out (prior to slipping into Russian airspace), that Jim’s mother Sarah had been less sick than depressed during the year preceding both the tragedy and, roughly, War’s end, and that even on the summer’s day when the man with whom (though Jim didn’t know it any more than his brother Brad could think it) Sarah was or had been on intimate terms turned up unexpectedly at the shore forty minutes from Windrow ostensibly to deliver Margaret’s old friend the geezer who as it happened was supposed to be dying, Sarah in Jim’s later-articulated view had begun to think seriously about removing herself from the quiet, ordinary life she lived with her two sons and the husband she did not know how to speak of—

—and thirteen years earlier, or fourteen, Ted gently responded, "Excuse me but were the two sons both by your father?" to which Jim, contemplating still the horizon toward which (as he once upon a time years later began to try to make Flick his daughter see) he’d more than fallen, quipped, "By? By? He wasn’t no author, he ran the fambley paper, married into it, was an editor, Honesty was his middle name, not a bad guy, not necessarily a winner, maybe, but I never put my finger on just what was slowed-down about him, he could make you feel he was raising his voice, though he never did and maybe I felt he ought to but he didn’t much lay a hand on me, he would now and then take my mother by the shoulder and it didn’t matter if they were facing or not, and give her a peck on the jaw; he’s still very much alive—and that’s something."

—mention such stuff matter-a-fackly and all, und jet und jet . . .

What was the Hermit-Inventor of New York—that is, doing there that day upon the strand? and why was Bob Yard not serving his country in the armed forces?—in fact as an electrician if that career information had reached the right ears.

We’ll get to those questions, replies the spokesman, using the "Agency We" for he’s on tricky ground and had better just release the prepared statement on the Lockheed pilot Powers and his "sniffer"—that so-called "flying test bed" totally unarmed and slower than the speed of sound for God’s sake but heavy on the instruments designed to measure, well, gust turbulence at 55,000 feet, also "sniffs" radioactivity—you hang out a sheet of filter paper to check the atmosphere, that’s all there is to it but NASA categorically denies that this U-2 was packing any radioactivity-detecting gear, for there’s always tomorrow up to a point until Walter Bonney is saying on May 9th or 10th—

—Well, which?

—he’s saying, "I thought I was telling the truth"—for his official statement re: this particular U-2’s work during a round trip of three hours and forty-five minutes of fourteen hundred or sixteen hundred miles (for both figures have been mentioned) identified "gust meteorological conditions" as the purpose of the flight, and Walt Bonney got his original statement from Air Weather and they got it from information supplied by the Second Weather Wing at Wiesbaden, which in turn was supplied the information from Turkish channels since the takeoff point was Adana airfield near the Syrian border, the officer in charge none other than Colonel Bill Shelton, low-profile but all business, commander of the Second Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Do you see the trouble you get into when you already had the Tiros satellite launched a month previous with fully automated eyes and touch which the Russians had no interest in pointing a rocket at (because for one thing they can share the data with us later), but beyond subsequent admission that this U-2, unlike the ones in Japan, California, New York State, and other, or all of the above, was engaged in necessary surveillance of missile sites, etcetera, we do not hesitate (so to speak) to (we proudly declassify, hand over heart, two hands for beginners, even three for those who have evolved that far into the race’s unconscious future Body-Self, the information in order to) acknowledge that from our U-2 we have learned that our bombers have nothing to fear from turbulence when refueling at high altitudes.

Like a contemplative and detached student of the stock market, Mayn followed the missile do-si-do in ‘69 to the point of getting quite fond of the Sprint missile that waited till the enemy warhead poked down out of the upper atmosphere at which stage it made a dash for it. But Mayn had been turned toward the more lasting field of meteorology, namely the comparatively "small talk" of weather that NASA had chosen to cover and to be its high-altitude lie. And Mayn was known to have studied the stodgy U-2 and its gadgets: for wind shear, ozone, and water vapor; for spotting would-be typhoons; and for looking into the dynamics of convective clouds. All this before he let go and went on (if someone had to speak for him) to less ambiguously administered manifestations of meteorological inquiry and application, straight stuff, journeyman work—

Yeah, said a daughter, yeah, said she who also did not see because he hadn’t completely told her what he had come back from like a shadow to reinvent: yeah, yeah, she said; straight stuff, Dad, hard information, right, Dad?

The energy-efficient home, he said . . . putting waste heat to work, he half-grumbled, hearing her add, Where homeowners can sit around and think what?

and later the U-2 ten miles high could see through the smoke a mountain on fire to map the perimeter of that little hole, that brief, wild sea-bomb, of light. He couldn’t say those words but felt them because we relations could release them to him, which we could do because he was capable of feeling them, which, thus, we might learn.

Flick would get a little mad but discount it with that voice of hers, that little demolition of the area immediately around her, all of it an irony of hers, and he would tell himself he couldn’t follow her meaning unless it was that she thought he should use some power in journalism that he was reluctant even to look for; she would make fun of his pedestrian reports, his "straightforward" assignments when he was back with AP but then he left again to work for the group of papers in the East owned by the South American supposed genius Senor Long, and Flick made fun of these stodgy reports that she half seemed not to know zilch about, so she got Jim telling about the hail-suppression work in Russia and in Argentina and where it all started at the end of the War (Right, she said, "The War") after the supercooling of high clouds was found to be why ice formed on aircraft wings which themselves proved to be the trigger that froze the cloud water—so you introduce a cold rod or —aha!—dry ice and god-like or in the guise of a sympathetic medicine poetess of the early American desert called Cloud-Water make snow at fourteen thousand feet over Schenectady (ever been to Schenectady, Flick?) and one thing led to another and the pioneer in this, Schaefer, got some input from a fellow researcher named Vonnegut—Vonnegut? said Flick—to try silver iodide crystals which don’t make the cloud water any colder but each crystal grows ice around it like a nucleus, grows and grows and then it bursts and you get a chain reaction (Oh that explains everything, she said)—and with the chain reaction the next thing you know—

"Oh Daddy! Snow! Thank you, Daddy!"—they were in a restaurant, she was seventeen, there were a moment’s tears in her eyes quickly ironed out—"Snow, Daddy," so he had to laugh but didn’t know all she meant but loved her almost for her confused desires to (what?) make fun of him?, to make him more political?, but not to get him back with her mother—

—Right! (his shoulders felt stiff and good) so they figure a pellet of dry ice the size of a pea can make a hundred thousand tons of snow—

Who figures? came a voice back (a voice of a daughter) (multiplied by us)—yeah, so who’s this "they" that "figures"?—a multinational oil-insurance corp.?—but it isn’t coming to anything, admit it—they don’t control the weather except in their Men’s Dreams of zooming into a zero-visibility cloud and blowing everything out of there!

Well the Russians have shot rockets into thunderclouds their radar said were packed with hailstones, said Jim.

She would eat her dinner and suddenly ask why the winds came from west to east. This led her father into air masses, their personalities and so forth. He drew one for her, on a paper tablecloth in a little dump in Boston where they had crayons in old jelly jars, drew a picture (with commentary) of the prow-shaped slope of the cold front, its hundreds-of-miles-wide keel bottom frictioning slowly across the land, a very wide load.

She’d drive toward some point, maybe of truth—across land that was water, do you understand?—Yes, Jim, we understand though you didn’t say it aloud to yourself—then shift into another type of love, because it was (we’re sure) always that—love and the incestuous anger-humor/humor-anger all mingled of wanting to send up a parent or two who a bit too easily granted their failings especially her father, though when he was tempted by affection, drink, and food to tell her where he was literally coming from he couldn’t because she would be puzzled as if she believed him (that is, that he was in the future) and in the current present only by leaning like a long-necked proto-pelvic closet-biped ankylo-soaratops into its brained past.

I know what you mean, she said to her father, but he didn’t mean the acceleration of time’s hardware that she meant, tossing her long straight light-brown hair back (and what would she know about how dreadful the future was?)—that is, that you might go and teach Peace Corps in middle Africa (there’ll always be an Africa), but listen Dad the overall grid was haywire, she felt, and run not by Decent Thought or even a collaboration of crooks but—she didn’t know—it had run away with itself—the answer was, she said, socialism maybe, but not the kind we had, with the corporations half-owned by the government that they more than half-owned in turn, and the only point in going to college—she had been accepted by a formerly men’s college that had just gone "public" (joke) and offered excellent skiing close by—Was to study and know your enemies: not men, no, not men, but—she would quit after a year mebbe and go to work for Nader, do obsoletely anythong he needed, but she ought to be a lawyer, but it took too much time, and did she want kids young?, but that wasn’t what she thought, it was her father.

The future her father had sloped out onto was like us the slope, static but for the shadow it threw, which was him, back upon Now, the Present, which was really the past from the vantage of that future he had gone into like a shock of memory which gave off a desire to return to what was a void and had to be reinvented, namely this present: God! he thought, it wasn’t him, this future position, it felt causeless, caused by an absence of cause, it came at him a sure home, not someone else’s.

Like when he woke up one night, and it was the night he walked out on the landing to find Sarah his mother wending her way upstairs with a book—and come to think of it her grandmother’s large comb—in her hand, reading. And a flashlight made like a candle.

But when he woke at first he had heard certainly his mother, her neutral though now unusually explaining voice, upon the ground of Brad’s crying coupled with his sort of whining word-sound, and she was telling him it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a good dream; his "terrible" dream (certainly) of the whole town going back in reverse into a volcano it had come out of, but— for reasons that were people in the dream that Jim missed out on because he couldn’t really hear—a "very moving" dream, a good dream, Braddie—she wouldn’t have minded having it herself—which made Braddie laugh and sob-snuffle at once, and something else that caught Jim but he didn’t catch, for what was it?, he only got out of bed. He could have run off the roof into space the way he felt but he had heard the train leaving Windrow getting up some speed headed for Little Silver or the Shore or Trenton; but he opened his door to the removed but spread light from the bathroom down the hall, which his instinct told him was empty. Turning to look down the stairs, he saw his mother on the way up with book and comb, reading—the big brown-and-black-and-golden-orange comb. But later on he thought it might have been her ghost, and he could allow the possibility of ghosts because he had ruled out dreams (though not for others).

All this more or less O.K. until—wait a minute—the next afternoon he heard the very same conversation through the slightly ajar music-room door, and Brad was even doing a bit of crying, same whimper-type really and the little shit couldn’t have just had the dream because he had been at school all day: Jim could guess it was lava boiling down out of the volcano in the movie the previous Saturday, even standing the other side of the music-room door, that gave his kid brother that dream of the town reversing itself to flow back into the volcano with everyone boiling back with it like stuck in the tongue of a titanic snake (sheep and people and even a farmer hoeing unconcernedly, etcetera), then his mother saying a "terrible" dream but a "good dream, Braddie," and Jim knew what came next before he heard it, which was, "It was a good dream Braddie because it was your soul rooting for you, telling you what’s inside you." Jim hadn’t ever heard his mother say "soul." But how had he known she was about to say, "It’s your soul rooting for you," except for her having said it last night when Braddie must have woken up out of a bad dream and she went in to him?

But she had been downstairs!

So was it that Jim could see the future? Or hear it! And so right then, surprised at himself outside this door, he thought that his mother coming up the stairs at two or three in the morning—with the book and the great comb he recalled combined so the comb was extending out of the book she was reading as she slowly came up the stairs—had been a ghost.

Though they had exchanged words.

And she had not really said to get back to bed, it was like they were meeting like friendly acquaintances downtown. Oh, hello, Jim—what a nice pair of pyjama bottoms you’ve got on today.

So later, after she had gone down the drain of the sea you might say cruelly, he looked forward to seeing her ghost again, because this other night when she was alive and Jim could have sworn had been just heard outside in the hall or in Braddie’s room sort of comforting Braddie out of his dream, she had evidently been a ghost out of the future. Of course as well as what she was. Which was reading late, while Jim on the landing had been hearing his father’s snoring and so you could feel that the breathing of one parent passed through you and met the nightwalking or breathing of the other parent. Were there thoughts there, too, along the breath-junction you made? He didn’t know. All he knew was that she said at least a couple of times that he only didn’t remember his dreams; it wasn’t that he didn’t have them. Until he once got mad and, yes, chilly at the same time, so didn’t say what he hoped to but did say she didn’t know what she was talking about, and some people definitely did not have dreams, like some did not see ghosts.

Was it her ghost? He got quite sure of it. But there was no proving it so he put it behind him.

Did he see ghosts where others dreamed? And had history repeated itself downstairs, or what?

He had little to go on, putting his mother together out of his later life. Until one day he regretted not asking people who had known her about her. Why hadn’t he? Because he thought it was up to her?

He went for the definite. Yet he did once see her later on. She was resting on her oars for a long time. He was playing squash in his freshman year at college in a cold court defending the center with hip and elbow and killing perhaps his partner’s very mind targeting the angles to make him dart forward or long-alleying a wall-hugger so the black ball found a home in a dead rear corner, yet always as if his variant wrist knew the future independent of its lord—and this was when he once saw his mother resting on her oars for a long time before some change that came would end this rocking pause.

He "decided"—how?—that she had felt herself not fit for relations with people, all these relations—was that it?

He had seen her row once, and off the beach at Mantoloking, which was crazy and fairly dangerous, and he, a child, had felt it. Though she had gone with a grinning lifeguard, who had shoved the boat, a white and high-bowed small boat across the barriers of magnet-strong low breakers to dig further into the swell. And they both got up onto the gunwales facing each other and grinning out there in the immediate distance of the boy’s watch kept for her, and then they both clambered down and she insisted on rowing. Why did Jim think "insisted"? A secret of the line between where he was and where she was, and the line between them was a foreign shore, and he knew he heard her speaking inside him or maybe him inside her—yet not then, but much later, after she was gone, he recalled this inside business and knew it had been felt by him then. He caught a follow-through of his partner’s racket on his right knee and was never the same again, though was playing two months later and played even better the following year though moving sideways was a bit risky. Out-thinking his "partner" was all it was, and yet he was there doubled in a future of the next second before it had come, it was waiting for him awful as a lost traveler’s inertia, you wouldn’t tell this about yourself even to the multitudes of eyes watching you from the totally imaginary Ship Rock of the northwest New Mexico desert—this future he couldn’t do more than joke about—with his daughter, that is—though once with the South American lady who had wandered thoughtfully into the bar of the hotel the night before or after the first U-2 announcement: and he and Ted were talking (hell) history, light history (Clear, two-plus-two causes; or Just Plain Accident; or the secret rooting capabilities of New Jersey beach sand and mid-1940s bare feet; or history’s trick of happening elsewhere if you paid close attention: well then, didn’t Buddha say speak only of what you know) and Ted had known an ancient relative of Greeley’s, like an old, comparatively valuable pistol, a tea-totaler incidentally whose great-great uncle had lived for a week at the semi-utopiate community in Greeley, Colorado, that Meeker and Greeley founded, and the ancient relative in question when living remembered sloops racing each other out the East River and to the other end of the harbor to the Narrows to meet an incoming ship and whip back to Manhattan to peddle the hot foreign news in the newssheets they had in those days before the great man had founded his Tribune partly to purge journalism of such obnoxious attractions as medical advertising of that day—

And Mayn—and Ted too—and maybe partly in the presence of "their" despised end-of-the-bar auditor Spence with the cruddy sideburns both bushy and patchy and the hide jacket frontier-fringed—showed off to the newcomer, the lady perhaps six or seven years Jim’s elder, a round-faced beauty with an exacting kindness waiting in the eyes, and independent; and she did put three fingers to her lips listening to Jim pass from the wind of sailpower running the news business all the way back to the 1680s when the law said no one might ferry across from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the sails of all the windmills were rolled up or in a rowboat ferry at least, which led to the friend of Ted’s who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights with a view from Grace Court of the ferry lights moving away from the Battery in the early evening and wanted never to look at that vast harbor again and had moved as far inland and slightly southwest as you could get without coming out the other side, and while one thing led to another, the foremost thing was that after the official NASA statement the next day that nobody believed, they had all foregathered (as Jim’s father would say)—pasf-gathered was more like it—here before Ted had gone off to dinner with an economist from Puerto Rico, and Spence, when Mayn had looked away for a moment from his exquisitely trustworthy interlocutress to whom he hadn’t mentioned he was married but wanted to because he was going to be friends with her, had seemed to appear—and for a horning-in moment inquired so incredibly what was the bean with the limitless oil that Mayn had recently been heard speaking of that’s like sperm oil and the planty bush survives up to two hundred years (which Mayn didn’t recall saying because he didn’t actually know how long and now said so, somewhat angrily, to this sidling character who shied away doubtless into his hole as Mayn turned back to the South American lady hearing Spence say, c"d you think I dreamed that?")—so incredibly, yes, that the woman said, Who is he?, as if she’d detected Mayn holding out on her:

—that is, he told his daughter Flick years later (when she could be told things to was it before or after college?) the barest facts of what he had told the South American lady in i960 but did not think Flick would believe him and anyway cared much more for her than for conveying what became so hard to credit that it was a shadow whose very source had been cast with it—all this both a species of but distant possibility maybe of madness, and a vulgar violation of his most ordinary self.

This, Flick might have partly picked up, for she said to him (admittedly the evening he came to Washington to be met by her, and not in his gift to her the old white Cadillac she had that very weekend sold as a collectible), Well you aren’t exactly ordinary, Daddy, the places you’ve been, but this business of our living in the future, well, I’ve never seen that transparent bubble and the plate that people stand two by two on to get transferred into space.

She worried her feeling; she said she didn’t want to talk about the therapist she had been seeing for three months in Boston because it set up a triangle though she knew he wasn’t like that—just paid the bills, right?—but she was trying to hold on to some feelings she tended to discount, it was easy for her to let them get away: one was that she herself had been a reason he and Joy (she named her mother) had stuck it out as long as they had—she and Andrew, of course; and this made her more sad, or she tried to think but it was really more mad since she was thinking it had been her business when it had been theirs.

But it was her life, and he was relieved to feel equality between the mad-sad point and how in late ‘76-early ‘77 she went on about not the maniacal aliveness of dioxin tinting pale cells palely and promising like a habit only the future chance to look back (dioxin in the food chain thus not the point but held to through her pedagogic rhythm which was her own well-known stubbornness now made into policy). But this label of "ordinary" her father gave himself. "Ordinary"?

But the future he was literally in . . . well she sort of chose not to see and he loved her too far to have to make her see he meant literally this four-dimensional picture that included him that he had hardly more than once or twice stated to anyone—stated to his wife, who almost believed him and was frightened to think he was not speaking out of craziness, and so did not quite believe him, at least quite early in his marriage.

But he could state it all to the South American woman Mayga so persuasively that almost at once she was giving Locus T Transfer of Two Persons into One New Libration-Colonist back to him like a reporter checking respectfully fact upon fact, template to jointed template of radiant, matter-turning force, while she was even lowering her voice (so we pick it up) when Spence had returned to the bar from having taken a call in the hotel lobby (Mayn knew all this without looking up), and Mayn said that though the lingo couldn’t have been there in 1945 or ‘6, he was sure he remembered Locus and some mid-space balancing of forces or powers which he had never in fact had any interest in except as factual-type matter that came like the dream he never had at night, though he had been told it was the memory not the dreams he was missing out on.

Had a lot of people instead to reflect on. So that Larry bicycling his own Manhattan Project north, south, west, then sternly east might bury all his toy suicides as they came into his unhappy head by the side of the road where journeyman suicides are s’posed to be buried even when, hard by a type-green traffic light, the pothole in question won’t any too soon have claimed the axle of a cab whose driver wasn’t lucky enough to carry as standard equipment an instant camera to record the waiting ever-empty insatiable grave:

So that his new friend—the joy of new friends, of a "new friend"!— Jim Mayn, before Lar’ was even thought of—may joke his way through and almost out of an evening with the lady Mayga who will hear him out beyond his staggered jokes designed both to stop the folly of what he’s revealing to her and keep him going to the end, well we remember the terrible fine blade of grass in the voice-over concluding Hollywood’s first atomic-energy movie for this was seen by him his senior year in the Walter Reade theater in ‘47, so powerful an ending that the audience were perfectly evenly divided two by two and one to one between those who were physically transfixed and paralyzed and those who were only mentally and did not hear themselves chewing or obliviously tearing wrappers off candy bars they should not have had left at the end of the first of a double feature, such a single blade of grass as whose atoms alone would power your beloved car (your first car!) from coast to coast of a continent as sentimental as it is adrift from an external point of view. So, scrambling his message a trifle, he nonetheless blew smoke by joking but literally from a cigarette first her way unthinking then in the other three directions thus all four (i.e., of the traditional Indian—and not just Indian!— directions, east west north south), like one of the People ceremonially beginning a journey as he recollected from somewhere as remote as the recent information that one day U-2 planes would see through forest-fire smoke.

The South American woman observed that as for such phenomena of nature or science, it was "one of yours" who had been interested in such only as it might have lain in a person’s experience for a time: but it was she who persisted: Now, the transformer bubble these people stand under before they are turned into frequency and . . . recombined, is it? at those distant points of Earth-Moon space—

—Shared.

Sure ... at those . . .

—libration points—

Yes, those are them, she said. This method of dissolving people, their. . . mass, is it? . . . how does it affect them when they arrive at the space colony and want to get back to themselves? I mean out of frequency and back to their regular bodies. Are they cleansed? improved? She smiled, but strangely not with doubt. You said two to one, like odds; it’s two to one they do get there or they don’t, or do they get there and then it’s two to one they rema-terialize?

Here was humor, but she clearly did not say to him, Where is this belief of yours coming from?: and he was glad. The kindness stayed back in her eyes ready. She must have known Spence but not that he was always turning a buck with somebody’s contact, and twice he went away and came back to the fine old bar and sat near the curved brass divider that looked like the top of a boat ladder setting off the small service area of the bar: he came back and once slid up onto a stool much closer to Mayn and the South American woman, but that alertness of hers was less than her plain attention to him, which said she would be interested to know more of this actual place or time he was coming from, she gave it a foreign dignity he didn’t resist except to make a diversionary joke here and there as if to say, You don’t have to, you know—and once looked at his gold-banded wristwatch but she must have understood this was less offhand than curiously gallant even though Mayn did not make a habit of looking at his watch when in conversation with anyone, let alone a woman. Even so, the woman he had married sometimes neglected to let him have the credit of his behavior if she plotted, across his eyeball, some brief gateway, a glint that your normal observer would either not see or would have to wait for weeks, or travel, to see, like the sunset green flash.

Like the universe to itself—which, while not We, approaches (always a mile or two too late) the receding idea which proves that We ourselves are neither that universe, nor it us, nor are, very much of the time, that articulating commonalty heretofore capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, which, it has occurred to us as we have curved through the bodies of our history a work without a gear, locate us as (no joke, no future joke) what is within Mayn and within the elsewhere-busied Grace Kimball and others as what they don’t know they know about each other and a world, which "there" is outself-growing, too. Hence, a hotel in i960. Hence, speaking out as perpetual insiders collected as a concept, which is that our speech is a hypothetical indicator of the other, likelier, theory of our overall silence. Or we are what is sealed inside these people in order to reach forth, even like fourteen unbroken eggs in the remembered recipe for angel-food cake once, twice, three times magically made by Sarah, mother of Jim Mayn, because unlike much other food it melted.

You are a journalist, Mayn said to the lady, yet you believe what you hear.

She had said that it seemed to her that in his account people were being turned into something communicable.

This was worth laughing about together. Yet she was laughing because the humor was true.

He explained that what "was" taking place at this future time was in two places at once and—and—he was a sane man, a journeyman male who played a bit of basketball, still ran and swam, and worked out on the light striking bag when he remembered to in the clubs of half a dozen cities if not countries, a bit of a social boozer and not averse lately to a social smoke though he had never rolled his own joints nor carried a lid like a pipe smoker; was not a particularly imaginative person, he thought, a newspaperman with hardly a view of history (its coming or its waiting or writing) who had gotten away from his hometown where his family had run a weekly paper until it quit during the War and it would not have lasted even if he lived on beyond high school and college to go in on it with his father who, though he had the same last name as his bride, had married into it—

—the two places, she interrupted, and for a second, though he had no middle-range insight into the future and didn’t want whatever bond with action it might confer, he knew that this fine and dear woman was going to be hideously interrupted herself one day, yet no one would ever know if (or not) it was because she had interrupted him in order to keep him with his story as if there were power for someone in it.

The two places, he said—well, it’s going on in the future, this thing that might seem strange to you but I know that I have been in it—and again he felt himself for a second in the middle-range future and telling someone else about this far future and the place it enacted and telling someone, as he was doing now in i960 with her, without concealing the fact (for it was) that he was there in that future. And this radiance, he said in i960 to the South American woman who knows where they import it from?, I’m just as ignorant there in the future as I am here cast back from there, but it’s tied into the magnetosphere cascades, cascades, did I say?, no one ever told me about cascades out there but that’s where they are at, strictly speaking the territory near the magnetopause on the earth side I’m told, where you reach the limit of the earth’s magnetic field where the sun’s wind presses against it hard enough to squash it—while those cascades, which are right there in my head though I have no right to them and haven’t been able to let them settle, are some reverse radiance flowing off from the magnetosphere like fish upstream into the solar wind but that isn’t really it because someway the earthward wind draws these cascades of field from the direction of earth, I guess it would be sunward wouldn’t it?, but yes! the point is that they can draw this radiance off from the magnetosphere in this future place I’m talking about, and have harnessed it, so the place isn’t entirely bad . . .

She laughed and made a note.

Oh it comes down out of the jointed plates of the—

—the bubble around them, said the woman like a partner in discovery.

That’s it: you got it: you know as much as I do.

She laughed and so did he. Her laugh made him think of the very short dress she was wearing, though he was looking at her eyes and her skin, though feeling unfaithful about her angelic sympathy with certain crackpot ideas.

She laughed because she was acquiring a language as different from Romance or Anglo-Saxon as Japanese . . . where they stand, he said, one in front of the other, an Indian-file twosome and they are transferred a hundred thousand miles or so out to the torus, it’s a colossal doughnut, do you have doughnuts in—

—the libration point, she put in—

—that’s where it’s at, he said—one of them, one of the colonies they would build by spraying metal coat by coat layer by layer on an inflated doughnut two, three miles wide, maybe more, a balloon in the shape of what they call a torus—build up the site by rotating this monster inner tube past the spray gun firing metal froth—

—Assembly line, she said.

—Endless, said Mayn; you know how Henry Ford got the idea from the Chicago stockyard meat choppers who worked off overhead conveyors.

Do we know for certain that’s where he got the idea?

There’s plenty of ways to build a colony, and that’s how they do this wheel-shape torus at that libration point between gravities out between the Moon and the Earth, a circular balloon is how it’ll begin.

You’re way ahead of me, she said, and they laughed again. He didn’t fall in love with her. He saw her bend her head, turning her neck stiffly or politely in a show of trying to understand; he admired her and did think of touching her along the two parallel lines of her wrists. But he was already in love, and Joy was pregnant with his son.

Someplace in the seventies of (we add) the century in question, on the same day that he heard of a Chicago intellectual who had said, 4 4No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country," Mayn was able to describe the vacuum-vapor method of squirting boiled aluminum onto the Relevant Inflated (i.e., the Appropriate Other, we intrude but only on ourselves), for they had the process by then. But back in ‘60, knowing a son would be born to him and knowing he the father might never be able to say the truth of where he, a shadow, was being cast from but not like the flat shadows of the Moon’s newly televised dark-side Sea of Dreams (the Russians named it) he was yet incompetent to see into the middle future and see his son going to college in the seventies, and leaving college to be a scientist, a lawyer, an architect (please not another dumb one)—

—an astronaut, she said.

And he continued with what he could see: the distant future, where, to answer her question, the two people standing on the titanium plate under the bubble of jointed electromagnetism when they rematerialize at their libration point far out from Earth are one person.

Aha, she said, and wrote a word or two down on her small pad beside her half-finished margarita, and then felt free to laugh briefly: What sex? she asked.

That’s what Larry asked seventeen eighteen years later, and we hardly remembered he was still (read here) there, he’s consented to be given a new Atala ten-speed by his father though he liked his old beat-up ten-speed Raleigh from the Island and now has an offer of a hundred dollars for it from Grace Kimball—he breathes so little in order to bring all he can bear upon his internalized systems, none at all finished we understand, many started like variant radii aimed in at a locus of centers where may be found backward a hermit-inventor’s new weather precipitated possibly from alterations in the charge-field of coastline configurations, not at this late date by that north-polar wind shift (you’ll have sensed by now) that turned the clouds and altered rainfall shapes in the time of the gifted, hapless Anasazi six hundred years before the East Far Eastern Princess met the Hermit-Inventor in New York and saw herself in his glinting eye whose new weather at our aforementioned locus of centers got carried on by the hermit-inventor nephew of that old khaki beachcomber who came to the Jersey shore to speak to Margaret before he should die of what whole-grain toxins trekked through his system for years of breathing fire and smoke of bodies flying by his tenement windows, of using alcohol and tobacco, of pouring through himself all sugars of the City and all salts of the elaborate harbor where weet-wit weet-wit the purple sandpipers hosting their southern kinflock of turnstones even more lost than they await the beaches of an earlier day, yet that earlier Hermit-Inventor managed to store one horned metabol adrift in his viscera drawing the rest of his substance toward it like a lip or a flower or flume. Upon which he took the train to Windrow, was found by Bob Yard the electrician sometime lover of Jim Mayn’s desperate mother on Margaret and Alexander’s porch, and was driven to that shore point Mantoloking and to Margaret who was walking on the sand alarmed for her daughter burning on the black towel, Jim and Brad’s mother, yet Margaret recollected still the bridges of New York that now by our reckoning in the eighth decade of the century in question come to nine majors not counting the lighted statue through which the Hermit-Inventor of New York in late 1893 or early 1894 or at least once upon a time conducted the East Far Eastern Princess reportedly as a mist, and secreted her toward home and safety in the East as once some years before in the presence of the then as yet unassembled parts of the giant Statue he had put young Margaret in mind of westward travel and transformation.

In fact, girls are interested in westward transition, though don’t worry it’s not your responsibility, we’ll get on it, checking all hitch-hikers between here and the roadblocks. Flick Mayn and her boyfriend united by his small car were seen to cross the April Mississippi and had been passing westward for miles and miles previous to this. Once the community’s infra-red satellite momentarily distracted by the unforeseen detour of its principal responsibility the Pan-Continental Wide Load, for which our road network was built only to become its baneful pressure to widen and expand, lost Flick and her boyfriend at Niagara Falls. They had to help us pick them up again, when, on our scope, they veered violently north to attend a tragedy at the Shakespeare complex at Stratford, Ontario, entering the bustling town as the sun fell.

Later, on their way (resumed under the infra-genic velvet dew of an Ontario dawn) to Midland, Michigan, we didn’t need the satellite to learn that Flick so asked the information office at the Dow Chemical plant there near the confluence of the Chippewa and other rivers with river namesakes elsewhere what it thought about dioxin’s suppression of immunity in guinea pigs, and what this thing was that dioxin did to mice exposed between the sixth and fifteenth days of gestation, that the voice of the information officer when it extended itself with suppressed anger informed Mayn’s daughter that agitators went no further than here and could apply by mail for information.

Yet Flick and her tall, dark, wired-up boyfriend, a former sometime actor on soaps, heard in the voice of its own answer that cleft palates aren’t caused only by dioxin, whether or not subcutaneously (or was it—torture-wise-san —sub-cuticley?) administered. And we hear the interrogator’s mind working overtime in multiples of Larry (who knows about Mayn what others without knowing might think useful). But the interrogator has said, not, Is it administered under the skin or under the cuticle and/or fingernail?—but has said, Sue (while others nearby are overcome by old lyric ceremonies of Navajo voices:

Far as man can see,

Comes the rain,

Comes the rain with me—)

"Sue . . . sue" the interrogator voices name exact but weighs which over which we can’t tell except in knowing we are the available relations— "you have admitted there was a room, there were traditional daiquiris in it, and it is quite long ago as the hailstones fly if we divide the labor of remembering a lime-green surgical blouse and matching trousers by reported dramatic weight loss, yet" (Wait, a budding community breaks in half-truthfully, that was the next room, the next room was where the green was surgical), "and a woman" continues the inquiry, "who had given birth yet wasn’t so sure what had happened, which is what you get when you go for this really un-natural, anti-traditional childbirth that irregardless promises the people hopefully increased consciousness of their personal histories"—and in that daiquiried room there was a Martin or Marvin—or both, in this age of plural priorities, if we make up our collected mind to go for both—but both, though it feels right to us, does not feel right to the interrogator in charge, who turns its potential he has no time for into the heated grin of a headset earphone fusing our ears with the molded plastic remelting them like they are same plastic family to be remolded, until through what we painfully hear, as our ear becomes the headset substance and is hard to tell apart from the sound of our own, well, torture, we hear the unmistakable pangs of a digital hand coming to birth from an analogous ear, why don’t we freak out? is it the revelation of it, the breakthrough transplant? why can’t we decide if this persuasion torture inflicted on us for having spoken out of both sides of our mout’ is real or not? was there some experimental anesthetic clocked into our re-system? we just dunno—and particularly about hand reborn from ear: it’s a new thing but our own, and the hand in question isn’t any garden-variety hand, or throw in a tree if you are all that confident, or human baby that like the coyote pup puts in its first year dependent on its parents: but is a hand that’s ready to go (to ir, in Spanish, fortgehen, which we already remember from our transplant meant Us, or go away, in aller-Mayn) which is why the interrogator with a generous, headsman’s execution basket suitable for dirty or clean laundry but just now full of exam questions for the hand (not afraid of being shot or chopped down) to take one cryptic potluck pick of, suspends the grabbag rule and with the utmost condescension as if we were black and white to be opened and shut asks what question wed like to be interro-gated on, for Martin (or whoever asked the newborn mother if she would have another daiquiri) may have been the name of a diver who cooperated with the police and a freelance documentary team trying to TV-produce out of New York’s East River the body of a girl-researcher and former Olympic swimmer reported with terrible inaccuracy to know too much about an impending prison break with hemispheric repercussions, but the diver and his man-hours came up only with a report of an unknown sound, he had been hearing in fact things down there (the Brooklyn Bridge groaning in its crypts via ghosts of the bends) and if girl-researcher lost in her strangely attractive low-gravity sleep down there manages like some women to "get herself found," she will still be an unknown saved (if saved)—while Marvin looks like being Larry’s father, the sometime husband not yet finally divorced of—

Sue be it, the interrogator jokes, reading the mere slip of a question which by ear-hand we fished from the bloody basket: to which our answer is that Sue, formerly of Marv, Sue, and Larry, would not have been at a party so pair-bound as all that: therefore, the woman who was heard to say "Sue" names another of that name or is urging action upon her hearer.

But the Dow information officer complete with company cleft palate has been relieved by another who would hum these westward kids Flick and boyfriend a lullaby if he didn’t have all this information on tap: e.g., that some nine years ago the British producer of the chemical that dioxin inadvertently derives from thought of closing the plant since, like, they had an explosion and some of the help developed diversified complications—got things—erupting as chloracne (Flick doesn’t need to take notes)—acne (no joke) pustules, inflammation of the hair follicles, heart trouble, bronchitis, spleen rift, liver lesion, what had you, excess gravity in lower limbs, we just want to get back to breathing and more—but here at Dow-Midland we have what we call your "Fool-Safe" (Flick does take a note, her phrase): say, a disk ruptures in a reaction vessel, the reservoir discharges into a holding tank larger than your original reaction vessel so your reaction would be quenched with water in 105 percent of cases. So there’s hardly anything actionable in our—

—but dioxin’s a pesky beast or herb, it will take a rain check for a few man-days only to return in the form of—

—rain itself, for will not the wings we flush away with prove the thing we fly?

But this stuff that clears up acne, the bean the nut the bush—whatever —said Spence years before at the far end of a Washington bar where Jim has met the South American woman (his son now having been born) and enlarged upon his prior answer to her question, namely, What sex? Far as he knew, the colonists two into one wound up with such deep memories of the other sex that such memories are built in!

—this stuff that’s going to revolutionize acne, quietly calls Spence from his position, I gather it thrives on no rain, right? (and no doubt he has gathered the name of the magic bush, plus a way to peddle news of the bean though Mayn won’t give him the time of day, he and Spence are so different) so why don’t we grow the bush—

—"Only God can create a cleft palate," the father wrote the daughter in reply to her account of the chemical plant written to him from a campsite on yet another Chippewa River, this one in Wisconsin, the lights of the motel over the water promising rest right here where they were, with their green Coleman stove open for business: and the trees and the stars and a hundred and fifty miles to go to a region of a thousand lakes but, for now, free of the wide highway where we cannot add to that loved campsite a Wide Load’s tracks free and full of cash on delivery.

Which same chemical-related "cleft palate" the little woman named Lincoln recalled as she sipped a new cup of Mexican coffee, the forgotten woman perhaps, contemplating the new "table," since the glamorous Latin couple, the woman of the marvelous piled auburn hair, the elegant, hard foreign man in gray flannel, have gone away leaving still the small bell of recognition in the correspondent-woman’s memory which is then only the dull disappointment when the woman Clara kind of snubbed her at the Body-Self Workshop saying that this restaurant was recommended by a singer she knew: until now the group of five impending diners before her became a group of three, a heavy set man, a tall young woman, and a dark-haired boy-man talking intensely to the man but for the girl; and Lincoln, watching them over her coffee cup, found the singer in Clara’s comment yielding to the thought that things were summoned in order to be cleared away (or us from their presence), like of the original fivesome the two somewhat older—the smaller, dark; the taller, flaxen-fair—they quietly detached themselves from the other three (who had been a group to themselves coming in like they’d been doing something together other than what the two women had), and when they three had come they had first signaled, more by a contented not-talking than by, then, a burst of intense comment from the dark-haired youth, that they (the broad-shouldered man with the gray hair and the girl and boy, both around twenty) brought into the place a fun that was like gossip: though now that the two women had gone (the dark one having given the boy a kiss he didn’t expect though didn’t not), the man and his young people weren’t talking much again, and the correspondent-woman watching them in her unused extra spoon felt that one of the young ones was "his," though who was it?, it shifted, and he was father to neither.

So that the correspondent-woman found the Chilean economist’s wife Clara blocking her—not with that snub but with her elect authority picturing for them all during workshop a magical area of "Cambodian" Vietnam where secret societies flourished like the crops which earlier colonists had striven to establish, all as if to enable her to cite the Cochin sage who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers. So that the correspondent-woman wished to be at the other table sharing with the man the company of those nice kids and not to part with her own senseless memories of Mister Guerrilla Prisoner-san, barefoot flying twice in twos neatly bound, down from the sky into the land-like dark cushion of tree-crowns and out of the blare of choppers noisy as creation’s opening day and out of the experience of their pilots.

But, the South American woman asks, two days after Mayn’s son’s first birthday, in 1961, it is quiet in these libration colonies fixed between Us and the moon? because it feels quiet—the great torus sealed up, the cows safely grazing down the spokes of the wheel, individuals fathoming their origins in couples that were dissolved on earth.

They chuckle with reciprocal memories.

Why hasn’t she ever questioned his sincerity in all this? begins Mayn with a seven p.m. grin, he’s been telling her he’s actually in that future whatever he’s doing here, and the colonists will be doing their future farming under ideal conditions getting eight hundred and fifty pounds of grain per acre per day and just like the desert greenhouses on the southeast shore of the Persian Gulf speed-picking tons of potatoes grown with unsupported roots—vegetables prospering on Styrofoam boards and spin-off colors spraying the roots that hang down below. We’re maximizing milk production using tomato-vine-fed goats that weigh a tenth what a cow weighs but give a quarter as much milk which will be all the sweeter if you keep the billies back on Earth and inseminate by space shuttle.

Why not scrambled messenger?

The matter-energy transit works better with two.

The two messengers.

Not to mention fish. In a weightless farm where gravity wouldn’t collapse their gills out of water, they could be raised without water. Yet since we’ve got artificial gravity, they’re raised in phosphate ponds that recreate the food chains we’ve snafu’d down here.

It all sounds possible, the woman said. And your place in it?

Mayn had to shake his head that she believed his basic report. Fantastic as his mother’s presence, that fantastically had never felt (whatever else it was) skeptical to her son.

And we in turn, like the diva, have to ask the interrogator (right back through our newly violated ear), Do you question the whereabouts of Mayn’s mother Sarah?

—and we get back not even pain through this torture device.

Do you question, we add, that she looked at him that day on the beach also to look over his shoulder at the horizon of the sea?

From a distance the interrogator does answer now, like he’s at home or at some other end of our body and he is murmuring with a lover’s assurance, a superior’s shrug: Was there ever any doubt that he turned and followed her look out to sea?, knowing that come hell or high water that was the nothing she was bound to, irritated, caustic, and anemic, deeply watchful of the boys they always felt, and there on the beach that day setting sail for where her sense of humor wouldn’t have a chance to—

—You mean this came through? but to even speak of her we need more of a handle on what she’s like, I mean wasn’t she involved in the War effort? the War was going to end soon. (Yes, she played with a Coast Guard pianist at the Coast Guard station at Manasquan, some violin sonatas and some old favorites.)

So that to see what she was looking at, he had to look away from her, the younger Jim had to turn at least his head if not his sporting body one hundred eighty degrees around to look and see for himself.

So must we resist the temptation to be judgmental?

Yes, but mental even more.

Yes, our body-selves will sing to one another if we let ‘em.

So let’s stay here and see if help comes.

What if she was waiting for a fugitive submarine to come and take her south?

—trouble was that very soon afterward Sarah the mother sent—or told one she was sending—her two sons away, one to be human, one to be an animal (were these the same? the same-san?). But has a woman the right to talk like that when she won’t come right out and have a fight with her husband?

Why must to be good mean to be angry, however, dear ducat, oh why not keep your opera light and save our steam for cleaning up the neighborhood? Pursue the provenance of your text and you damn well will find yourself in some Chilean household of the last century but who cares. Are you—dee dee dee dee—inspiring me to stammer more, damned ducat, oh!—sein oder nicht sein, stubborn boy, designing boy, your music comes from my heart strangely, too—unpack my heart, Roslein, design or not design—you’ll have your Hamlet opera in your warehouse with one great voice if not the two, but I’ll keep trying. Oh it’s the neighborhoods we have to clean up, you dum-dum ducat you, blares the basso rotondo, not the true source of your stolen light masterpiece, ya little bitch, that’s why I’m moving out of the apartment. Hookers on every corner. I ask you, Roslein, asking me if I’m going out tonight, of course I am—with you—though I know they are goodhearted, those women in their hot pants, if you could scratch them. And please don’t get depressed because your opera’s sorely needed and don’t ask about One More Hamlet opera when the real question is, Let’s Have At Last a Good Hamlet opera, wherever it comes from.

The neighborhood problem (comes a voice we don’t buy or, having bought, don’t use) is potentially statistical, therefore reassuring. And it may be stated: What is the ratio of prostitutes on the job to potential prostitutes?

Let’s stay here and clean up the neighborhood.

There are more things than are dreamt of in your whore-ratio!

The moment or phenomenon of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-old Jim’s sudden sticking in the sand on the point of falling upon and perhaps doing away with his half-breed little lust-bred bro assumed by most to be his real—

—baked meat, dear ducat, bawls the basso who incognito rotondo is to sing two and only two performances, as a favor to his ducat, of an unheard-of newly resurfaced Hamlet opera in originally envisioned former bank branch converted to a darkly echoing Baths tiled with abandoned Coney Island landmark ceramics in which Hamlet Senior (father of the good news) comes back to life for love of his brother Claudius, and Hamlet-son (whose madness is supportively encouraged to work withm the system of Shakespeare’s mere working original) is reunited for whatever it is worth with his mother Gertrude both settled in Wittenberg for a season—

He heard music late that night as if his mother sang to someone. Brad had been sick on Alexander’s chowder, frowning from spoonful number one. Alexander, free as a cook after hours, did not drive home to Windrow with them but remained reading and dozing in the Mantoloking cottage as on an island content that a boat would come back, though missing his cribbage game. It hung—the music—the song—Jim’s mother’s—at the margin of Jim’s remarks to his old pal Ted in ‘63 and later they discussed the possible explanation of young Jim’s sudden down-rooting in the Mantoloking sand arresting his fall all but his shadow upon his little brother, Brad, the good little son of a bitch: it could have been psychic hesitation, you did not really want to kill him and your brain bone connected to your stomach bone and thus held you poised out there above him; it could have been sheer convergent accident, your foot found a shelf in that no-man’s land to brace your ankle, an ancient spar weighty as your all-purpose iron I-beam; it could have been a miracle, Jim—

Let’s exhaust other explanations first. He got sunstroke later in the afternoon.

I believe you, the South American woman had said in ‘62 at this same Washington bar that the creeping, odorless, lank-haired, would-be hip-Western photographer info-scavenger Spence had just appeared at the lower end of, for the place had a higher ground where Jim and Ted were, that after many drinks you might start to slide from, don’t you know: I believe you, she had said the preceding year, I’m more interested in what the place is like or is to be like than how you get to be telling me the truth about elsewhere, if you see what I mean: all right, you have come back like a cast shadow of light, she had said—and he had known that that was it—but is it that you are warning us about that future from which you are maybe a reverse reincarnation, Jeem, or are you really telling me of a place that’s fascinating, where—

for with charm to spare, he had expounded an actually wet oxidation process that heats wastes to 500 degrees at 100 times atmospheric pressure for 90 minutes to yield rich water yet a purified gas as well whose carbon dioxide will feed the space-farm plants to supplement what our compound colonists breathe out.

And the song Jim at fourteen heard late the night of the Hermit-Inventor’s last words with Margaret on the beach (if it was the Hermit) was "I Hear Music When I Think of You" as an unfettered sweeping, and as professional as on the radio Sunday night, only this was piano: and it was his mother and she might be singing to someone and so, as we say, he "stole" downstairs past the great real-copper Indian-head calendar, past the yellow sweater with the buttons, folded at the bottom of the bannister, and stood at the closed music-room door, his brother asleep, his father downtown at the paper, a sweet scent of tea-biscuit crumbs and, he could swear, iced tea—and he didn’t know what kept him from falling into the white-painted wood of the door he stared at and listened through, as if its oblong within oblong of molding directed him to his mother’s meaning; for she was alone, she had to be: until Jim, not wishing to disturb her with a knock, took hold of the doorknob and slowly turned it and let the door open, and let the knob all but silently return, until he could see her, and later knew he’d had a message for her retarded because it was inside him and could only be gotten by her not given by him, he didn’t know enough. Well, he didn’t really know at that time that she had been loving Bob Yard, who was comic and rough, but nobody (wasn’t he?)—

—maybe loved only once, because that’s all it takes—

—and the rest of the times they were . . . what? . . . lying side by side under the midnight sun communicating by profile—

—until she said to Jim breaking off the song alone there at one in the morning unsurprised in the music room, Are you a fox with your hair all up in the air? (for he had been sleeping) your hair’s been dreaming! so he suddenly knew all over again that, unlike other people he knew, he did not have dreams of the night variety as if knowing replaced remembering—or are you a bear standing on your hind feet?—you better go away and find out what animal you are. Jim recalled the funny small moment as making him a little too young, as if he had skipped that state or she had leaned away into another.

Which leaves room for growth. Which we know through him, but know through others. For from our own words when asked and even when not asked, we learned that we were as many things, live and other, as we were willing to divide into and be partial and patient through; be sometimes overriding yet only through leaning upon what moment’s Body-Self we could be like; or contenting us with being the marine varnish that brings up the amber grained in a plywood slab; in short we were relations, that was all, or the fork a baby playing with it above a rimmed dish of pancakes finds a use for, and upon raising a piece of pancake is praised by the whole family, oh they are all wonderfully there, and thereupon baby eschews the achievement, waves the implement above his head beaming and takes the cake off the prongs and flings it on the floor, the wide oak planks where a circle of milk stands near a toe print of banana: and these would word our presence if we needed to tell that we found being in the fork, the praise, the act of giving away the achievement which may be digesting it, assimilating it, divided by the name of the floor (which equals home) and the brown, cast shadow of the small puddle of milk-white telling us in turn all the co-laborings that gave this child room to breathe, some actual abstract, angelic disappearances into the body of a universe even Einstein plus or minus Euclid would calmly grant to be flat for purposes of love: while we, in or out of such words, knew only by being known, and became in our very own absence the tree in Central Park growing out of our thereupon absent eye or via our ear when its potential pollutions waxed shapely enough to make a tree, unless that destiny came out of us, an interrogator internalized off duty dreaming of the diva’s desert succulents and sugarless polio sundae under the eye of a woman at an adjacent table who must have known who the diva was but might well be a what-you-call-it, a tail, following them: and yet the diva feels she had been waiting for them, she for them, which the diva, if not the still green memory of her dream-tapeworm, far sidewinder gobbling where it went, great as a winter whale blowing the Chile coast, can’t understand quite, except to hang on to like a new stateless passport because she has to get through the wings of a theater that’s putting on an opera she is supposed to agree is unknown—Verdi daydreamed of it and may have felt it in his angry hand but hardly wrote it down—until if she can’t ask the internalized interrogator (for he had been that in her and he is breathing, we hear him, feel it on our silent voice) and she can’t sing, because he is dozing against her throat and they two are to be mentioned in the same breath so she can’t kill him quite, though he is what he is and his superiors or he himself may have asked her lone father far off in Chile questions that answer not words but body language such as shortened fingers or temporarily separated testicles: and so she disengages herself from his breath together with his cheek and chin, and gives in to the desire of her life and, as normally as if she were going to the bathroom to sit upon the John (though not like the new acquaintance of Clara’s at that workshop who according to Clara squats with her feet on the seat!) and as normally as if she the diva (daughter, priestess, lover, unborn mother) might "light" the refrigerator to pour herself some orange blood, instead with an art evolved by long unconscious history of need, of human hope to find the bit of courage to take the next barefoot step—

—Quit the corn, we got a funky opera to put on, and the main actor’s traveling incognita (ha! ha! ha!) Speaks aria darkly hinted to be the great man’s fragment abandoned in anger when he fell out with a librettist on how to liberate the musical nightmare from Shakespeare’s edgy depth—real fragments of reputedly Verdi’s Hamlet text—eased away then (could he care less?) from Verdi by the young friend Muzio who toured Civil War America laughing all the way until they hit him with a tax (was it, within the larger inarticulate structure, a particular logical tax on Italians?) and somewhere out there he unloaded or purloined such sheets folded and refolded of aria and scene as threatened to summon from Hamlefs gravity of relations two triangles past and present pivoting wife/sister-in-law/mother Gertrude into deep, rainy par-allelogrammatic refractions of male poetry/love/power: so in Muzio’s wake were to be found unrecorded frontier traditions of some Latin’s wild horseless yet familiar opera—Amleto? Amleto did some Mexican-Indian divisible into one Mexican and one Indian call it?—performed in a southern Colorado saloon with, the story went, a mathematician’s daughter in the lead: and these traditions dispersed themselves during a rare symmetrical tornado in Navajo country in the eighties, only to appear as folded pages in a Victorian melodrama in New York not read but used as part of the insides of a prop, to wit stuffed desert javelina, its head and shoulders crisped with blood guaranteed by the naturalist wife of a commercial saguaro-cactus exploiter to be female human blood not shed by the javelina whose hind-mounted scent glands puzzled South American zoologists and travelers for decades until one of them nurtured an idea slowly northward following the javelina hundreds and hundreds of miles till in some wonderful dependency the tracker, feeling and at last smelling that she was tracked by what preceded her, knew so surely and doubly that she was and yet was not the momentum of the sparse herd ahead of her that she foresaw a moment when she would gain traits of theirs in exchange, possibly, for some collective mind of theirs situated who knew where, outside us all maybe, for as a system like war or love marginal to one eye may to the one next it be viewed center-stage, so will one day an immigrant cook come to teach natives that desert-fried javelina chops may bear their stuffing owfside:

—chemistry that, on its way through systems able to digest its clouds and pellets, carbons bows milks and staggered scaleless explosions, so becomes its course it reincarnates mere myth into day, a coastal day in ‘94 when the sometime Princess was turned by the Hermit-Inventor of New York to an experimental mist, to be secreted in that great, once upon a time dismembered Statue carrying a torch for the elaborate harbor, the Unknown State, in which meanwhile at other places a brave lover-scientist Prince ran up the steps into Miss Liberty’s folds about the abdomen and the might of the virgin wind-cooled sun-heated breast and felt in him a touch of her as of the entire continent so prodigal in finding its way to the wrong home at last that the only memory is ahead, the only work is a change made of knowing you will never come such a distance again from your People in the West and must now only internally howl and yell for a girl who took from what he had to give, took love, then self-protection, then more love and power part pressed upon her then acquired till she flew away under her own power, not wings of a father’s loaned bird circling in the skies above the Four Corners of a universe: so the skies themselves seemed spirals feeding on species with no compass, no princess, no crystal monitor to fly it back to Choor or the whereabouts of the Princess to whom the king had entrusted the giant bird as he had entrusted her to it:

—and the diva who has her part in many operas secretly picks up a phone in her dark duplex kitch, and because her totalitarian beloved is nearby is glad it’s a pushbutton and "dials" her friend Clara to ask her what she and her exile husband know of the sexual officer still mayhap asleep in her otherwise directionless huge bed or watching from some wonderful naked limb of his equipped with sight.

For the correspondent-woman, who tried and tried to hear the bell that rang in the void of all her memory’s trained convergences, while she kept an eye on the man with gray hair and the young, intense-talking kid and, of course, the girl, who paid as much attention to the man as the boy to her, recognized in the fresh absence of the auburn-haired dramatic woman’s elegant escort none other than the man in the park last Sunday his back to a tree beside the interior road where color-fast joggers, like all the different dogs there were, came contentedly by, passed by racing bicyclists who though they passed them seemed to stay with them as if the bikes circled the same center but further out (yet speedwise further in!), while for her part the correspondent-woman had been going through (on her park bench) being stood up by a man named Spence whom she had never seen and whom she had not liked the busy, riding-falling sound of over the phone (as though it was his phone, not hers), and to whom she had given a description of herself so he would know her, assuming he would give one of himself (when he didn’t), till a whirr of glimmering spokes soared past like force sweeping the last of the joggers past—and the Latin man leaning against the tree had a visitor out of nowhere, as light had tumbled into its shadow, a loose yet tense type of man in a ponytail wearing a fringed hide jacket glazed with some substance, maybe use, who craned his neck forward (so his neck was abnormally important to some rest of him) speaking: but looking once around the tree, he never moved his hands to express his aim, so that the correspondent-woman, intrigued, forgot she had been stood up by an unknown contact named Spence who over the phone had asked her if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where the correspondent-woman had attended a women’s workshop run by one Grace Kimball.

Attended also by a woman named Clara, yes? . . . suspected of helping to spring from a New York State prison a supposedly anti-Castro nationalist:

So that this trained agent could supposedly find sanctuary in a South American nation. But why had a man such as her phoner said so much to her on no acquaintance?

The aforementioned anti-Castro anti-Communist with cousins in New Jersey all with thunderbolt emblems on their cigarette lighters was then to operate against that very South American, junta-ruled (what else was new?) sanctuary state he was supposedly sympathetic toward, by liquidating a key general officer of the junta and abducting a famous old socialist presently under house arrest (in this case apartment house). A nation, it is learned, recently redesigned to replicate the tough-money model generated by the Chicago Institute but a nation also where the thousand-mile-long surf coast often pondered by a maverick meteorologist moves like a would-be shadow as we think about it, listening for breakers, for breakers breathing, recalling the silence of undersea boats passing or pausing like evolved creatures, silence remembering sound, bearing music.

And now, having identified in a Mexican restaurant the mustached Latin man leaning against the tree last Sunday as the departed escort of the woman with hair whose rich auburn might drip blood, the correspondent Lincoln left the place certain the gray-haired, powerful man’s eyes were on her—she would gladly have made a foursome—he had obviously had it with the kids, yet loved them.

But she did not stop, nor look back, convinced that she had figured something out only to find behind it the obstacle that had been keeping her from it.

Which was that she had reached this awful point before, like stalled full circle, nor very full, at least of love, like knowing all the souls in the world who had had this sentiment, but not knowing any of them as friends—for "full circle" (we recall In Jim) said Sarah once, and took her long hand off the lower keyboard of the piano bringing it to join her right hand in her lap, when her son, her older son who took his life as it came and didn’t need as much as little Brad, pushed open the door long after midnight. "You woke me," he said in a friendly way as if she had given him some help.

She was playing, she said—had broken into song—come full circle, Jimmy, singing to myself again.

"You ..." said Ted in the bar of the Washington hotel, "let’s see— you knew—?"

"That Brad was my half-brother?" said Jim. "I don’t think I knew."

Does Bob Yard love you? asked the son like a soft pistol shot, that kept going.

Bob probably did, said the mother.

You didn’t love him, though, said Jim as in a normal talk.

Not today, came the answer challenging the boy to go on, and that further point was exactly where he directed his sense that "it" was not full circle she had come; and she seemed to decide he wasn’t saying anything else and without warmth yet in a friendly fashion not saying the obvious which was go on back to bed, she gently raised her hands from her lap—she had a very prominent beautiful nose, so she was always "created," "drawn," and she dropped her fingers upon the keyboard giving them life to play into the large Chickering piano a thing he’d heard often—his little brother would know the name of it! but well maybe he wouldn’t!

"Well, you got away," said Ted ("Clean away," said his friend), and Ted finished his highball as if by "you" he had meant "we," and she hadn’t done what she had done, which few mothers did.

But then as Ted left Jim in the Washington bar a decade and a half ago (and Jim couldn’t later recall if Spence had been in, that night, for he could be a couple places at once besides Mayn’s mind, live in a burrow economizing on oxygen while he made a few phone calls) the South American lady came in. Jim hadn’t seen her in a while. She had a son and had a snapshot of him in his scout outfit far away. He stood at parade rest, squinting, smiling up from the southern hemisphere. He wore his neckerchief tightly furled into more a tie, so it showed striped red and blue hanging down through the neckerchief holder, and he had blue tassels on his high socks. Pretty tough-looking kid. She was going back home to work in the national airline; her husband was expanding the airline’s operations and wanted her to stop being on the move all the time. Away, more than on the move.

And this time she didn’t ask Jim about the practical successes of the dream colony—the opiate-receptor molecules chemically tranced so that old ingestive habits were erased—curious enzymatic persuasions between brain and belly so that a colon ate only what he/she needed and gradually might achieve through mental concentration like a springboard diver’s single act the elimination of all waste or residues which one day would ironically reduce the water supply which had relied on recycled human waste which had itself grown such a pale tan as to be transparent like your jellyfish that’s had its sting bred out of it—

—but instead she asked if there were other space-station shapes besides this spoked life ring, this torus in the great lake of nearby space, this doughnut generated by a circle, and were there compartmentary sealer-walls—they’d have to be vast—that would drop down, that . . . (she drew it in her little notebook) well, what would happen, asked the South American woman, if the pie een the sky came with its own slicer and one day it swung through the libration point in question and cut right through the life-ring torus . . . ?

Oh, the trouble with compartmenting (said Mayn reacting how?) is it interrupted the passage of daily life through the torus wheel but you know the doughnut’s is not going to separate into two pieces if in the event of a break you could equalize the gravity-pressure differential between outside and inside but surely the shell would crumple. But it had never happened; and anyhow, the real heavy traffic was in those equator orbits where they put the weather and earth-resources satellites.

However, when he began to speak of other shapes—the cylindrical and (on the dark side—of Earth) the boomerang that bent light and made it lurch toward it—her question got between them and he saw his mother’s so self-sufficient eyes, the musical mind of her queenly nose down which she looked upon the neck of her violin until one day Margaret his grandmother became his shield in the absence of his mother who was the shield in the Indian custom his very Margaret told him of: a shield, a painted buffalo-skin shield that he had, it seemed, against taboo heinously let touch the earth on the way to the horizon notwithstanding—the shield with deerskin cover and green turtle depicted there. But this earlier shield of his mother had seemingly left him, not he it. So you look after your mother particularly if she has left you with a leeward conundrum that takes ya breath away and is beyond you and so you set out to obtain information to outweigh your absent breath, not having seen that you had the message upon your person all the time until, having found the barside woman’s question an obstacle leading to that other woman Cleopatra’s historic nose—

But then Ted—in the thick of his idea that history lurches from one womb to the next womb by small talk and hence is written with the left hand since the right is busy handling hidden impulses which nonetheless is how you Jim partway levitated above your brother prone upon the sands of the Jersey shore, the sun casting you—

—upon the place beneath—

—beneath you where your brother lay—

Mayn saw he had had pity on his brother Brad and could not have hung at peace with gravity if he had known the pity: so he said to his friend Ted —in ‘63; no, ‘64—wishing to get on to something else, for Spence, the only other occupant, was at bar’s end watching with his ears—"I threw my shadow on him, that little bastard, instead of strangling him in person." Why was there no one else in that bar? An answer was somewhere on the way.

"But it wasn’t your responsibility to kill him," quirked Ted.

"What year?" called the vagrant tag of a man Spence from around his glassless beer bottle, missing Ted’s humor, until Spence looked older than he had ever looked—made up, perhaps, with the herb and pulverized-mineral hues of the earth down where he had his moldy little hole.

"If we knew the exact direction Brad was lying in," said Ted, "we could know the hour, given the day—or the day, given the hour."

Jim knew the day but a cold weight in his stomach worming through his brain like his brain was everywhere in his body made him know that Spence was listening with his eyes now, as if Mayn and his family were promising news.

Jim said instead that that had been the day Mel Mayn, his father, with a fresh gray brush cut, had come palely, plumply home to find them arriving from the Mantoloking shore and had proceeded to the kitchen to make himself some iced tea and a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich and soon afterward addressed his sun-blushed wife Sarah (whom he would rarely and rather gently yet with faintest insult call "Sorry," which was not her middle name) on the subject of Franklin Roosevelt’s new pay-as-you-go tax plan, concluding with the curious surprise that the newspaper would have to cease publication within the next year or even few months.

Sarah for her part told her husband not to worry and to take it up with Margaret, she was the one who cared about the paper, though of course she had preferred running a family to running it.

"There’s a word for you, suspended above your little brother like magic, Jim," said good close friend Ted, who perhaps because he could not put his finger on the word at that moment interrupted himself "—oh by the way," and Jim felt something coming, "the Chilean lady we used to see here who went back home to—" "Yes. Mayga." "Why she was killed last month, I heard it from ..." Ted had discovered the weight of what he was saying. He went on deliberately: he had heard it from that colored guy, covered South American trade for a wire service (who, Jim in a dazed pocket of timelessness remembered, therefore had not seemed so colored, so Negro).

Mayn would not believe it. But he would believe that this was the way you heard. He wanted to dispute her death, or pretend he had known.

She had fallen from a cliff at Valparaiso (the manner of her death not under dispute). Somewhere behind that semi-circular bay so much more fine than the foul city important in direct proportion to its ugliness (where Darwin during the latter half of 1834 having disembarked from the Beagle survived a several-weeks bout with a worming ague induced by the wine of the country). The Chilean lady had been climbing in company with her husband, who had that very day arrived back surprisingly early from a business trip to B.A., and a third person, a rich printer from the North.

A what? gets asked somewhere communally way inside Mayn, who by habit takes information as matter, as grist.

Named Morgen—with an e—a printing magnate, North American, more recently exporting paper products from Jacksonville; kept an eye on things South American; was a humble descendant, Mayn already knew, of that mythical Alsatian mathematician who in the last century arrived in Chile from the California Gold Rush. Already knew because Mayga and Jim had shared these coincidences that barter themselves sooner or later and may seem mad or silly or nothing depending on how people feel no doubt, though he did not tell Ted, who saw still the feeling in his journeyman friend and must have felt the factual coinciding, etcetera, suddenly covered the shock of sadness which itself wasn’t at all unsayable because Jim said words to Ted at once, though aware of Ted exercising discretion in what he let himself imagine had gone on between professional acquaintances, that nice woman and this fella Mayn he’d known for donkeys’ years.

Arrived in Chile from the Gold Rush—from the middle of it, you might say: though having entered an American desert and for a time found no exit from it, at last traveled on one of the steamships licensed by ten-year monopoly from the senators in Santiago to that Yankee projector William Wheelwright, who was said by the Chilean lady’s friend Morgen (the math-man’s descendant) to have inspired Wheelwright to move inland of that country’s indefinitely (and in a later fractal meteorologist-maverick’s theory mfinitely) long Pacific coast so problematic in Chile’s economy. Wheelwright, having listened to his inner ear’s itemized interest rates all converging on the number five (percent), saw drawn on a perfectly good tablecloth (in the very tavern where Darwin had drunk a toast or two to Nature out of a local bottle with a difference) a somewhat numbered design (the original lost up North but remembered) depicting with lines that angled outward, like very slight arcs generated by the Earth, lines that felt like railroads to join among others two towns one of them coastal in a desert province where the great silver mines had been discovered.

"But you knew her really well," spoke a tinhorn husk of highish voice, downbar, and it was not that current curious old meteorologist of New York no doubt (someone else must add, since Mayn would not credit such coincidence) carrying on a late uncle-counterpart’s weather work that Jim’s grandma had described the East Far Eastern Princess experiencing in 1893 or ‘4. No, the voice was the photo-info dealer Spence’s, the year no less than 1963, some soiled-pollen aura of Earth tunnels about him as if he had been reared underground. And Ted replied, "So you did," as if adding only now the known times when he had left, or found, them together, Mayn and the round-faced striking lady with the high color, Mayga from Chee-lay, who had put down in her notebook some facts of that future Mayn was convinced of. Did he remember what women said more than men? Had he drawn her to him? Of course not. Did he believe in coincidence, convergence? But what belief? He was here because of his job but also he was here because he at the moment had not tried hard enough to be somewhere else, some hundreds of miles elsewhere.

But in these fugitive, not deeply bibulous chats he and Mayga had not found out why he had happened back here out of that future that, by no principle at all consistent with his habits of mind and happily pedestrian imagination, was present to this reimagined past (which went under the name of Our Present (1962, ‘3 and so forth) than they had reached Marcus Jones (visibly clearer in the narrow shoulders and wiry torso and rapid legs than from the neck up) bicycling the locoweed circuit of Colorado and adjunct lands.

How on earth—? (Ted’s topographical question)—

That’s it: on earth, his grandmother had stressed, fact-wise, and not in (Mayn observed) the domestic sky where run-about "outboard" rockets never quite made it into the consumer economy oh the minithrust type of moderately priced spinal rudder job’s O.K. for a quick hop to a rooftop supermarket, but, when it came to it, no more competitive against the new microbattery of the late century’s mirakelectric tri-wheel automobiles than bike copters on which old heads got high: whereas lean Jones, so lean that his head at some approaches to recollection approached two dimensions, took his lumps obsessed with unknown varieties of locoweed until, the night before he found his last one —which was the night or late afternoon he ran into the woman naturalist whose white lips testified to her own devoted acquaintance with the fierce javelina —"Marcus" (as younger followers of botanical history readily called him) found the famous bike’s hard wheels at last weirdly cogged right into that grand terrain like cog-mesh teeth seeking but finding an answering surface in the land: we mean the battered but undying experience of his wheels had come to fit what they met until, with things at last adjusted, Marcus thought he didn’t have to worry any more: contemplate tomorrow’s variety, and this morning s lone sunray, an ordinary western wildflower, wasn’t it?—but, wait!, with a right-angle-growing stalk!—yet same gray-green leaves and broad yellow head—but no! this ninety-degree bend in mid-stalk! So that, trusting the unlooked-for sign, Marcus altered course to roll on toward whatever the stalk and neighboring events must point to. And never gave it a thought: until in the twilight of the Four Corners’ vast vicinity, the moons of the lady animalist’s lips looked more and more particular (yet not smaller!) as he approached so smoothly that his bike sailed through the land. She called, Who was he?, her white lips navigationally fixed by an unidentified ground-level glint—which could be a shard of the dying day—but only if, Marcus Jones thought, ‘The sun out here in the West sets in the east—that’s it." And she asked him who he was on that bicycle, and if he had seen a hermit of the East who on vacation out here fed animals so carelessly as to upset the natural food balance supporting the fierce javelina whose study she pursued.

Whereupon, with a glint conscious in his eye as if she had said the word, Marcus Jones leaned his vehicle ‘gainst a waiting cactus (fleshy-speared cardoon-o’choke, New World style) whose eye was the eye of an owl—which thereupon turned around and shat its guts out—an elf owl that went on shitting blue particular guts out from strength to strength yet then to weakness. Marcus humorously and like a cavalier told how he had been directed to this convergence in the middle of nowhere—the bent stalk asking for (what?) some new significant existence—the right-angle bend an unusual growth in botany—

—"A gnomon!" said Ted, out of the crossword muzzle he could tighten round his mind lest it tell his long, lumpy body, Be sad, or, Be sick, when, as now with the late Chilean journalist-woman, it captured something elusive and/or disturbing—"a gnomon!"—upon which Spence abruptly left the bar for all the world the way he left when he had a phone call in the hotel lobby. "What’s with him?" said Ted; "he cuts in and cuts out—"

"He’s a creep," said Mayn and ran his hand up his neck into his hair that he certainly wore longer than in the high-school brush-cut days: "I know him a long time. He photographed a divorce-murder once that got into a Newark paper but he had some deal that he never got called by the People when the case came to trial. He parlays and parlays. People owe him."

At Mayn’s urging, Ted explained his gnomon. He drew it on a bar napkin that ripped. The thing wasn’t quite clear anyhow except in his words. "It’s the thing on the sundial that throws the shadow, the angle iron, the thing that sticks up; there’s a word for it ... do you—"

"Gnomon?" said Jim, Caribbean, and they laughed, and both looked at their watches.

"No, I mean for ‘gnomon.’ You sometimes farm out your sense of humor; how do you do dat?"

Jim wanted only to get back to his wife and kids who at that summer moment sojourned in western New Hampshire—full days without him—and whom he swiftly then left the bar to phone, as the disreputable Spence curiously reappeared, brushing him in passing, returning from the lobby and no doubt the phone, so their speeds were to be added together, Mayn’s and Spence’s, in opposing directions. Spence’s irritating voice rising with verve, greed, a deep-creep-rooted silliness re printing tycoon Morgen: for "Morgen has a brother in Philadelphia, a left-winger, a job printer whose uncle once carried a card—the brother’s just a common, garden-variety job printer and there’s his tycoon brother friendly with Mayga and her husband has the national airline, a piece of it at last word . . ." as if someone’s nose would be put out of joint by whatever Spence was trying to say.

But how on earth—?

—did we get from there to there?

—Well yes; but you—how did you?

—We aren’t there yet: there’s so much in our way—

—As long as it is your own by which you get there, right?

—Leave it to us—

—Getting there your own way is all.

But you: what of you?

Indeed, adds the interrogator, what means the U in the contemporary saying "U-2"?

Don’t worry, it’s not your responsibility, anyways. We’re not up to there yet, observes your all-purpose child in the memory of men who over a series of years are always getting back to the family along a curve of more and more advanced homework until one day a girl child who swims like the wind in the summer where there is no homework reveals to her father (is it a float to be built?) a rectangle without firm braces—or with the nails coming loose— that tilts sideways in order to become . . . a parallelogram!—good, good—

—while (to jump the gun) the information that a son went suddenly in search of (for himself and for his brother) after being left in that "lurch" immeasurable except in games by a mother who seemed herself (having told her sons to depart) to have been the one to go—this information has itself divided and divided like some difference between a good, strong, honorable person and a disreputable hound of a trash-purse slew-handed if not lunatic information-salesman investigator loose in the vitals of a divided history which the, well, more or less good guy all honorable and aforementioned acknowledges, with a jigger of calm and a twist of resignation, harking in his daydream and, here and there, in person to some sequence of loving his grandmother Margaret and of her love of a variety of truth—that may lead between a Princess who came imperially on a huge, pony-consuming bird from an unquestioned mountain sovereignty of the East Far Eastern Manchoor cum nee-Choor and a doughty young last-century woman named Margaret who, dispatched by her editor-dad from New Jersey to Chicago, thence sent him dispatches that by the time they reached Windrow no longer came from Chicago’s famed World’s Columbian Exposition—and to and from whom goes more due than she would claim were she alive now and not a lucid, "terminal" suicide in 1950—a superior mother making her own daughter’s life come true, we may say, jumping the gun.

So that—in 1964, in the bar of a Washington hotel whose sidewalk turning right yielded a view of the front porch of the White House—Ted, Jim’s colleague and friend, might answer Jim’s guarded sorrow for the late South American lady who had "believed" all his stories and took notes to prove it, "Why, hell, we always knew history was made up!"—in between the now serious dispute over how many runs the left-handed-hitting first baseman of the Senators batted in the summer of 1957, who for better and for worse went with comparatively light-hitting Washington when the franchise moved to Minnesota where he might have wound down his career fishing Mille Lacs with the Indian descendant of that part-Ojibway half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer who passed on to the ancient Anasazi healer the revolver he accepted from a dying white settler in southern Dakota with hope between them if not in pure form in either the prostrate owner of the blue Anglo eyes of the dying or the timeless custodian of those faceted orbs set against the brightly narrowing sky—

—So that we, on whom Mayn hardly knew he was too proud to draw, might from time to time feel blindly (if we did not actually make up) the prospect of a certain non-sweet nothing at the rough or no-man’s-land center toward which were pointed, still, many of these that we take pride in having known: the printing magnate Morgen who was at Mayga’s side when she went to her death largely without help; libration colonists each one of whom twain Earth and Moon leans like an inhumanly extensible shade back to where he or she once upon a metal plate was two; not to mention the Mayn-family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat who vainly asked Old (Seminole-and Cherokee-baiting) Hickory (who, once, in the absence of information that war had ended, ended it all over again with his wild gusto) why he had met as if in secret in a dark coffeehouse whose front was half blocked by dark kegs of flour the village girl who had followed her lover William Morgan from upstate New York where he had been imprisoned briefly for vowing to tell Masonic secrets and then on being let go escaped death by ambush; not to mention the welcoming mother of the Navajo Prince whose head was the subtly gaping issue of the Night Sing when Margaret arrived, saddle-sore but in love—and who instantly gave her an amulet and said to this visiting pale-faced princess Won’t you come in and bring the bird with you, upon which Margaret smiled and looked into the gaping but unwounded hole in the lady’s head and then quite coolly looked about her until she sensed in the periphery of her vision not right-or-left-cornered but in some higher margin a movement in the sky and she rolled her eyes upward and bent her head with the gentlest ceremony back to catch it; and not to mention Alexander either, the young man waiting in Windrow and later grandfather, who poked about in his shop where he had for sale or inspection tables and chairs and things on them such as small objects in small boxes, and had for sale also framed things and well-preserved cloth-bound tomes of travels and battles with pages you would not bend a corner of to mark your place for fear of cracking brittle paper or a rusty note inscribed, even a clef’d line of song from women we relations utilized more than once to infer an entire articulate structure even when words aren’t music, thanks be—Alexander, toward whom with his own half-forgotten gladness the family pistol from its twin source via the Anasazi ancient points, who despite rank, baggy, navy-blue, beyond-shiny worsted trousers with the cuff bottoms worn through, and a khaki shirt that must not be ironed, and a gray-green (apparently gray or green) clip-on bowtie that belongs in a fatly rounded attic trunk, walks always in a pair of size-thirteen dark burnished cordovan brogues supplied him each year by his younger grandson Brad, who keeps the haberdashery establishment and is kind enough to recall a William Heighton who in 1828 was an editor in Philadelphia and led the Cordwainers’ Union (isn’t that right, Granddad? cordovan?) but not that William Morgan, the President’s rival for favors or secrets or both, set type at Heighton’s Mechanics Free Press—a memory whose fault Jim’s life-support (luggage) system can, externalized and unbeknownst to him, supply. We and our multiples had looked into the incarnations we had so needed and curved for and found; but once in them we some of us or parts or branches felt these bloodstreams and fibers of true feeling and stomachs and eyes and bone-play to be bodies we for one had already been and left. And this was a sensation so unlike leaving one another that we or a breathing majority proved what we then saw we had known already, that we had no angels keeping our curve just and our histories and our fluid breaths pure of interruption—for we were those angels and being so we must become ourselves forever, which meant losing those incarnations in order to guard the curve of consciousness, even thought, if not pure gold. Which in turn, though we accept the truth we speak more than take time to know it, the people aforementioned such as Clara or Mayga, the physician and others, untold and unportfolio’d physicians, have learned to breathe quite regular now in the workshop where we take responsibility assez hopefully for ourselves though with baited breath and less the lung kind when naked, for except for the buttock places on the kitchen stool all the naked points are of breath, the body’s bait to whom it may concern, asleep as the fellow-countryman-lover admiral ashore-intelligence observer he’s supposed to be, and unlike the reputed anti-Castro Hispanic inmate reported scheduled to escape really is, as she presses out Clara’s phone number, the stab of current beeping in her ear, yet then as the phone begins its purr and she knows that besides asking Clara what she knows about this man who Clara just possibly might guess is with her now and growing, oh she’s thirsty for her father’s safety so what is she doing with this mine of a man reverse-mountain she doesn’t know what she feels the thorns and hot stones of something more like love than torture melt the balls of her feet in her mouth and she is thirsty for watermelon not really danger and could drink whatever the poet says, cataracts of dark blue night, could drink the South Pole even if with her feet here in New York she would be upside down, she wanted also to say certain words of poetry that she can’t just recall (though grasps) to this lover whose flesh she suddenly knows so well she knows his soft sinewy armpits have creased the night atmosphere of her flat as he moves, and the fingers of his hands are reflected in the next room in the piano’s darkness and the balls of his fine feet cross her living-room carpet where he could stand on his own feet in English while in their own tongue it is wings—to stand on one’s own feet is to fly with one’s own wings—yet his skin tracks the carpet in that next room so lightly he is almost here as Clara answers the phone and words come to the diva after all that are the most beautiful words she would give up music for and this man too, who is perhaps a terrible person whom she never imagined murdering for she is using him and, surprised, she believes he is using her (he likes to be with her) for love half understood—which is at another diameter (completely) from the love that is itself fondly half and yet is wholly understood, with her Boston-grown physician to whom she haltingly said some of these lines in English that now months later in her own tongue she doesn’t forget so that having near her the all-but-breathless yet not odorless idea of her lover all but beside her behind a threshold and not present here in New York to manage the clean seas as a young admiral should (except they cover all that he is truly doing as a visiting intelligence), she is heard to say in English to Clara, the exile-economist’s devoted wife, "Forgive me for phoning at this hour—yes, it’s Luisa—I could not sleep trying to remember the lines that come just before . . . Listen, what is going on—do you know what is going on?" and, since he has followed Luisa this far, he is not in the bedroom to pick up her other phone, which she and Clara would hear, as Clara asks in Spanish why she speaks so softly, and Luisa recalls then all the lines (and then, with a suddenness, that Clara’s man visits a prison somewhere—a kind man yet with some curious purpose there) and Luisa recites, like some American or English verses,

"that on the coast scattered with wild rocks

the sea the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

watching how they fly? They seem

to be carrying the letters of the world . . .

. . . something something . . .

. . . pelicans . . . like ships of the wind,

other birds . . . like arrows, carrying

messages from dead kings, viceroys,

buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

. . . something something . . .

and seagulls, so magnificently white,

they are constantly forgetting what their messages are."

She weeps, and she hears a man’s voice near Clara, who says, "I don’t know what is going on. There is nothing between ‘las costas andinas’ and ‘las gaviotas,’ ‘made of whiteness,’ ‘of purity’—but what comes before all that?"—she asks her husband for the book that’s on a table in the room across Central Park from where Luisa sits on the kitchen stool, one hand warmly snugged between her thighs—"but I remember . . .

‘Tu me preguntas donde estoy? Te contaré

—dando solo detalles utiles al Gobierno—’

por supuesto, Luisa, el no quiere decir eso ..."

No indeed, details useful to the state are not the sea and the fields, petrel and the meadow or even the sun’s atrocity upon the nitrate miners, but why an (albeit officially Swiss) opera donna should permit—why, is there a Swiss opera, as there is a Swiss fleet high and cold upon an angelic peak at the upper end of the world looking for a flood to float a lone whale to give their navy sperm power? The answer, my friend, lies in some Protestant comedy night that asks the question what nationality is the Pope’s gahd?—why, that is, a Chilean opera star (to continue) with a father under house arrest in the land of her birth, the land the earth the ground, permits an agent of that Chicago-model balanced-budget economy to take from her gently her clothes (read gently tug, read peel away from the very skin of her, life within life without end, slide down the grand pout of one buttock or up the soft give of her back while a thumb along the groove of her pretty spine keeps, with the operative fingers, love’s parallel compassed and gratuitous), the Druid folds of her priestess, the spangled shirtwaist of her barmaid’s Golden West, the silver rose from the auburn abundant hair of one who took off the satin breeches long ago and the white wig and doesn’t really like her lover to undress her anyway—oh what’s doing? she has to get out of all this—but would rather find her own way to the bathroom and come back smiling partly at him, partly at Clara reporting a new archaeological massage that you don’t have to wish would go on and on because it makes you longer(!), her robe of bright toweling open to her stomach for her not him, and yet for the first time she thought in her life wanted this man half lying half sitting by her bed table, his plain, uninteresting black shoes flashing, his necktie lowered almost like some more significant garment, opening the pages of a book she rereads at night that lies upon her tiny gilt address book {libretto!), to sort of follow her toward the bathroom having removed his shoes, his socks, and, leaning on the doorway or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watch her pee, her back thoughtfully arched, her eyes in his—but he lets her go her way though stares at what he’s reading with a close attention that to her feels affectionate as she recedes— follows herself—across her bedroom to the John, all but too absorbed in him to think (except she does) that she has the great silly Ford North’s unlisted number under M for Momo (her great bell of basso rotondo, her dear stammerer who finds his tongue in song, canto bell songo, and must phone to tell him of course she will not play Horatio to his unprecedented non-tenor Hamlet in his boyfriend’s three-night-stand opera (with-some-talk) (mysterious of origin, by repute) (J ... I Just want to die . . . I Sometimes you are so pitee-ous and pro-found) at the one-time warehouse owned by a ritual friend of course not, por supuesto, he asked her about it at the very moment when she was considering her naval officer on bended knee backstage finding a place to impress his Japanese now ballpoint upon her satin thigh, but Amleto, Amleto, what a lousy opera the real one had often made, Boito, Hignard, ho hum—in the absence oh what an absence of the only one for the job kicked by his priest as a no doubt cute young acolyte down the altar steps into unconsciousness (during which he might have imagined the whole nineteenth-century opera of American life if he had chosen), kicked into such near-immortality that if, long past his Requiem for a novelist, he wrote Otello at seventy-three and Falstaff at eighty, why not at ninety La Mestizia del Danese if those windy young waters ‘tween Elsinore and Sweden didn’t rush too wetly neither to be nor not to be for the old field marshal’s baton (for we know in all our keen relations that death don’t either want or not want us) . . . if in fact some text of Hamlet was not written years before and scrapped, dispatched, appropriated. . . Hamlet’s mixed-blood upon the stale promontory an angel swiftly interprets, but no—mestizia means just "sadness," or, if we will, "melancholy.") So that—so that, lengthened like malleable shadow, this moment when Diva Luisa fears again her lover’s absence more than anything else (for she can’t hear except in imagination and memory the breaths she knows are calmly being taken and absorbed by his naked chest in the darkness just beyond the dark of her duplex kitchen) comes to contain the presence of another man so briefly in Clara’s closing words that when a click occurs along the line all that is left is the man’s name.

So that for us, collecting in and around such organism, what young Jim was in fact put through, that summer night of interrupted wartime sleep, can converge upon Mayn’s naming by an exile-economist’s mujer, yielding blindly a new brief obstacle to the three who heard the name, the lithe man who had gently uncradled the bedroom phone, and the two women who felt the intervention in their very hearts and therewith said, not in the Gluten Nacht or Buonappe-notte tongues of gran’opera but in good, honest Anglo, "Goodnight," yet not by a long shot American "G’night," or, literally—with the additives restored—"Have a nice day, tonight."

So that while Mayn in ‘63 or ‘64 (no problem) insisted that Roy Sievers had batted in 114 runs for the Washington Senators in 1957 (well before Washington was, lock, stock, and barrel, moved to Minn.—which means, observes the dictatorial interrogator with an accent of the sea shadowily awash in his syntax, that Sievers subsequently did not equal that personal best because with Washington in Minnesota he was himself to his own distraction permanently within shooting distance of the famed antler’d pike-whale of Lake Superior which our own nationals matriculating in the aeronautical program near that thousandfold lac, have been warned of by an Indian with a squint valuable enough to be worth preserving who exchanges such warnings for such information as our nationals have to offer, such as relocation techniques or disappearing acts used for certain anti-Castro Cubans now variously resident in our blessed coastal economy, its sovereignty cast like a shadow by the overlapping sea, a subject Mayn had to be interested in until the involvement of another whom he could not respect returned him to those routines by which he had made his living. He preferred to judge as waste-coincidence the convergence of his own route and that of an exiled Allende economist house-ticketed to an opera one of whose principals had a long-term relation with a simple, cuff-trousered Park Avenue G.P. who had fished with a Lake Superior Ojibway Indian with the same given name Santee as a diamond-squinting aeronautical trainee who relayed information about Cubans being relocated in Chile via an underground North American route more direct than if they’d traveled overland or underground from Cuba right to Chile. If not purely coincidental, at least impurely: which however hastily inhumed in lurid likelihood Mayn would leave to others to bring to light which when it came wriggling forth might have an ageless Spence coiling and coiling around it as if it were money in the pocket more than history on the make with or without that moral "eye" or epicenter Mayn quietly eschewed to own was his.

Leave to others? Like one misled.

By what? By what had stopped his mother singing? A ringing that surrounded her voice? But then him—well—her son with the reddish hair that in one month, like overnight, a year and more later began to go very dark like dye or through that gravity between colors that bled the red away.

But misled more by words of his mother Sarah, that threatened to forget themselves but he didn’t let them as he took himself and his in-spite-of-what-that-strange-woman-said not very foxy thick shock of exploding strong-springing hair that she told him had been having a dream so he ought to go away, she said, and find out if he was fox or bear, well he hated that kind of talk, he wondered if when his father gave her a little kiss on the cheek he kissed the mole near her jaw, all Jim wanted was a bit of information because that would have been just unintense and friendly, but little Brad whom she talked music to and had a tenderness toward (out of all proportion to that little begatten nothing’s deserving) she didn’t have a respect for (that Jim did get but didn’t know what to do with) so he took it out of the music room, her strange respect, at past one in the morning and left, ten stairs at a time, to leave her where she was downstairs—that woman, his mother—and he dived into his T-shirt and kicked into his chinos with a few stiff paint stains of glossy gray porch paint on them, he touched them, and he bent to finger his moccasins back onto his bare heels, and went into the frame of his window unhooking the lower end of the screen to bank it out just far enough so it didn’t come off at the top when he slid out onto that side of the sloping shingle roof and was on the ground smelling the leaves of summer and fresh-turned earth of a flower bed that had a smothering dampness of rock about it and a sweetness of hands, of hide, of the milk of humus; and he could recall being on the roof and being on the ground, but nothing in between, except the words of his unsatisfactory mother that tried to forget themselves, like forgetting her, their utterer.

So that he was out of the house and on Throckmorton Street’s broad sidewalk of great natural slabs of slate washed and rubbed free of the blood they had attracted in falls and minor kid fights. And he ran fast through the quiet night, joying in the extent of his speed, the length of his bounding stride.

So that he was at his grandmother Margaret’s house too fast ever to have seen what he later found had seen him—his father coming home under the maples and elms and serried streetlamps of that moonless night of Throckmorton Street past the steep little cement ramps leading up to each house’s gravel or blacktop driveway, that is, had seen him come loping round the side of the house and out across the grass as if toward a football field’s sideline which is the sidewalk in tonight’s fresh opportunity to forget our life if we will because you want to run and like crazy sometimes.

And he is on his grandmother’s porch near the swing couch and the white-painted woven-wood chairs remembering that his granddad Alexander’s snore could be heard only at a distance of twenty-five or so miles because he was still at Mantoloking, he hadn’t come home with them that afternoon. Jim felt the wooden pillars supporting the porch roof luminously personal with the streetlight beyond, and his right hand was on the ornate front doorknob before he thought to raise his left to the doorbell for he didn’t call on Margaret at this hour, when he heard an angry—wasn’t it angry?—surge of words garbled from inside the house like the only sound within half a mile and he didn’t ring. He took two soft steps to the broad window where the dim light came from the little sitting room beyond the front parlor with all the furniture and the mantelpiece with Alexander’s cigars and two long bookshelves and wonderful long tubular sort of velvet cushions in the corners of the couch, he could smell it all through the window but what was going on was beyond this in the little sitting room, through the door of which Jim saw his grandmother and the wiry, shaky old man from New York who’d come to see her at Mantoloking beach that afternoon, and they were not at each other’s throats but holding each other at arm’s length laughing like before or after hugging as Jim had seen her do with her husband.

And Jim had a good look at his grandmother’s face changing, and then she seemed to turn her back to him, it was to the window. She wore a light-colored summer dress, there were beads across the back of her neck—which was the way Jim remembered.

Her legs were pale as he had never before seen them, and she seemed dimly to have said, "... may need you . . . time comes"—or words to that effect, whatever it was—words with a murmured vagueness at this distance and the window between, that betokened great clarity at close range, that is for the Hermit-Inventor of New York to whom she spoke and who didn’t have his dark glasses on now but the old man’s eyes or one of them, the one that was visible, seemed to be looking at Jim and her at the same time so he felt something not terrible about what parents don’t feel they have to tell children.

So that Jim left the porch, stepped down the steps one by one, went down the walk, and heard his mother’s words and then his own eardrums pounding his brain. And turned away down the sidewalk but stopped to look back at his grandmother and grandfather’s house and a figure standing now in that window Jim had been snooping through. And the figure, just some townbody like anyone known, or on the other hand the Hermit-Inventor of New York whom Jim had always heard of but never before seen except now when (if it was one and the same and it possibly wasn’t) he was very sick but had a nephew, he’d been heard to say at the beach (though Margaret had said precious little about the funny old guy in his khakis and his sneakers with a concave chest and long white eyebrows). He was the Hermit-Inventor of New York, and after Jim with irritation stood his ground and stared back without real connection at the face he couldn’t see, he broke into a run back toward his own house but slowed up when two late cars passed slowly like Sunday up the wide street in the direction of, perhaps, the race track or beyond it Lake Rompanemus in the woods where the "piners" lived in poverty. He stopped and found himself walking as if nothing had happened, and the cars passed, and he heard his mother’s words again and looked back at Margaret’s house and then the other way at his own, which he could just make out the lights of. And he looked at one and the other, back and forth. Until he heard a slight ringing in his ears like when he drop-kicked a field goal, smelled horse manure on the cool fall air, heard pounding feet not blocked out by Ira, the Indian halfback from the other, not the race-track, end of town—and got hit in the head as if he were ball and runner by the little enemy guard who moved like crazy, the one weapon the visiting Toms River team had, but the ball was on its way, a tremendous drop-kick field goal which actually Windrow didn’t need in order to win—a day when Jim’s father stood on the sidelines and never made any response when Jim looked at him in those days before protective face masks, but when he came to, he found his father above him with the same look on his face. And so, wandering between the two houses of light in the quiet street, he got around his mother’s awful words to what it was that had first woken him. It had been the phone and he knew his mother was saying, downstairs, what he had heard her many times say but couldn’t remember what, except that it meant that his father was just leaving the newspaper and was walking home and would be home presently though some part of his home he would never reach.

And hearing his grandmother Margaret call his name down the street, for he was almost home now, he kept walking and didn’t turn back toward her and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, never guessing then that his father had phoned Margaret but assuming rather that the Hermit-Inventor had seen him at the window and Margaret had come out on the porch.

So that, understanding what had first woken him up, Jim said out loud the words that were trying to forget their utterer: his mother had said, and said to him who was the son she could depend on to look out for himself she said and whom she loved, and loved maybe more but not the way she loved Brad, her only other child: "I have to get out of all this. I just want to die sometimes. I could just disappear into the sea. You look at me as if you could kill me. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault; it’s not your responsibility; it’s not your life."

"What do you mean?" the boy asked. "Oh your grandmother said she had to talk to me tomorrow," said Sarah. "So what?" replied Jim. "You’re right," said his mother.

But the dashing, languid interrogator lest those words of a generation ago forget themselves if not their utterer asks, What wasn’t his "responsibility"?—to kill her or to keep her alive?—the words let’s make no bones about it cut two ways if we should wish to implement them, the interrogator adds with the century’s signal neutrality at his fingernails knowing that the torture he can give for fucking around in the words that we use to answer him gon’ hurt us more than him.

So that, on an evening with two young people still young enough to be "his own," Mayn spots at a resounding city intersection a foreign face that tells him what it could never guess it bore; for, a generation ago, on that night so many months before Jim’s mother did disappear into the future of the sea, the father who phoned Jim’s grandma Margaret downstreet to check that the boy racing whitely across the lawn and down West Throckmorton Street like some thief (but which one?) was headed her venerable way, had been in his slow-moving, only apparently hard-working (right?) march toward the void (not like me or any of my family, was Sarah’s line) so unlike his son Jim in Jim’s sharp eyes that Jim imagined some alter paternity; but then the returning walker saw his father watching from the porch and understood that his father had come home, as usual late, and was no doubt taking a pleasant breather thinking about things, maybe concisely separate news of other people’s lives, before penetrating the awful suspension of his own house—a reliable person, "kind of like a brother to me," Jim’s mother said; and Jim felt (though it then got thrown away—a shadow—into the future of a New York intersection and beyond) that if between two dimly lighted silent porch fronts he himself had no alternative parentage, he must have something in common with that impassive father.