THE HERMIT-INVENTOR OF NEW YORK, THE ANASAZI HEALER, AND THE UNKNOWN ABORTER

The grandson, who had refrained from asking if a certain skinny geezer that came and went one summer day was the man or weird character in question, would recall his grandmother’s remark—history, prediction, regret, relief—that there were things about the Hermit-Inventor not even she knew; for the grandson said, and at once recalled saying, that there was maybe stuff the Hermit-Investor didn’t know about the Anasazi healefs discoveries.

Oh that must be so, the grandmother averred, with a pensiveness not humorous this time, yet embracing but never equal to a knowledge they both had that the grandson would know things about these her fabled history and lands that she herself did not. Wasn’t this because she had always been so near to him, he to her?—yes: down the street of a New Jersey town’s seasons from the late-spring morning when light shared itself with him, shored from the tiers and banks and steep slopes of foliage seen from his own third-floor room when he would stay with his grandparents, or seen from his grandmother’s own second-floor bedroom (where once he had learned to whistle), prime green-sea mass of waves of maple-bough leaves that crowded the porch as if the trees were mysteriously withheld, all but their leaves, which so surrounded the dining-room windows of his grandparents’ house that lawn and dirt-ground and driveway and the raised sidewalks of Throckmorton Street where it crossed West Main all just flickered as if through the fine wings of butterflies known by name or as if precipitating the broken motions and real flow of these sidewalks’ own brown and slate lozenges, on, on to autumn’s first intuition that winter had been in its mind all along (we mean chill) when the boy, who was like a man and felt somewhat that way, left his own house for school; left always later than his kid brother always in haste yet with the leisure of those young years no matter what the weather (while the kid brother curiously hated and could burst with rage at the lunatic winds that visited the street during just six or seven January days, unlike the tougher elder brother), who came out of their now motherless house a hundred yards down the street from their grandparents’—and, on instinct that morning as he was turning at the end of the flagstone walk toward downtown, he glanced back in the direction of his grandmother’s house to find her there—a watchman or, in the midst of everything, a live eye—there diagonally up the street on the far side as if something in his head way in advance had been seeing her there but she hadn’t gotten the message until now, a figure who waved like a mother seeing him off to school, where he was a regular person and a husky, friendly guy, etcetera, nothing odd about him, he’d leave that to others in and out of his family: yet now seeing his grandmother standing by a pillar of her porch, her hands clasped, he registered some rift in the scheme as an extension of it, economy of scale long before he knew those words (which years later like many others seemed to have been waiting for him inside him)—only that that grandmother woman, whom he had fallen out with after recently doubting for the first time her old but secretly always mounting stories, doubting because they began to flicker as more than stories and to bear queerly upon his life so that he had to think that if an event then that was so like here and now wound up like that, things here will too—ugh ugh ugh and shoot and shit but it sounds silly!—was waving him ("downstreet," as you said in that town like "downwind") off to school from that home of hers that he loved and sometimes lived in, and not this other home of his own at the other end of this flagged walk less than a regulation championship pool’s length behind him his father’s house, his departed mother’s undervalued house, and his own (an early real-estate insight belonging to him as freshly and clearly as in later years the house never seemed to), from which he had just emerged (for yes he did feel the exposure), with a gray-with-white-trim porch one step lower than the porch of his grandparents’ white house, "his grandmother’s," up the street: yet his own porch had dark, earth-damp, min-erally aromatic room under it to store two or three (in fact two and a half) rakes and some crates and a litter of forgettable junk and an occasional eavesdropping boy and a lawnmower that you made into a congenial machine between your force and the sweet sluggish-grown growth of the grass that didn’t feel very grassy green when you were pushing through it: a house with, above that porch, a ruffled tangle of dry, dark, indestructible ivy running up and around the porch posts sticking by some adhesive, some type of time, and pretty only at a distance, but a porch not with the everlasting paint smell in one specific corner of his grandparents’ porch, the corner behind the all-weather wicker-white chair (with kind of webbed legs, roostery-furred legs, if you know what we meant at the wordless time this was thought) in which his grandfather sometimes but not in this weather or at this hour of the day sat with a tome of the Century Dictopedia (as he said it, open under a pearl-handled magnifier which he fingered and looked less through than at, murmuring that this way you could see double:) while this school morning, whether because alone and watched, or from a mental wind from her, to her, a very grandmother-wind if you will, the opposite of that supposed ill wind (yay) Danny Kaye sang of in one of those nutty movie numbers as the identical-twin celebrity-extrovert—or in fact mistral (of the largely unknown boy-man’s later years when we lived to Change or talk non-judgmentally of Change late into the night show and mistral became miztral); but did this grandmother-wind, like nor’easter or sou’wester (also a rain gear in the overall weather machine’s sluice-drive continuum), come from? or did it "go to?" (as Shakespeare in high school said, while Jim and friends snickered, "Go to"—"How now, Gratiano?"— "How now, my lord, wilt hear this piece of work?"—"Come hither, sit by me"—"Go to, thou varlet")—for this wind, grandmother or ill or other—or mother—moved this morning across his broadening shoulders from left to right pushing him to turn squads-right upon achieving the main sidewalk which he was going to do anyway toward school which is beyond the other, far end of town, and he thereupon turned against this momentum, only to find, up the street, his grandmother on her own porch waving, as his mother sometimes more slowly would from her window if she was awake and in position to and had she now still been among the living if in all probability suicidal:

Cut, said the man who played the director in a picture about Hollywood that was showing one weekend in Windrow, New Jersey; but you kept watching; the movie went on, the screen didn’t go blank on you with consequent whistling and stamping as if the audience were trying to get out: Cut yourself in on what someone else is doing, a woman coming home, saying hello, waving goodbye or was it good morning, or just good, practically speaking, off there, until you can’t tell if her scale is inside or all around her, like your own according to the powerful woman Mayn visited in the Bronx years later not because he wanted his own auras read but to get information on someone else, and there the locally famous woman, who was unexpectedly pregnant, leaning back thoughtful on one arm of her armchair, told him she do him but not gonna talk about someone else, some lady he said come to see her: Cut, to the grandmother waving slowly, not at all trying to be his mother (it came to him), but being herself, which didn’t rule out being at his house when he and his little brother got home from school, Brad earlier, Jim at dusk, a tall, surprisingly soft woman, although quiet somewhere inside her, for he understood one day that they had this understanding not to pry—let some feelings, some of the past, go unknown although wasn’t it true that it would always come out? and he waved back to this grandmother of his who’s way up the street there on the opposite side—she’s got her life thank you—as if this morning salute happened always or, looking ahead to when another event that felt sort of laid out, used to happen oh twenty years later in the century, and his own wife marveled that he accepted this odd event, namely, meeting just like that on a city street a very specific person from years past and on the spur of the moment taking for granted that here came this person he hadn’t seen in several years, but—well, walking down a street in New York’s Greenwich Village past a bike shop all metal, glass, and color and with a quarter ton of maroon newness in it, perhaps because of a great cold red English bike frame that, as he had not noticed knowingly before, is a plane figure in space, a near parallelogram stronger with sides and an angle or two gone on to a kiltered inertia of vector-time elegant and ready that always waited for it, a bike frame detached from all wheels applicable in future and hanging near a soft-blue French Motobecane completely assembled so the blue warmed the shining saddle as much as did the sunlight, he reflected upon a harshly curious interview he had just smiled, factored, and chatted his way through with a maverick meteorologist, only now to get run down by two small laughing kids escaping their mother who’s at the door of a brick-faced bank just as he met a russet-bearded man (economist) not knowingly seen by him in seven years, and (here’s the point) said directly, "Hi, Cliff," as if years were days, and nodded with a smile and passed on down the street for another seven, ten, twelve years—as if (did we say?) it had been laid out—

—laid out? asks a voice threatening to get comic that instantly acquires the body of the all-purpose interrogator who has probably picked up "all-day sucker" in his crash research for potential enemies’ childhood laid out with a jawbreaker roundhouse right—but no: not laid out on the carpet with one punch, laid out like a ground plan in motion—

—so later he knew that that morning that his always beloved grandmother had been off there waving away the distance between them like thin air, he had put away into a dump of his brain some sketch or letter in the seldom-emptied wastebasket in his own room two doors down from his father’s bedroom (pyjama’d forty-five-year-old bulk dead to the world in sky-blue cotton issued him for his July birthday till that father would come awake jerking up onto one elbow and shielding himself with the other against the room’s deep shadow so Jim could quote his father’s old "He’s a good boy when he’s asleep" remembering many not apparently unhappy bedtimes when this got said in his mother’s company but when company was present so the smaller Jim would grin dumbly, he saw himself, but no one in this dark bedroom to say it to now, and so much surrounding the now bigger, older Jim inside that it’s worth putting also out of mind), a diagram (close to) a coach’s blackboard play-pattern remembered (doodled) with an exactness honoring maybe not the scale or content but the method of the October History class he was sitting in; or during Geometry; or during Journalism (which, oddly, his father with all that practicality sweating toward acumen if not quite to it, didn’t think he should waste time taking when there’s a newspaper in the family:

: so the lines of two homes got linked by a street paralleling them by means of sidewalks the length of the town, and got connected by him and corrected by his heartbeat so that, shifting through at least one inequality, they became like the lines of one T-formation halfback going in motion to the left side until the ball was snapped, and the quarterback faked a quick pass shallow to the left but he handed off instead to his stellar fullback (me) who went three steps to the right, leaned toward scrimmage—toward tackle, where a void had been cleared by "Tornado" Tim Ivins, thus attracting doubly a new flow of enemy defenders—leaned the other way to cock his right shoulder and heave a surprise pass as unexpected as it was diagonally risky to the far left sideline where the very halfback who’d been in brotherly motion and to whom the quarterback had just faked a pass was now all on his lonesome, while drawing during History your circled Xs and your broken lines and the blocking assignments, he was aware of growing a rollicking hard-on receiving beside him his girl’s faint halo (just before lunch) of gentle sweat and a seasoning he knew one night some weeks later was gardenia. He had brought her one, having never knowingly smelled one, in a shiny white carton, shoebox size, he had to carry like a coffin offering with something live or afloat inside, gingerly anyhow, and dared to greet her with a kiss upon her cheek but long enough (was it one kiss, or two or three) so he felt her smile but with precious quakes along the dimple which are now and forever tender plus amused, so that (in any event) the play pattern of the quarterback’s faked pass and the fullback’s faked run displaced the teacher’s words—which were about words—and well this was the way the diagram of the two homes acted like a play pattern and that early morning that he felt was brought to some wonderfully imperceptible point upon the raw air by his grandmother’s being there,

he displaced or slipped into a fold of some soft luggage for the journey (Great day in the morning! his granddad could say, happily astoni’ed) which fold might have been itself something slipped away—dis (we continue) placed the atmosphere of seeing his grandmother waving, in the time it took him to go from porch down own front walk to sidewalk, his own home behind him had obviously swung round (but don’t tell anyone, they’ll say you’re nuts or, worse, that you’re not serious, don’t tell even yourself, for, shit, the truth’s gon’ come out anyway)—sailing before those prevailing easterlies you heard about {prevailing westerlies, a man interjects at seaside Mantoloking cripes anybody ‘n everybody knew what west wind meant!). But was it blew from or to the west? because Jim asked and forgot—to think about it, that is—and asked again {and wasn’t told!) for they didn’t even know all about clouds and you could see clouds but couldn’t see wind (said some voice in him) and this was there in him and yet wasn’t him at all because he was on the march to school: he blew up at his girl (though laughing all the way) Whadda ya mean I’m spoiled?—just ‘cause you say you got homework so you can’t come out to the movies?—and he squirted—

—quite unexpected words at her: "What if you got pregnant?" (he would say anything to her at fifteen, he could do that and she didn’t get shocked) but he was thinking horrified a second, What if this queenly girl has already (not gotten, but) been!—and never told me!—because some girls must be like that, ‘stead of putting the screws to you in which case you followed Owl Woman’s example, "I am going far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling." But if it is not an irreverent interruption, How did owls get a reputation for knowing so much?—shit, Owl Woman, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who heard it from several people including both Margaret and the East Far Eastern Princess, was just always turning into an owl and her getting the name (they took all the good names—Red Cloud, Left Hand, Reared Underground, Tall Salt) Owl Woman might not mean a thing about wise owl shit and mean only that she disappeared into an owl when she wanted to and maybe flew around at night looking for bright eyes to aim at until—cut—she was back again Owl Woman, singing songs she didn’t claim responsibility for since they came to her in dreams or when she was an owl but who was to say if the owl was in her or she was in the owl, or basically was owl?, she was known to have had children, so maybe she wasn’t an owl; but what happened if you turned into an owl in the middle of giving birth or in the middle of—

—squirting water he had virtually sucked (so distant was it) at the old low-pressure drinking fountain outside the noisy school cafeteria at his friend Sam’s big brother who wore glasses lensed thick as whirlpools and was fat enough to sit on you but when fighting threw these fiendish longitudinal jabs that looked fast but no more than fast until they went through you as evil as an electric shock and permanently greened a muscle in your arm y’know, and on the march to school (for, after the million shocks flesh is heir to, it’s still only the late apple-breeze of the fall of 1945 with the dust still setting on those immortal Japanese recreations one beginning Hiro t’other ending saki that through their layers of sifted, screened, pastel’d tumuli-cumuli foretell that with American aid the Japs can imitate anything, up to and including an obliterated polis) it’s his grandmother just beginning the day sweeping the porch a bit early, not this daydream of his own front walk maybe twenty or twenty-five yards behind him turning into that other and only apparently much greater distance from him of her house so when he waved back far down the street and held her gaze a second as casual as if she was there every morning, the distances to either home with him at the center were, well, equal—her large gray eyes his body swung to, as close as his mother’s eyes sometimes at the window behind him of his own house that’s turned by this arc of mind or swing of wind to his grandmother’s: This afternoon in his mind anyhow he would be fighting the halfbreed (who most of the time had no smell) for the halfback spot that in the new formations was basically left halfback when everyone knew that he should and would stay where he was, he was broader and right for fullback where the coach was playing him for sure-footed solidity and while his grandmother, who often employed that halfbreed classmate of her grandson’s for yard work, asked of the "endless hole," as grandfather put it so slowly filling up with doughnuts or crullers, how football was going, or Sam’s father’s huge greenhouse for commercial roses, or how Geometry was going, she would listen so truly to what was said that she might have been drawing out of him those shelved daydreams where the halfback’s positioning and speed went apart from his person, in fact so perfectly separated from the halfbreed’s braggart person that you acquired your own signal back at you that, on a morning porch not obscured now by the bough leaves of other months and from the center where you yourself were just equal in radius (that warmed and vanished into his hand’s question now Which was more sensitive—the upper slope of his girl’s breast or the lower plum-jut and did one breast get aroused by the other’s being aroused?)—just equal in radius to his distance from his home porch, because that porch of hers was home to him, and never forget that if he himself had lost his one mother (by sea; one if by sea), the grandmother-woman had lost a daughter (which word he could apply to his mother only with the difficulty he had of thinking she was not dead), and if he couldn’t think of his grandma generally and of his girl’s breast in the same head, nor with the real regular stuff on his mind and at the same time that dopy radius that belonged in someone else’s mind not his daydreaming its swing around behind him and in front of him plotting out some future, and then around and back between the obviously near house his father now alone owned and the grandparents’ place obviously six, eight times as far away (leave the surveying to us, to George Washington and his sister city Thomas Jefferson), why the radius from being impossibly the same to both houses to being plausibly and clearly the same now became a radius just a shade more than you needed or wanted: but for what? for some godforsaken reason that forgot itself in the doings of his day till he paused at the threshold of a class early in the darkening afternoon and got shoved with initiative by some class799

mate just as he saw rain hitting the silver panes like light, and his teacher, a statuesque woman capable of movement, turned from the board with wet around her eyes und cheeks, so that, elbowing the friend who shoved him, he could put all of it and none of it together for a second to embrace an elusive burial of fact, that it must be many mornings his grandmother had been on that porch of hers up the street watching the motherless brothers go to school in succession, and he had known it with some corner of both his eyes so not shifting their light upon her who watched over him was just this vacancy about the thing that had befallen him—not a death, though someone else’s, but a thing—fallen right through him to leave him nowhere to be found apart from the wave that had fallen through him, so there’s this feeling that’s unsure embarrassment (he told his girl Anne-Marie after they had lain on the night ground fifty yards from Bob Yard’s parked pickup truck, and she understood how you could feel embarrassed at being so) over what his mother had done or "arranged to have done," he kept hearing and hearing, though this he did not report to Anne-Marie, layin’ on her elbow once in a while noticeably blinking with the coolest and most loving concentration so that he finally cried one time there on the ground and said he didn’t know shittin’ why except he was now more than embarrassed (she said, I know), he shoved her in the shoulderbone, scented flesh, matter!—and she shoved back harder and he almost asked her to marry him by which he would have meant go away now at the age of fifteen and a half, which she would not have done and partly because she did love him, but he didn’t say the words and felt better for holding those words in, while sensing the Tightness of feeling, yes, embarrassment (it didn’t matter if anyone else in the world felt it for this type of event—he did) embarrassment at the departure of his mother, his grandmother’s daughter; at the same time he was not going to go out of his way during that autumn to tell his grandmother he couldn’t trust her old Princess and Indian stories to be stories any more because she was obviously often the East Far Eastern Princess and had done at least some of the things that some of the time some of her old kid stories said, an Indian chief’s son’s mother who was nuts or at least with a hole in her head all the time filling with demons really did die and really did come back to life when her son left in pursuit of that paleface Princess now immortally bronzed by the western sun (though bronze was an alloy of Bolivian tin and Chilean copper, though come to think of it, how did you alloy? did you melt the metals and stir ‘em up in a bowl made of earth?) and somewhere in his mind populated by football smells of cleat-rubber, fresh (green) football shirts, hide, choking earth, and the tense, constant future of play patterns and populated by his now only one girlfriend’s wonderful proof that flowers might perspire with dew that other scientists could imagine came down from above and from the outside but really came from the interior of the soul even on Sunday to the straw-creak of slightly shifting cushion stuffing in the church pew (that seemed the least Godly place of the week and in some pleasant threat one of the more exclusively sexed-up of times in the fairly steadily sacred week, feelings he years later knew that he had accepted as wordless and unlosable), he recalled and recalled that his mother had told him he should go away and would go, but then had gone herself: so he woke up into his mother’s oceangoing hallucination for which there was no word, not even the one they gave it beginning with s (for selfish, for sea, for simoom, for suing in absentia), too confused to do any but the next thing, suspecting that his grandmother’s west-easterly histories shed upon him some shadow if he let them (which he did not do) imagining through the successive fall and winter clarities of his mother’s absence that no force acted on him, oh he was freer (oi, he was freer—oi, they would say, because one of their friends was Jewish and both his parents were, too, in that New Jersey town and this kid’s father had bought out the hardware store and enlarged it just at the time another newspaper got started that commanded the outlying agricultural advertising and audience, oi), freer than free, which equaled but an illusion of manhood he even then guessed.

So he chose to be friends with his grandmother—but friends instead of relations or something else unknown to him—having never told her he wasn’t friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel a man. And the day dreamt radius of one school morning faded into his life countersinking there some power he wouldn’t take, particularly because it went on thinking itself into the future unless he reined it back a little like beeg thoughts that if shortened find their true area, as closely real as it is troublesome—that is, to survey such facts without taking the speed, juice, and directed path out of such moving bodies the better to see them.

So he found his grandmother again and they were talking about the weather. They went that much back into her old yarns, when people cared to know why weather happened as it did. The two weathers of the Anasazi Medicine Man and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, who in one of his successive incarnations, just one year before meeting an editor’s daughter on an island that belonged to Bedloe among the littered limbs and deep-mined uncratings of a Statue he called a French gift for comic art, had witnessed a tornado so symmetrical it sustained itself for two hours, while the Anasazi Healer, who said if you reject the Yuma preventive of an ounce of mesquite wood ashes and purest brook water and must choose the pound of cure as my old friend the Hermit-Inventor of the East has taught me, go ahead and beat your belly with rocks (knock knock), but if the wind turns to hail or even rain you may wind up having the baby anyway—thus the alte Anasazi who would ever be six hundred and more years of age but whose death without-reincar-nation was real and important, having precipitated an eastbound cloud un-precedentedly noctilucent and low that was to be contemplated as weather and not for its long, slow trip in the lee of a young Indian man (the boy flickeringly, and the man less and less, recalled) tracking during 1894 (a hundred years or so before the end of the world) a young Anglo woman one day to be herself turned into a mist and temporarily secreted if not inhaled by a statue large as a giant rising from the waters of an aging harbor.

The two weathers of downcoming and upgoing were not quite the same as observed ("just seen") and created ("suddenly made, y’know"), or the weathers of presence ("there") and absence ("not there") in turn not the same as the two weathers of leaving and arriving; nor were these pairs to be parceled or paralleled equally between the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor. For the Indian and the Anglo agreed as well as disagreed regardless of their relative distances from each other; they were near each other sometimes even to the point of meeting, and yet they were oftener far remote, while the Hermit in his Net-Space-Traversed seemed less a hermit than the Anasazi who dwelt in a high rock cell but in order perhaps to be visited by those wishing to be away from where they were and get a glimpse of the more than old man; and he was visited by images, winds, and creatures of everlasting hues and waters including his friend the Hermit and the alleged Mena (woman-zoologist, Chilean, specialist in the javelina and its hind-mounted scent glands, also in horse-bone meal) and the troubled young Navajo Prince, who for the love of a strange girl visitor had abandoned his principal pursuits, his studies of the northern bison tongue’s energy potential, the improvement of corn crops, the messages of Earth told in the apparent motions of storm mass and dry cloud from mountain to mountain or the transparency of an aborted fetus.

The grandmother’s grandson thought a minute, as if like an avalanche of warm air the events during that awful summer, which was always the year of his father’s age, had not happened; he said he didn’t remember if the East Far Eastern Princess had ever gone to see the Anasazi Medicine Man; then he caught himself—It doesn’t matter, Gramma.

Doesn’t it? she asked, piqued, at odds with him and ruffled but not flummoxed; No, she supposed it didn’t.

For what would she have gone to the Anasazi Healer for? He wasn’t your general practitioner, nor much interested in disease (his own people having all died out hundreds of years ago), though you don’t always go to a medicine man to get rid of some old Eurasiatic disease, and the lady in question, bearing upon her person an aura as real as the turbulence a person may conveniently release from his or her heart system in order to externalize it so others may enjoy it, may have trusted the phenomenal specialist she consulted who was himself so old he was about ready to become a more or less fragrant crumble of herb fossils to be read on the concave floor of his retreat, if she knew how to read such herbs, for she knew next to nothing of the lore, only that the fern leaf of the reddish-lavender-bloomed redstem storksbill showing in early spring in open areas where the soil has been disturbed may cause upheavals in the womb that are heard as if from afar until they come closer like a dream and may be woken from but whose releasing magic may be overvalued by some women who imagine they seek swift solutions when in truth they seek knowledge—until, with his gentle wisdom, unaccompanied by what went without saying (that he would respect her privacy), her aged host the Anasazi Medicine Man said that in a few days she would know what to do and then the how would follow naturally; and she went away feeling at once that she had arrived and was all of a piece, which when she told her future husband many weeks later at the other end of the world he took to mean "all in one piece," which he echoed gratefully. But by then the intermission in her life was over, and he was a good man and it didn’t matter what he said—

—because the two weathers of leaving and arriving went on regardless, observed the grandson (and we who were his Choor relations often so far from the country he inhabited as to be beyond body though bound in many bodies saw that her smile at being told this seemed pensive and neutral, not an elder being told a bedtime fancy by a child though charmed by how he said "regardless" at the age of fifteen and even sadly dubious at the soft corners of her infinitesimally downturned mouth, though she was the one who had thought up a long time ago leaving and arriving, to express what she recalled).

Where did he recall a tornado?—I’m getting old, Gramma, losing my memory. Let’s see, she said, fifteen is only the first prime you’ve passed. But he did recall a tornado, and there’d been a division of opinion. The Hermit-Inventor of New York looking upward described it according to his lights and claimed to have seen the whole flotsam-jetsam the tornado snapped up and took away to its grand crocodile nest (the Hermit humorist), and chewed up, bag and baggage, animals, people, some possibly both, and some so ruined as to turn into each other, all in the rotational storm that toured the area like an early Geiger-sucker and that went away across a mesa and could be heard but in the uproar not seen, then suddenly came back (But but but but, didn’t he see?)—because (he said) the only thing it had done was leave, after having been in the Earth there to begin with and would never in any sense have arrived—for it had only left.

The Hermit knew with his own eyes, however, that the winter wind when it leaves New York precipitates the arrival from an equal and other area of spring air: and this must be exactly as real as those consequently materializing birds which the Anasazi on the other hand knew had in fact never left as birds or anything else, but became the winds, whose many-voiced, potentially screaming speeds were but streaming cloaks for their absolutely unchanging spirits: and he, on this other hand, from his acquaintance with the steeps of Taos’s holy Blue Lake where the ponderosas hold the upwind and keep it from getting away, and from his acquaintance with the heated, standing-still breezes of the desert to west and to south, knew that wind only appears to move in or move on, but really waits at rest in invisible skins of breath and when the sky speeds up, to come even with the Earth it hardly knew was as entranced by it—say, a slippage or molding shrug or searching readjustment by the sky frictioning the Earth possibly in memory-for-future of those rare times when all the layers of light hiding us from death but each with its cleft may shift into line leaving one great wheeling spoke-like, aisle-like cleft—those invisible skins of breath at rest in all the places of the country are stirred to make their breath blow outward from their fierce stores of force so that few of the People if any know certainly that a wind blowing from Nevada land or from northwest isn’t a wind blowing in truth to New Texas or to southeast, or "aimed," as the Anasazi understood the habit of the breath winds when let out of the skins—or cells, said the Hermit, because according to the grandmother he was always remembering the cells that hermits of other times lived in in Yay (or Yea, Ti, or Ye) which was a dry but not thirsty site that Choor never annexed. (Guess they was both of them windbags, said Mayn years later to his son asleep and his daughter awake, but his daughter didn’t say anything, while his wife from another room called "were.") And when he said he was reminded of old General now new President Harrison’s Inaugural Address in 1841 whose deathless prose when subjected to spoken time went on over an hour and a half in the March air even after Daniel Webster had spent days pruning it and old Harrison had refused adamantly to wear his overcoat, caught his death, and departed almost at once after his arrival, the listening daughter said quietly, Get back to the night-shining cloud made of the Medicine Man’s remains that followed the Navajo Prince across the continent following the Princess east. Well, the father said, kissing her and then his son, there’s a lot of gaps in the record. Fill it in, said his daughter, how about it, Dad?

Come to think of it, that young Indian must have been in Pennsylvania right about the time young Alexander was, because that was his one stint for the family newspaper the Democrat, the early preparations for Jacob Coxey’s Easter march on Washington (Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds!) and he met Chris Columbus Jones near Rockville who believed in some recompounding of the soul’s chemicals, called it reincarnation (industrial reincarnation!) and believed in Coxey’s road bill and his non-interest-bearing-bond bills for municipal improvement loans that came in a dream to this self-made sandstone-quarry tycoon who did not believe in prayer but in action but against the deep-laid plan of monopolists to plough the poor under, crush them to the Earth, whose sin was not the begetting of children whom Parson Malthus declines to economically christen but only that they have come to the dinner table after others have already fallen to. Coxey’s child was named Legal Tender, and that was Massillon, Ohio, and somewhere in there Margaret had had tea with Coxey on her trip home from the West.

How about it, Dad? Fill it in. But Mayn had finished with so much of that at age fifteen when he took up with his grandmother again, who could help him with French, that he would ask how high it snowed out there and hear his grandmother regret she had not seen excessive amounts of snow while among the Indians, but ... but .. . (but what? he thought, imagining that she didn’t want to talk about the trip back) while he himself had this sight that didn’t leave him as if it saw him of the Statue of Liberty being drifted with snow higher and higher—no kidding, with snow from the West—cripes, some kind of record, that’s for sure, or when the old stuff hit him later in life he would check out for instance that avalanche of warm air he knew she had said rushed down a mountain slope for a week before one awful night of lightning and hailstones, hailstones like trees made of luminous bole-ring timber that wrecked a horse and practically annihilated a woman, and wonder if, well, you could honestly get that type of weather after a sort of maddening Washoe Zephyr running down mountain or in the Urals the wind White Russians (or so told an interrogand) call the Ilya that jams luckless landsmen with restless ions running down Urals as down the grandmotherly eminences of the West or what she described with a good deal of invention inevitably—which all wasn’t what his daughter wanted to hear but she was young and even at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen would not, like her father before her, ask Gramma how the Indians had broken their horses, or if there had been any fighting against white people she’d told him about who were also poor—all this rather than complete any more that dubious record arising from his grandmother’s strange sources and occasionally supplemented by the boy’s young inventions such as (inspired by listening to a dog that had just survived being "snow-ploughed" by a car at a moment when a child in the car unaware of the skidding dog looked out the closed window of the back seat and silently with eyes closed sneezed and the dog had trotted away putting the experience behind him though first sounding that high metallic wheeze that’s as nearly beyond our hearing as our Kultur’s sound vibes that will pain a dog) that the Hermit-Inventor, who knew his friend had never written a word, not a colon, not a comma, not a Sequoya point, heard the Anasazi healer’s last-breathed words over an incredible distance not just of space (one mile horizontal, sixty-five feet vertical) but of the real time (estimated by the Hermit on arrival as "a while") that brother Anasazi had been dead, heard said sounds (said last words of the already-awhile-dead hence now-ageless Anasazi) by means of a slow-carrier pre-sound like what the boy many years previous had made with pursed lips to his grandmother when in bed together in the early morning, auditing the generalized soft snores of the grandfather in the adjoining room, because his grandmother had been showing him how to whistle, "learning" him because you can be taught only what you know already. And if at sixteen when this was all about over, but earlier at fifteen when his mother had vanished from life—yet in prior years as well—he went on feeling something like his very self-like body literally beyond his wish to get hold of it or drop it, something he had to be or do—a thing as real as a thing—he left it to those growing relations inside him and the world to store leaving and arriving along with hints of dawning hailstorms sifting the wake of a great bird (that had a not so great disposition) whose terminal activities might have no more navigational bearing on a story-book tornado around 1894 than the muscle of a frantic horse reflected the mind of the tense eastbound rider or some risk blowing its shadow over that rider’s shoulder. Yet if the conjunction of the Navajo Prince’s instinctive (while doomed) departure in pursuit of a person he thought he loved with the precipitate recovery of his demon-tenanted mother to actual life brought the boy to the hour when the Hermit-Sojourner (sensitive to an overall convergence flow-pattern) tore the East Far Eastern Princess from the company of the local maidens who sang of their as yet unborn children while grinding and whisking the corn flour as she their precocious visitor wove at the measurable Anglo speed of beginner’s luck upon spindles three of forked, sheet, and streak lightning according to the old saw, and one spindle the white-shelled rain-streamer, but she had just that moment finished and could go calmly, whatever the alarmed inner voice of her would-be guardian who told her when she came to where he was that she must leave at once and ride eastward, her bird was not going in her right direction, she must let it go its way back to her childhood haunts in the foothills of Choor: but, arriving at this moment, the boy, having to speak, asked questions other than what moved him to break in—hadn’t it been flash lightning before? and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had not done any tearing of the Princess, for she had left her work as if nothing was the matter and walked simply to her pony (a gift she’s going to take home with huh) and ridden someplace to rendezvous with her hermit who advised her that if she could let herself be altered to a mist and spirited into the Statue assembled that had been only semi-uncrated pieces when they’d met in ‘85 ("the year after that skinny old geezer," interjected the boy, "saw the two-hour-long tornado according to him") then the Navajo Prince’s mother would live again—

I never, you know, said that, said his grandmother, I couldn’t have— but she did ride east or southeast (fast and quite carefree, considering) to the dry orange valley of the Zuni who were learning beautiful silverwork and turquoise then (not centuries before, in case you wondered, it was an employment project—late nineteenth century) and when she came to a house a woman was piling clothes and a pipe and what looked like a naturally grown toothbrush outside her door and the East Far Eastern Princess (—come on, Gramma!)—the Princess asked a man the way who loitered outside and he said he would go with her to show her and when, alive to the niceties of reciprocation, she said, But don’t you live here, he said, Up until five minutes ago. And he picked up the pile of ejected belongings on the doorstep—but anyway, who ever wove with lightning?, it’s too hard to handle, said the boy—

What is lightning anyway? said his own daughter Flick years later, and by then he knew, or anyway could say)—couldn’t you, said the boy, carry lightning around in you and when you opened your mouth—

—No, said the man years later, you don’t hold the charge; naturally you get burned, etcetera, but you don’t hold the charge—

—so what brought the boy to that moment setting in motion the Princess’s departure, hence the Navajo Prince’s, hence, foreign to all we are supposed to know, his mother’s recovery to life and legend right there without moving an inch and where she had been dead, although the demons did come back although they found her Indian head healed of its hole, and could but canter about among the follicles of her supple scalp for the first time getting to know each other ‘stead of being all business—

—and it was not until another time that he and his grandmother went into the matter of downcoming and upgoing weather, when they seemed to reach an intolerable moment when he had to speak of his mother to her and almost did not—

because he heard his mother’s voice saying what he had, however, heard her say once already: "I am waiting for it to come to me. I know it’s going to. It’s inside me." Oh she was smart, that’s why she got herself into these spots to get out in one piece: he heard that, too, like some thought she had had when he was inside her but we don’t believe any of that crap, it’s in the same league as reincarnation. She was asked if she hoped it was a girl this time around—oh God I just hope it can walk as soon as possible!—well it’s not a horse (a foal) feeling for its stirrup out in the darkness of the unknown world!—until, knowing the awful word because Sam’s mother had known somebody who had one, he asked his father, Did she really want to have Brad? (the little spoiled bastard) and his father for once in a lifetime backhanded him across the bridge of the nose, a point hard but sensitive to pressure, only then to ask him what he thought he was saying. And the boy who felt like a man but enough to honor his father’s stupid pain and not strike back, replied, Just did she want to go through with it?—so his father stumbled out of the room and the boy knew the man didn’t know how to say I’m sorry I hit you, and the boy thought correctly that he would despise the man for many a year.

Yet forget though we may that long ago in terms of American continental space-time the Indians had horses that were midnight blue from Mexico—the hoofbeats go on along the parallel tracks that cross at will in memory as if they were underground upside down by our angle and we were in the ground not they—we already remember a beeg difference between the levity that itself can be seen visibly coming out of the collected mouths of those concerned, and the real wounds appearing on the surface of the long-mentioned and long-suffering victims’ form as he or she is bent to her task of recalling what the interrogator has or had asked, including how the Hermit was entitled to the title "Inventor." We, as his and others’ relations have spoken for Mayn, who havee power but dinna want ooze same, and in speaking for him suggested that while subject may be encouraged, nay gladly prodded, to find in recollection a future of sorts, and truly the past recollected the person in such a way as to concoct a future, a parallel to turn to or on, parallels meet, which they do on these new spherical drawing boards plus in the horse latitudes though strictly speaking it’s horses there who meet.

When the Hermit-Inventor in need of a breather and fresh from his New York exploits though unable to sell the real world of commercial architecture on his theory of wind shadows told the Anasazi ancient that the horse latitudes were so cold because horses were thrown overboard in those oceans, the Anasazi explained that this in turn was because sea and land were joined like earth and sky and once ships had been able to sail right through the land and horses galloped the waters, but horses had forgotten all this and it was cruel to just throw them into the sea. We didn’t hear them any more. But after all these tapeworm tracks and evolution of self to new limited senses of the worm, the not-hearing of those horses kept up till we had to admit in the absence of interrogation that we saw the horses we had heard, there’s a number of us, so a number of them, while admitting as well that a man James Mayn (not always to be identified with the boy who looked out of his grandmother’s house into massed leaves mysteriously withholding their trees or with the fratri-being who left the other house, his own, second every morning for school) saw them (horses) like a (dreamlike?) recollection (reported wifeward, who herself would always say, in the days when she was near enough by to be heard, Oh you always have them, you don’t remember them) the horses were racing, two dark brownies left to right, two paler incompleties below the first two but racing (or, better said, frisking, left to right) yet from the right came two others going the other way like a market or the optical illusion a wagerer has that the horses he has bet are running in the wrong direction and will reach the finish line too soon; but, Mayn finds in the (day?) dream some horse that grew long mountain horns and a one-line body no less abstract than the two mere lines of long horns (long arcs) and two that are identical but legs, directed downward in case gravity evolved in the body drawing it toward where gravity go; except that to his wife in the morning as one day in the future to another who isn’t his wife but some of the same things get said like was, horse, you, antler, laughing, water, new, though it can’t all be reincarnate-new until he said, oh of course it was that postcard—which postcard? asks the lady from beside him, and with fatal charm adds, I don’t know anything about any postcard . . . !

—Postcard a fellow sent me, French guy, we talked about Polaris subs in a cab going to the airport, or was it the other way around?, the card was the famous caves with the drawings twenty, thirty thousand years ago, better than I could do.

—Let’s go see them, she says, but what did you mean the other way around?

—Oh it may just have been Polaris cabs we were talking about in a sub going to the airport.

—Airports are on dry land.

—Anyway only five people can see the caves at a time.

—There’s just the two of us.

—But it’s the humidity, the chemistry; open the cave and the humidity erases all the drawings. You have to be a scientist, a scholar.

—Scientists don’t hold their humidity?

—That’s more or less the idea.

—Oh Christ what time is it?

—Too early. Am I being interrogated again?

—No, just haunted. Well, I wasn’t asking you. You’re not here.

—Thank goodness I’m not. I don’t have to listen to you nag.

—I take full responsibility.

—You would.

—Look, there’s a river running in the middle of the air between the halves of canyon, I mean it’s just optical, but—

—It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Europe. We ought to be in the American desert.

He heard horses’ hooves from the cemetery, which we some of us recall lay between the golf course and the race track, each of these tracts farmland more recently than this other field where bodies planted in time might yield lettered stone and eminent urns of granite flowers. Facts arose that you could arrive at in later years for a living, arose from the cemetery moment when he decided to close down his grandmother’s stories. Yet arose is not just arose —and didn’t he call a halt to those tales upon surmising that the stories were not so much like what had really happened to the East Far Eastern Princess as (uh oh) really were what had happened? At the intolerable moment between grandson and grandmother when they were discussing downcoming and up-going weather and he had to—had to—speak to her of his mother departed, what was to be asked? asks an interrogator so internalized it could be I or they across that sexually shared ocean. Was she perhaps sick and tired? Why did a woman glimpsed in one of Margaret’s tales pound her belly with stones and eat ground-up horses’ bones for a late-afternoon snack? It wasn’t the common cold she had, or the measles, or what Indians hither and yon were likewise curiously unimmune to, to wit Eurasiatic tuberculosis, which the Anasazi healer may have had for two hundred years or more since he wheezed like that three-hundred-pound old bullet-riddled General Winfield Scott so President Lincoln could hear him coming in the next room. On the other hand, the Anasazi grew widely bald down his center part-line—and baldness is more rare than gray hair among Indians. How do you remember all that? When did that happen Gramma? Who was the woman pounding her belly?—It was a woman called Tall Salt, a widow, and she did the asking of the person who had interrupted her. Jim felt very much like a man at fifteen. So what? So plenty, even allowing for silly dialect jokes he and Sam told—Jewish, Negro, foreigner, farmer’s daughter. Felt then like a man why? Was it because he looked in at his widower father pyjama’d amidst more surplus man-hours of sleep than Jim needed? Was it that in sotto voce discussion with his friend Sam at the drugstore soda fountain about to order a second chocolate Coke, he answered Sam’s "It ain’t exactly a hole" with "It’s an opening; but it’s not quite open ... it’s .. ." Was it because with less parent to go around Jim was victim to what, later in the dying century, came one inclement year to be called "parentifuckation"? Or was it that he had early experienced as vicarious future that mode of murder called by the same (Latin family) as that given and ahead-thrown generation later, to the effect on an arriving missile of the thermonuclear explosion set off by the preceding target-happy missile so that he felt he had foreseen such usage of the term in question, "fratricide." This was more like it, for if he seldom or never felt his strange presence in the future as his responsibility to himself, he did early think (ahead), "I’m getting out of this," unlike his brother, who sat around the kitchen table with Mel, who’s supposed to be their father, and planned never to leave that town and was reassured by Mel and in turn reassured him that the lady of the house was not returning from the dead or from whatever matter she was with them and their mad memories—or the matter.

But whose horse was it if not a communal or common horse that paid with its hence ground-up life for being in the ongoing plane of the exit path of the giant bird that had already gobbled its one-for-the-road wolf, that moonlit bite of Navajo horse? How the extended grandson at fifteen felt a lot like a man without seeming to have passed through normal induction or initiation processing turns to further questions, to wit his sage if fugitive or half-sane njt-picking foresight that two or more questions had better have one same answer because he’s so harried from behind by one of them while dealing with another that, hell’s bells, he plans to get him gone from this town soon’s he decently can. Paired questions such as (a) What were his grandmother’s tears made of the night not so long after his mother’s disappearance into the sea when he accidentally found his grandmother under his surveillance from the backyard?—and, on the other hand (b) By what process was the Navajo Prince’s mother returned to life, assuming this really did occur and occurred almost as soon as her son departed in pursuit of the alien beloved?; or another pair, (a) Was the rotational storm tornadoing its great business that night of the double moon in fact the wake of or the very presence of the Princess’s former bird that, when the Princess departed that Navajo settlement, itself departed in its own Choorish direction? and (b) the question on the other hand, Why had it been at the juncture of downcoming and upgoing weathers or their vouchsafing by the grandmother (who was helping him with his French) and subsequent exploration in subsequent talk about these weathers that he had reached a moment not only when he had to ask about his mother (but what? pirce-quoia?) but a moment intolerable because he couldn’t—that is, ask why his Gramma had been crying that night he’d spied on her, was it straight grief? and what she had seemed to say one day at the cemetery actually was there underground where everybody knew that his drowned mother was not—at the same time asking again if the great day when all the atmospheric clefts lined up and one light-year-long slot or slit parted for cosms of the sun to suck up the life of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head, had been made up by the Hermit-Inventor or brought on by the Anasazi healer’s sense that something should happen to get them all off the hook including the mad mother herself who that very night, upon the sliding forth of the double Moon and the departure of her son hotly abandoning his studies of the power still untouched in the northern bison’s tongue (that can be dried and reused up to twenty months later), had come back to life and limb, which left a faithful imprint ever afterward upon each downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts even though in later days the Anasazi healer had passed into high-flying noctilucent cloudhood doubtless turning to use some of those cosms that (themselves infinitesimal power parcels holding immense unused energies) would have sucked the lady’s life away on a permanent basis.

Until one day, wondering if he himself was cloud-and-rain, mist-and-snow, temperature-and-wind expert hermited within himself re fleshing that skinny old geezer who (Jim had been privately told by his grandfather Alexander) was sick but still breathing loudly somewhere in New York

Jim happened to say to his grandfather on the porch one idle hour of a subtly sad weekend this dumb-ass thing about wishing at least two or three questions that came at you all at once had one same answer, it would make life easier, ‘stead of keeping it all up—and Alexander guffawed in his own white-wicker world only to break off almost tearing a seriousness from his eruption to say, "Jimmy, that’s what the great ones understand they have to do. History is a knacker’s yard and the trick is to specialize in one use for all your ground-up bones. It’s why Grant told Sheridan to remove General Warren who foresaw every damn danger except the delay occasioned in acting to forestall every damn danger." (What’s a knacker, Granddad?) "It’s the secret of scientific genius and of any great military strategist, although it is not why Grant declined to join Lincoln at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14th but took the New York train instead, wishing to see his children in Philadelphia."

Then grandfather Alexander guffawed again with a touch of unease. Jim nodded sagely. Alexander confided in his grandson as they rocked and gazed out over Throckmorton Street at two highish, narrow white Victorian houses out of which then came Leonardo Hugo, the blond, parchment-tanned oculist, from his and his mother’s, and Miss Amyabel Larsen, the pleasant over-the-counter clerk in the post office who had surprisingly large breasts when they were looked at, from her and her mother’s house, "Why that crazy friend of your grandmother’s, interesting old bum that he is—and was!—told me about a tornado he saw in ‘84, the year before his ill-fated meeting with Margaret at Bedloe’s Island that was absolutely symmetrical, straight up and no bulges in the wrong places to speak of, a cylinder of sorts which went on in one spot like a dervish for two hours." "Oh yeah, you told me, Granddad," said Jim who thereupon recalled that when he had told Margaret that she had told him about this tornado and she had said she certainly had not and he had thought how had he known?—and at the same time remembered his late mother saying there were things he had in him now that he would know later, and he had not put two and two together because he was suspicious of that method yet recalled her telling him to go away where he belonged whereas she had gone, at least for the time being, so he had concluded that he was in the future therefore like someone shocked by a terrible event into a sleep—got it?—yet now could see that he had heard Alexander say it.

But that fine, broad, ever-bald, ever-well-shod gentleman grandfather quickly within the regular tempo of his rocking said, No no, he had never passed on to anybody that little tidbit, and went on muttering and rocking while Jim was busy knowing both that he would like to touch if possible Marie Vandevere’s longish neck with his fingertips and follow each softened point of her arching strong spine downward because she liked it, and (knowing) that he would someday be in a position to recall this important talk with his grandfather as if many streams had made their way toward each other steaming over heavy, jagged rocks but as in a hill-and-valley rural model of Washington, D.C., where he had twice been, where streets meet sometimes like spokes or these streams were a liquefied city he had daydreamt of where parallel avenues and such would melt into one another and meet while being preserved parallel by the dreamer’s will itself: and magic of a loving kind seemed then added to the importantness of this talk with his grandfather because as both rocked and watched the single pair across the street turn away from each other in opposite directions, Leonardo toward town, Amyabel the other way toward what we might today term the cemetery-golf-course-race-track complex, though as anyone could predict she would call for a girlfriend en route and they would vkit the unprecedented greenhouse on the highway to study how the vast new rose operation was run, Jim tried to frame a question for Alexander, which was about what Margaret’s tears had been made of that night and how (or by what process) the Navajo Prince’s mother had returned to life as a result of her son’s having run off after his alien girlfriend: but Alexander had arrived at a point of being audible to his grandson, who now heard him say, 44Oh she’s responsible, she’s a very responsible person and sometimes takes her responsibilities too far—some events just happen, you know—and even at this moment she thinks she might have saved . . . well you of all people, Jim . . .it’s like thinking that you might be back there a few weeks ago the way it was, but having more foresight, you know what I’m saying—I mean Margaret knew your mother was generally unhappy, and worse."

Which didn’t have a thing to do with the weather (or for that matter with the way Jim thought others saw him—sensitive and observant? a knower of things? was that him?) but one day years later while factually extending for the benefit of his own children how the Navajo Prince could be interested both in energy buzzing potentially in the soft valve-needles of the often overvalued tongue of the often largely wasted northern bison and in messages from mountain to mountain as moist air rises to cloud itself into waves and accumulating towers or a warm column stops rising at the top as if to come down spreading out in a stable deck or layer mushroom-like, Jim recalled that when he heard his grandfather Alexander speak thus of his grandmother Margaret feeling responsible for everything and then, yes, got kinda funny, he found he could answer (who knew? forever) his own question in this instance re: that odd rotational storm of (the Princess’s getaway) ‘93 or ‘84 (the symmetrical tornado)—two sides of the same whirl that, he took now for granted, was both bird and wake; and that cloud-aborted, downcoming funnel that whirled in to suck then upward like a later-model industrial vacuum all substances available, liquid, illiquid, and all objects even those that had not been objects a moment before, was Jim’s plain responsibility to take fact away from antifact, the second unaccounted-for egg in question from the former and Choor-bound bird, and distinguish the Hermit-Sojourner of New York (sometimes Inventor), who helped Margaret get away, from the lion that turned—tornado—into a wolf at his moment of dismembered truth; the ground-up horse bones, on one concretely remedial hand, from the my thy maw that, airborne, had its own air aboard; the downcoming and upgoing weathers later understood in such staircase documentation as the compression-warming-drying-evaporation descent cum the expansion-cooling-humidification-condensation-precipitation ascent, versus, on the other hand, in the midst of discussing downcoming and upgoing weathers the Anasazi healer’s view (reviewed by Margaret for her grandson Jim) that mountains drew heat upward from deep below Earth’s rock, hence the heating of air along the slopes, this literally a mountain way of thinking—a mountain capability—since thinking was "Aimed Being" versus the Hermit-Inventor’s view that if there was any of this subterranean thinking going on it was more dreaming. But the less restlessly scientific Anasazi didn’t believe mountains dreamt, while the Hermit-Inventor held to the notion (the "motion," said the intuitive Anasazi lightly at a distance of many miles nonetheless audible) that western gravity created some heaping of friction in the molecular cascades of slopes, a turbulence heat form although it might conversely feel skin-cold. This stuck zone-wise in Jim’s mind so he never thought it prevision till he arrived years later (and ludicrously) at a visual formula for wind flow, he no scientist, while traveling in a small plane that lost its "lift" during a slow descent and then the pilot lost control a moment later coming in in the wake of an airliner’s takeoff. Jim did not or could not ask his partner Grandma in the aforementioned discussion of two weathers (and a new batch of toasty crullers) what on earth she meant implying that even in the actual absence of Jim’s mother’s body something was there underground in the cemetery locus of the Mayn family area—perhaps because he felt responsible for having spied on his grandmother when she wept (but she never wept!) one night on the back porch, Jim in the dark out there, loose and free, upon the damp, dark lawn of the yard where his part-Creek rival the (behind-his-back called) /za//breed halfback, was sometimes employed by Margaret to weed or to trim hedges at fifty cents an hour, who had a mother who probably cried from time to time.

So, while it was with "I am responsible" derived from Alexander’s characterization of Margaret that Jim had solved (oh for God’s sake let’s get out onto the field) questions re: (a) wake and bird, and (b) why at a certain juncture of discussion he could not ask Margaret something about his recently departed mother, he had a lingering doubt, for after all he had answered his own question and perhaps had his own way or had in the parlance of later times no feedback, cruller’d or disturbing. Yet Margaret did disturb him when she retorted that she had said nothing about this or that—nor had she ever known anything about a symmetrical tornado, he could have made that up, although she granted that the East Far Eastern Princess had in fact been turned into a mist to facilitate her being spirited into the great Statue (that had floated dismembered into that aging harbor of the East one day to be there recomposed and to stand up strong and centered) during the last throes of the Princess’s return home—so that years later, when the man Mayn found himself desultorily absorbing a concept of convergence-flow in the theory of storms, he recognized not only that back then in the fall of ‘45 he had felt he would one day know what such inklings meant, he felt even that then (and then later) he had been in some angle or isle of the future already: this he had rather not be thinking about, for there was so much else, yet why could he not ask Margaret what he did ask Alexander, Was that skinny old geezer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York one and the same?—to which Alexander replied that there had been two or three of them, very bright, sleazy chaps, taking long vacations for generations in the western lands, apparently experimenting in the control of the atmosphere but entering at times too easily into the lives of impressionable young people though he thought Jim might not agree. But it was not satisfying the single solution for the paired questions, it was like when they all sat around after his mother’s suicide (he did not like the word, it was awful, it was as embarrassing as something he might never know), the family friend Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl had the same look, same protoplasm or something, as the sandwiches, whole-wheat, and as the hands of others there, like they were shrugging off their differences and yielding their one common substance, so their equality had to be fought against or it would be your death too, or fought for so you’d come into possession of what you had anyway. And years later he felt that unbeknownst to him he had been some scientist in those fearsomely exciting bereaved days but when he found how at fifteen he had been in future e’en to understanding those shear zones along wind boundaries where friction increases dangerously he later had not your true scientist’s interests in such, though still a law or two or three from the old days such as 4’Answer the question that has been asked, not some other question, O.K.?" from which extended a corollary (pronounced by the depressed geometry instructor at Jim’s high school with the stress on the secundo syllable), namely, when possessed of an answer (especially when it has become conscious within self) make sure not to marry it (as they say aboard ship of line and cable) to the wrong question, that is, find the question that has asked this answer. Later answers increased so crazily that their content mattered less than their spirit, if that is possible; meanwhile, he, part-distracted by that dynamic virgin his grandmother in her earlier incarnations, revealed another answer to himself which was that responsibility or "I am responsible" wasn’t the only answer to the second pair. For, still unsatisfied, he saw that past equaling present would do equally well for the tornado’s wake being the bird as for the discussion of downcoming and upgoing weathers coinciding with the question he could not ask Margaret about his mother, since in so many ways the silly old humdrum weather was his future, or what he later surprisingly turned his hand to, events in that sphere of vapor, so that in that original juncture, the present equaled the future, which was another way of saying past equaled present, though only his nerves did these equations, he didn’t shed no blood for them, from day to day.

But what if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the answer to the first pairing? He reached that point one Saturday afternoon when his brother Brad paused at bathroom’s threshold to watch a drop of blood pass from Jim’s face into the basin as the elder shaved. Then the same occurred to Jim that night in the front seat of a borrowed pickup truck when for the third time he found Marie—Anne-Marie Vandevere—her neck, her bared feet, the whirlpoolings of her ears, her way (it was a way) of not wearing a bra, carrying him beyond the quiet laughter of their happiness into a winglike breathing that was alive in what it was missing, which was a—call it a full-length naked realistic halo (read hello/)—he didn’t know then but years later found some capacity in him to maybe recall it, though its being a "visual" half-blocked, half-revealed a fact of life he succeeded in not thinking about by concentrating on Marie— anyhoo some aura that nonetheless warn’t about her for she was realer so maybe ‘twas someplace else if you had to go look fer it but if you didn’t, why then Marie was here, at least for the time being till graduation do us part (and she never mooned over him though she would have gone with him when he left Windrow, yet worth noting is that she did not get pregnant, not at first, and then not later, when they took to consciously talking about it, and he never asked her if she had used some foam or something to begin with, but many years later when a colleague from South America named Mayga (he never saw her name written) passed out of his life, he wanted to put in a phone call to Marie in whatever later life she had made for herself to check if he was right recalling that she listened with marked care and only a smile or two but with some sensuality of paying attention to what he said as if she believed its truth more than he and wanted to convey this to him, to wit about the Margaret-Princess-Hermit-Anasazi scene shifts and shelvings across the inverted floors of a still recognizable continent, a wider load than would feasibly in terms of profit margin pass all those highways that brought the Wide Load itself into being and motion unless we invented a system, you see, if it could only develop from those fingers in his fifteen-year-old head that were Marie stroking him while he murmured nice jokes to them both and she had no concern about dislodging her aura because she didn’t have any, leastways not for him and possibly not for her father either, which was due partly to her, a very clear upstanding person even supine—’cept maybe way inside her there’s an aura taken for granted, though her fingers, having proceeded right into his head, frankly said, There are other women, and among these others seeded faithfully in him were some disappearing acts (spelled ax) wind-driven as the vessel of his own damned mother’s unburiable suicide where excessive drama and words sometimes met in embarrassed agony; and if you could be embarrassed (at school, for instance—as if his mom had left his dad—and at college where he rarely spoke of it except to a woman now and then in a moment of lusty sentiment, and still later, when it had become history without ever having been understood and he could tell a colleague with a hoarse laugh named Ted and a friendly woman named Mayga also a colleague though as professionally elusive as she was personally solid and right there during some early, early evenings in the bar of a Washington hotel hearing him say that if you could be embarrassed about a terrible, paining, destroying, living thing like that . . .) maybe that meant his mother (God bless and damn her for the medium she chose, namely solitude and seawater) was not dead: for that’s what he couldn’t explain to himself very well, much less Alexander, his well-shod grandfather, who anyway was saying a thing or two that rocked Jim back (no joke—only back, not forth, only back, like our undiscovered energy window warping out of age and time, we once believed)—that if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the one unifying answer to the first of those increasingly distant pairs of questions that years later surprised him as if from behind though standing obstacle-like and sensual under his nose, his tongue, his hand, his foot, his eye which is one window of your windows that can tell us things without even being operated on—how did he use, then, at fifteen, such syllables as "substance" and "process," they were little more to him than the battlement-gray scenery he helped his little half-ass brother Brad tack up for a school play that required a trapdoor so a ghost had somewhere to come from and call from, sing from (almost, the way that spook sounded when the play was actually put on instead of being there potential and silently exciting on the shadowy daylight stage of the auditorium with sets gathering paint and nails as if the voices working were keeping the story of the play from leaping up out of nowhere which you had to put off till it could leap out from somewhere or just walk out) then Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the single answer to the plural questions, What were Margaret’s tears made of, that night on the bright-dark back porch when she thought she wept only for her own and for her husband’s eyes (and ears)? and How did the Navajo matron regain life the night her son madly departed in pursuit of the Princess who was in turn leaving because it was time to and though she loved the Navajo Prince the Hermit-Inventor had all but impelled her to go: yet then, as buriable as Jim and Brad’s seaward mother was not or at least not yet, came a next space of thought which reasoned its drugged conclusion downward into some sleep of Jim’s growing body and so as it got clearer got deeper from the acoustic air where it could have been said, and Best thing was to go on, as Jim’s friend Sam’s petite mother in a large, dark straw hat said quietly to Margaret at a gathering soon after Sarah’s suicide to which Margaret bluntly and as always with no blur of conscience or guilt replied, Oh that’s what we all say and next thing you’ll be telling me that time heals all wounds

reels all moons, congeals all ruins, steals all sounds—for divorce!) —the conclusion too thought to be true, surely, that Margaret was at once responsible in the substance of her most rare tears for her daughter’s untimely evacuation and in her storied narrative of the East Far Eastern Princess’s roughly eastward exit responsible for the also departing Navajo Prince’s mother’s recovery: because if the tales she had been telling her favorite grandson who ran like the wind and could gallop a middle-sized black pony bareback around the edges of the Quirks’ horse-corn fields at age twelve (and at age fifteen in the middle of the night in the general direction of the Grange and a house near it where two girls might have gone to bed by now) were in some godawful way true, didn’t that mean that Sarah Mayn, whole mother of Brad and Jim, half-wife (as they say precisely in one ancient scientific marriage-culture) of Mel, and sister of Marian who now distantly makes her home in a suburb of Boston, and daughter of Margaret and of Alexander, . . . "lives on," said Warren Winecoop (as if listing the coming week’s events) from the pulpit of a church not much frequented by Margaret or Alexander, "in the memories of those who loved her": so that, quite apart—apart—apart from the atomic question of whether he could or did love his singular mother after an action so unforgettable, he was confused enough to be derailed from responsibility, Margaret’s or for that matter his mother’s (for maybe she had acted responsibly), and was much taken by his grandfather’s remark, that latter-day porchside qum friendship, that the Hermit-Inventor of New York, as, strangely, Jim’s uncomplimentary grandfather went on calling the skinny old geezer’s 1945 manifestation—whatever it was he had invented—had confided in him things he had never told Margaret though adding, to Alexander, that he was another man entirely from that sensible, methodical guy who told Margaret to go west in 1885 on Bedloe’s Island amid the pre-ruin of the Statue of Liberty: yet, Alexander went on, he sure as hell had the look (though sick, now) of the man he had briefly seen when Margaret returned home from the West in ‘94, same weird bone-ridged forehead so you expected to see through it, same crappy clothes and scuffed shoes, no, he had sneakers now, same irritable and confidential manner, told Alexander of all things that the Anasazi, who knew more about the weather than he was saying, had been the only man then known—i.e., in that century or apparently in that area in earlier centuries—who for certain had never been reincarnated but been only himself, his long self, and who upon dying had been bound to be but a memory, which was fine by the Anasazi, as he always had said though never guaranteeing the truth of this fact about him gleaned first from the spiny-sinewed bicycling botanist Marcus Jones who had it from Mena the Chilean zoologist specializing in javelina-peccaries, their possibilities, their hind-mounted scent glands and luminous lips the hue of moon-drenched cactus flesh peeled by the eyes of an elf owl that on certain nights shares its being with a female seer much as the cactus shares its with the owl or at the least the owl’s eye: yet key here (though key to what was not yet sure) was what Marcus Jones on the locoweed-naming jaunt told the Hermit-Inventor (who upon meeting him under a red crag near where thermonuclear devices were even then latent and to be unearthed had expatiated and complained how New York had so changed just in the four or five months he’d been gone): to wit, that a certain aged Indian healer had told Marcus’s friend the woman-naturalist Mena upon her one visit to his eyrie that we create our weathers partly then to observe them, that is, so that there will be something in front of us: we make them by entering into the four-cornered creation which when we do so by conceiving it as four corners meeting back to back not as four corners facing one another at a distance we live through again the one son becoming two, namely Destroyer and Born of Water, thence multiplied to four sons, namely Reared Underground, or the Double, and Changing Grandchild, which, because he had been able while still in the womb to see the future, the Anasazi had singularly always been, that is Changing Grandchild, which was why he stayed young or, if not young, alive, and in his singularity never could gain or want reincarnation as another kind of man or as a woman, say, though he had strange interior memories, like a happy worm moving round inside him, of a time when men and women were first created and did not fuck but the woman masturbated with a quill or a sour cactus or a stone if you could find it, that in its fleshiness bore hard future knowledge that one day it would be a stone used by a woman to beat her belly with and induce an abortion.

Mena, at all events, was a remarkable person who had told Marcus this and more that he passed on to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who, unbeknownst to Marcus, recognized at once the Indian he was talking about, and Marcus in his happenstance encounters with Mena on the great nocturnal plateau from time to time found support for a view that came to him more than he to it as when one day near a river leaning against the bright, birchlike shadow of an aspen trunk musing upon the snow that would fall here in three months he had been accosted by a man who with his young son who presently arrived set about persuading Marcus by commercial means, later the violent means then commercially available, to divulge what was not Marcus’s to divulge, to wit some doubtless mythical mode he for one had not heard of of dry-steaming the flesh of the sometimes almost animally attentive saguaro cactus while it was still alive high above the desert floor, betimes adding a seasoning of one of the northern Navajo locoweeds Marcus was supposed to have named for the benefit of the New World, the end result a winter mash marketable for horses (that could be dried, stored, and shipped East) as well as a porridge to attract passing Indian refugees who because of their ovally-whorled tastebuds would never recognize the ingredients, perhaps also because of their kinship to the vegetable world. But the treacherous habit of the saguaro plus the mystery of which locoweed to use had led the exploiter and son to seek out Marcus Jones and, as he reported to the Hermit, thus inspired Marcus at the cost of "but one joint of the right little finger of a left-handed botanist" (he would grin) to reflect again on such mobile kinships between animal and vegetable as had tempted his contented mind upon seeing and touching Mena’s lips that had acquired a petal-patina silver-white in sympathy with the javelinas she had tracked so long observing their hind-situated scent glands—but still more from hearing Mena report Owl Woman’s retreat, like a fugitive hallucination, into a cactus in order that the cactus grow an owl or owl eye: so that Marcus blamed his renown for the violent brush with the saguaro exploiter not to mention the minor amputation (to prove a humorous if not evolutionary bereavement) but had found in the self-created obstacle of his professional reputation and his unwillingness to make up some story to get rid of the saguaro exploiter a none too costly spark of inspiration he then understood he had often dreamed in the form of ships sailing the desert stirring eddies as if the ships were wind, and humans exploiting their animal or vegetable souls at need so some pains could not reach us, like pistol shot or lonely lust, until the renewed use of our coupled natures might lead to some similar union of our male and female selves.

Now the Hermit-Inventor of the East at once recognized in the prior words about created and observed weathers and the direction in which the world’s corners were envisioned his colleague the many-hundred-year-old Anasazi plus the old healer’s strict habit of never peddling the same conversational tidbits twice, for the Hermit was hearing these "created" versus 4 ‘observed" weathers for the first time though at once remembering the Anasazi healer’s suggestion to him that he not always see opposites as being necessarily "versus" or opposed. The Hermit told Marcus what he never had told a soul—that a girl he had seen but once at that time and told to go west, had in herself shown him why he had been drawn to the West for decades.

She was a fine girl, beyond subtlety at that moment in 1885, her hands at rest at her sides, her dress full of lilac flowers and the minute fire of red loco, and upon being spoken to by the Hermit she advanced to one limb of the dismembered Statue of Liberty and ran her hand along the molded metal and tasted it: and both her fresh directing of interest, which was a humble appetite for what lay ahead, and her actual ingestion of some far-flung grain of the copper sheets recalled to the man how when he had first known the Anasazi among the high caves of those western zones touched more and more by the perilous magic of Anglo law, the old mediciner would give him a pod to chew as being for the side teeth, the pulverizing teeth (not the front ones), and this then-nameless pod or bean would dissolve ultimately in his mouth but soon reappear in spirit, a whole minute vessel passing everywhere inside him until, accepting it, he found he could use it, and, using it, found it curiously navigational like a lode that lives in what of our active selves we let rest, until, decades after, as he in fresh form (his own) saw the girl, who could not have yet seen more than thirteen or fourteen summers, turn away from a grand haunch eyeing him and smiling as if the pale flush of her neck (for she had just been bending warily over that piece of statue) betokened a wise smile the whole of her young body gave to the irritable, disheveled, impatiently alert man who had said thoughtlessly Go west, and she said Oh she planned to do all that by hook or crook before she settled down to marriage and a family and she would pay her way, what’s more, and was meanwhile happy to be here in New York where she didn’t visit often. To which the Hermit-Inventor dumbfounded could only blurt out a dumb fact that hardly began to tell how he felt, to wit that according to his geography she wasn’t in New York right now, but in New Jersey.

Which was how Jim often felt in Windrow when he needed to go away both on his own hook or because his late mother (now departed herself) had told him to and yet how he felt in New York itself whose immigrant men and women in their transparently individualized transporter capsules seemed often more understandable than such minor mysteries as the Navajo Prince’s mother’s revival and how it left an imprint upon downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts, ‘mselves so blue and constant of sky that the Navajo Prince’s envious brother in mild shock (because he was still envious now even in the absence of his envy’s cause) the morning after the Prince left couldn’t see why the Hermit-Inventor bothered to explain the blue, especially when he said it was really black but dissolved to blue by the Sky’s incompetence to use, yea wake, its full force—a most funny (Anglo) wrinkling of the Obvious (the Navajo brother who was skilled at dressing buckskin and making whips and hobbles could feel with a neutral, silent wisdom of contemplation displacing for several minutes his inveterate envy of his more gifted brother), yet, as this remaining brother did not suspect, a needed detour for the scientific New-Yorkono round possible interrogations that the Hermit-Inventor found risky since, by a rich defect of language in that world, to describe, say, the buildings of his native city of the East as being anvil-shaped like clouds was the same as having invented those buildings, likewise his city’s streets tall as the treacherous Cleft Pass between the Anasazi’s remembered border and the cliff pastures of the Indian sea isles when Ship Rock was scarcely a thought—to describe meant to have invented: which meant that the Hermit’s actual inventions such as a rooftop gauge to predict differences between light and heavy air masses (possibly inspired by his thoughts on pistol design during the Mexican War) or an underground railway (which was never to be built perhaps because it had been conceived as soundless and to be cooperatively maintained) might suffer unforeseen unimportance, but mainly that he might be credited with the Prince and Princess’s elopement were he to describe it, if only the atmospheric phenomena that attended it (doubtless recalling, said the grandfather Alexander on a spacious white-painted porch in Windrow, New Jersey, in late ‘45, that expiring French wolf who remarks at the end, "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, / Only silence is strong, —all the rest is but lies").

But he had lost the boy or the boy him, for Jim had heard his grandmother and she was on the tall-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock, and he had had to wonder, on that day-night in ‘93 or ‘94 when the sun would not and would not go down and all the slits in the onion layers of atmosphere clear up to the spheres of most and least change lined up and cosms of the sun descended more suddenly than two eyes together could have seen, to deform or translate, depending on how you saw them, if the quick-winded timber wolf into which the egg-sucking mountain lion turned just as the Princess’s giant bird stopped to snap had been there perhaps already, and did the lion vanish into the underbrush atop that volcanic neck rather than turning into an alternative choice on the bird’s farewell menu?—so that he heard and didn’t hear like classroom code words "kinetic" equals "motion," got it?, "K" equals "M," some words of his grandfather’s to do with "fool" and "wise" and one day fifteen or more years later, when his own age had doubled, recalled some weird consolation of reversal in that word "fool" and in his grandmother’s news that three small babies had been found abandoned near a piner cottage at Lake Rompanemus but strangely or like sacred aliens nestled up in two old trees as if to keep the babes safe from flood (though they woke drenched in themselves), which saved Jim from being asked how he’d done on his French test, she had been tutoring him mainly by famous sayings, famous to her, like "Keep quiet, people will think you’re smart," or words to that effect which sometimes took effect later, as when he learned the French for a thought he had already heard his grandfather casually say without laboring the fact or even acknowledging that it was a French thought. In the middle of such tutoring as Jim and Margaret indulged in the following Friday, namely some dumb verbs (about seventy or a hundred!) in a special tense of the past he never got straight, he got her into downcoming and upgoing weathers and knew definitely that she was telling the truth though, albeit amidst science, he’d let her get back into these rotten old stories or margins thereof he vowed after {post mortem!) his mother’s death he was through with: the Anasazi healer held (and apparently had demonstrated) that thunder was the upgoing burst of undreamt dream mined in a flash from mountains by downcoming knives of lightning—"But the Anasazi believed mountains didn’t dream, Gramma"—True enough, but they arose from dreams slanted out of the Earth (its quality of being layered) and because of this origin never after were able much to dream though they thought and thought and were admirable if left alone and alive which incidentally proved to the Anasazi that true feeling must follow thought, even at a slant, not the other way round, because mountains did not feel in that human way. Yet they had all this stuff and bone and drama of dreams that never came to view and like some horsepower that didn’t know what to do with itself could get blown up by the right lightning coming down the right line at the right time—’ ‘that would heat the air and make rain, right?" the boy added— Right you are! whereas the Hermit-Inventor who remembered late humid-dark afternoons in early August in New Yorkono as it had once been called differed with the medicine man in that the so-called upgoing of the thunder was really ongoing, like a flooding of the banks or later much as the Heaven of Space-Thought grew to be an owf-concept more than an up-. But Jim, this being the weekend before another French test, swept all this away like love and all but stunned his grandmother telling her that Bob Yard had told him that thunder was gas expanding within the channel made by the lightning short-circuit and Bob had added that was it, that’s absolutely all he knew: but when Margaret retorted, "What do you expect of a man like Bob?" (who was an electrician), Jim, who with Bob’s illegal permission had borrowed Bob’s pickup truck the weekend before on condition that he and Anne-Marie ("Marie") stay clear of town, could reach inside himself for words but only so far as a ball of raging love to hurt his grandmother so that, for a silence that was large enough only for him to know that the French she had just recited to him thrice very slowly of a poet named Alfred he didn’t know was the very thing her husband grandfather Alexander had said in English on the porch a few days ago and for him to recall Alexander’s words and knew he could at once give a smooth translation, he could not bring out this intolerable question until he gave up trying and then heard all the voices inside him, his mother’s included, audibly then voice the question: "Gramma, why did she do it?" (the "she" at once felt as a lapse in his possession of his mother and of sonship, for he ought to have said "my mother"), the "Gramma" at the last gram of moment thrown in to tell her all he supposed his cool interrogation in its clipped outrage did not tell her: which at once let go in his own head, like a thought which, with Margaret beside him trying to recall for him things Sarah had said, could not contain a parallel question so hard to control that it became "Who does she think she is, to commit suicide" (as they with such natural syllables say com-mit-su-i-cide) "when she’s got a husband and two sons?" (hey, and a mother and a father and a sister in Massachusetts); a thought that became a year later offensive inquiries into the full circumstances of Sarah’s sandy, watery leavetaking by Jim’s statuesque journalism-English teacher Pearl W. Myles who had by then lost her job yet she had at least imprinted the basic interrogatives upon the majority of her pupils such as Where?, Who?, When?, Why? (or was Why? not one?) for Margaret, whose one-time self (if she was the same person) bending to taste a limb of imported copper, had refreshed in the Hermit why he had gone back to the West again and again—to wit, the seed pod given him by the Anasazi to chew on for the good of his grinders—could say to Jim, "That much we will probably never know."

And the grandson snapped shut his French book and ran off the porch at a bound hearing his angry grandmother call to him, "They don’t know for sure how lightning comes!," thinking nothing but these irrelevant thoughts out of his energies that not even his girlfriend Marie (really a friend) could contain (with or without precautions): Where, When, Who, What, How— wasn’t How contained in Where, When, and Who? but go easy on the Why because maybe we don’ gong know that ever—and flung him outward past impediment after impediment he was no doubt responsible for providing himself with so’s he’s have somethink in front of us as the Anasazi’s "created-weather" watch had concluded into a larger life of fact that wouldn’t go away even when you couldn’t prove post partem gloom might, in the humid late August of a young woman’s mind, be literally feeding on the most freshly electric of charges, those mythic ions, a weather inside out and as violent as an opera in which people stand for walls, or a lonely crime whose victims (who are victims only of the life that’s left them) do not know after all what the crime of this departed’s departure was, although they feel endlessly how it works in them, a person who was one of them now gone into a gap each survivor would fill if he could with stuff of himself or even, God help us, from others.

Yet, years later, when his own wife said she had a totally real picture of his grandmother Margaret from only the little he had said and so she didn’t fit this tale stuff he only alluded to into the picture of Margaret, he knew his grandmother had of course talked also facts. Facts about the Prince’s aunt, named Tall Salt, a promising widow who made the visiting East Far Eastern Princess laugh and inquired with a discretion that was even more intimate than its opposite about her state of health, as if she were blood kin to Margaret who, one early-winter day to interest her fifteen-year-old widower-grandson, told Jim that Tall Salt had expected her to marry into the clan—"And stay forever, Gramma?"—and had rope-burn welts where her own uncle a generation before had practically lynched T.S. as she rode rudely through his cornfield—he’d run wildly after her to lasso her and her horse rebelled at her familiar heel and started going round and round in little elegant circles she had taught him but not for emergency getaways, but her uncle he gave her two sheep one day when she had herded his flock for a year. She herself taught Margaret how to coil and weave baskets in the shape of bottles and stick them all over with pitch so they held water, and she never would say her sister the Prince’s mother was crazy or possessed or even a witch when to not quite everyone’s amusement that Navajo matron slung a coyote pelt on her back and ran away on all fours for a day or two followed by her horse and then came back and got up on the hogan and blew magic pollen down the smoke hole until it rained, but Tall Salt explained to Margaret that the nail parings and the small portion of dry shit her sister kept about her were her own, not from someone else who was thus to be bewitched and made sick as when a witch shoots a shard of mica into a person; and Tall Salt, who was very fond of the Hermit-Inventor’s ways, always cited her sister’s predictions such as that basketmaking was on the way out because the proper grasses were harder and harder to find.

Tall Salt also took part—rare for a woman—in the Night Sing aimed at ridding the Prince’s mother’s head of certain all-too-familiar demons her hospitality toward whom did not interfere with her (well) actually Christian hospitality toward Margaret whom her son obviously loved and to whom she gave an amulet asking the by-now-not-so-pale-faced visiting Eastern Princess if she would come into the isolation ti-pi "and bring the bird with you"—the giant bird in fact larger than five or six hogans dovetailed securely together by the best woodworkers—though a bird with proportionally small eyes oddly diamond-within-diamond-shaped, the type of eye the Anasazi medicine man should have had, to represent wisdom and watchfulness, though while he had the first he could not bother to have the second, for he left watchfulness to others which, even without diamond eyes (squinting or not—whereas he had normal gray-gold liquid eyes), was a mark of the reincarnality their beings secretly yearned to get over with in order then to watch out during a succeeding lifetime for the next life after that—though, as the Anasazi believed with a smile from his slow-beating, all but immortally slow, heart, one did not know this was what one watched for: and when Jim, like his daughter (though not his sleeping son), told grandmother Margaret he didn’t believe any of that reincarnation stuff (and found himself momentarily off guard to hear her cheerfully concur, "No more do I"), he wanted her to add something else and he heard the long-at-large memory find her in a catch of her breath: "But do you know," she said, "he told the Navajo Prince once toward the end that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation like a unique green butterfly—seen luminous-night-herring-fashion from the shores of both oceans uniting them for it was the same perfectly sane butterfly in two separate places and there would come, in the future, a way to verify the fact by instant communication over that full distance—this a prophecy without question for when the Anasazi, himself close to death and (not, of course, reincarnation but) that cloudhood that proved to be his own lofty noctilucent burial, saw the aforementioned new mode of communication in future as possibly a kind of ear whorled inward to a tiny pool of air dense as the cactus juice, strong as a rattlesnake’s jaw, clever as the percussion cap of a firearm from the East (tested or not in Mexico) that might receive at will messages from so far away only oceans could express this distance, he obviously knew nothing of the telephones from the mid-seventies of his own century that already connected fort to fort, Fort Keogh to Fort Bowie, to some deep bank of Black Hill treasure plundered without interest, to the sacred lava lake where Kiowas exited to the Pacific Coast told their Modoc hosts of grandparents killed at Fort Defiance and of Anglo warmen listening with their bare ear to the rail to hear seventeen miles off, say, or exactly eleven and a quarter, the iron blackbird of fortune grinding closer and closer bearing unconscious in its mineral genes the coming concept of Wide Load cross-continental haulage, but the Anasazi’s prophecy of death for the young person who found this new species of reincarnation was not less true than it was unnecessarily harsh.

Now Jacob Coxey, who marched an army of unemployed on Washington in 1894 and who had tea with Margaret who interviewed him in Ohio on her way home from the West, believed in his cohort-populist-financial-theological windbag Carl Browne’s theory of reincarnation. At death the soul returned to a reservoir like a caldron which contained all previous souls and this reservoir was where you got your soul and its special mix when you were born (as, from the Earth, your bodily chemicals), and Christ’s soul was in that caldron too, and therefore, in the fractional reincarnation which soulhood was, you had some Christ in you, but Browne discovered he and Jacob Coxey had an exceptionally large ration of Christ’s soul (presumably not embezzled in those panic months of defalcations by the dozen) which explained why the two men had been brought together for good works and for the march on Washington commencing at Easter of ‘94 (by which time Margaret and Alexander were reunited in New Jersey and making their own plans) and Browne called Coxey the cerebrum of Christ and himself the cerebellum. But the Hermit-Inventor had nothing to do with religious or social questions.

But . . . but . . . (the boy who at fifteen felt like a man asked his grandfather Alexander, who raised his palm in the peace gesture and laughed, Don’t ask me, don’t ask me), but didn’t the Hermit-Inventor of New York say the Navajo Prince’s mother would come back to life if the East Far Eastern Princess let herself be turned into a mist and spirited into the great Statue in the aging harbor?—Don’t ask me, laughed the grandfather, I thought you were through with all that stuff, so that Jim saw Alexander with meaty hands and bloody festoons reflected in his eyeglasses, because the awesomely pale-faced butcher with his Panama hat downtown had a sign behind him saying, DON’T ASK ME. I DON’T KNOW AND I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. But did that mean the Hermit knew the Prince’s mother would recover? But how long was it before she actually did come back to life? Wasn’t it that very night that they left? Or did the Princess’s promise to let herself be turned into a mist later on make the mother well again? Did the Hermit actually make it happen or only know that it would?

Oh, said Alexander, I think most of their ceremonials are against disease (can’t blame ‘em) whereas down among the Zuhis most of the palaver and singing is aimed at making rain, I think—your musical mother wasn’t the slightest bit interested in all that—but don’t ask me, ask your grandmother: Think what stems from not asking a given question ("given"? who gave it?). Think what would have happened if Jackson had asked the Indians what they wanted. The Civil War might have been averted and U. S. Grant would never have had the chance as President to fill the Indian Agency with Quakers who often actually did find out what the Indians wanted. (How could the Civil War have been averted? the boy started to ask, but his elder was perhaps way ahead of him.) For one thing, Indians westward might not have been so bad off and Margaret might not have been so curious to see what we had done to the Indians, and how—because you know she met a nasty little chap, part-Sioux I guess, at the Chicago Fair who told her the Indians deserved the Long March and had a perfect right to their poverty with their dumb ways of farming and if the magic was so all-fired powerful why did they not make rain? A man named Wentzel or Hintz or Lenz, the name doesn’t matter—and that’s why she got mad and disobeyed her father whom she was sending news dispatches back to, and went on out to Indian territory, still sent her dispatches mind you, wore her hat clear to Colorado, courageous girl, Margaret, but . . . but . . .

What? asked the grandson, who had once asked Margaret how she had gotten back to New Jersey from the West and she said she had had enough money to get to St. Louis where a collateral, thoroughly disreputable cousin of the Eads family whom she had met months before at the New Jersey exposition at the Chicago Fair helped her out—he drank too much and had been a friend of Gustave ("Le Tour") Eiffel in the French countryside where they had studied trees and computed bridges—and this man had gotten Margaret onto a train east, he was owed a favor by a railroad man, a German immigrant who had supplemented the meager pay of two Democratic coun-cilmen but made more money faster across the river in the East St. Louis mule market just before the famed windy flood of ‘85, and both men were now obsessed with putting together a World’s Fair for St. Louis within ten years to top Chicago’s, one already writing a book about it; but Margaret fell out with the conductor of the train somewhere past Cincinnati and made the rest of the trip under her own steam.

Ran out of money in the dead of winter, wound up in Massillon, Ohio, taken into his home in nearby village of Millport for the night by Jacob Coxey who was then planning his Easter march of the unemployed on Washington and whom she liked up to but not including his adopted theory of reincarnation; and much later at home in Jersey she wrote two humorous accounts of the Great Unknown:

the day before Palm Sunday a mysterious stranger appeared near Massillon to participate in Coxey’s "Commonweal" march, one "Louis Smith," a big well-dressed man who seemed the best-informed man there. He disciplined the "Commonweal" marchers and taught them to drill and salute officers. A Secret Service man on the march was also unable to find out who the Great Unknown was.

When Coxey’s March reached East Palestine, Pennsylvania, it received a chilly welcome. But it was at East Palestine that the Unknown proposed a system of publicly owned farms on which the unemployed might work under military discipline for the benefit of the State.

At Columbiana, a boy recognized the Great Unknown (or, Unknown Smith) as the ringmaster of a circus that had visited the town three years before.

Jim asked what Margaret recalled his mother saying and she said, "Oh, some severe thing about Chopin being better than Schumann, though she loved his wife." But his grandfather, who never went anyplace, had always until now seemed a source of certain knowledge. This day on the porch, the boy thought: They’re married. And it was not the marriage of his own, now halved, parents.

Anyway, Alexander went on, it was an accident that she went out there to start with, and if she hadn’t gone out there, she wouldn’t have had to come back. (He chuckled.)

Was Gramma in love with someone out there? asked Jim, who was a man already and a romantic who could take at some moments of softened and recompounded time a year stroking Anne-Marie Vandevere’s fingers in the treed darkness of the cemetery driveway at one in the morning (in the borrowed pickup truck, of course) and never wonder that she let him—

Oh it was back here too, said Alexander abruptly. And after a minute or two he retired from the porch, half as if for the bathroom, half as if for the "radio room," and Jim wondered if it was true what he had heard Alexander once say to Jim’s mother, that all too often one knew a woman through a man, through her husband or her brother or her father; for he now heard Margaret on the long-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock at news about—as he had already heard downtown—three piner babes living or dead out by Lake Rompanemus swamps. (Oh, the Indians took all the best names before we got here, she had told him. Well, they was here first, the boy had heard himself say.)

All things being equal, it was up to him, to Jim, to decide about things, about people. So that, responsible as he mysteriously was for anything or everything—including his exit as soon as possible after high school graduation from this town which contained these stories but not him—he would find an outside sanction to go away in the command of his mother whose own example he was swollen with and yet could set apart, that is of leaving him first: which were, whatever their dark or convergent, (or non-) connection, undeniable facts that would not go away, though he would rather make his getaway without seeking information, rather take a sea voyage—yay, sea voyage!—even a Coast Guard weather patrol, the ship was not at all the mere tinder bomb that war films Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights made you think ships basically were, where explosives all this time were what he knew he should study, namely the explosives that science was coming up with along with a glassless beer bottle. Yet this glassless beer bottle might be explained several ways and absorb all the explanations—might be an electric field, or a plastic substitute, or an inventive description of a bottle served without a glass. The last inspired by the presence some very late afternoons in the early sixties of a sleazily momentum’d collaterally professional slew-handed, sometime information dealer who sat at the end of the bar of a Washington hotel like a western visitor hoping to be mistaken for something—as if to overhear what Jim Mayn and a colleague (say friend) or two might be discussing. And once there he was, taking an interest not in some fact of Mayn’s past that was small-talk till it entered this perpetual one of Nature’s eavesdroppers’ ears to glint then left-handedly in his sickeningly interested eyes, but in a curious left-handed discovery, through near-disaster, of Jim Mayn as accidental scientist —not that his formula, framed at a moment when the pilot of his light charter plane making a descent for a landing lost "lift" and stalled them into the briefest of dives, would change the history of wind, and the formula had in any event already been arrived at independently of Mayn.

Nor was it much of a formula—kinetic power of wind equals (but here he didn’t know how he had arrived at) mass (which he had seldom understood) times windspeed squared, except that the turbulence layer their small-businessman’s Cessna hit was so like a landing strip undergoing an earthquake and thick enough to immerse the plane, disintegrating the smooth flow of air the plane’s elevator surfaces were plotted to play and be played by, grasp and be grasped, that this frictional boundary with a life of its own (though made provenly real by the presence of this light aircraft) seemed to multiply wind by wind, like some airs don’t mix, to make the energy splashed in among the controls some personal spirit he had been waiting for to make of him a conclusion; but the rollercoaster leveled and the pilot called back to him, Are you still there?, laughing as they got down to fifty feet above the tarmac when the wings went—no, God they fluttered vividly, and the plane, in a scale of motion so slow they had all week to watch, flipped one "arm" half-over so that Mayn, within the body of the plane whose wing this was, bruised his rib cage, daring the vehicle to go right over upside down to prove (extra-vehic-ularly) the difference between flying and landing. But their descent to touchdown jibed exactly with the roll-back into level so that the Earth, which was after all, Mayn saw for the first time, always one prime boundary to winds, seemed to draw them toward its magnet against the double whirl-wake that had been crazily waiting two or three minutes for them in the absence of the airliner that had started them spinning and departed; and he knew he had a grinning formula for this too—what the pilot not so casually stammered was turbulence tunnels caused by wing-tip vortices that kept whirling sometimes for several minutes—"Can you believe it?" the pilot called—"Sure, now that I’ve had my frontal lobotomy!" his occasionally suicidal passenger said unwarily and so enjoyed his remark that he let himself for the hundredth time fall short of the Anasazi’s high standards of non-repetitive conversation and possibly silence (the line between which one might be moved by yet never understand): lost, however, on Spence in his leather fringes at the curving end of the monumentally lengthy bar but who upon hearing the name of airline correctly identified the time of Mayn’s landing (was Spence lookin’ out the back window?) as being that of his own departure from the same surface on that very commercial carrier whose turbulent wake spinning air off its wingtips had doubled and redoubled the hazard for Mayn’s small plane returning from a business powwow with three sewage-disposal companies in Delaware on a day marked by a band of clouds with some embedded showers and thunderstorms.

Spence then fell so silent he was actually a moment later not there, no doubt calling long-distance from all the lobby pay phones at once; but he returned with his beer to inquire if Mayn was still interested in NASA’s "overt weather operations" (joke). Mayn’s nod was not curt cordiality. How do you nod to a worm? (Now a snake ... a cobra that can carry a tune und reise to an occasion!)

"Ah was on thet plane," Spence mimicked; "ah was on mah way ta Arizone."

The men didn’t give a hoot; Mayn heard Spence murmur names of other western states—"made a fire out of mesquite roots middle of nowhere forty-eight hours ago, small business conference, might’s well a been blindfolded, in the middle of some desert, man named Santee Sioux—ever been on a forty-eight-hour pass, Mayn?"—which sounded like "Ever know a man named . . . ?"

"You know damn well I’ve been on a forty-eight-hour pass!" but Mayn had never told Spence such a thing, and Mayn’s words told both of them that Spence had an interest in Mayn but it was probably no news because some years previous—the eve of the U-2 press conference when we learned how we had sown the atmosphere known as Russia’s airspace and they in turn had seeded our seeding so that a pilot named Powers was precipitated from the issue of whose weather it was that NASA was examining—Mayn had been restrained by his friend Ted, the skinny, obnoxious Spence would defend himself with a weapon you felt sure.

Why—spor-quoia—did it stick in his head or his grandmother’s (who would get to the point at once if he demanded it but showed her care for him by making him, like his living life, wait for the upshot of a tale maybe somewhat like his brain, maybe a tale that proved always to get into tangles that emerged as having started earlier though he hadn’t seen it, so he knew she had loved having him in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t at all like teaching him to whistle while they lay in bed when he was six years old, and you do it or you don’t, you summon the exact wind and supple crevice for it and then of all things forget what you’re doing in order to do it, but—)

Why did what stick? Why, this long-lived, half-dead couple of guys: do we mean . . . ? Yes; the Anasazi (semi-retired) medicine man (who was uniquely invulnerable to reincarnation) and the Hermit-Inventor who seems to have existed in three manifestations at least (the great great uncle three decades before the meeting with the girl Margaret in ‘85 "at" the Statue of Liberty (if you call those scattered large-scale units one statue) and then much later in the mid-twentieth of centuries an unfrocked weather thinker who lived almost as remotely in his own drab Greenwich Village street as he did in the lost feelings of a man called Mayn who would inexplicably imagine not primarily what this old specialist geezer had gone through but the galaxies of people who had known him and looked at him—to which we have to add the immediate, more amused and optimistic, yet shorter feelings of a woman on the street named Grace Kimball, star-quality possessor of a bicycle, great giver of instructions and sympathy to other women—who saw the most recent manifestation of (unbeknownst to her) the Hermit across the street one day escorting an old lady both beautiful and baffled, entertained and confused (in this loosely articulated Manhattan capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale lives) but if confused, also beyond transition.

Now, the Anasazi medicine man lived high up in a honeycombed cliff because his ancient people, of whom he was the ultimate survivor by centuries, had traditionally inhabited such apartment structures or multiple dwellings; but his real reason was that, given the name of Changing Grandchild after one of the four mythic or directional sons, he had been unable himself to "change" for a good part of his life, sitting in his desert basement as a distinguished adolescent thinker, maintaining for over a century an alarming reputation as a healer of seductive tranquilizing powers (who could have foreseen but, by self-definition, not reincarnate in a Presque Isle, Maine, obstetrician long after to whom many-times-miscarried woman traveled hundreds of miles to receive his magic) and when the Anasazi had changed his life during his second century, he chose to live high-celled and inaccessible in the canyon wall. He betrayed strange likenesses: between his noctilucent teeth and gums and the specialist Mena’s javelina-like lips; also between (a) his capacity to recreate outside him, from their origins in his bodily organs and circulatory precipitations and heart-light, such weather phenomena as warm sleet (whence?) or the fan of shadow-rays across the pre-sunrise sky, and (b) the capacity in his friend the Hermit of New York to take such phenomena from outside inside—to "internalize" them, we already remember saying in a later language—and explain them in the poetry of science; also, the penetrating humor in the Anasazi’s stark, light, truth-reflecting or -inventing voice seemed a less dense otherwise identical imprint of the Navajo Prince’s, for instance on the day when the Anasazi yielded him the pistol which had belonged to the Thunder Dreamer (the very day when the Prince’s mother refused to consult the Anasazi about the aperture in her head which a voice on the winds of a storm seeming to be the voice of the healer himself had ascribed to weather of foreign origin falling into a mountain in the vicinity precipitating forces like weather then falling "out" of the mountain to target selected human receptors). The likenesses aforementioned hinted to Margaret and her grandson that the Anasazi’s future non-reincarnality had been made up for by some simultaneous dispersion of his being among his contemporaries. Jim did not think it through at fifteen, though always knew that he was not scheduled for reincarnation. Enough could happen in this life. Enough for what? for whom? But when, years later, at the end of a night on a Bermuda beach with his wife, Jim saw shadow-rays over the ocean knowing they were not really fanned out but parallel and they shot out from an irregular horizon profile of tradewind cumulus, this he remembered was pretty much what Margaret had said the vacationing colleague from the East had told the Anasazi, who had seen the phenomenon though never the ocean except the ocean of the desert, and the Anasazi had been glad for once to agree because what had emanated from him via the back of the eyeball observing the confluence of seas, mountains, irrigation ditches, and the crepuscular cactuses that while you’re not looking fly away (in exactly as threatening a manner as the prehistoric Texas pterodactyls with thirty-five-foot wingspread flew at their prey), had reappeared in the Hermit-Inventor’s science refreshed in its turn by each summer’s breather westward.

Could weather precipitate from the ground upward? The two colleagues agreed it could—"At least once in a Double Moon," chafed the gaunt New-yorkondo. But the semi-retired medicine man, whose way of seeing things the Anglo did not pretend to see as an insider, and who looked too fragile to smile, much less shake his head, blew a polite negative upon the rosy sand map on the cell floor before him. Double Moon was Double Moon. Ground-upward clouds were something else; likewise, hail growing in the great planted fields like the old black-and-white "bullet" melons, then to be sucked upward by passing "chimneys" of thunder so the Anglos could have harnessed this downside-up hail against one another. The Hermit-Inventor of New York asked if the Double Moon that had fallen upon the pistol Mena had brought to this cell had turned it into two pistols or only roused rumors of two origins for one. The Anasazi recommended he stick to the subject. The Hermit said that his great-great uncle, the only short man of all that singular line, had once in London stood upon a sunny hill Christmas morning to see hundreds of feet of ground-upward weather. He had taken a photograph upon a large oblong of card treated with a layer of fresh bodies of the tiny marine carnivore the comb jelly plus a film of glassy "shite" from the French marbled newt. It showed a sulfur-gray gulf of ground-cloud packing the city with an effluent known a century earlier to put a fur and crust upon silver plate. But the Anasazi and his eastern visitor saw weather-from-the-ground-up differently. The old one had never seen a city but could imagine it sunk two hundred feet deep in its own poisonous fog; and he knew that the sole source, the earth itself, had turned the temperature upside down so that ground-level stays cold even after sun-up and the sun cannot lure the ground-level airs upward. The Hermit felt this upcoming weather derived from circulations within the Earth that upon reaching the cool pre-dawn surface mixed with airs already too well breathed by men and women and chemically redestined by the feelings and leftover dreams their bodies impregnated those airs with. The Anasazi blew upon the sand-patterns and simultaneously laughed: he saw no real difference between these views, unless he and his guest should wish to have a wrestling bout over it.

Jim’s grandmother was avidly reading a love-story book about a whaler one day he came back from football practice. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and he asked why she had never returned to the West. "I had responsibilities here," she said. She went on reading but stopped, and she looked right at him in her way. But he left her and went over to Marie’s house where for some reason she was neither peeling carrots and turnips for her mother nor reading Sinclair Lewis upstairs, she was sitting on the porch staring ahead irritated, and some absence of halo round her up there on the porch where he joined her made him think upon a strange potential fact, and this was hard so he thought instead of her breathing body and the friendly scent of her under her sweater like a whole air even more than a smell and coming from her when she breathed in as well. He sat down next to her and was glad to think a thing or two through, which was the last time on this score, which might have seemed unsettled between him and his grandma, while he now made a discovery. But when, in the midst of it, the familiar girl in her plaid skirt and short-sleeved angora and bobby sox testily rocking said, "Looks like rain," he knew it wasn’t really him she was mad at, if him at all. Anyway he had seen that between the steamily upgoing weathers and the resolute downcoming weathers, between that observed and that created, between the weathers of presence and of absence, and of leaving and arriving and most strangely of inside and outside, and all these always divided up so you could practically see them out of that time when people really cared why a luminous night cloud came widely low to the continent in subtle motion each day as if the continent were turning westward and the cloud hung waiting for places to come under it, the grandmother had always been out to entertain him at a fairly high level but had been led into history she herself cared to keep if not create; likewise she had told some pretty fair horse and cactus tales to pass their time as if there would have been nothing otherwise, but in doing so she had covered up things that had happened so the coverings became queer to the eye approaching, say, that mother with a hole in the head or a tornado that rumbled off like the made-up pterodactyl bird it really was, that is when Margaret turned into a Princess, which was really another person in her that he didn’t ask about, but she was two persons, both the young woman who saw slaughterhouses in Nebraska and dry farming among the Indians—

—what’s dry farming?

—It’s get-right-out-there-while-you-can farming just during the brief period of the rains—

—who read the 1892 commissioner’s report and knew that medicine men were adjudged to be barbarous conjurers and got ten to thirty days in jail for a first offense; she had studied provisions for "field matrons" who would help Indian women learn hygiene, crafts, and in the "Lend a Hand" clubs proper observance of the Sabbath, and she had looked forward to visiting the Indian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair which was confined for lack of funds to an industrial boarding school, thus demonstrating Washington’s commitment to educational progress for the Indians who were not to be called Red Men but the People, not Injuns but the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Seminoles, Creeks—we’ve got a couple of Creeks right here, your teammate Ira’s half Creek—

—he’s crazy, Gramma—

—which Indians was she referring to?—the industrial Indians, the boarding Indians—

—they would go home for the weekend testing themselves with often a round trip on foot of eight hundred miles between Friday night and Sunday night—

—the Five Civilized Tribes recognized by treaties of 1866 and later—

—and on the other hand, the Princess who sought nothing by experience and felt in her wrists and heart, amidst the smoke of the Night Chants which her host the Prince demanded she be allowed to watch, the high juggling of live objects by ritual clowns who ran so exactly out of step that they were simultaneous reincarnate priests branding the night with its own outlines shifted into question—but when she grew sick she could go on sitting on the floor of a still unbewitched hogan in a beam of light from the hole in the roof, upon a beautiful blanket whose design she knew had no more urgent meaning than the designs on other blankets (or the way the light from above siphoned her into some space of the future in which she would remain here forever) and be glad that the practicing medicine men would not come to heal her—for she did not miss doctors, the doctors of Choor, the more gentle island healers hidden among the lakes of the Long White Mountain.

Grandfather Alexander, whom the boy talked to more since his mother had died, and who must have been one of those responsibilities that had kept Margaret from returning to the West, said Margaret was going to Muskogee for the Sequoyan Convention in 1905 but she had a couple of small children by then. The boy asked what that was, and Alexander told him they had had the idea of a state of the union drawn from the Indian territories and organized by the Five Civilized Tribes. Quite a big thing at the time. Creeks, Cherokees, forget the others; became Christians, owned slaves, real civilized. Made a dictionary, started a newspaper; built regular houses—not those six-sided hogans of the Navajos or underground houses like the Salish out near the Pacific (because it don’t get very cold below ground level).

Only one state? said Jim, and his grandfather laughed, which put into the boy’s secure memory his own remark.

That was what got him into the newspaper business, a reasonable memory for and a respect for fact, y’know—plus a way of removing some facts from his head to an ink imprint on paper, and it came to cupric sulfide and pen-taerythritol, supercooled cloud-seeding agents that proved to be much less convenient than lead iodide or dry ice (though Nature wasn’t to be sniffed at even when it evaporates a cauliflower cumulus and disappoints a farmer): how to remove intact from his mind a fact so that it might never lose its authoritative meaninglessness, even (he bet) for chemists who nodded with matter-of-fact intensity at names of yet other cloud-seeding agents phloroglucinol and me-taldehyde: and throw in the more earthly meteorologist contacts Jim ran into, who had a trick of telling you how the gas law explains a good half of weather—that is, that a gas adjusts its state moving from one environment to another—and in a trim surveillance craft gliding not at all silently (because of the density of conversation) just below a growing cumulus at its flat, football-field-long base, where the cooling air turns rainy, he could be shown one afternoon how the base’s center was higher than the surrounding edges; yet confronted with a restless atmosphere—the air rising; the pressure on it hence decreasing so that the air answers by expanding, which in turn takes effort on the part of our "only human" air which as a result must spend some of its energy which is measured (we are reminded by a child or young person in the next room) in temperature (check it out) the air gets cooler ten degrees Centigrade for each kilometer upward—Mayn’s contacts (friendly as relations he phoned once a year) could also speak to him of this rate as the "dry adiabatic lapse rate" (it will never desert you and in a pinch will tell you how high or low a cloud will form). And these clouds were what you put into them too, it came to him years after he had committed to some memory morgue the sometimes furiously, yes, furiously made-up spiral winds, whose attempt to return only to their source in the breathing of certain vegetarian reptiles and the needle-shooting cactus those reptiles woke up once a month to feed on, the Hermit-Inventor would explain to the Anasazi as an effect of a shearing or squall line between the reptile’s moist breath moving to meet its nutriment and the cactus’s oppositely targeted dry—thus stirring at widespread joint-feed times spiral breaths that on rare days joined energies and went away, uniquely dustless but of a discernible green hue due, the Hermit said, not only to the cactal skin but to the fall sun’s blueness elusive to the naked eye mixed with yellow, bile-like blood which these vegetarian reptiles tried to purify each day from their prior carnal form of the minute Pressure Snake of the South that preyed on mountaineers who one moment would see a sky-blue worm accost a boot toe and the next would be sucked all but their bones into this (we almost felt "human") compacter, which, to those few who had lived to see it, then proved to have rooted itself to the mountain and while maintaining its wormful size digested what it needed of the object-human whose flesh it had separated all but instantly from the bone cage, and shot the rest into the mountain. This caused a general tremor since the mountain understood that the flesh so dazzlingly compacted into that blue snake could hold, in some riddle of energy, this reduction only for a moment, which buttressed the Hermit’s theory that mountains dreamt. But the Anasazi would not be drawn back into this issue; he explained spiral winds his way.

With his breath he drew upon the sands of his rock floor. These early weather maps coiled shape inside shape, the abiding forms present in the weather places at rest and restless and always ready to open out so that we saw a wind had been potentially a bird, a bending tree some moment clothing a wind; a flash flood rivering down the sky ocean high above it had once in the desert’s territorial memory been a reverse waterspout. The sands in which these maps were drawn were rose and green and blue sands, sands orange and nearly black, sand sand-colored (as the Anasazi’s colleague from New York put in); and more unusual was the live violet of that western chinook wind the Anasazi once had seen from far above it in this specialist eyrie of his, a wind that warms and dries and avalanches down a mountain so not even the desperate trees could detain it, speeding to eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour across the flatlands to remove, incidentally, moisture from the ground so swiftly some of it was never seen except in unexpected memories; long, shallow islands of volcanic dew; salt arms of some departed sea become rivers without issue or source that stood almost unnoticeable, dead as the dense Anglo rivers of the later East that have learned to store even the most bright-veined wastes against a time when we will know how to use them. So all the above colors dropped from the Anasazi’s ceiling as if dye-separated from the sands subtly crumbling thence down in order then to remix with them: but no, said the uniquely non-reincarnable elder to his much younger hermit-co-thinker who advanced this theory of separation and reunion; no, the colors could not have left the sand even as they filtered through the ceiling, because in that event they could never come back; so they must have created, in the precipitation from ceiling to floor, a shade in the color skins of our snake-like eyes, an obstacle or message that had the appearance of an illusion, so we saw only sand falling (and when it all caves in someday there will be no cave!).

But no, said the Hermit in his turn, when the ceiling falls in—and the Hermit had acquaintance with different ceilings where he came from and had invented some to fill a need—we will get the landlord to repair it!—and while they laughed, and the Anasazi muttered absently who is this Landlord of the East? they both admired what the four winds, or the four generally heroic brothers the name of one of whom the Anasazi bore, had created on the floor—a scheme of avenues and parallelograms and squares and anvil shapes, outer ovals and apparent cols and crags within, in turn hexagonally windowed by forthright trenches tempting a marriage of lights just as the irrigation ditch reaches out to the water if people let it. For like the weather patterns windblown into the map—that is, by breath not solely owned by the breather— the colors in the sand came from ages of high-handed flow especially at sundown or sunup when the blood of the mountains stirs about toward the thoughts of its own horizon light and this red passing to and from the Sun through that upper land of filaments and nation-sized curls and rippled sand ("Mackerel," put in the eastern Hermit, always inclined to give the precise, if eastern, term) becomes all the halo colors, all auras mapped on this floor cooled by one of the silver moons that come near, and in the night told the Anasazi again that these maps radiant as a musk thistle or serious as a city were not the four-cornered history of his early adulthood when his devotion to healings so curious they got to be ends in themselves took him away from his children whom he loved more painfully from a distance and his sometime loved wife from whom distance had too seldom been possible until one day he found that they had contrived distance between them and were lost to each other. And he would see her face looking up to him from a mountain he would pass when death had turned him into, as he predicted, an unprecedented cloud, or looking up to him from the shaken grass-grains of an earthen winnowing tray or straight into his eyes once when she told him she would not use the age-old wooden pillow for the head of their new baby in her cradle board. Until with, thus, the moon’s cool help, he saw again these weather maps for what they were, a history and prediction weatherwise as sure as that when you stand with your back to the wind stream you will feel its absence in your left shoulder and intensified presence in your right inviting you to turn, though when you do and find you have risen slightly onto your accepting toes, you find not the same pressure of hands upon you, for in the circles are always motions upward or away and thus we would feel deserted by these spirals of wind if we did not sense through the twining spirals originating inside us in our internalized four corners and always breathed outward if we only recall how from endless sources in us that it is always the same wind. It is always a different wind, groused the Hermit-Philosopher but saw in the sometimes angular neighborhoods in the map, which became another map before his hugely color-sensitive eyes, that winds did not follow only the curves of valleys and the ovals of bird flight but turned sharp enough and often enough to frame the very territories about which he and the Anasazi once quarreled.

This was not to be compared to the long-distance, sight-unseen, though ear-to-ear exchange of opinion between the Anasazi and Marcus Jones who heard upon an angle of the counter-twilight breeze, though they had never met, the (to him unmistakable) voice of the old healer identify the musk thistle as radiant, and Marcus found himself on instinct responding out of his ear, of all likely responders among his bodily parts, that the musk thistle’s flower-head system was in fact without rays, and while the Anasazi might have replied that the color over the haired and convex reddish-lavender head was radiant, he contented himself, and Marcus Jones, with praise of Jones’s love of the coyote thistle as witness his discovery that in look it obviously was some distant pineapple though he knew pineapples only in the descriptions of his visitor the Hermit-Inventor of New York.

Yet the Anasazi was stunned, as he told the Hermit upon his next visit, to hear the botanist Jones’s real point: that animal and plant were more than kin, blood and juice, animal and fruit, hide and leaf—for example, the immigrant giraffe of Choor and the wild swamp tubes of New Jersey that would stem-suck those swamps dry for one swift, illusory day each year were morph-ically one organism. To tell the truth, this thought had visited the Anasazi some centuries before upon loving his wife and sensing that they lived off each other’s breath for hours at a time and fed one another like cooperative animals and grew ripe and large and silent and close and even mutually shadow-rooted so that there was no telling which they were, plant or animal.

But the Hermit-Inventor, who was to love one woman from the time she was a thirteen-year-old girl throughout her later life’s general absence from him, shrugged sadly (perhaps because it was, that month, time for him to return to the invention of his eastern city, which equaled often the invention of ideas to explain or utilize what the city’s spirit had already brought into being), and grumbled that it or they would be all "one" a century from now, he was not sure how fast it was all flowing together, one gross anthill of coincidence, but it surely was. To which the Anasazi, who had not practiced medicine in many a generation, added: Like female and male, returning to the one they used to be. The Hermit said No, he drew the line there—though community might have much to gain from such a transformation, to judge from imminent mingling of the races and also to recall that, even with future increased vertical building, a part-time economist he had met in the forests of Massachusetts, or visited conceived of a mile as the right distance for neighbors, for they could if need be at that distance see each other. There was neighborhood in silence, concurred the Anasazi, as witness his own adept ear for what Marcus Jones had forgotten to be amazed by at the time, that in fact the Anasazi had picked up on the subject area of the coyote thistle only Marcus’s unvoiced thinking, for Marcus had said not one audible word out of his ear or any other of his functioning organs.

But the Anasazi, nearing term, was glad the power did not extend to his eyes and ofttimes painful touch. Yet when the Hermit, his annual sojourn done, said Keep in touch, the aged savant had to wonder if he had powers he didn’t know about, if so he must learn them lest before the right time they accidentally de-leave the woods of the East or dry-freeze an adjacent volcano in full cry. He used such words as "adjacent" and "Keep in touch" to show his feeling for the Hermit-Sojourner, and in their anger over the question of shared and territorial weathers he showed words and ideas that convinced the Hermit the Anasazi was so far ahead of his time as to be—not crazy but so bony of mind, so humorous about a violent future, that the Hermit all but asked if it was weather he ought to been discussing or some other—what?— obstacle?

It must have been at this point in his later skeptical discussions with his grandmother, the winter and early spring after his mother’s permanent vacation from this world, that the grandson apparently forgot or deposited at a distance from his life a pile of rather rich data. His grandfather reminded him of these at thirty-five, as if for the grandfather, who was on his last legs then, recalling territorial versus shared weather was the most natural thing. "Oh, you got mad as hops didn’t you just. Because she told me you did. And it was some dadblamed stuff about a mountain of flesh and tainted hailstones—"