But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things—no, to be in the same understanding room together.

(What crap!) And what was he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards—the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at me, Jim didn’t say.

Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question Is he my brother, Gramma?

"Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eukie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his—maybe his only—large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this?—for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more with his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

"We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the Democrat," he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold to someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick ..."

No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do . . .

"Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself, he had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?," and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"

"Listen, kiddo—"

"Bob" said the unknown foster father.

"Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

"Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

"How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

"Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re all of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind—isn’t that it?"

But who is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for men—which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called input taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").

"That wasn’t it," said Jim’s newly discovered half-brother Brad to Miss Myles, whose handsome scale fitted that of the stonework in the Windrow cemetery, though it might have been lost on Brad, who pondered the mere stone marking his mother’s undug grave; "she said—"

"—well I was the one that heard it," said Bob, staring across the gravestones and spruce bushes at Cousin Eukie and at Jim, who could seemingly hear what he could see an actual face and mouth say, no matter how far, maybe, except when a vehicle came along the highway which was about a football field away from where he stood.

"But you didn’t believe her," said little Brad, "and even if I hear what she said from you, I believe her, and—" he raised his finger profoundly and shook it at Pearl Myles, who taught high school—"Mom meant—I know what she meant—the Earth turns and it pulls the wind sideways."

"Well, I don’t see it," said Margaret; "the wind winds up at a different latitude because the Earth turned while the wind was moving; I heard of a person who could actually see latitudes but couldn’t quite see the wind. What happened to Alexander? Did he go back downtown?" (Not that the gathering here was a regular month-and-a-day observance, it had just happened; and she turned to see Jim take some steps toward them. A hand touched him and dropped off; he was drunk.)

Miss Myles said, "You’re convinced—?" and there was an authority in the in that rose and fell in half an instant that sounded like she wasn’t thinking about wind any more.

The hand dropped off? inquires the Interrogator with a humor of new pride in his sense of the idiom of our history.

Jim called to Bob Yard, who hulked with subtly gentle animus with his hands in his overalls, that he should leave his brother Brad alone—what was everybody on a day like today doing getting mad over nothing?

Brad said (the little shit), "What day?"

Henceforth, though never again observed, "Brad’s Day" was what Jim plainly meant. Bob asked who needed a lift, Jim turned from the beseeching eyes of his grandmother who was for once in their lives at a loss; and Jim saw what he had declined to ask Margaret: who was the father of Brad? And like a visit to the future he saw that the feeling the drink gave him was just sustaining in order later (when it wore off) to enable him to belie the feeling that had moved him to ask Eukie for a drink, yet now turn to him and ask, "What was my grandmother out here for? what was she telling you here all alone?" Only to hear Eukie, whom he couldn’t hit any more ‘n he could slam—though, mind you, not scared to slam—Bob’s face, say, "You got something on her?"

Facts come in their time, reminds the interrogator in a minor mood; if not now, then in time to come (he smiles at his English and as if caused by this lieutenant smile a shriek appears in the next room, of discovery or of pain yet maybe out of both sides of the mouth), and most curiously facts are the future of their absence where that precise absence is in questions here and now. You hear that call—

—read shriek, we urge, not call, as if he were not one of us, this Interrogator—

—O.K., shriek, he concedes—but there was and will be again a sage in southeast Asia, in the southwest of the United Conditions of America (or States, literally) or among the current urban Boston Unitarians, who say (a la Tao), "E’en though one’s held as a slave, one need not let the external imprisonment bond the free mind within; O.K.? Therefore, feign insanity— but hold to one’s true sentiments."

The shriek came again, like fact. The shriek was not a person. It was in lieu of a person, in lieu of a silence faultily designed to extend the putative person’s inability to answer the question put to her, if it is a she, by the interrogation process: Did songs by her carry coded advice to kill their recipients upon receipt? did the code tell which Cuban refugees were to be contacted as having been in fact sent by Fidel, the Cuban king? The singer-composer, having answered with silence, has next tried to sing her answer, which is her own song but out comes that horrendous shriek (more to come). But that was a woman, what do you expect?, they are more strong than men, hence make mas noise (read news) like Jews disagreeing yet we have in support of the regime agreeable Jews too, whole families we are glad to report.

Whereas to answer Eukie’s question, we had a boy, fifteen years old about, and strong-legged if a manly young drunk thickened by the real turf of his home cemetery; and we already remember that where do you go when hit by death? a hard act to follow, where do you go from that fact, if it is a fact? and where do ye go from the fact thrust like a bodily part to play, to wit the fact that Brad is your half-brother, which isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, because it isn’t as if you were adopted, which Dick discovered on the day of his father’s funeral from one of his fellow scouts (who had come to the church in step as a unit, as the patrol they in fact were) and a moment later in a stupor of what felt like embarrassment asked a fellow scout what he thought it felt like to be just ash though still living—

—No; Brad’s half-brotherhood, I could handle that, the newsman was heard to say—and I guess Brad didn’t completely fall apart that day, it was an amazing piece of behavior, that’s all, and then it was over . . .

Funny, said senior journalist-colleague Ted in the sixth decade of the century in question, a blockbuster like that, it’s almost easier to handle than . . .

—than what? asked the Chilean woman Mayga, stepping down from her stool and putting a hand on her red pocketbook, and smiling at Jim and Ted with such affection and neutrality Jim wanted to give her a present as if that would complete the event, like the last fact.

—than being told by your grandmother, said Jim (feeling some palpable unlosable sleaze spread slowly in their direction down the long bar from that character Spence who was listening as openly as he was not looking), that you didn’t need the kind of attention that your brother did—

—or a fight that you’re not sure you want, said Ted, who knew Jim but had never heard the future that Jim had confided to Mayga who in turn had told Ted, but hadn’t told, or had chance to tell, Jim, her special friend (though they met in all only half a dozen times in ‘62-’63), that she had a sinking sense returning home to help her husband as if giving up her job here in Washington were the start of some long fall.

And Jim wasn’t sure what he wanted, with applejack of which he suspected there was yet another pint in Eukie’s voluminous suit heating Jim’s thighs and chest and wildly thickening the hair in his eyebrows, and a wish to get clear of that place and even, for the moment, of his grandmother’s look that went through him to be met behind by Eukie’s words which were an inflated shadow of what world there was.

"So what if I have?" said Jim, not knowing what he meant except if he "had" something on Margaret it was the age and experience he had reached that could turn away from her stories and still want to know what she was doing with them beyond for years holding the attention of her favored grandson whose mother apparently didn’t tell stories. But Eukie’s question—well, it sort of smelled: because you don’t have something on your grandmother; you don’t. And he didn’t say, My mother’s another story—for Eukie wasn’t entitled to hear that from Jim, ‘cause who the hell’s Eukie?, as Jim walked slowly toward the group composed of his father, who had his hands in his old seersucker trouser pockets and stared at the plot of grass as undisturbed as his wife’s permanent absence, and of his brother Brad, who said to Bob Yard he was sorry, it was just that (and Bob raised a hand gently and smugly and said, Sure), and Pearl Myles, who took a tiny pad from her pocketbook and made a note, bent slightly from her statuesque height—Jim, as he moved, not knowing what he’d do but standing toward the dumb future as he walked, until he reached Margaret; and to her he said, "You said there’s something here. I believe you, but it’s not my mother and it isn’t any spook." He wished he could turn some answers into questions—answers off there in what the cosms of the hanging sun did to the Princess, but he settled for Bob Yard having a crappy attitude, and he went to Bob then, his father Mel shaking his large, square head again and again the way one might cry, but Jim couldn’t walk through his mother’s—for Jim just knew—one-time secret amour (as which this after all not unduly hairy or unwarrantably swarthy person was, horribly incredibly but had they kissed?). So afterward Jim thought he had gone around him. But no; Bob had given way. Jim had told him, "You don’t insult my family." Bob had stepped back (he didn’t do that ever)—and to the side; and, dividing the unknown with young Jim, Bob grinned and then cut off the grin, though not because he knew what Jim was about to do. Which surprised everyone and with, for Jim, a surprise within the surprise which covered the larger asininity of what he did.

Which still was fact, and people saw it happen, saw him seated "running" away when he had not known how to drive, he had only seen others do it.

He loved his grandmother more than his mother. But no he didn’t. And shit, if it was true in these stories that delayed and delayed, that the fingertips of the East Far Eastern Princess when they were met almost exactly by those of her beloved, inquiring Navajo Prince printed a sound so beautiful to her she had to show it to him but it spun slicingly upon the membranes of his sick mother’s mind so she yelled and hurt so badly the elders declared the music of the original source of the painfully uncomfortable hole in her head was a punishment for wandering into the mountain when she was with child —why then Jim would one day find out for a fact that the Princess, whose father, like an early gubernor of New Neitherland personally known to an earlier manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York, claimed that his people had taken scalps (because smaller and easier to handle than skulls) for ages before the Indians got the idea: which they must have borrowed, shall we say, from Choor—the Princess, to continue, had whorls on her fingertips while the Prince had a high percentage of arches which when joined to hers created cascades of sweetest friction—so the breathing Hermit-Inventor would have written down the tones had he not been most agreeably disputing with the fast-fading old Anasazi healer the relation of breath to wind and flesh to cloud, taken so much further on his own by the otherwise skeptical newsman James Mayn, who could not trust but could not abandon Margaret’s "histories," that once upon a time reporting these histories in a future world which encompassed his own timely children, boy and girl, at one warp and, at another, a libration-point space town free of weather and conveniently reached from Earth by Matter-Frequency Modulus doubling up two persons into one, Mayn could not tell if the tribal medical society specializing in removing bullets were Zuni, in the Zuni region where the Princess, with the Prince pursuing her, passed to the south soon after they left the Navajo outcrops and dry sheep grasses and bands of horses. Later the pursuit placed its hopes in some known river such as the Susquehanna or Juniata, above which (unprecedentedly low in the sky) one night early in 1894 the Navajo Prince, the Colt revolver he would give away when the time came loaded but no protection against his having lost again the trail of the woman he followed and whose dreams he had shared up to but not including her last three before leaving the site of the Long Afternoon, saw, smelt, and even, like his brother’s grandson Michael whom he never knew who in 1943 carried coded on his person in the words of his own curiously exact Navajo tongue an American radio message which saved a thousand lives, heard the sough and song and veritable humor of a low night-cloud the Prince identified at once as having been the Anasazi medicine man or a goodly part of him, knowing then, too, if only for a riddling instant, that, whether he was a giver or taker, if he did not turn and pass back across the land to his own people he would be childless like a woman.

But it was Brad who proved childless, though only in the Interrogator’s genetic sense, for Brad and his wife his high school beloved who was possessed of the faintest dark down in a curve of the small of her back, adopted three children before they were through, and were at once adopted by them. Brad, who on the day he was revealed to Jim as only his half-brother and grieved from nine in the morning to nearly three that afternoon for the mother whose death he accepted, jumped through this strangely overdone act of grief in Jim’s mind from subhuman occupant of same-home space to full-brothered divider of such commemorative labor between the two as had never been spelled out and never was again, except in James’s very life.

As not even he much knew except in flashes of past connection meaningless as that between the Navajo Prince’s sudden departure and his mother’s miraculously coming back to life, unless it was the young Princess’s clandestine prior flight that did the trick.

Did Jim grudge his newfound brother Brad nothing after that? He would surprisingly pitch in unasked and help Brad build a backdrop for a school Shakespeare play when Brad fell behind and his friends Bernard and Mark forgot and didn’t show up; Jim—while Brad frowned like a bloodhound puppy—would help him with math before Brad had a chance to speak to 4 ‘their father," who was going to invest sixty-some thousand dollars in General Electric after the sale of the paper whenever that came true, and lived, indeed day to day, to see value enhanced; and Jim, transcending fact, would tell Brad how on Brad’s Day he had taught himself almost without thinking to drive along the weedy shoulder of the blacktop playing it by ear and only once funnybone-jamming the indestructible transmission of Bob Yard’s surprised pickup truck which felt like a very wide bed behind you as you swung and rambled rattling down the road that passed the garden of the dead where he sometimes imagined his mother’s ashes, in lieu of her moldering body—ashes in a cylinder he had heard, and in his daydream inserted at night so the grass sod hardly blinked—till one day he saw the standard container, and it was a regular oblong box not any golf-hole-type cylinder or whatever the time capsule was that they buried at the World’s Fair with a picture or was it a lock of hair of Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl with a beautiful smile and a fast answer.

It was a fact that, the year after Mayn’s friend Mayga, back home in Chile, lost her life (whether or not taken by one of her two male companions along a cliff path above Valparaiso harbor, but almost certainly not given by Mayga), a minor State Department functionary named Karl wore an automatic pistol under his jacket during the emergency "Hot Line" discussions in Geneva; and a fact that an annex to the agreement called for two duplex circuits, one a tele-wire telegraph, the other a radio telegraph, plus two terminal points with telegraph teleprinter—though Mayn’s daughter Flick who heard about Karl many times but never met him doubted that he would have gotten into that room in Geneva armed.

Mayn was not brilliant and was perhaps barely average in math (which had less than nothing to do with his encouraging his wife to do the income tax with AP pencils he brought home); but he found himself nonetheless or all the more fascinated by such mysteries of ballistic deflection as the path of a shell fired nine thousand yards by a capital ship in World War Two that missed by a hundred yards to the right, even after all the obvious allowances had been made. He did (over a drink) plot the curved course of a projectile to be fired out of a totally collapsible and degradably exportable little ‘‘ system" from a roof in a tree-lined residential street of northwest Washington, D.C., where he shared an apartment for a time on Kalorama Road, to a target area on the White House lawn, and wondered why it had not been tried.

He was less fascinated than fond of that nuclear incident in which one weapon, through blast or radiation or heat or what have you, is "totaled" (we were later to say) or neutralized by another weapon belonging to the same country. (Ted and Jim were having a good laugh at the Defense Department name "Fratricide" for this type of incident one night at dinner when they received almost simultaneously long-distance calls, Mayn from his wife five hundred and more miles north who was moved by a luminous sunset across a lake and had brought the phone out to the screen porch to prolong what she saw and share it with Jim—Ted, a call from his former wife to tell him his two daughters had driven the car into an urban ravine the night before—the night before!, might as well say "last month"—and one of them had lost her little finger—"Fratricide" was the official name they were laughing about and playing variations upon when first the waiter came to inform Jim, then the owner of the restaurant came and said Ted had a call.

I need to be alone, abruptly retorts the interrogator (read aborts) glad his "interlocutor" (electrical jargon) is wired to the chair in the next room, not this; you can (his retort continues) lose touch with your feelings, engorged with fact like a mosquito or a penis con came (that is, with blood, in Spanish, he adds, instinctively testing us to see if we’ll admit we know that came means not blood but flesh as in "fleshed out."

. . . boring, as boring as family life yet not so moving, not so rich; for the current events of fam-life are richer than a lump of uranium; interesting because boring, which is not a paradox to wake the Interrogator, such as, that the reasonings which are our history’s twin valve for keeping abreast of itself concluded at the pointed end of the ABM decade that anti-ballistic missile systems for defense of city and family would step up the arms race, whereas ABM for defense of military strategic bases wouldn’t at all escalate us.

Wake? did we say—as if a part of us woke up, or didn’t. A part of us that if it were not there would have to be encountered. Gibberish, softly calls the Interrogator from sleep, but dreams two pistols with one source not one with two. He is being watched by many in his and their sleep. A singer, for one, who has to think off of both sides of her tongue and knows she has been seduced yet maybe to be a new Judith to this mufti warrior finely furnishing her king-sized bed; he is half-covered, up just to his knee, and she passes her mind’s hand over that knee and becomes that knee so that unknown to this sometime interrogating lover of hers who is a fellow national (though strictly she carries a Swiss passport), she looks back at herself from that knee and can’t believe what her ribs and fingers and mouth and blood have done, she sees her life all summed up in one damned minute (but which one?) and, back in herself again, leaving the knee where it is, she sees through the skin of this Chilean naval intelligence, and though she hears us of whom she is a part whisper Holofemes, hollow furnishing, hollow furnace, she knows he is quite real and is possessed of myriad tissues too fine each in itself to allow space for hollowness.

And while he sleeps on, her father is surely awake under house arrest thousands of miles from here controlled by the system this lover represents here in New York where he has asked her more questions than she wants to answer yet has given her more attention than would her potential executioner, and she believes he loves her and does not think her a traitor (but is he right?), and she wonders if she could interrupt this life of his as he apparently might interrupt the life of a friend of hers though exactly why may remain unclear except that the friend, an economist who was in the previous government and was living very quietly here with his wife who is still more a friend of hers, never stopped analyzing the fascist regime, or being the man he is has not stopped thinking. Has she stopped thinking, a famous singer highly visible?

Singing can seem an alternative to everything else, to thinking and to consuming life; and an alternative to (in the guise of) love. And yet to have been your lover’s knee for a brief breath of time recalls what we, even we, can’t quite bring ourselves to think upon while inertly we too move among self-righting, self-wronging systems, themselves often non-inertial.

"Interrupt? Interrupt?" murmurs the Interrogator, from his inertial sleep system. "Do not think our old-fashioned electricity couldn’t, if we told it to, attack both sides of our mouth that you speak out of: your words interrupt a life might mean break into—into a house or other sealed container or broadcast—or mean stop, as in thief or time, or heart-beat breath-flow (as we say in strategic forces training). So what is it going to be?"

It looked like the dumbest joyride there in the cemetery to take Bob Yard’s pickup truck and interrupt Brad’s Falling-Apart, or interrupt its conclusion (which was Brad-Together-Again, at graveside); but Jim turned right at the stone gate to his surprise, and heard the motor whine upward to be shifted and at that instant he nearly ran down someone’s collie itself spinning round and round at the edge of the road ready to race him, and by the time he was past the dog he found he had stepped on the worn-through metal of the clutch pedal and shifted gears.

And a mile down past the golf course and a brown field of strewn corn stalks and a two-horse trailer all by itself and a couple of narrow frame houses, he decided without warning and without checking behind him to turn around, and he needed to shift down after he stepped on the brake but, upon swinging grandly round from shoulder to shoulder so he felt in his buttocks just that first shadow of tipping, he found in his mirror if not in some new weight that a boy about his age had jumped out of nowhere into the back, a stocky boy without a shirt or (Jim later thought) shoes who’d been working in the sun all summer and had a prickle of stubble around his chin and on his upper lip, maybe the son of some indigent piners back in the woods around the lake (that the Democrat ran a piece on "the problem of" about once a year); and as Jim skidded his rear wheels completing the U-turn so he’s headed back toward the cemetery, he found he had shifted down without thinking.

And when the stocky kid, his hands braced upon the side of the truckbed where he sat, looked comfortably back down the road at their dust like he didn’t care where they were going, Jim without thinking leaned the wheel to turn again, reaching the brink of the ditch this time so he scraped gravel and dirt into it from the shoulder and this time thought about shifting down but didn’t kick the clutch pedal quick enough and the transmission screamed; but by then he was turning again and by the time he was ready to shift up, he looked in the mirror and the kid wasn’t in back any more, Jim had shifted O.K., but a little too soon. The kid wasn’t in the road or anywhere to be seen.

Jim braked. He looked back through the cab’s rear window while opening his door with the stuck handle. He stood on the running board surveying the ditches and fields and the woods a half mile beyond: but the kid was gone as if Jim’s violent maneuvers had thrown him away into the air.

But he slowly turned the truck again to head it back the way he had come, toward the cemetery, toward town, his first driving ever and never taught, and then he did see his fugitive passenger. He was striking across a field behind a little yellow frame house and Jim waited to watch him go through the fence at the far end and enter the woods without once looking back. He wore dungarees with side pockets down the leg, and his shoulders surged as he went along. Sure he would have taken a ride to town but, swung off the truck’s turning circle, he found himself aimed toward the woods, which was O.K. also. Jim tasted applejack in his throat. An old school bus passed him, shading the white line, four or five kids inside, farm kids. Jim wondered how his grandmother had gotten out to the cemetery. They were all waiting when he carefully shifted down like he’d been driving for years and turned left, in through the gate, and rode the clutch to the exact spot where Bob had parked parallel to a low curb half-obscured by grass. They were crazy, standing there as if they would always be there.

And when his beloved grandmother said from her distance, "Jim! What’s the meaning of this? What did you think you were doing? You could have—" he found words come out of him that he enjoyed more later than now because he could not believe he had said them . . . "Sorry, I forgot the body."

You can hardly, says the now-ruminant Interrogator, expect belief in a tale like that about Jim driving not so much licenseless as without any practice—unless we had here a heroic episode?—have you an epic in New Jersey, all worthwhile states yield at least one, and Jersey is no exception.

But later, when Bob Yard came round to Throckmorton Street to see about another matter, Bob told him he had understood just how he felt and for a moment laughed when Jim went looking for the kid the following Sunday; he wanted to find out if he really had taken the two screwdrivers Bob had left in the pickup truck, and settle the matter with him. "You just went down the road and came back, eh?" said Bob, but listening as he must have been he might have heard Jim stop the truck even without turning off the ignition.

He went around the lake one spring afternoon with his friend Sam, and a woman was screaming and groaning in a shack. This was before they had much in the way of trailers for settled living. She was crying out at intervals and a tiny child opened the door above the two steps and peeked around. Screams got as fast as breathing. Jim said they should get a doctor. Sam said she didn’t need one, she was probably having a baby and they better get out of there.

Jim went to Bob about it, not his own father. Did they have rooms in those shacks?

Bob said, Just one, but they didn’t have to pay anything, but sooner or later the town would clear them out.

Margaret got in touch with Pearl Myles and got angry when Miss Myles said she shared Margaret’s sorrow for her daughter Sarah. Jim felt drunk again when he got out of the pickup truck at the cemetery. He never, to his knowledge, asked Margaret how the cosms of the sun gave the East Far Eastern Princess her future, during that afternoon the sun didn’t go down and didn’t, and didn’t, but if that wasn’t prophecy, what was? And somewhere along the line he figured, yes, Margaret did have powers, though maybe it was to keep stuff to herself, though he was pretty much past all that: certainly she didn’t volunteer more story stuff though she knew many facts and often told him about the actual places and how the Navajos, with originally twenty-four thousand acres of land (which multiplied astronomically) were lucky they had no gold or silver near the surface and smart enough to turn their timber into board and not sell it just as logs, but this was long after Margaret was there. Young Margaret lived with them, did some weaving and rode a horse, learned some Spanish and was never taught Navajo. For years Jim hardly read a line of those old dispatches she sent on ahead of her (or, at first, behind her) to the Democrat and the pieces she wrote when she got home—some at breakneck speed, she hardly knew how; some, she said, slowly and painfully, one about a time when, in the dead of winter, she had swapped a lesson in herb healing and a public talk at the Browning Club on the Navajo ceremonial "Blessing Way" which helped to keep wind and lightning and so forth in harmony with other forces, in return for train fare from Cincinnati, but she wound up in Massillon interviewing over tea a self-made populist businessman who had literally dreamt up a solution to the Municipal Improvement Problem, to wit non-interest-bearing bonds to the extent of half the assessed value of the property within the municipal limits—bonds (all of this in a dream!) then to be deposited with the Department of the Treasury (significantly including since i860 the Secret Service) as security for a loan of legal-tender notes—the man none other than Jacob Coxey, whose sandstone quarry supplied steel and glass works, who bred blooded racehorses in Kentucky, whose daughter was christened Legal Tender, and who, a few weeks later, set off with an army of unemployed to march on Washington.

The Democrat was hardly a well-known newspaper. In the 1870s but-tonmakers plundered Indian burial grounds. Margaret saw a locomotive literally stalled by the squashed corpses of locusts. You could feel it. Hundreds of jackrabbits like giant unwinged bugs racing each other out of town ahead of a dust storm. Mayn had to ask a lot of questions in his line of work if you could call it that. Maybe a third at least of our known reserves of uranium are in Indian lands in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. Navajos emphasize what happened more than when, but do not kid yourself, they know the sequence where it counts. Which came first, the well or the sewer? The day the world ends will be the day the Navajo lose their land, or is it the other way around? It’s the other way around. There are plants in the desert, in New Mexico and Africa, that get nibbled all year long; so they grow spines and brew poison juice. "The new policy is self-determination without termination." "Say that again?" requests the girl on the beach. "President Nixon to Congress. The policy was to terminate tribal control over resources and phase out federal protection of Indian control of Indian resources." "Say that again?"

"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"

Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away—it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.

He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did you hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"

Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later—as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which we are and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly—Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack and without a license and with a passenger he didn’t mention but later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—

Did you ever see that boy again?

Who knows?

But the screwdrivers however casually left near a tool box and near probably some rags and usually a gasoline can with a neck on it not where Bob had left them were really gone: so the kid—

You expect us to believe you never told your wife?

Scout’s honor.

Did you belong to the Boy Scouts?

Well . . .

You brought it up.

Officially, yes.

So your word is worth only the paper it is written on.

He could live with that; sure.

Jim looked at his father’s bowed head and his half-brother eating a sandwich and as if through the munching of Brad, the mouth work and prospect of digesting, Jim smelled peanut butter, so it wasn’t one of Margaret’s sandwiches. He saw why people got drunk. He had looked out Bob’s windshield and his breath was taken away and when he looked back into the truck bed the kid was gone. As he had been to begin with.

Well, why hadn’t he told about it? Not even Sam, his friend, whose long face would look like a bloodhound’s in twenty years, Jim saw it exactly. Sam, with his leather boots on a hot September Sunday, who was always ready to go someplace but you had to give him the idea first, and then he would take over and see the sky through the trees, a beaver dam along a junky old stream, faint depressions across pine needles, tracks of an unknown creature coming out of nowhere, and suddenly remember hearing beavers smacking their tails on the flat water at night.

And then Jim thought he had seen that same piner kid of the truck ride a month before at the movies. You really knew it when you got near a piner kid in an enclosed space, not that they had the money for a ticket to the movie, even though they probably watered their bodies in the lake from time to time. Didn’t that kid go to school? Jim had seen a woman with hair flat on her narrow head washing clothes, and there was a little shoreline of foam like Mantoloking seafoam—but with mud and roots. But it probably wasn’t the screwdriver kid, that day in the movies so soon after Sarah’s death. After Brad’s Day Jim saw the kid’s face and the back of his head several times, but it wasn’t him. It was in Sam’s long backyard where they played touch football that was practically tackle and Jim left the game and ran up past the beautiful old red brick house to the picket fence but it wasn’t the kid slowly hiking a bit surly along the sidewalk; or it was coming out of the soda fountain and looking across the street at the window full of overalls and there was the kid with a dirty sailor cap but after getting practically hit in the middle of the street by two cars passing each other, Jim saw it wasn’t the same kid, this one was taller, without the rangy shoulders; or it was the jungle in Guadalcanal, hand to hand, get him before he even has a chance to pick his weapon up, his father and Alexander had been reading a book about Guadalcanal, man to man, you didn’t have time to ask questions, you’d heaved your last grenade back on the other island, Iwo Jima, Guam, one of them, launched it with all you had, which was your discus arm if it didn’t get sucked away by the same grenade it was propelling by the slinging mode—so that that hand without time to ask questions felt like the future but the War was just over, and Bob Yard didn’t talk much about it any more, his brother-in-law came home intact, his niece elected to stay in the WAVES for three more years having become an expert typist with a better chance to travel now than during the War, and Jim’s father who seemed to be developing a bulbous chin dragged out the deal to unload the paper until one night in Jim’s senior year Mel asked Jim if he himself would have considered hanging on to the paper, all other things being equal, and Jim said he wanted no part of it (which alas was only part of what he had had or had meant to say) and his father shrugged and said what he maybe hadn’t meant to say but might well have felt, since he had already been left once, to wit that that’s a big reason he decided to sell out. To which Jim quickly said, "Oh thanks, Mel, thanks, that puts me in my place, I had that coming, sure I did." (The first time he had called his dad Mel.)

No newspapers for him, not that the Democrat (whatever they said about Jackson and the bank) was a real newspaper; it had social notes on relatives who came to spend a week or a friend from New York or Reading, Pennsylvania, though not Margaret’s funny-looking old tramp of a man whom Jim first saw on the beach at Mantoloking the day Bob Yard had come and had that unsuccessful conversation with Jim’s mother more or less one-way where, on that black towel of hers, she lay irritated and still, but the old guy would talk and talk in the car and stayed with Margaret and Alexander a couple of days at least but Alexander kicked him out because he upset Margaret after Mel wanted to run a note in the paper but Margaret preferred not to and the man was known to Jim as that Inventor from New York though Jim never asked him his real name, and he wasn’t quite the same as the Hermit-Inventor from 1893-4, but was his decrepit nephew carrying on the good work, Margaret said, because you had to, and Jim asked him what he did: It remained to be seen, he said; it was partly just living, but it was unpredictable—he had invented a smallish machine that randomly invented new shapes there was motion for, but no formula yet, and he had carried on his forebears’ work which was beginning to look like learning not just to control the weather but in a new way to live with it, partly through seeing its relation to the interior activity of the land, even mountains far away, and so he was moving toward maybe a new weather, which made him practically unemployable but he had a small "competence" descended to him from an "ancestor’s" patent royalty which enabled him to maintain the "family railroad flat" in a city that—but Jim sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, wasn’t sure what he recalled and what inferred—so that the piner kid was maybe one-quarter made-up, and had forced him to share the pickup truck he had, briefly stolen the afternoon of Brad’s Day; and he was pretty sure he recalled the Hermit-Inventor of New York saying he had been given what equipment and training—mostly self-education—he needed so if he lost the struggle he could only blame himself—the very words, almost, that Mel said, the day of the final and crucial football game when Windrow was definitely the underdog as Jim pointed out to Brad, whereupon Mel said all that about having enough training and equipment so if they lost the game it was their own fault ("equipment" a crazy word), the already semi-retired father saying the sentence like words he had been given and was bound to say, so that at the time of another war in which Jim did not participate he knew he would hear those words if only because automatic packaged phrases are future phrases, a thought that Mayn passed on to his unlucky and largely unknown though loved friend Mayga, the Chilean woman—passed it on and passed it off as no thought at all but she asked him please not to dismiss it as a thought, but he could count on her to take seriously a lot of what he found to tell that he would only very occasionally get soused about—that is, drunk and loud, though not fighting mad, for if you tear someone limb from limb you might hurt that someone, he said, and although once during his married years he did in fact go for the jugular (‘‘after the jug?" said Ted, who was readier to believe Jim than some layer of his brain gook could accept). Well, to the late Mayga, and perhaps once to his journalist-colleague Ted, who was with UPI for years and knew everything (which was what he said about Jim), he explained that this type of evening’s undertaking (that is, to get thoroughly drunk) marked an effort to prove that some of these other thoughts which would persist actually then more strongly though less coherently were dependent on an inebriated state of mind and were dumb and a delusion.

But he couldn’t have told Ted as he did Mayga about his position in the future, because he liked Ted, knew Ted knew he wasn’t the type to go on like that; wouldn’t believe him, or worse would think something permanently (not odd but) wrong with him. Which future are you going to worry about anyhow?—the upcoming election or the state of the dollar four or five years from now? You control the immediate future by reducing unemployment by not slapping controls on.

The recently bereaved boy Jim Mayn took to dropping in on two old (in fact late middle-aged) ladies who stopped being surprised when this boy who had mowed their lawn until he lost the job when he went to work on a farm the preceding summer came in and sat with them. They had hardly known his mother. Their piano was out of tune; he tried a chord and was asked to play and couldn’t; they talked horses, they would argue whether a gigantic trotter named Native Hanover who’s with all the other champions on the wall outside the bar of the hotel downtown had done in fact all the things they each thought they recalled, or were they remembering two or three horses; they knew times fantastically, and once Jim asked how long they had been living together, he’d forgotten for a second they were sisters, but he might have asked that dumb question because he had felt that they wanted him to go—their bathroom had a crocheted-or-something thick pink cover over the toilet seat and smelled perfumed. He visited—always unannounced—a doctor who lived over by the military school, who played the organ at the Baptist Church accompanying himself in a heady tenor when he didn’t, he said, even believe in God most Sundays; a couple of times when Jim showed up he had a feeling that he had interrupted the doctor and his wife and their daughter who was a year younger than Jim—the son was away at boarding school in Pennsylvania: "Let the Quakers see if they can do anything with Hank"—in the midst of discussing perhaps some rotten thing they had all done or the doctor had (because his family seemed so nice, though Jim liked him)—and he got up and went out of the room saying he needed a drink. He was the first grownup to ever offer Jim a beer, when he was still fifteen. And Jim took to dropping in also on the Bob Yards, and she would ask little questions about his grandmother going in to New York to look at material at Schumacher’s and had they gotten tired of Brad’s cooking yet? She was better arguing with Bob and laughing at his exaggerated stories from downtown: there was a dimmer switch on the market like the lights in the movie house and someday you would go away for a wild weekend in the city and your house would light up in the evening and turn all but one of its lights out at, say, midnight, and look like it was being lived in, even project two moving figures up next to the window ("Doin’ what?"), while you were dancing the night away or attending the horse show. Bob was practically the first to have a television set in Windrow and Jim thought the Notre Dame-Army football players looked like squat dolls or soldiers but you knew it was real, and it was a fascinating trick that had been put over on that whole scene that you felt could—or should—only be told about by the announcer. Nobody asked Jim something he couldn’t spell out himself.

Now that, wakes the interrogator, is so empty a statement it is downright bracing; what is the humidity outside our chambers?

Jim fell forward, sent away. But by whom? For it was his (only somewhat sickly) mother who had "passed away" (as Pearl Myles put it of her own mother’s death, discussing what, where, and when matter-of-factly for the class; her mother having passed away less than four years previous or, as Jim with a sour smile hidden in his heart swiftly calculated, not long after Pearl Harbor!); fell forward, as not even he could quite know, borrowing Bob Yard’s pickup truck (this time legitimately) one afternoon of his senior year, but we, who were always potentially part of him, knew and would claim credit for saving his life that afternoon if it were not some section of our own, not to mention that of a farm kid in a baseball cap driving a bare bodiless chassis the wrong way out of the street behind the Courthouse as Jim, with the right of way and Ann-Marie Vandevere braced beside him in the same seat that Anna Maria Pietrangeli had occupied with proud arms crossed over her breast the week before, floored the pedal only afterward to be in a position (thanks to Bob Yard’s brakes in the days before inspection) to know that at that instant his errand had been less to kill that vehicle in front of him and its exposed operator than to pass through it with an angry (not "irate") vision that if he’d been given what his force for a moment demanded would have propelled him and the severe and passionate blonde girl with him through that thing—that "thing" he’s driving, that dink, that fuckhead—by way of a mere rearrangement of the matter making up said unwary obstacle without altering it in any way but the experience of these molecules that made secret space for him and the girl and Bob’s vehicle to pass through yet paralleled by a memory felt in Jim’s shoulders and knuckles and calves that this was no way to get out of town. The kid’s life was spared. The so-called Hokey-Pokey Man, who peddled his homemade vanilla ice cream by a little horsedrawn wagon at dusk, told him his mother had been one of the nicest persons he had ever known; a lot to live up to, he said—an Armenian, but not quite the only one in town, said grandfather Alexander—some Armenians are gypsies (some gypsies are Hungarians), but the Hokey-Pokey Man has that fine head of white hair and a square head like Mel’s, only smaller—he’s no gypsy—

—We knew that anyway, said Margaret.

Jim reported to his father what the Hokey-Pokey Man had said, who incidentally must have recalled how much Sarah loved vanilla ice cream as deep a vanilla taste as heart of nutmeg; and Jim’s father said how most Armenians were Catholics. Jim didn’t get it, but wasn’t in the habit of asking his father things; but when he reported his father’s odd remark, Margaret, whom he never talked with any more about her old hole-in-the-sky stories, told him Catholics considered suicide a sin. Jim just said, "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," and Margaret retorted, "No second chance there." And Jim added, "Maybe there’s no heaven." "Maybe there isn’t," said Margaret. Margaret laughed and went to give him a hug, which he more or less went along with. But it made him hopeless—how could that be?—and he said what seemed to come between them: "Well, they never found her." Not that anyone was really looking now, or raking the briny floor for a person he felt like he knew somewhat less now, though Brad for God’s sake recalled stuff about her from before he was born—maybe the little bastard really was more her son—such as that she didn’t want any more kids but after Brad came along she was glad; and that she had been a great surf swimmer in the old days, fearless and stubborn, until later she hardly ever went in. And she laid out her writing pens and ye olde music-copying implements on the drop-leaf desk in the musick womb—the next room, a room full of possible and future music, and Jim fell forward (it felt like forward) through furniture, people, walls, power lines, hilly roads—and, and—

Is she clear to you? asks the interrogator, faked into a second career as listener—and who, he adds, are you?—it’s suddenly not qua-t clear; in the modern city they have just adopted one of our own venerable methods of causing pain in order to elicit information; yes, a youth approached a park bench containing a couple who were either of different sex or same, and shot them through the leg with one shot, and (which was his original "touch") only then inquired what money they had.

—and Sarah wrote little letters to Alexander her father though he was just downtown and if he replied it may have been by word of mouth. "This is a great-grandfather desk," Jim heard her say to little Brad and she smiled at Jim who appeared at her doorway and she went on speaking to the baby of the family: "that’s a grandfather clock because it’s tall and old and it’s been telling time for a long time" (she reached to release the arm of her metronome and let it swing back and forth, then stopped it—Jim in recollection couldn’t quite see her principal audience, which was Brad—where was he? he was standing by her desk); "but this is a great-grandfather desk because that’s who made it, and over at Margaret and Alexander’s house there’s a grandfather pistol" while she smiled at Jimmy now and then and would say, "Oh Mel, you are so goddamn polite," like she was against him; or she would kid with her "baby," Brad: "Now what was your name? I forget, was it Benjamin?" (‘Wo," cried the child)—"Was it Jackie? was it Sammy?" ("No," cried the child and developed hiccups from giggling and couldn’t say his name)—"Oh /know: it was Emily, that’s your name"—("No," but he’s too young to say, That’s a girl’s name)—"Oh I remember, you’re Brad" was said at last, like sheer invention at the last burnt-out moment when we’d run out of potentially erroneous facts.

There were ladies in silk blouses with dark chiffon scarves inside their instrument cases and such; but, never forgetting her sister in Mass. who didn’t get along with Margaret and Alexander and rarely (though with some considerable annualized ceremony) visited, Sarah came more to life with the male musical contingent whether or not they actually made the music or sustained it. Here were Barcalow Brandy wine, a would-be singer with a natural performer’s name whose family owned extensive orchards and other properties in the county and who wore sport coats you’d never see in any store and a scarf around his neck like an actor, Jim thought; and Byron Kennett, who wore silkier sport clothes and, one secret shocking week, went to state prison for a while, where his mother’s dancing shoes could not penetrate, and who could play the cello and did so out of it seemed love for Jim’s mother, not for the cello which in a way didn’t even belong to him though against his will it had been left to him by a maiden great-uncle who had desired to exert some strong influence upon this only child whose father had left his wife and son otherwise fairly well fixed. The truth was that Jim didn’t much want to go near that room with its sudden empty or shouting or laughing halts in the music when someone had missed a note ("Probably turned to the wrong page," said Mel one evening when Brad reported that the music group had had a bad argument over a few missing notes, etcetera, "pages stuck"); yet Jim would not have wished those late afternoons or Saturday mornings to end; because —he didn’t just know why—because his mother didn’t turn toward or away from him but was in that room sealed by an agreement arrived at—aha!—between Jim and the intermittent music itself: but not an agreement not to enter; for he could, though didn’t because the music (chamber music cat’s-cradling and/or sawing up and down and around) gave the house a comfortable good sense, whatever that might mean. And when a fellow named James Mayn came, years later, to tell his wife Joy (to try to tell her, though then with oddly little strain) what he hadn’t known he knew, that his tone-deaf father Mel had to keep replacing a thermostat with a mind of its own (though Joy didn’t want to hear the make of thermostat it was and a detail or two Jim couldn’t have helped recalling), all part of a conflict between Mel and Sarah, who claimed that her catgut tightened up unpredictably so that during the cooler months she couldn’t keep her violin or her big viola tuned (at which the Interrogator’s knee jerks picking up a poignant sexual slant as when a condemned, in, after all, industrial process of being electric-chaired, sends back upstream through the cables his own unequal but distinct charge that changes the warden’s hand if not his being for some rest of his life e’en though he knows it not): meanwhile the brink-like brevity of Mel’s news item that Sarah had "passed away," together with such elements of her life as time and names might sum up, capped the event so Jim later felt he had not known where the event was and while respecting his father’s not unloving conciseness, he looked for news to fill the gap and found it in the future inside him, even to some nothing fantasy that he was in the future with everything Go and under control, looking back—throw in a space settlement and balanced atmosphere brick by factual brick, etcetera—but . . .

But in the weeks and months ("mouths," in possible misprint) succeeding Brad’s Day, Jim held to his friendship with Margaret. Was she "all he had"? Maybe not. He had his new angle on his father Mel, and this now heavy-laden, really fat-jawed Mel a special father to Brad, and a person who forgot to touch others on the hands and arms and shoulders and back and body (but stood around with his fingers locked behind his back and his shoulders forward), a person who once suffered enough to slug Jim in the cemetery when he brought Bob’s pickup truck back after an untraced joy ride, these were real things that years later he was thankful for, as if they were themselves the thanks.

Yet Margaret was Margaret and Jim was Jim. Newly confused about her tales, their exact date of inspiration, their pretty weird anatomy, their topography that changed like the weather, their hinted nature of foretelling, yes, foretelling for the Navajo mother with the hole in her head had come back to life when local Prince departed in pursuit of visiting East Far Eastern Princess, otherwise unknown as the Alien Beloved, and, as if part of the same crap, the mother of Jim and Brad had said that they must go away, or anyway Jim should, while for his part he was pretty sure that she had been the one to go away—well, she warn’t here, so where was that lady?—among the Navajo? on Second Mesa among the Hopi? the long-gone Anasazi? was she sweating in an underground chamber? working "with" the poor?—give me a poor person any day!—swimming toward water, toward China, toward Choor? (to the strains of a liner’s band playing "Let’s Take the Long Way Home" what Jim had swayed in the dark to the music of, with Anna Maria, her proud, very powerful arms around him instead of crossed over her tits).

A joke: "He was pretty sure she had been the one to go away"—well with a fact you don’t always know: and facts in combination, next thing you know you’re explaining the last World War or some President’s raid on the icebox.

But still pals with his grandmother Margaret. When she went to New York to (annually) buy material at Schumacher’s and stay at the Hotel Seymour near Times Square which excited or intrigued Jim in absentia, for he had never stayed in a hotel and refrained from asking Margaret if they had dance music under the chandeliers and gambling kings and movie stars and rich, kind criminals all visiting each other in their white satin suites—Margaret would see a few people, a cousin who did something important in a museum. Jim did not like her being away (well, of course—what with no Sarah any more, etcetera). ‘Specially when the secretly joint owner of the Brad’s Day pickup truck, namely Bob Yard, added, Boy she really had to get away—(what did he mean?)—as if he knew more and less than that—more and less yes, come to think, as when some years later Bob recalled Jim’s mom Sarah talking funny to him, making a decimal point (she said) in the dust with (she said) her parasol, when she didn’t have a parasol: yet Jim felt Bob knowing something more than his stated ignorance—"said we met in passing, that’s what she said more than once but we were somewhat better friends than that," said Bob, who a bit overwarmly recalled the day he first saw Mel upon a running board sweeping to his destiny downtown from church to hotel-reception the day he best-manned a local friend’s nuptials, leg out like a skater (who on earth had the camera to catch him? maybe his inner immobility conquered his outer)—grim gay smile exactly as fixed as that of a man (to wit, him) who squeezed as much a record amount of concisely edited news into the paper of the family he later realized he had known he was about to start marrying into five minutes later, while smiling not so fixedly that he could not be a shade long-winded and w/tsmiling upon meeting an unexpected feminine obstacle en route to the hotel punch bowl who was so taken aback by his fixed best man’s grin that Mel momentarily introduced himself—they had the same last name. Maybe remote cousins? she asked; from Jackson’s time? she tilted a head. He thought it through and doubted it: a branch of the Mayns’ from right around Harrisburg-Carlisle way (Pennsylvania’s beautiful, she said)—until his post-introductory at-a-loss-for-words near-solemnity in her presence now made her laugh and tell him he should always wear those trousers and a cutaway and the gray top hat, while he abruptly explained that he was second in command of a small-town weekly over there to the west, that was getting more into wire service and statewide news which was what he had been working for, these many long months; and meanwhile he said he liked Caruso, and she could only reply, You don’t say, not knowing what she felt, nor recognizing by speaking voice a tone-deaf man—though she laughed (never knowing he would be tone-deaf nor that if he could not conquer tone-deafness he could still rise to one side of it); and so they walked away into the room together and he dropped his topper, which landed right side up, and he picked it up and left it on the punch table, falling in love but not with love, as the music had it at that very moment, she had told Bob Yard, never guessing (she told her father one day indirectly in a letter downtown) that Mel Mayn (without the e) would never again drop a flustered gray top hat and snatch it up and drop it and pick it up as if it were soaking and leave it on a punch-bowl table; never again, because he managed it just that once—having power, but not for Sarah, who married him on a whim because he wasn’t afraid to tell her as he stood up with his hat that he’s tone-deaf, yet because Margaret had kept her on the strictest rein yet had bent her ear for years about women in the home and at the polls. Which Jim and we—changing track less and less angelically to its summary moment the night of the day that Margaret died, a few years later, so swiftly that we hear Alexander (implicitly paralleling deaths of daughter and wife), in the midst of more grief (which he’d call "trouble") than he will ever have time to grasp, apply the word "Ow" but to his daughter’s marriage, that old trothful plight Sarah would write him little "humor-me" "gists" about—’ ‘What more could you say but Ow later Ouch to sum up fifteen years or so of marriage to Mel with a point like that one, Jim: Ou . . . ch."

—which Jim and we unconsciously fast-track (O.K.) inward, past a not quite totally unloving remark by Sarah that Mel was the only man she could conceive waterproofing his carpet slippers; inward to Dr. Range’s ex post acto word that Sarah at the time of her vanishing into our coastal waters hadn’t had anything incapacitating or incurable, just anemia plus periodic blues which he for one (with a gentle shrug) could not track down but did associate somewhat with the fluctuation of her musical activity, for things might take a downturn right after a chamber recital at the church, for instance, but there was—or had been—little organically the matter (in those days when antibiotics had not yet priced house calls out of the market)

—inward to little Brad’s dream—no nightmare—of Sarah standing in his room making her own dark moonlight waving her pale fingers through the air like the conductor of the Philharmonic in New York and told him she would wait for him till he came back but where she was he could not remember, though she had less burn than tan for once and the black towel draped over her until she swung it off her to reveal grandly, like terribly peeled areas, skin that did not have the beautiful tan, and he wanted to give her some clothes —woke up (for a dream of Sarah would never be long-winded) and went back to sleep but told the dream at breakfast, and started crying, and when Mel said she was in heaven, Jim reached and touched his half-brother’s shoulder: "You thought she was cold and needed her clothes; she’s O.K., Brad, no kidding, she’s O.K."

—so swiftly inward to that time "done" under the porch, inward through the dull clank of a trowel against the upended iron teeth of a dark rake under a front porch (the dark side of the porch), and Mel’s unwillingness to say, "for the record," whether his visitor was right that Lincoln was married to an impossible woman; upon which the other voice, which was Bob Yard’s, swiftly and softly observed, "Lost the battle, but won the war," only to hear Mel react with a violently amplified scraping on the porch boards above: " What war?" and moments afterward he came after the boy who, just happening to be there in the course of a day, seemed to be eavesdropping upward from underneath

—so swiftly inward through cloud and clear, through moons that stretched from a dismembered Statue of Liberty past reflections in Pennsylvania’s Juniata River where the Navajo Prince camped on his way east, to great plains and basins not even an Eiffel could cantilever out to view beyond, and through dawning hailstorms to the wake of a very large bird, too large to have gotten clean away inward so swiftly through such fact as that when Margaret was in New York a couple months after Sarah embarked upon her ultimately boatless voyage Eukie Yard told Jim a phone call had come to the cemetery inquiring if interment had taken place, and when Eukie, with the receiver up against his ear on that day, four or five days at least after "your mom was drowned," wanted to know who he was talking to, the fellow in New York instead said he knew the mother and had seen the daughter Sarah but once, and when Eukie said the lady had drowned off the Jersey shore and they had not recovered her so of course there hadn’t been no interment, the loud voice at the far end of the phone line said, Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, and hung up "‘z if he’d told me something I didn’t know"

—inward swiftly and (like orbits th’t git smaller but faster) with a speed capable of accommodating inversely a multiplicity of small-scale units kept in mind by the wind whose convenient passive/cheap fuel though we don’t actually see it we’re glad to use as a means to an end though bypassing the question that—as he lived his own life in years to come—Jim couldn’t have cared less about namely our need of him, his largely unacknowledged use of us to whom he has certainly been a good and loyal part, like Grace Kimball but also countless others who’ll always be less here than she, whether in that multiple dwelling in New York or moved-out—

—inward in short so fast Jim conks out cum schlafing off the d’effects of a (neither war nor battle) heartfelt marriage that he abandoned (since institutions can take rejection easier than folk—or federal agencies) to leave us, actually in his vicinity, within the controlled weather of the tapeworm track which sans loop takes We to pauses where we have always been before: to hear a woman help a man hear what he heard before but didn’t know; to have a woman being helped recall love by hearing but despite hearing her lover joke about having shared freely her labor, her agony, her joy (almost for free); to hear a wife with the education of a specialist guess or mind-read what happened at a distance to her husband for whatever it was worth; to listen while two women, one still very young though, paired, of convergent ages, review men as if it’s all for one and talk so intimately in a large window as to transcend the chances of female friendship as if some male Fate sets us back three decades to early post-War rent control before vacancy became by law the lode the landlord waited patiently to strike, while the tapeworm track literally lets us hear a fashionable physician originally from Boston now secretly in therapy remind his famous childless patient (who varies her delightful English foreignly and with elan) that "using" a tapeworm to effect dramatic weight loss might shift the . . . onus, and be a form of avoidance—through which no doubt she would learn, but . . . but learn what? she asks in sync exactly with her medic’s same thought sensing the tapeworm track still there a semi-permanent trail or scar through the very thought of American peanut butter, while she half-knows she doesn’t need to lose weight no matter what a friend of an acquaintance has done to herself through some old or new regime, there’s so many ways by 1977 that if you don’t feel you’re in the worming tape tunnel ‘stead of it in you, you got to feel that it opens outward like a lip growing and rolling from every moist glim of its circum, and you are it and might’s well look back down the narrowing wind-tunnel as when you could—we all could—indulge in the uncontrolled controllability of nostalgia’s splicing and slimming of events to recombine or reconstitute them, as in "constitution" at some later libration point which Jim, addressing gentle Mayga in a Washington bar early in the 1960s describes as a balance point of pulls, hence a good spot to settle down or out ‘tween Earth and her-or-its primary Moon, that is for an in-space settlement, so they contemplate each other with affection giving diplomatic recognition to that great area of gap between their socially stooled thighs, which is a gap of experience, if we will but let it in: and the diva Luisa years later finds in her a track left by some grace of the divine, like experience to be traveled, again if she will, and again she can’t tell her loving physician of hands upon her thigh (two hands belonging to the same person) or of how she let herself learn to love him even in the dark of night in her duplex balconied kitchen for hearing her lover’s bare foot near the threshold, she had resumed her phone recital in the English in case he may not know that the poetry’s Neruda but at least prior to her covering explanation when she hangs up (which his surveillance has decided her against lest it seem guilty), he can kiss her skin, on his knees on the linoleum, one of those thigh listeners but listening with his lips for any clue from the subtle anatomy of her experience—a clue to whoo shee’s talkin’ to—at a moment when, for very love as well as ultimate hygiene, she considers flushing him out of her "life" and off the planet as simply as some gently acting bacteria suggested by your family G.P. much less our intrahemispheric tapeworm and teach the ecstasy of middle-class hunger excruciatingly prolonged for a future of weight loss and healing—until Luisa, hearing from Clara how surprising and warm(yes)-hearted are the Kimball workshops, Luisa now beyond danger which is fear abruptly concludes "Momo, it’s late" into the phone to her friend Clara, who, knowing whose nickname "Momo" is, intuits by the magic of near-disaster who Luisa’s with ("Momo" being Ford North, basso profundo and gourmand silly genius with stammer in his wings), "Momo, for the last time please I would love to oblige you but—" (she has to pause to hear Clara’s own real conclusion as if Clara on her own imagines Luisa’s lover padding back to the bedroom extension phone to hear no basso but the voice of the well-known Allende economist’s wife)—"Momo, that warehouse isn’t the—" (she breaks off as if Momo at the other end has interrupted her)—"isn’t the place for either of us, and I am no Bernhardt and anyway she wouldn’t have doubled as Horatio, and there has never been a good Hamlet opera or we would have heard of it (I don’t care if there have been two dozen), the only chance was Verdi and he abandoned—"

—but Clara is talking some more and telling her she could use a Kimball workshop but where are her loyalties and who is she planning to get herself killed by or risking her neck for

(how’s the weather down there? we hear ourselves ask, having long since given up the idea we’re single)—

—and Clara’s not so friendly now and hangs up on that name again, that man’s name again with Luisa speaking it stupidly into the receiver (why? why?—so her lover can hear the name?)—

—oh we said it close to her neck, her thigh, her volcanic eyes, though to our erstwhile Interrogator, who knew it at once—the name Mayn . . .

—while the diva, alone with her great self and her undeniable lover kneeling on maroon and white diamonds of linoleum that are black and white in the dark (ready naked for any type of attention) knows she never thought seriously of killing this man: how was it done? (Yet, easily, she sees!) She’s hurt by how Clara rang off. But it’s her own fault for phoning like this with this one lover, but a man who may have done nothing but pass through naval school. To murder him now—that asks too much of him! The soul goes elsewhere, the body stays. She would like him here with what she cannot swallow left out. But that is asking so much of him that he will have to die, but how has she gone this far, to fuck with a man who whatever he is in that regime knows too well what’s happened with her father—responsible as she for her career—

"I came in here, I couldn’t sleep, and—" she’s explaining too much . . .

"I was thinking of Momo and this Hamlet musical, opera, whatever it is and like mind reading the phone goes and I caught it in mid-ring so you wouldn’t wake up—"

And as she moves reluctantly her thigh from his lips thinking she better get to the John—but wondering then what she would destroy him with—pour bleach down his ear, his nose—all one—the thought whets her for a simple kiss in bed. She hears him rise from the linoleum, asking if Momo sings any Spanish roles: to which she answers swiftly, too swiftly, that the city is bilingual: everyone knows some Spanish even if Ford North never rides the subway in his double-breasted camel’s-hair and his basso’s bowler—it’s more than she can handle—yet she will handle it and whether she kills him curtained behind a shower bath of blood or swallows him with a brand-new tapeworm, she cannot but be ready when, behind her, he wonders why that basso is getting Neruda from her in the middle of the night in English and Spanish when she said he only called to persuade her to participate in his degenerate send-up of a great though decadent work of Shakespeare: to which she rises in angry acceleration, turns upon the naked person who she can’t help knowing is about to love her even more: "Neruda was why—why I cannot get mixed up in that claptrap Hamlet, whatever it is—Neruda, ‘the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines’ "—" ‘petrels,’ " her bilingual companion continues, " ‘petrels and eagles,’ " comes back his voice equally in English, while—" ‘meadows and foam,’ " she says, and ". . . Tu me pre-guntas donde estoy?’ " (remembering the lines Clara has given her) and her naval officer with relentless complexity or culture replies, " ‘Te contare’— ‘I will tell you,’ ‘ but stops short of the next line he has heard Luisa quote to the friend she phoned—which is: "giving only (solo detalles) information useful to the authorities"—stops short, and she wouldn’t know why except maybe he’d rather not give away any threats; so many people she never met and never had to since she’s who she is, a dutiful daughter only in anxiety, in mind—while, fixed as he is, her dead or alive father (no longer with the telephone he so used, the many rooms of people he sat and talked with through the everlasting political moment, les urgences an ambulance entry sign reads upon a dark building near the Seine) would still have paper to type with, though type what?, a man in history no less arrested in a house she has never seen—

—but she can’t control her thought which goes to the man who was sitting right there in one of Clara’s orchestra seats—

—and left her (though he stayed at "home") before she left him, which matters only if she turns toward it, which she will do if she turns back to her lover; yet doing so now means only the male bone and blood he turns into, over her shoulder, and more important is get to the John, save a friendship, find out why Clara feels her husband is in curious peril apart from his allegiance or his voice (though in his businesslike scholarly way he never was a speaker, a sound, like her father), as if his antagonists were making up their collective mind whether he knew about a certain thing or not, besides all the other things he knows; and she hears her now treasured friend Clara with her unfailing large dark blue eyes, wide pale mouth, deep heart waiting out all the trouble of grown children in danger beyond precise reach, husband in danger, nation beyond reach, a West Side apartment where she won’t let herself miss her interhemispherically abandoned belongings (while he with silent humor jogs thrice around the neighborhood)—an apartment where she and he still move each other—hears, Luisa hears, her treasured friend laugh and tell what these women in the workshop, these American women say to each other such as that wars and houses are made by men and understood by women. The women expecting Luisa’s life story. Free with the cost of the workshop. Complete with revelations as if the women there were from the newspapers. Turning the corner into her bedroom she wants a boy, a little son against her, and on the current of her own feet on the carpet can hear him in pyjamas someplace and can hear him, hear the fridge—watchfully watch him take his chances, just her and him, and the name on which Clara rang off abruptly comes back, with nothing now in front of Luisa and with a man behind: to whom she turns but not to him, he isn’t there, or she’s lookin’ through him in the dark; and by the way she looks good, too, and when the check came at her Mexican restaurant her fascist escort stared down at the total and murmured, "Una jovena al izquierda de mi y on your starboard quarter has been contemplating you for the last half hour"—aficionada doubtless; alone and small, with a box of foreign cigarettes beside her glass, big thin gold circles hanging down out of her hair on either side, no rings on her hands—who seemed to have eaten alone often.

—till, as cramped as her own personal tapeworm that flew in from the Minnesota territory and descended toward her gravitational center, and was flushed out of its own coils and crannies by a loving physician’s recommended dose of atabrine, she lets herself forget murder, forget the threatened bond with Clara, in order to know—as she knows when in her morning tub (so still) she lets a dream forget itself—that she hit upon that woman-in-the-restaurant’s profession for one second—but now what was it; what was it? (her very certainty had lost it): and with that, she sings a phrase with intervals so slight they are primitive, a cry, a thought—that still gets an echo far off in her apartment, for he is not behind her phrase. It takes her, while her twin sense that some half-conscious community rhymed this proposition to her lets her rest both with her abrupt decision (to sing two roles, the second Horatio, the ultimate friend) and her wish (which even Judith might have entertained could they have run a power line to Holofernes’ tent) to watch bedroom TV with her lover whose hand (yes) palms her belly pregnant (yes) and with shared peperoni pizza sent out for, and meanwhile she is reading in his mind places elsewhere where he thinks of her—yes, he thinks of her—even to the point of telling someone, a stranger to her, how much he likes her (it’s a man friend he’s having lunch with) yet she can’t get off the—the unavoidable phone call from her compatriot Clara that tells her in the guise of possible friendship that (whatever you call it, the chilly bowel below the Swiss bank vault or the prisons of acoustical foul-up suddenly offstage) this is it: she wants Clara’s friendship despite what her loneliness also hears in the long words of her father (thou shalt love, well, thy father)—she could hear the breakers like dreams of mountains stagger distantly down her father’s known words until, hearing her lover en route somewhere between here and the kitchen, she hears as if for the first time her father defending Karl Marx, a man real as her own father—lest we forget that the shortcomings in his thought are the shortcomings in our own—his history ours (she recalls)—and she, who gives pleasure and pleasure that begets pleasure to those who pay to come to Lincoln Center and to those who do not pay because she has given them free tickets whether they use them or not, would say this about "Marx" who comes back to her like her father as "The Moor," the dark-faced, the naked shape now rejoining her in (after all) her dark bedroom, she listens while her lover lubricates with the essence of her refrigerated Deaf Smith peanut butter du pays the softest of predictions—that’s "unknown," he grants, but "forced" upon him by what he cannot but infer—that in the near future she may forget what stage she is at home on and find herself before a small but far more risky audience: upon which she does not bridle (after all, she warms to him, if, granted, now with some cute irritant of fear, some additive that does not yet subtract though it could strike in the midst of anything, of love, like a woken tapeworm track), and handling the back of his neck, "Do you know Shakespeare?" she asks, "do you know Hamlet, do you know his loyal friend Horatio who is around at the end, isn’t he?, to pick up the pieces? What’s it matter what small closet stage downtown, what auspices?—Momo is my friend and—" drawing her lover to her so that, of their four hands, only the fingers of her left upon the back of his neck come into play, breast to breast, leg to leg, she hears his breath intervene, "It was not Momo—"

"—you were thinking of?" she finishes, knowing, though, that he meant calling (phoning) not thinking, so who but his mouth inquires finely of the skin of hers, smiling she is certain, neither asking nor telling her, "Oh Ford North is not your friend in that sense, I think": so that both of them are in control, shared (less than two but for the moment more than one); and she’s for a second French, then for a second a grain of history, as Sayao’s emerging equal in Boheme (she won’t do Boheme, she prefers to avoid lingering coughs) or a gifted girl from a legendary hemisphere who heard the great American Iago in Buenos Aires and upon speaking to him later in Europe got invited to visit him and his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut, at his "South American house," paid for by tours through Rio and B. A. up until Evita banned American singers, from Iago on up or down: no, Luisa is Clara’s and yes definitely Clara’s husband’s friend, what would she give up for this?, but she is being thought of at this instant, nor would she believe in living through others’ thoughts of her, yet has done it, she has been that priestess mother murderer, she could not otherwise have raised her acting hands so rarely through three hours of onstage carrying-on (she’ll look at hands always, she knows the hands of four heads of state, always looks); uses her own onstage so sparingly it has been noted in the press—could not have stood before her audience and on occasion turned her back to them all, stood so still in the flesh of that living "house," the mass, the masses who (of customers, that is) alone matter if they take her away with them so there can be still more value of her and more, multiplied, spread everywhere—so there, Father, and yet she will be to Clara, woman to woman, in this way more resonant, a friend even should she become so active a compatriot she’ll risk her skin, even her still clean Swiss passport, a risk worth being not less than a friend with Clara and her aloof husband who once recently had rather hear the opera at home, and Luisa here in her home, a vastish unused apartment with a duplex kitchen where you can get a balcony’d view of an egg frying, knows, too, that all this sea of rapture, this air winding out from her passion, her art, also gets shut off the minute the show stops and the curtain call smiles its (one) way into the eyes of a thousand people now standing to go elsewhere with or without her.

"You exist," comes the soft voice touched off by her fingers on the back of his neck, "in the hearts of so many people; have you ever thought about that?" and she laughs loud a simple laugh from her sex, from which then comes "Where are they now?" so she in her words can just think what it might be to be him, not so much with a slight (pretty unimaginable) erection in the dark—puce? prepuce? she must see!—as with his wide, taut chest about to meet hers, yes—and no notion amid the small sweep of his male but threatening propaganda that she has, through some new dependency (that’s banana-peeled between present and future), left him in this scented and odored bedroom (made larger not smaller by the bed) if not escaped him into an event, discovered her same old self in an event she didn’t order curtains for, for where would they hang?, hence an event she couldn’t escape—

—oh she’s more real? ‘z that it? oh she’s reckoning a political or national conscience into the cost of her tax-relieved Alpine passport? (while hearing her father once call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation)—

—oh let no one call her more real now than when vicariously singing, singing all these years, but—

—is she then recklessly involving herself in the for-the-moment gratuitously naval intelligence officer’s pursuit of happiness, being authentic, plus some knowledge or intelligence of her apparent friend Clara’s exile-economist husband whom Luisa might in some womanly (or theatrical) way unveil to her lover: because there isn’t enough drama in her life—or in lieu of having a child? (her medicine man speaks within her like the trace of the expelled worm)—

—let no one call her less than friend to Clara now after how many months of the New York sojourn of Clara and her husband (who is or is not imperiled, for a lot of people seem not to know, yet): yet suddenly it’s would-bt friend, for Clara may hate her if she knows who she’s been sleeping weeth, or Clara might not want to understand what’s between Luisa and this man whose national employers’ planned violence has over it like a blinking sign the alternating hence moving words both of save Chilean business and Chile’s old families, yet words, too, of her own father’s house-arrested position which now she feels but also because she ought to feel it and in varying words which may be not how many thousand persons the conjurers in power like population controllers cause to disappear behind the very wall those about to vanish stood against a moment past, but how many millions the persons in power represent; and all the time there (for is she growing by necessity more intelligent?) alternately appears like a sign the mere fleshly face of a father who brought her and a brother and others, always others, sometimes quite silently along solemn (damn serious) mountain paths, casual precipices in her little hook-and-thong boots so she wondered if at the height of the hike they would find again a coterie of serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry (though the amount of smoke held constant) led, inspired, moderated by the man her father who expected possibly nothing of her, a mystery, she couldn’t tell, she’d seen him close those eyes of his listening to her sing at the age of seventeen, seen him close his eyes and frown as at some idea, while also he sent her a telegram here and there, or once upon a time and then again, like a bouquet of local flowers, Milan, Los Angeles (where she really ate), London, Vienna, "take it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese" Momo’s pouf sang upon Momo’s piano one night in Momo’s apartment building which God help us is just where Clara goes to the women’s workshop, which couldn’t be any less helpful (at least, if one were thinking of taking it) than a very, very tall young American woman poet who did not know that she was pretty—from cheekbone to upper knee and all, she was secretly pretty (and her adored daddy had called her "giraffe" until the day he died! animals first, then habitat, for she’s) secretly pretty instructing Luisa that Luisa’s country equaled some (no doubt American-made) shadow: O.K., Chile is a long shadow, O.K., good (and why is she listening moist-eyed to this girl in a noisy, aromatic room? she knows all the ways to get away politely, and all the other ways), yet (And do you come from a line of poets?) she with a Swiss passport gotta wait for this long shadow spoken more from the secretly bruised eyelids, melancholy and self-swelled, than from the wonderfully wide (not wide open but wide-long) eyes of the young woman—a shadow (she’ll swear) "cast" (maybe out of one of her own poems) "by the lapping sea which is the overlapping silence of the world breaking upon the hemisphere, a ghost coast like a mapmaker’s lost lore"—Luisa’s homeland, Luisa’s country down there a million miles under New York, "a planet," the girl goes on, "a planet in essence long" (and does this description of Chile make the American poeta political?—heavens no! only nostalgic for a nation she has not yet visited for Christ’s sake): let that poeta help herself, O.K.? . . . "what is in others ..." (but these words ... do they ask, do they interrogate? or do they tell you? or are they part of words to come?) . . . You asked if I came from a line of poets, senora? oh God no!—did you ever hear of a financier named Jay Gould and did you ever hear of the blizzard of 1881 ?—(she had heard of the blizzard, actually)—O.K. you heard of the blizzard, well it blew down the telegraph lines and Jay Gould had to keep sending his rapid-fire orders to his broker in the stock market—(was the poet descended, then, from Jay Gould?)—and his broker was doing O.K., too, you can be sure—(was the poet descended from Mr. Gould’s broker?)—No, senora, so Gould sent a messenger through the snow with his buy and sell orders, the fastest he could find and, well, the boy was kidnapped—(ah, you are descended from the messenger boy)—let me finish, senora, and Gould’s rivals put another boy who looked just like the kidnapped boy in his place who would tell them day to day what Gould was selling and what he was buying—(ah, you are descended from the lookalike)—No, from the boy who was kidnapped: he survived . . .

Are these words that ask, that interrogate, are they part of words to come? ... as in this same noisy room one man, two men, three men, all (though she’ll guess their occupations) unknown to Luisa who is so gloriously known to them at this reception on a Sunday before the new production, a different magic lantern in each set of season-subscribing eyes, all with attentive mouths (and noses!) each with raw carrot stick and glass of urine-tinted wine, approaching made the literary girl in the midst of further utterance perhaps fade proudly away into the rest of the room with a chandelier, two chandeliers more heavy with glass than light, and a large bell on a leather-and-mahogany bar that the Australian consul will pick up and ring in a moment—fade proudly away and toward no one special when she could have been talking to Luisa the diva, the opera singeuse (joke, we get gladly from her and she throws back to us half knowin’ we’z there only as {qua) need for change as we’z individuals being we’z race and we didn’t get wise to this overnight and haven’t even yet, which is why we’z currently angel-human alternant, you mayba gon’ not like this—halva takah chances—truth be maybe not so true as ye made up) so that to adapt to Manon’s or Piaf ‘s language (not Bidu’s or Luisa’s) Luisa’s own adoptable New York accent (turnoffable, turnonable depending you pay the bill) in order to double or treble or make her ever-various self even more many in the also still singular (if pidgin) French of singeuse, which does not in French exist, gave her a kick, hence some precious sense of entertaining herself, a solitary pay for those who are incorporated and much in demand, and, not wanting these three men whose lives might be waiting to become hers, nor anyone she can think of except Clara maybe, nor quite wanting the twenty-two (odd)-year-old poeta (who’d understand Luisa probably much better than Chile) to come back to confirm from just what collaboration there has come to Luisa’s brain through her ears—or (!) vice versa! —the words What is in others yet has others in it? and she is having help, she knows it, to hear those words and to know that it doesn’t matter if these people, the "others," are part of a statement or of an interrogative, she’s having help from somewhere, inspiration from the foothills (thank you), or from a dreaming person possibly whom she has never listened to, a mother in her (say) that she wished to be to her own father—the poeta would understand this of all things—when in 1950 or so he opened the great door to look at her standing fifty feet away beside a grand piano that was an intelligence in itself, with a tall window bright with a sky like sea beyond her singing voice upon which he shut that door again as if to say, You are here and I am elsewhere—he was then himself moving someplace: while she, with whatever back-straightening and shoulder-yearning, stayed where she was unless interrupted by herself or her teacher or the thought that her father had poked his nose through that door to look beyond her to the sea view out that nineteenth-century window: while the heavens knew we’z content to be foothills or her own mother herself, since we in never staying still might, since the sea becomes us, shrug seaward albeit thus yielding Easter or other half-known isles, or fault our half-known funking ways upward to Andes we may have felt we had to try being for ourselves however many (granted, temporarily) missing per-sonae would tell us convincingly what it was (you know) like to be ye Andes when not even her former resident tapeworm could tell (apart from living the—take it day by day—reality of) what it was like to be her or at least a parceled part of her team: but relation as we but are of her we found it not easy to swing away from her of late, since her vicarious habits kinda worked both directions, so, in process of getting suddenly real, she was living us, and only the sternest kind of asshole talk was going to keep her from going kind of crazy upon the creation of the distance necessary to move on, which us had to do constantly anyhow, being ourself as essentially relations as the coast of that ghost country is that country so long as its length is long: yet even then, our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind our lengthening, contracting proposition, which will seem at times a century in question, at other places a curve of something like land, and at others a conclusion we drew that then drew us: and so, to get that distance from her, we were all (be quiet, be quiet) hearing us say, quote, "She is, but now we see always was, in a dependency structured to cope better than it knew with a multiplicity of small-scale" yow-knows, say ongoing kinship not to be either totaled (qua dependency) or—

But Luisa holds on to those words What is in others yet has others in it: which later she’s not sure belonged only to the bend of the tall poet-girl’s retreat, but stayed in Luisa’s mind (in her, she-sees-now, doomed, though naked, lover’s presence coming to her which might surprise her or pass her by, acoustically adorned with his "You exist in the hearts of so many people"—that is, Don’t get mixed up in the troubles of exile-economists; think of the life you make for yourself though no one’s saying singers are dumb, "we" know how well you’ve personally managed your household finances long distance to Zurich where the portfolio info if not the buck stops; but also the way this gifted scholar-compatriot of yours, the husband of your friend, trots in the park, he is drawing some attention to himself and did you happen to know—which comes through as his quietly interrogating Do you happen to know—)

"What is in others," she breaks her lover’s silence (hearing again Clara’s last insinuating word "Mayn," a name, Luisa is sure, interrupting barely her lover’s silence), his approach, his amazing gravity flavored with her refrigerated peanut butter and as male as it is more hooded than blind, more blind than false—so her breath becomes "What is in others" (her breasts softened each upon his chest then gently filling at the rub of fur—as she continues "yet has others in it?"—

—for we, with her in us, stand ready if always on the move like her father even when he’s (as now, if not defunct by someone else’s game plan) under house arrest, stand ready, being but relations in the vale we genuinely rent though it gets smaller contrarily the closer we get to it—constipado we try out with the o ending, for the universe is now allowed to be too-badly male, and the female principle is considering having nothing to do with this pustulated uniwurst before it disappears into its own core-needs—

—meanwhile, Luisa’s real; she’s no longer the vehicle for tapeworm tracks to get us from there to here in or out of the persons of a diamond-squint Ojibway medicine man operating just a stone’s throw from the Great Lakes system, or his New York contact in this inter-worm arrangement the sometime fisher-friend guidee the Park Avenue doctor who swears by wood fires and reads by them to drive off winter spirits while thinking often of beloved Luisa, now still more real: her that does not—in her lover’s mind, say—quite add up . . . this just plain naked lover adds to all else he is half half-feeling, for he thinks pretty well without clothes on, though never has been obliged to as it were kill naked, and wonders if we had here (in others, others in it) some mere fresh citation from Hamlet—could be Horatio herself speaking—until it crosses his mind bound elsewhere unto the unknown that naked he might be obliged to undergo death, and cannot tell where that thought came from or comes to, for he is not given to whim—

—or totally to any one (the fur upon his buttocks might tell that to someone too late for it to matter), while not so knowingly for he is not by himself a poet he ships daily on the ship of state without questioning you know the Chicago-school anti-inflation economics his captains import to run the ship which lately has expanded its range though no less tightly compart-mented against local breach from ghost coasts it cruises multilaterally by theoretically lethal instruments only occasionally looking out a porthole into a life where this mufti officer himself will see here and there a wood fire, or its tiny glint from cabin embedded in a childhood mountain so that if we have, though not knowing him well, told him, we did not need to tell him, he’d suddenly like a wood fire right here in Luisa’s bedroom with its marble hearth (and could almost go looking for wood, send out for anything in this city) and at a moment when he finds he loves her, he does, and so won’t say (for now) the name he heard her (intelligently) say into a stage phone in her kitchen with its cold linoleum some minutes ago, he can puzzle that conundrum, puzzle and puzzle it with a lover’s fanaticism while not hearing in his arms Luisa’s mind say again the name from the phone—but now her lips themselves breathe the name, and he won’t seize whatever lead it gives, the name from the phone—and she runs her middle fingers hard down his spine, and he is quite taken if unprepared for the bumpy impress that is one track, one touch, and answers breath with breath, "There is a future in those fingertips—" "In America it is known as foreplay," she breathes back with an extra exhalation of smile—"Preparation," he breathes, and she, ‘7 feel it too," and part-withdraws part-draws him with her by the small of his back when he murmurs like a sleepwalker, "The motive of our preparations," as they move together, where are they exactly?, the bed gives off light through her hair, and he knows for certain that she knows Mayn only as a name, a word, no doubt through her friend on the phone, yet knows that she has decided something about this unknown "Mayn": Absent, intimate, sitting on the edge of her bed, "I know," she says, "that that little woman you said watched me is a journalist; don’t ask me how; I know," but where her absentness is now he doesn’t know, but feels her friendly hand on his buttock, and his toe, firmly in the carpet, feels waited on; and "Good," he firmly answers, "good," while, being almost in the ship of kind, he is not enough there to know what would happen were he to find his sea to be land and if so if he would crash and crumble and kindle, or would pass simply into another life.

For we exact but what we are: we are relations. And if not always so perfectly where, yet we will loyally to ourself ever exact what. Between kin and kind, between blunder and art, between the first words of the saying the diva distinctly heard from the ponderous, shy, likable young American poeta and the second half of them, which seemed to come to us from other distances if not from no distance at all. And turning from the poeta (who was in turn turning from her) Luisa found in the three hyper-dressed men less matter for speculating what, say, they did than lumps taking up room unless one were to remove them by coup, by blender, by dribbling one’s salt on them so they dissolve on the rock threshold of one’s private house imagined beside the strong leg and ribs and shoulder of one’s father giving a nature lesson on a mountain rock that for small Luisa became a doorstep of a crazy cottage in the trees, far from all else save father and brother, and where question fades into question along with their interlinks: oh such as the one hundred percent inflation through the first nine months of ‘72 and how much of Chile vanished into Bethlehem’s pocket through iron from 1913 to the fifties, and what sign hangs over the sale in ‘23 of Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine, to Anaconda by the multinationally musical Guggenheims and who had told her lover she’s bought and sold and bought some shares of Voest Alpine for he so so so carelessly mentioned it as they stood together operatically approaching the monumental dirty green of the Statue in the harbor only the other day (who got herself together, walked out across the waters of New York, and took up her stand in the last century Luisa supposes it was and hasn’t moved since)—while her father’s prominent nose so large and beautiful and, in those childhood days, straight (not the nose of a frequently interrogated subject nor ever the nose of a drinker) and, in the days of her adolescent music training, without those hard-to-appreciate (you know) dark hairs creeping out at the nostril, is recalled withdrawing, almost funny like a Walt Disney cartoon she saw where creatures come and go and those Marxists aren’t yet explaining that in Disney the only workers are lumpen thugs or noblesses sauvages and you will no ever see them makin’ steel to make trusses to make a bridge to carry coal over and/or be in slow motion blown sky into wind high: no, you might see that culminating reality but never the industrial process.

Did you mean (?), asks our (now old) friend the shifting interrogator not wishing to be indelicate on the score of sexual version, that, well, the lady in the harbor otherwise known as a one-hundred-fifty-odd-foot copper envelope without portfolio had in the course of this American greening we used to hear about acquired a warped relation to the one-time Guggenheim gig deep in Chuquicamata (a vintage Chilean wine) on which we have run a time-and-motion CAT-type scan turning up no link with Voest Alpine or Bethlehem (iron, that is), which does however sell on the Zurich exchange—

—for the interrogator, part of us as we him, can use wind as we while not quite ‘‘getting" as we do the concept of passive energy to process us inward while more and more as if with interpurse generosity accommodating the multiplicity of small-scale relations, as that ironmolder whose father had been inspired two generations earlier by editor Heighton of the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia and who met Alexander in Pennsylvania in early March and met a thousand striking/striking ironmolders of Coxey’s Army with

The seed ye sow, another reaps

The wealth ye find, another keeps

: not that Jim young or older would know or care for Luisa’s doctor’s haunts—such sayings haunting him as "When me they fly, I am the wings," though that devoted one-shot-and-only-one-shot tapeworm importer, who got from Boston to New York years before the flying shuttle or even pre-shuttle flight scene yet stays young, has those words in common with Jim’s mother Sarah, as few would know nowadays besides Brad, back in Windrow, N.J., who might not know he knows, nor if it is a "quote" or a bone-deep gene of his long-gone mother: but in the midst of such outlandish matter at graveside as what Sarah who ridiculed weather conversation said once about wind curving, Jim easily retained a mystery he had already worked out for himself— that according to Sarah, speaking to him when he told her he’s going to work on the farm this coming summer not in the office of the newspaper, he would go away: "passed" away, Miss Myles even in a model obit could say—which, O.K., also retained mystery, if you want, and as with Jim and his mystery, or was it his mother’s, the mystery didn’t get solved and shelved or even lost, but got said: yet really just remembered:

: we already remember what had been going on, the whirlwind ride in Bob’s first pickup, the unknown piner boy who got on and off but appeared only to be first there and then not there, in the bed of the pickup, though visible at a distance that didn’t add up and apparently not carrying the later missing evidence of thievery that was all Jim would report to Bob, who at first had said if Jim had wanted the gasoline can he would have given it to him, then shook his head and agreed that the piner kid had taken it, what’d you expect of them? (—but what did that mean? Jim abruptly asked—Mean? why that those kids are survivors; that’s what Bob meant):

: we already remember, despite the red herring interrupting us as to confuse what’s the margin, what’s the leverage, what’s the center, what’s the fulcrum (to compound the possible confusion if not the possibilities, for the interrogator had tried to cut in, perhaps just to show he knew what’s gon’ on to ask, Do you mean that the diva’s giving her lover head while contemplating murdering him on one of the unwholesome nights during the degenerate run of the gay Hamlet opera-ette?, and who, by the way, is doing the script?).

Already remember what’s so soon not here any more; remember at last what’s been here with us so long we had more’n enough time to see but now would seem to have been waiting to remember.

Oh that’s crap, all that regret crap, say James Mayn and Grace Kimball in unison at a distance so that curiously they hear each other but don’t know it, a distance that could be stereo if Jim chose to say it as loud and long as Grace; but less noise betokens often superior conviction, where here, Jim, in a Washington hotel bar, having described the mourning of Mel for Sarah, heard dry colleague Ted "agree" you don’t know what you had till it’s over, and described the love of a woman he had experienced only to find out upon her departure for Hawaii on a bird-study vacation that he had felt stifled by her attention, though granted it wasn’t yet quite over but her absence was like it being over, and only then did Ted see what he had been living inside of; and Mayga, quietly or, rather, patiently and strategically there with them at the bar waiting till she knew what she would say and had the right moment, seemed then to say we have the time to see but we rather let it go, you know?, and then remember it, remember with rue, let the marriage go, then lament that, let the life go—

—but crap, the fact of the matter, broke in Jim, his hand belyingly gentle upon Mayga’s sleeve, and as near to the White House fence as a trip to a window would evince, and he’s albeit freshly shaved and facing the crystal cone of a martini that particular very late afternoon or earliest evening (recalling a daiquiri his mother sipped all by herself in the music room before Sunday lunch once) the fact of the matter (having been, he feels, succinct all day, he repeats the words but hears himself gabbing, hears himself from an interior angle, which maybe is just the bullshit-radar often birdlike or snakelike sweeping the area, so he starts to say) "Wind does curve," but only gets out the first two words and will improvise, "Wind does know which way it’s blowing," and while Ted does his theatrically hilarious coughing at this, Mayga holds on to the spirit of the word "crap" and Jim suddenly sees she meant slantingly what she said and doesn’t believe you have to look forward only to figuring things out after all the damage is done, and he wants to embrace her there and then, and then somewhat untogether he does embrace her, but it isn’t just because he sees what she meant, and later that night, oh yes it’s about time (quips the interrogator) that this relation was owned up to, Mayga persuades Jim that the real indirection was his own, oh I know you you see, I know you, I am proud to, you understand, but I do know you, it’s you on the contrary trying to tell yourself what you don’t much credit—

—and here I am letting my marriage go? he asked—which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down or sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth—with her going home to South America and "going home" with him tonight each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

: which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She did like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was not," said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom—but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it?, years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade)—and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he—and his wife at least—did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he still didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly—aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t his house but his grandma’s.

But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he?, and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning —a Sarah special—had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into his own mouth his own recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah—"they ain’t curved."

Unless you were talking about a hurricane spiral, Jim observed out of the blue to Bob, who didn’t know Jim had been sitting here in Bob’s basement thinking, but now said, "We had a false alarm that day your brother carried on," as so they had, for no less a member of Brad’s Day than Mel had arrived in that strangely focused living room like a "living" wake with the info on his lips.

And so Jim found and soon afterward must have left it there unsummoned where it belonged in what rapidly developed into—hell!—the past (shrug), that he could collect if he concentrated (sun heat, uneven Earth shape, airflow cells, pressure belts, horizontal current)—all there was to it, you had to concentrate—not be confounded with "Get centered," from Grace Kimball which three whole decades later nonetheless comes out as unison to our ears, relations though we only are, the skeleton of that Brad’s Day talk about the weather. (You’d make a good newsman, joked Ted in their Washington bar not twenty years later and got a wrinkled forehead from his hunched, heavy set friend and a snicker from none other than Spence, whom they often had at the end of the bar pigeonholed but too sleazed-out and too silly for Jim to ever contemplate picking on him—under layers of slightly ugly comings and goings.)—and the skeleton was attached to people: for it was grandfather Alexander who had claimed that air travels from your high-pressure areas to your low, because to begin with, as Mel had pointed out, you get your pressure belts because air heats and cools and when it expands and contracts to put it ass-backwards (though isn’t that where the ass was, the last time we didn’t look?) and your pressure belts move because, to begin with, like stays with like, so you get cells of wind despite the warm always moving if not spending itself toward cold—which it becomes—for to begin with, whatever is true of the water which Alexander predicted would be on the warm side should anyone sample it this afternoon, the air moving at speed over an erratic Earth’s land of mountains and valleys, beauties or pockmarks, is not warm, as Margaret said with something like faraway anger, but not because water is slow to lose the sun’s heat, land fast (which is why the far, far more than cozy warmth of the sun’s radiation journeys so many million miles earthward while Earth in its ball of damp vapor is always moving but cannot ‘scape this given life, though by what or whom given the shouting tenor of the doctor-organist Sundays when Jim for a time, then, at (what?) fifteen attended service, could not say).

But Bob, why did Bob, eyebrows and all, dispute what Sarah supposedly had said? Well, Bob himself was the source: ‘course wind curved, Jim thought, yet when Jim did think about it one Sunday in church beside Anne-Marie Vandevere, who set no more store in church than Jim and did not find the doctor-organist much to applaud as a person perhaps because his daughter Cornelia wasn’t in her group, Cornelia could hear the horses whinnying for their corn in the stalls at the military school down their street (Do they feed them corn? Jim asked), Jim had to wonder if Bob all in all wasn’t right because what could nudge a wind off course except another wind and yet his father said there was no question about it, winds do curve: until one day that like other days in that year of his mother’s suicide might have been easy to forget he kept Anne-Marie waiting in Bob’s pickup discreetly (because illegally) down the street a couple of blocks clear of school because he had been thinking analytically and nonetheless passionately about dropkicking in a wind and whether his father would come to see him play since his father really didn’t have the time (But yes he did, intervened Mayga, swapping her stronger old-fashioned for Jim’s while Ted looked on)— As it happened, he did, said Jim, for Jim had been discussing basketball with Ted, the enclosed court, the trick of taking up position so it was (you hoped) clearly, stably yours then by law, and preferred not to find his father in the discussion, though then Mayga’s kind interruption had turned the talk to that afternoon of the pickup truck parked two blocks or three from school, Anne-Marie still sitting upright in the cab (as it happened, the driver’s seat) of Bob’s vehicle while Jim was somewhere (he had to admit it) thinking—if "thinking" didn’t make it more than it really was—why yes, leaning on the glass above that great old green-gray-brown relief map of South America somebody’d donated to the high school: thinking that if the fucking wind (which might curve around buildings like New York City or mountains) was in cells like individuals, well, how about a football? it got going its way up above the ground, but the land wasn’t promising to be there where it was when the ball came down. Ted and Mayga and Mayn all laughed at that expurgated evocation of what he did not for a minute know was a well-known effect that got named eventually after a Frenchman far more recent than it and that at some time had inspired Mayn to go get stuck in some difference between inertial and non-inertial systems, which explained why science had no satisfactory way to acknowledge this Coriolis effect; but there was Jim leaning on the glass above South America, as a familiar commanding voice called at him, "Get off the glass," and he removed his arms, transferring the support of his extended weight to his stomach and back muscles (no doubt), exactly at the instant he had seen that distant continent move beneath him and understood with a shiver, hearing scary words from his otherwise friendly coach, not just that it depended whether you were here on Earth or beyond it; and if you were out beyond it the wind down here crossing at right angles to the kick that he’d aimed downfield goal-postward, was straight as a die, even if Earth wasn’t; but if you were on Earth the wind with indubitable deflection warped—wait, I thought the football was yer wind, said Ted (and Yeah, echoed the wise little bastard free-lance photographer and news "dealer"—if the deal wheeled to his sleazy satisfaction—at bar’s end)—but coach John Rocker was asking if Jim had heard what them two girls in tenth grade had done, and at that moment like another discovery even more confounded unless you just stated it and let the fucking flickering mystery be—like the would-be dream that kept Jim "busy" (as Margaret said dreams kept her when asleep), the would-be dream Jim had-and-lost the very next dark, dark morning when he saw he wouldn’t have the chance to understand it except he did hear singing in the next room and it wasn’t his brother’s (room, that is)—which was in one sense the only next room next to Jim’s— but the music room downstairs and his mother was singing interrupted bits of a song teaching it to apparently Brad who was there with her and the word "world" and the word "morning" that came through the emptied, dark air were all Jim knew or was let know and what was between—well, yes, what was between, except the usual nothing—and yet hearing John Rocker’s hairy, husky voice discovering what it was saying just as its own words croaked out happily, "Why they damn near killed themselves in that pickup truck of Bob Yard’s I heard—hey, don’t you go with the Vandevere girl? what’s she doing driving a pickup truck when she can’t drive, the Pietrangeli girl was with her and I heard the right door was open when Anne-Marie swung the truck around in the middle of Manalapan Avenue so it almost tipped and the other one fell or jumped out and a car hit the right front headlight but they’re O.K.": so it wasn’t clear whether this was something two girls or one had done: but, leaving the glass counter covering the crocodilean relief map of South America and angry and reluctant but expressing only surprise and concern to John Rocker to whom he told the factual truth at once and John certainly did help out in the next couple of hours, he found pockets of relief in the middle of his anger and chaos—because his mother was dead and he was expected to, he was expected to, he didn’t know at all what? but pockets in the anger that were independent minds self-protected where the understanding had come along with South America moving beneath the glass (maybe you needed glasses, said Ted)—which marked the limit of what Jim could confess to this good friend whom he would go on joking with and detailing packages of fresh information to year by year over a drink or at a ballgame, baseball that became football that became basketball Washington, New York, Washington, home ‘n home, two decades upwards of—while to Mayga—

—Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—

—no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—

—I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—

—to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too—but the insight had held to Jim, that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home—When were they at the beach? —but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—

—it was that Bob had needed to be part of Brad’s Day, well he’s a nelectrician ‘n has a pickup truck ‘n a dark red Ford sedan simonized like grandfather Alexander’s shoes, and a load of friends who say, Good old Bob, you have to watch him because only he knows where all them wires and cables are going—and he hardly belonged with the Mayns in Throckmorton Street or even in Sarah’s awful story but was in it no less and knew he would provoke by introducing that staggering fact of Sarah’s expressed opinion re: wind curves and re-provoke by citing his dismissal of her late view but it was where he was—where, Flick Mayn years later able to bring herself to say, where he was coming from, he wanted to be part of it and so—

—and yet as Jim raced through the uncaring halls of the high school, damn it, to the no doubt real location of that bashed-up pickup truck that was his responsibility when he had only a picture of it in his head, a blonde girl with lipstick (judge’s granddaughter) embracing the wheel of an endlessly rocking vehicle, a dark-haired girl without lipstick spilled, Catholic thigh by Catholic thigh, out of Bob’s stupid truck with her history notes bound in a notebook but adrift, Jim knew more, knew more than he knew, so he was minutes and minutes getting clear of that high school and a picture of a blackboard full of fond chalky shapes abandoned by human hand, but the very obstacles—

—read ob. (we recollect already)—

—very obstacles that kept him forever from getting out of this high school and down the street to stupidly hunt for the girls and the truck without asking directions though it was his hometown, wasn’t it?, the very obstacles that seemed to make his run down those halls endless wonderfully let him see, let him see—

—not a principal and a journalism teacher in passionate dispute or a male math teacher with some solid on the board and his head on a desk evidently too tired to even think "n’est-ce pas" at the end of one of those loud challenging non-questions of his—but that something in Bob Yard had loved Jim’s mother, and Jim, who didn’t care for either man too much, might be a hair closer to Bob than to his own father Mel, but that was crap like everything else, and beside the point and one more obstacle while the world seemed to be rattling yer cage, you had two systems no matter what the truth and so on about Sarah turned out to be, and it was more than that, oh shit, she was right ‘bout wind and Earth, and Bob (yer uncle!)’s right too even if he didn’t honestly and truly say it to her, except Bob’s the one on Earth, where winds what with Earth’s easterly rotation do look like they curve, whereas he’s takin’ the view from out beyond the Earth that ought to be Sarah’s. They had their problems all right, that clung to them like this sight that came to Jim and stayed after Coach Rocker launched Jim outward with his scary words, and he felt denied by those goddamn girls the chance to hang on to the two systems but they held on to him and went on knowin’ him even when he left them, seemed like, to rush away to handle one of those well-isolated—

—incidents, the interrogator fills in, proud of idiom—

—incidents to be handled, dealt with, coped with, covered, etcetera, as if this up-to-now continuous world, one by one—

—taking it a day at a time, adds the interrogator—

—oh, were you divorced too we chime in? did you have your limb cut off and then regret it? did you lose a loved one by unforeseen overdrift and have a really hard row to hoe because of it coming out of left field where there was no warning track to tell you the guys off there on the firing line rattling the fences wasn’t just taking batting praptice (as Sammy pronounced 4’practice")?