: inspired by Spence, who was nonetheless real and if (give him credit) turned down by the U.S. Marines nonetheless semperfidelis to know what he would not report himself but package for even Mayn to bear:

: who in turn is uninspired himself no doubt, a journeyman who among the violence of an indelible child’s bike devoid of training wheels falling on a small, caged leg, and the violence of an unknown husband’s head that, with all its holes, would not pass, by terminal magic, through the grid chamber of gut pressure he himself has had strung into his wife’s racket frame so she can kill him, and the violence of an anonymous wife’s love for her husband precisely when he (having spent an evening having Hemingway prove that it’s people that are the matter) is telling her her women’s workshop puts down men, and the violence of a teenage child whose anguished anger normal for her age multiplied by (and perpendicular to) the parents’ separation after years of uncertain vibes (read frequency, read in-frequency) divides and divides until the simple knowledge is too large to quite see, to wit that when you get to the age when you want to kick your parents around it’s easier if they’re living together, two still one—among all these violences which were not a newsman’s reportable Delaware Water Gap development or income-tax reform or wind energy used right in the backyard (read roof) of a Lower East Side apartment building—Mayn could see Pearl Myles on her ambiguous exit from Windrow High School, urging her Journalism Circle swansong fashion to remember that anything might be news but it must be something, something, and while you were wondering remember that in the City was where you found—and some snickered, including Jim—"human nature posing in the nude."

Good material for Spence blown adrift in the vitals of a divided history. Looking through Mayn’s daughter’s keyhole in Washington? Or her address book while she’s down at Tradewinds, having a beer, talking to a boyfriend about another apartment, being possessive or being low-key (well, her father himself would like to know, but not through keyholes), or thinking about conflicted parents but about important stuff like her life? Good material for Spence, who come to think of it liked cappuccino and pistachio or vanilla ice cream like a regular person who, disreputable skew-handed trash-purse that he was, had had at least a father or a mother (grant him that!) maybe the bad bean of a good marriage (for that could happen, like wondrous spinoff of a supposedly bad marriage), didn’t seem to need to go to press briefings to find out, for instance, as Ted, who ran into him "retailed" to Mayn, that the unthinkably rich relation of the low-profile Argentine silver magnate who ran the string of eastern papers Mayn worked for for a time had not gone up in smoke with his plane but was redesigning a private golf links surrounding a green-bean plantation once owned by the Presbyterians of Cameroon.

Spence was the problem. He was no less than making a living. Mayn joked with Norma, the night Lincoln had called her: "If he gave you all the news—" "—not me."

‘ The, uh, storied botanist-explorer Marcus Jones used to object to having to explain himself, why, for instance, he loved the blanched lips of a lady scientific colleague he used to run into in the desert—" "Someone your grandmother knew? I think you mentioned the bicycle before, and . . . and ..." "Spence did, probably." "But Spence called Lincoln, not me. You never mentioned the botanist to me, just that your grandmother traveled to the West in the nineties." After they hung up, Norma came downstairs and rang his bell and she seemed apologetic, as if she’d ask was it true Brad had needed more attention. They didn’t talk about any of this. Mayn was concerned about Lincoln. He felt he had already talked to her—as if Spence, crawling about in some lightless bloodstream of phone lines, shaped time and Mayn knew what was coming up. Mayn didn’t want to talk to Norma and got her gently out of his apartment. He really liked her. She didn’t understand. Probably thought he was feeling a little seduced.

He had to cut off this period, the arc-second segment of these few days. Just say where this unchecked inquiry and publicity stopped. But Spence was making a living.

Yet, like having the power to know and look hard but being convinced that history was a costly drug that played at being a secret that would not be there when you needed it, while he knew he was waiting for Larry Shearson to get back to him, that third woman-phone-call detonated by the creeping Spence made Mayn start again asking himself about Spence if not about such historical convergence as Spence sought or preyed upon the shadows of.

And listening to this woman he’d never met but who’d met him (!) (who had just become "a carpenter," God love her, "it’s like a revelation—used to be in your business")—he could not tell if Spence had or had not heard him one time speak of the Brad’s Day wrangle re: bent winds, so far forgotten by i960 that Mayn’s "discovery" of the fictitious Coriolis deflection of winds when he boned up fast to check NASA’s U-2 cover story did not at once bring to his mind his mother’s words or that dubious giant of a debate that never stopped growing between the Indian and the Anglo of Margaret’s private dispatches to her grandson, and Mayn imagined first that Spence had made up independently any number of events signal in Mayn’s abortive or largely unreportable family such as (though he had no evidence that Spence did know) that the cousin diarist from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Marion Hugo Mayne had recorded from an adjacent table a potentially erotic meeting in New York in the 1830s between a young woman whose lover was in trouble and an anonymous but most powerful statesman-dyspeptic friendly to M. F. Mayne because of the Mayne family’s New Jersey newspaper founded to promote that statesman’s political career; then a moment later Jim Mayn was thinking that Spence just plain knew about him what Mayn did not know except in this windy code of scavenged surplus connections that had a dollar sign haunting it, hence for Spence a credibility value.

But this woman with the rather large, husky, yet naked voice, Lincoln, who asked like Mayga years ago, Who is he? (and unlike Mayga would bleed words into Mayn’s ear for a moment) had not only been interrogated and apprised by Spence, she had been stood up by him maybe because she had told him what she looked like but have to learn to take rejection but that wasn’t the point of the meeting she had thought, and she’s actually very nice-looking especially now that she’s been cleaned up—

"I know what Spence looks like," the voice came back to her and she added, "And I know what you look like and your daughter read me one of your letters."

He did not stoop to the bait if that’s what it was. In his eyes, in some one of the liquid, lucid filters his eyes maintained as memory chips not worth circuiting into the brain, he did feel someone looking at him in a restaurant, and so what?

... but this Spence had called to ask if Lincoln knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where her own whadda-ya-call-it consciousness-raising (—it’s not conscious-ness raising, if you don’t mind, she’d told Spence, or not what you think that means, if anything) workshop, where the workshop met, where there was another woman—

"I know all this, Lincoln, I’ve had it from another source a’ready, and your Spence could probably be in two places at once, he’s something else again, stay away from him, he’s down a burrow half the time breathing his own carbon dioxide economizing on being human while he makes these phone calls on someone’s charge card."

So she went on to more painful Spence as it turned out—"I feel I know you, Jim," she said, "please call me ‘Lincoln,’ O.K.?"—(well Christ maybe Spence was a lunatic, whether or not that was his voice so deep dark inside the still athletic James Mayn it could be where the tawny cirrhosis crouched, budded, unbuilt and rebuilt so process supplanted its normally maintained result preferring to the degenerate future-liver a richly compacted coffee-black hole Indian tandouri, one thousand pork chops, twenty-three hundred New York steaks, eggs rancheros, soft corny chicken enchiladas suizas, and enough veal Parmigian to melt down the James River clear to an Italy where Jim had been but once and once was not enough)

—at each point on this skewed circumference someone stopped him inside himself and he looked across an edge into a dark he had always taken for granted, no use surveying there, do the next thing, etcetera:

Spence—Spence had interrogated, apprised, mingled the two modes: for as a talker he had a voice that could almost sing, high-frank, working, eager to help; and she had answered him, she couldn’t tell why, could-be it was that she’s a carpenter now!, and he in turn asked if she knew this man who had followed the Chilean economist’s wife and Lincoln said, Only his daughter Flick, who’s a wonderful girl; and he asked if she knew a "chick" named Amy who got free opera tickets from the Chilean whose wife (her workshop acquaintance) was friends with a singer whose father belonged to a venerable logia lauterina which the regime like emperor and pope before them would smash if they could as if the freemasons were still stoneworkers and their liberal (here, liberation) lodges were made of masonry or for that matter secrets, and Lincoln, alarmed, said, No she didn’t know any Amy; and Spence asked did she know any journalists working in or out of Minnesota because his instinct told him she did, and she suddenly didn’t know but had asked what he wanted and he said, To enjoy a meeting with her (—enjoy? it was like experience, she imagined) if she (Spence went on) had any related information for sale or barter; to which she retorted she had no information for sale; but he: Ma’am you’ve already contradicted that; and she: Don’t call me ma’am—yes she did know someone in Minneapolis, and Spence replied, By name Pearl W. Myles around sixty years of age? who lost a job because she did some hot-shot legwork all written down but never printed to do with a person who disappeared off the Jersey coast right when a maverick U-boat had been seen in the camouflaged vicinity and linked with a German composer (read perhaps compositor—no time—copy both) who had bought all 250 eel-steel feet of it for delivery in Chile where he was going or already was?— does that ring a bell? Never knew so much talk about curved wind, by the way. But Lincoln loathed Spence. (Like a relation? Mayn asked, and she laughed.) She had tried kidding Spence did he know Mayn had visited Medicine Bow at least twice to see the giant windmills where her own workshop leader Grace Kimball’s non-smoking Buddhist brother Walter hailing also from the southeast territory of Kansas used to be a trouble-shooter for the Department of the Interior—and when Spence after a pause called this sheer coincidence (while Mayn asked if it had been she or Spence that had "never known so much talk about curved wind"—Spence, she said; Spence, Spence, but I don’t know if I told him about what your daughter said about him or he me).

So Spence became formal and polite, different, as if asking her out— and she saw a buggy all painted shiny and black and gold with a Central Park horse distinguished by a large bunch of flowers between the ears, yet no future in that buggy or a dangerous future like a waterfall he for me or maybe me him—for all the world as if Spence was forgetting he’d already asked her to meet him: Had Mayn’s daughter (he wanted to know) spoken of a certain Mayga?—Mayga?—A South American woman with a round and not-at-all-bad-looking face who lost her life soon after being associated with James Mayn, who’s married, isn’t he?

Mayn hung up on her, hearing only the word "not—" then had to call back, didn’t have the number, last name, any sense of her except information he didn’t care about.

Lincoln, he laughed within himself. Oh nothing need happen. He had fallen forward into life beyond Windrow. The house phone buzzed and he did not go to speak into it, for Spence was at work in him; the layers of dirty cloud passing the Empire State tower that looked like it was falling was the atmo healing itself getting ready to "wet-clean" the air in a city where the sun’s light is easier to look right at because of—what?—he had never gotten the cause of the seasons straight in General Science although he recalled it was to do with tilting—maximum scattering of light in the line between looker and light source, you get your man-made brown haze but not your natural gray haze so the faraway ridge is made to seem less different from its sky, easier to understand than the seasons, the salt microns, the soil invisibly infinitesimally tilling the sky’s presence so if you could only see it you’re in a desert dust storm, but give me your poor man’s filter the blue haze, but you have to go to it, to Grand Canyon if Australia’s out, not even an electron micro-eye for auras can bring the blue haze to you, where the milky sky-within-a-sky draws viewpoint through semi-precious distance, opaled, to tell the truth, by billions of turps! yea turpentine, but organic natural, not combustible like the human brain’s troposphere of endless economixes.

The house phone buzzed again and the phone rang—something abstract in us won’t go away—and, seeing that in the absence of knowing what had gone on between his parents he had looked into other lives—a world of workshops helping themselves to the apple pie of change—he took the telephone on the way to the house phone and was saying, "Who is it?" while hearing the puzzled urgency of the woman Lincoln apologizing, then again apologizing ‘cause her house phone just went and she doesn’t know who it is, and he sympathetically allowed as how the doorman in his building was half the time in the deli across the street though they did not employ a doorman in the deli, the illogic of which she seemed to understand and told him she was sorry she hadn’t told him . . . that in the workshop she had passed on a story she had heard from his daughter about the Navachoor Prince and his fate that Flick had figured out—she said Jim didn’t sound like his letters, though "Your daughter in this long thing you’ve probably seen doesn’t read like she talks, of course."

Cut to where he was a week ago and will be a week hence, as if he waits for what Larry comes up with. (Isn’t there at least another person all this years of stuff has been about? Margaret? Sarah? Grace Kimball!) Cut through a movie years ago containing a scene of a movie being made, with director in breeches and a second pair of breeches enclosing one of the actresses, and Jim’s friend Sam opening a crackly-wrapped Clark bar in the dark one week after Jim’s mother . . . "went" (as Jeanette Many, her musicale friend, who actually believed not just in God but Jesus, said, who years later wrote Jim at an address she said she didn’t understand because it was not his wife’s to ask what was "going on" in his life, she "just" needed to know so she’d know what to pray for (read pry; just read on to the "Fondly" at letter’s end))—cut to the Bronx Puerto Rican woman wonderfully at rest who looks at your aura which is what you said you came for, recommended (you say) by the lady Clara, who is deeply troubled but it’s only partly events in Chile (you add, as if you’re a friend), but the broad-shouldered, heavily rouged queen of a vision sees what you said you paid to ask about even if she’s declining to discuss that other client Clara whose husband is mixed up in an intrigue at the prison with the man whom Foley knows less about than his words are able to say, yes Hortensa, here beside the thunderous traffic of the Grand Concourse in a furnished but uncarpeted parlor with the freshest sunlight everywhere so you must be sharp to see an aura, tells Mayn his aura gets denser, like breath that as it speeds up finds more and more energy instead of less, but it has a limit though that limit hasn’t been reached and not only isn’t dependent on who else is reacting to him, it depends on his not being touched by that—but he has been in the future (she says) too long yielding only a shadow here and now, and his aura is of great force waiting, waiting, the light around the torso give waves no less, a person trying to get back into you, she’s claiming—

Cut, past her name, which is coincidentally also that of a guy in prison Foley knew; past Spence; but, though snubbed at bar’s end, it was Spence who did the leaving, if only for a few minutes to ring up a (Kontac: new Russian, poss. borrowed fr. Amer. Eng.); cut fast to a light plane, but not Mayn’s that landed in Spence’s wake and yielded a wingtip vortex-turbulence formula in the form of a dumb grin, passenger-to-pilot, instead the plane the boy-man Jim nev6r saw nor could have looked for except its toy remains: the one that came in like an exchange for Sarah almost to the day, in August ‘45, driven by mind, by wind, some sea-to-land meteorologic reconnaissance?, air-to-earth purpose (do not read porpoise-quoia)—and the man who was surf-casting saw it out there in front of his arched rod, saw it bank sharply, come round, turn ninety degrees plus, and aim at the land on a course that seemed to fix on a house it wanted, not an empty house that time of year but under renovation, the occupants doing most of the work—and at the last segundo the small aircraft aborted the house mission and lowered its sights, reeled in by could-be the God whose "Divine Wind" means Kamikaze, and hit the beach at around six a.m. , the dawn coming down this time and not like thunder and hardly burning. It was the day after Sarah "went," and Pearl Myles asked Jim if his family knew the man, a breakfast-food heir and sportsman-diabetic who had a medical degree but had never practiced. Jim didn’t know the man, but his father asked him what Miss Myles had wanted to know; at school, Sam’s fat brother, always on the move within some larger laziness of nonchalance or rest, casually reported that "Pearl" had bothered the owner of "the" suicide boat and that that was why she was quitting—she was being fired because she was asking questions, according to Fulkerand, about a deceased citizen of the town of Windrow. But Jim never knew. But why didn’t he ask {per quoit pran-quaia)? Too much else going on? But what?

We’d say, today, Heavy. Ever lose your mother in mid-o’bit? Jeanette Many volunteered that it was just her view but she for one would not talk about the Miss Myles matter; Mr. Winekoop, who underneath it all including his excellent, sporty clothes, didn’t "shiv a git," told Brad and Jim that Pearl Myles had had a run-in with the after all very-peculiar-looking principal over a range of activities that had a generally extracurricular tone and had kept answering, People matter, people matter. Jim got stuck. Never told a soul. Stayed in his head ready-formulated. (What? An idea? Himself?)

Who was Spence to think that bent winds were code for what happened to Sarah and that Pearl Myles a colleague distant in time and many leagues west of Mayn’s New York apartment was still on the scene which would not go away because it was connected or waged in the tactics of an action Mayn kept thinking was really all over, and his own interest, as he had tried to tell Jean, who was more understanding of his motive than Jim was, turned not toward such grand machinations as a prison break packaged to hide a violent political purpose but to some coincidental wisdoms that Mayn had been reluctant to ask for right out because from the start the figure of Spence, at Kennedy Space Center and later, had interposed itself making some deal with the Chilean economist who was evidently in some danger perhaps because he was not really incognito yet acted like it, so he was in some fashion parallel to himself.

Ted was away and Mayga dead long years. When had Spence been there to hear, and of what informations was Spence as ignorant as of tact? (Mayn felt language change in him, Hortensa’s auras, or Foley’s prison-bound astral projection threatened to come true.) Yet second-hand and third-hand information for Spence was just as good for whatever uses Spence planned. Mayn could get Spence’s phone number somehow, but talking was out. He phoned Flick and saw her face in profile turned half away from him, a dash of blue-pink across the cheekbone, hurt or made-up he didn’t know, and for the first time an answering machine gave him her voice, in which he heard the accent of his son Andrew, whom he schooled himself not to grieve over, or anyway not wallow in paternal sin. He wondered if it was true he never had dreams. He had felt drawn to ring Grace Kimball’s bell, they had acquaintances in common—but to ask her about non-dreaming. He walked around the dimensions of this apartment now his own by under-the-table purchase from the landlord, it would go for a load of money next year, he never cooked and he believed in hot food three times daily—anyhow he found that the resident roaches had deserted—and he realized that like some saint who had gotten zen’d out, he hadn’t thought of his son in weeks, why here’s the little room that had become Flick’s when she would not sleep in with Andrew any more, family is next rooms, oh the shapes of the rooms with little or no furniture "at the moment" (as Mayn said to Norma) held neither free space Norma said Grace K. was creating by shifting furniture right out of her life, nor a multidimensional movie he couldn’t stop, nor his reasonable body as strong almost as ever, falling through the births of children, the love of flesh and furnishings of habit, orange-juice glasses evened out one rushed morning, a deserted toilet unflushed, a cobweb he watched grow behind a sink for years, hot tears from a peeling onion, cold sweat down the forehead from fear and love when he saw not other wives in those gapped descriptions of final half hours in the delivery room but his own wife, his "girl," howling just once amidst all those steady, working groans on her back suddenly laughing in pain in labor to actually show or was it get rid of the child she had grown almost all by herself out of one of her eggs of which she had already the exact number of all she was going to have—his wife suffering in labor with his cold sweat to show for it—yet equal as fluid to all else he fell casually through, the trivia histories of the degenerating daiquiri which, as he falls unstinting through the strawberry d. or banana d. into the tequila sunrise away from his family as if he had something more important to do, meets, for example (but an example of nothing), a free-lance diver with a taste for Bach convinced after his young girlfriend left him that he was being irradiated by inaudible sound that was taking him apart because it doppler’d back to him having originated nowhere else—and a whole lot of people who could double-up and triple-up on names (be much simpler and no sacrifice) like the man Larry’s father knew who wrote his daughter he happened also to know not really well but somehow for such irritated immediacy and interest and even respect for drive, which the man said he got from his late mother that he felt like one of the two reported women in that man’s life past and present who met each other and talked about him thinking each had her own "Bill" when it was the same guy named, incidentally, for one of the famous millionaires in American industry, friend of the family, that man himself nearly superstitious about one market indicator he would not identify to anyone, not even the boy who was named Bill for him—until Mayn on this evening wished he could name this living room and in some uncertain solitude which obviously he had asked for in reinhabiting the apartment he knew this living room was no more about to tilt or collapse or do anything deranged than those temperate settlements locus’d by gravitational balance out ‘tween Earth and Moon would be successfully reweathered—thundered, hailed, flooded except with the speed of light, while he wished that the multi-d film (not as great as art) of his own life with his wife and his kids would yield to the coming attractions except it worked the other way around. He punched two spider webs—one, two. He wanted to rip out the phones but he need only unplug them. He didn’t find anything at all between the information of his work, which came down to measurement gadgets, and the living life of the people populating his emptiness; between his instinct, once, about the distinguished exile-economist and the purported facts threatening like Spence to cluster round the man’s head.

Nobody was on the other end of Mayn’s house phone. Or maybe there had been a click-off, he wasn’t so sure. Wrong apartment. Did Lincoln neglect to answer hers? He thought so. People were dead whom he could ask; he would as soon exterminate Spence, whose power hovered near, convinced by his need profitably to parlay a history or two that he had acquired in a country where he didn’t speak the language but was ignorant of this fact.

Mayn wrote abbreviations absent-mindedly all down a page, Larry’s initials, Flick’s, some Larry-concepts (S.R., O.G., O.M., D.M.), with crossword junctions accommodating M. H. Mayne and, out of the void, Pearl Myles (ha!).

Mayn wrote his daughter, this night, a letter in his reasonable hand which was the visible presence of a tiny, terrifying, reassuring teacher in fifth grade whose surprisingly full-lipped smile descended over his shoulder as he learned fast; and in the letter to Flick he said he didn’t like her answering machine but knew how helpful it was to be in more than one place nowadays; he wrote that he had talked to a "Lincoln" lady who claimed acquaintance through Flick, and being of "sound mind dwelling upon this and that tonight"—(and, pen poised for thought, such as a lady-colleague he had known socially in Washington who had gone out of his life and of her own at a moment when, he now felt, that woman was about to tell him—what?—something to do with external copper interests opposed to the election of Eduardo Frei whose individual career making another run for the Presidency of Chile she promoted by selective reporting; or tell Mayn something about his own humdrum life, for she’s like that, yet also not prying: she didn’t tell you about yourself any more than she took notes on you down in her little notebook—yet come to think of it, she did take a note or two when he told her the strictly outlandish things—civilized South American hacienda-class, Mayn mused, pen poised above a page destined for his not-at-all-old-world daughter to whom he now resumed)—"but coming round to the belief that a system" he was part of was not sound, he urged Flick to have no dealings with one Ray Spence, who might involve her in harm yet had perversely turned Mayn’s own thoughts to such regrets as he could swear like a trooper concerning (if he weren’t afraid of being taken for an Episcopalian!) thinking maybe he and Flick and Andrew’s mother might have kept the marriage going if he for one had known that he was falling forward, casting shadows backward, anyhow known himself better for starters, though that might have kept them from getting married, which had, as he said, turned his clock back past the Indian Thunder Dreamers he had retailed to Flick and (when he could stay awake) Andrew, from their great-grandmother Margaret who had adopted if not changed them herself as had evidently Flick, but he was very sure the meddler Spence had never heard tell of the Alsatian mathematician that Mayn like their last-century diarist-relative M. H. Mayne (with an e) had (as in responsibility) delegated (to whoo? to wit, to air), but now along an inconvenient wishbone of a path with an old dear foreign colleague haunting the way, better say "person" these days (smile—to a daughter who shrugs tolerantly), just thinking, you know, that your great-grandfather Alexander, who predicted the weather from his elbow-tendon’s infinitesimal contractions or his cordovan-coated instep-tarsal better than his wife ever did with her Anasazi and Anglo or than Mel did with his Bureau bulletin (always itself a few hours late), got so exercised one day when Margaret had gone to the city for a funeral and he was alone on the porch perusing those old (as it turned out) foxed and brittle leaves of Marion Hugo Mayne’s diary that he didn’t hear us come up the walk—it began to rain— until Sam called out, "Hello there, Mister Mayn," and Granddad jumped up from his white wicker chair and clapped a hand to his throat saying "Ouch" and clapping the other hand to his elbow that had somehow gotten banged on the way up and we thought he would die on the spot, unmoving, like a horse asleep, and he wanted to speak but couldn’t, but whether from sickness or some kindred problem we never thought because it passed and he smiled and asked us in for some chocolate milk mixing the Coco-malt darkly to a paste in the bottom of each tumbler then carefully adding milk to get a matchless homogeneity of mix—then looked long at me, while Sam gulped his chocolate milk and looked out the window, and my grandfather said he had been astonished to see in those diary pages he knew as well as he knew the back of his hand a mention of something that may well be what is pictured in casual sketch at the back end of the other volume of these diaries, most astonishing—but grandfather Alexander was cooling down now, sipping his chocolate milk—and Sam had to go—the rain had stopped—and Alexander then told Jim but in a manner of someone dizzy still that the half-erased picture was—he stopped but seemed to feel he must go on and lowered his voice— the picture was just a small circle with corners, what looked like pointers, with angles spreading beyond it, lines running out at different lengths—but when you looked very hard at the parts you saw that two lines looked like a carpenter’s square, and one double diameter had dim curves above as below marking a sort of oval eye in the middle which looked like a carpenter’s level—,vhy did Jim not ask to see the picture?—and an odd dotted arc connected the angles with two other lines to make them a draftsman’s compass or either line into a plumb swaying a little before it found its true vertical— and these were (he didn’t really mind telling me this hush-hush old stuff) devices so important to the Society of Masons they kept them secret. But something was missing. I didn’t say politely, So what, Granddad? But he had something to do and the Indian kid whose job I should have had showed up for work and went on out to the garden where presently he and I had words which upset Alexander and incidentally we had a fight, Ira and I, a pretty bad one, and later Alexander gave me a Band-Aid but you should have seen Ira —and my grandfather asked me if I thought Ira would ever steal if he was this violent, and it was the only time I ever got angry and really angry, I remember, and disappointed in Alexander but he removed the pistol from the mantelpiece but told me he had done so and said not to tell Margaret, but one day I did: and the point of all this was that an Alsatian mathematician Morgan wandering around our West who incidentally once saw a mythical pistol you know of in the hand of a mestizo spy (for proliferation of arms seems inevitable) was a namesake forebear of the printing magnate Morgen (with an e) that presumed friend of Mayga with whom she and her husband were perilously strolling the day she fell off one of the scenic heights round Valparaiso harbor; but, more, the printing magnate has a brother Morgen who is a left-wing job printer—ring a bell?—as was the romantic lover Morgan (with an a) who threatened to divulge Masonic secrets and fled an upper New York State village jail and was joined by his girlfriend, a lawyer’s daughter, who met with Andrew Jackson in New York City because he loved her and she wanted to bargain for her reddish-golden-haired lover’s security, or Jackson wanted to hear how much Mason lore Morgan knew, or Jackson had been prevailed on to come, by another admirer of hers, Marion Hugo Mayne, who had suffered partial paralysis of his vocal cords (he says), represented an unusually righteous New Jersey newspaper whose support Jackson had had and still desired, and was (unbeknownst to the others) aware that the brave master-printer Morgan, exiled from an upper New York village to Philadelphia where he had taken up with such trade unionists as the newspaper publisher Heighton, had ensconced himself at a table in a far dark corner of the tavern. It is coincidence that our relative-diarist-historian M. H. Mayne (who records what anxiety Jackson’s adopted son caused by his note-of-hand debts—he in fact even "charged" a young female slave, according to Alexander, the only person in the family who actually read the diaries—though Jim felt them in his hands unopened tightening that sequence of undone duty, newspaper, father, hometown, and the further knowing of his mother’s recoverable personality and biography; and M. H. Mayne, because of his connections) was thus secret custodian of the incognito Morgan who, if he is not related to the Alsatian mathematician who en route from Mexican War to California Gold Rush was nearly murdered in the desert by the mestizo bearer of what came to be the Mayne family pistol, must be such collateral to the Alsatian as to compel other parallels, ours, Margaret’s, Spence’s, straight or warped if not worse for wear and non-wear, to forks as curious as that given us by our alternative Thunder Dreamer who we think also brought the New York Hermit’s Anasazi weather friend a Colt pistol that had found its way not absolutely curse-proof from the upshot of the Mexican War at Chapultepec where the father of that dying white settler whom the Thunder Dreamer said spoke a bit like one of the Germans of the Plains had begotten his son unexpectedly and darkling upon a Saxon-blond war correspondent so subtly male, or so beautifully so, as to reveal her female center to the blind passion of the in-fact-doomed man only in the strange retrospect of the next day when as a Winfield Scott volunteer he realized at the moment of dust and staccato voices when he was hit by a Mexican ball that the nape of his exquisitely frightened lover’s neck the night before had been a girl’s. And so as the wound and the knowledge that seemed to come with it turned him inside out, the glaze of his eyes might reflect or absorb that the hand snatching respectfully the Colt pistol he had dropped belonged to the future mother of his child, the white settler-to-be. And so the pistol or pistols trace back both to the Thunder Dreamer’s white settler’s blonde mother, an Anglo-feminist war correspondent who, when embraced, had been writing personal memoirs of Jackson, when even the angels happen to know that Marion Hugo Mayne enjoyed a convincing English accent for many years, or trace to an unequivocally male correspondent even more English and a compassionate Quaker as well, who had never been seen with a pistol until the night after he had been interrogated by none other than Marion Hugo Mayne, and then he succeeded in losing the pistol at cards to the very mestizo spy and far-sighted horse fancier who very nearly insisted on trading one of his mustangs to Marcus Jones when Jones on his adjustably corruga-cogged bicycle wheels happened upon the mestizo in the American desert just after the latter, having breakfasted indigestibly on some desert shrimp grown instantly from century-old eggs he had pickaxed out of a dry mudflat and watered with rain stored in a random cactus—had relieved the Alsatian mathematician Morgan of a foolscap paper containing a design and calculations that might prove valuable when in fact Morgan had it in his head and was interested only in finding an exit from the desert and preserving his life from the pistol that continued to stare him in the face even after his accoster who would nevei have fired that weapon with some curse on it had it back in his coat pocket preparatory to finding out how old the person pedaling toward them might be—Marcus Jones.

Mayn’s phone rang and he discovered brilliant tears of laughter sticking to his face and thought how Flick asked him about his work for God’s sake, but that was what she wanted to talk about at present, certainly in lieu of her mother, so let her, though she got flip. He hadn’t made to Flick in this astonishing letter some address he felt in the back of his demonstrably shallow brain pan, and as the phone stopped, he reached and dialed her again in Washington, and reached again the machine, to which he said, "I’m writing you a letter that’s cracking me up except I think some things in it are true; also I need reading glasses." She preferred the telephone to writing.

He felt at his elbow the typewriter, unused tonight, and at rest, ready for overdue copy on the Second Women’s Bank of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. At hand his pen, mightier than phone or machine à écrire or the liquor closet which was just four or five bottles standing on the old painted counter in the kitchen, an appropriate destination for a sentimentalist: yet this material spurred now by its own noxious threatener Spence came out so unsentimental that Mayn could get depressed, came out of the wrong orifice which must be a future designed to handle medium or low not high temperatures out between Earth and Moon in controlled environments colonized by individuals who had once each been two.

Not even supposed to be here in New York tonight, he told the Albuquerque woman; supposed to be someplace else. The Women’s Bank waits patiently for him. Had to tell his boss he’s going after all to World Meteorological Orgy’s spring congress, more talks about global weather network, what to do about drought in the Sahel, go to a new weather make clean break, flood-warning coordination, regional aqua pollution tied in with NASA’s long Johnson Space Center project in conjunction with federal agencies to get automated (i.e., "no human intervention") water-qual monit-system with sensors sensing bacteria and one gas chromatograph thanks to NASA Ames Research (as always) Center (let’s get potable!) while EPA’s dreaming total waste use for pilot apartment complex (or small city), will recycle people glass/metal, turn paper waste to hot water, so let’s economize as if people— let’s economize on our matter—while Mayn in person’s pouring a small four-D "mirror" exactly a third full of bourbon, draining the unfrozen water from under the surface ice of two trays of apparently permanently semi-defrosting fridge (fix-it? second-hand? new?): and sip-launching his body back to the large, humbly furnished living room whose floors could be scraped and twice polyurethaned, thinking, turning, turning, falling forward forward with sufficient inertia to carry an atmo or two with him, sharing information (witness the white 8/2 by 11 paper long-handed daughter-bound under the lamp beside the old black portable), divorced and all, yet summoned, summoned, and from this apartment that was "theirs" and’s now "his"—"his" and "theirs," a room full of so much tiempo it compacts into an empty obstacle to get through.

He drank off his bourbon, one and only one tonight or he’d get corned enough to mail this angelfood shit to his daughter who by instead not receiving it will achieve equality with her brother, his son, whom he knows only in imagination constantly split by Andrew’s blinding-binding disappointment at his dad’s calling it a day, he did not want to look at his son’s face. He buzzed the lobby, did not speak Spanish, learned that a man had asked for Mayn and rung the apartment and hung up saying nobody home and Manuel told him he’s surprised, but—What’d he look like?—Good-looking suit, good boots, dark blue pinstripe with red flower in buttonhole—you get the picture.

"But I was here. I picked up."

"Said he catch you the next time. He sound Spanish."

"Thanks, Manuel."

Mayn dialed the Albuquerque woman’s hotel and dropped the handwritten pages into the wicker wastebasket where they came together as a unit, and when asked if he had left a message before, he said, "Yes . . . Spence."

"Oh yes."

"I want her to meet me for breakfast, I forget what I said the first time."

"You said . . . you recall, I’m sure, sir."

"And did a well-dressed gentleman, blue pinstripe, slight Spanish accent, leave a message at the desk for her?"

"No, she had another phone call but he didn’t leave a message; we’re really not supposed to tell you that."

We’re not s’posed to tell you what we already told you. A memory misfires during orbit, o fires as i, i as o, a "bit-flip." Jot it down, then you can forget. But what if it don’t forget you? Mayn will turn into a phoneman like Spence, funds transferred by electric diaphragm—puts the receiver back down where it belongs. But dialed Amy’s number, eyes fired, with a faintly loaded sense in his hands of someone possibly dialing him direct to potential clot in bloodstream. But got a busy: but then, in the innovation-operative midst of busy signal, got Larry, but not to say Hello or to give what Mayn remembers he has half been waiting for from the founder of Obstacle Geometry, expounder of the Modulus, and determined non-victim of Open Marriage or the hoots and hollers of the opera basso’s weeks’ delayed departure and ("Off-off-4Center’ ") Hamletin negotiations down Larry’s hall of this multiple dwelling from which Larry is this evening absent—for he is at Amy’s of course in order to report that while briefly out purchasing (as Mayn thinks, the most rudimentary obstacle for them to get through) a pizza for the two of them, Larry suffered her loss; for upon reentering her unlocked home (after all even at her and his age), he found her trenchcoat gone from the kitchen, her wallet from the bedroom, her address book from the upright piano, her beret from a bowl molded into the back section and rear feathers of a large china goose leaving there her doubtless second set of housekeys glittering, valuable, seeming to invite Larry to leave. He was not too upset by thinking he had been forcing the pepperoni and sausage pizza baked by this Korean pizzeria at the corner upon Amy, to add that he was through chasing an older female when it was probably Mayn or her boss that she—no, no, Larry corrected himself, no, Jim, it’s jtist that I’ve had it, my dad now hates my mother, she’s really not coming back and she let us think she was (didn’t she?), and she phoned me from the Island to say she wanted me to live with her and her heavy-duty friend and hated herself for leaving for God’s sake.

Does the front door lock automatically or do you have to lock it yourself?

It locks automatically.

"It" was not the time to find out what Lar’ had come up with.

Nor was there time to find time—or, more, not to find time—to locate the simplest answer why "all this now," the answer that answers the most starts, or Why we—who often have to not understand Who, What, When, we are—are slowed coming to the illumination that should giddy us up. Because these many starts ain’t mysteriously endless; there comes a day (as we optimistically say when we must mean "an afternoon" when all clefts align to open our danger and opportunity e’en if but to a zen golfer conceived by a lone green golf course visited by the speed of sun’s light, yet we better mean a borrowed hour, a minute borrowed from a theory we might have heard had we been deaf to the violin or piano whose solo ye theory proved concerto to, for we found when we tested the Earth earlier that we grow abstract in inverse ratio to some relative loss of power we had not decided we wanted or not upon last acquaintance with our best selves, for we were so busy knowing the truth of a new, more limited theory of reincarnation, say, that nonetheless answered the most questions of all the competing theories, that we many of us missed the quiet power we were experiencing being thus reincarnate) so there comes a day when we’z done with starts and R been found by what we thought to find, which Mn’t all bad, for as one used to say re: Moon exploring, You find it, you got it: whereas in later days of the Locus 5, many of these privileged settlers who’ve been compacted each one out of two original Earth persons (in most cases acquainted to start with) reported an unsettled sense of lasting content on arrival, later thought by the thinkers of those plexi-axial sun-tuned torus-states to have been due to the mythically rich feeling due in turn to the indubitable source of each individual in this and other space-positive settlements of nothing but individuals, i.e., originally a pair of persons, mostly female-male, often female-female, occasionally male-male, depending on long-term needs though all (literally) united by a Locus T platform plate celled by a milliard electro-magmatic chip-templates jointed to form an ovaline elevator-like capsule so clear that as the templates throng two expecting bodies (but we already remember learning this but without remembering that if you describe what happens, you are responsible for it) as the Hermit learned, describing these and more usual atmospheric, if violent, lumen phenomena that signaled the Princess to take her leave, as they did the girl’s nesting bird-vehicle that rose to the challenge of a mountain-jawed cat when neither cat nor giant bird knew bait from hunter and the cat ate one egg and either disappeared into the future which was the egg’s scent picked up hours later by the hind-gland of a javelina thrown off its eating routine by a between-meals snack given it by the botanist Jones, or disappeared into the form of a sudden timber wolf so great in the shoulder, muzzle, and loins it transcended Pueblo lore that called it devil and was taken to be a real wolf, after all butchered in mid-air by the bird, an event for which the Hermit the day of these departures in his responsibility as Describer of the How and Reporter of the What was punished, but only with exile from that territory. But he returned as his own nephew years later to describe experimentally to the Navajo a gauge on the roof of a multiple urban dwelling to predict, through coastline configuration differences between light and heavy air masses as well as to describe to the underemployed Navajo a future Two-for-One process—in those days a pilot project—whereby the two expecting bodies who are presently to be one elsewhere are thronged with more radiance than their God-given cells know what to do with in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin straining to see a future, while an old-style woman or man now and then sent out like Mayn to report feels extra mortal next to these colons compacted by an economy so simple it’s more question than solution, such as what should be the minimum daily allowances of negotiated or unnegotiated love-merger for these new beings who are the tacit annunciation of what they’ve been compacted to and are experiment they are making with their lives and for which they may be said to be answerable in the sense that a "respons-" is an "answer" and if the Two-for-One origin holds vivid its internalized dialectic should comprehend both question and answer (e.g., in issues of the reality of property out there, or the legal obligation to repay capital borrowed from Earth when, for example, the Moon ore from which so much of the torus’s oxygen is farmed does not create a "debt situation" though it comes from an organic Earth satellite, and the near-panic demand for the soccer-ball-scale tomatoes grown rapidly in high humidity in the frothy soil whipped from lunar earth revalues the interspatial basic-barter objects) in these great wheel settlements with their gravity-inducing rotations that make at some hours and angles the giant spokes seem to turn backwards or bend their shimmering into fixity like the outer radiation-shield rim which seems to rotate with us we already recall and keeps down stresses on its light, vast structure paved with Moon mineral which communicates by reflected light as below through the ingested beans of its new soil a sense of secrets waiting in the otherwise open-and-shut "Given": so that as the boy Joseph Smith consuming and consumed by a pre-Mormon fungi-mold strangely empowering the rye loaves his mother baked him one harsh winter in the New York frontier village of Palmyra near Seneca Falls a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario conceived of secret documents and later hallucinated where to find them (though he was not responsible for their being gold or for plural-marriage doctrines implicit in the tablets), so did some Two-into-One econocolons eat beans and know in their hearts there had been built into the torus structure, like a color and promise of which the artist is but half aware, a point of cleft-potential at which the torus may be enlarged and enlarged again, boosting lengthward acreage for sorghum, potatoes, tomatoes, and, yes, the very beans that yield the secret of the growth point so that production will far exceed the mean projection of Earth planners.

Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in Celebrity Aura as wanting to change her shadow, quiero mudar de sombra, minus her footnote that the words are not hers.

There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead—in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo—not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.

A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare, her work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.

Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.

But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you don’t describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read project, read diverge, read dig, read Lurgi transformation, read matter, read people) is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.

And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or into him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We didnt ‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights—coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he has heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince—so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer—then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last—alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so he seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday—not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his—his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to Closed Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until ... as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found Y&rself crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid—it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible—until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read -ship) with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."

He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t"—and he was grateful to hear—in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

"I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

"What about?—the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

"You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

"They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And were there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet—perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art—Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance—his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a writer; his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself—nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm, and angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention his not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.

"If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement—and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would?—no, he would loan it to him—while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected . . .

Jim’s grandmother was marginally pensive there in the sunny room, a scent of soap, her oval translucent soap, coming from the bathroom; thoughtful, he sensed—though she was so curiously remembered by him in ‘77 that he was startled to see he couldn’t fully feel any more the time or its span then in 1950 back to his mother’s sudden absence in ‘45, though was able to recall not knowing the terrible wonder that took place the afternoon after he had seen Margaret in ‘50 (while a section of his mind was disloyally stuck back in his college town, gymnasium at the head of the street, movie theater, bookstore, soda fountain, package store)—thoughtful, he could recall her in ‘77 through that sprightly conversation which turned then into what she seemed to be really thinking: anyway he remembered no special sequence—only, at some center of their talk, "Better get it now because you don’t get it after you’re gone": which was, yes, reincarnation, that mortally old friend they joked about that used to come up in the old Indian powwows they had had when they both agreed when you died you died: while when-you-died-you-died didn’t mean that your buried flesh or ashes or even the miles of compact intestines and liver and all the little sacs your personal undertaker (Margaret had a good gruesome side) flushed down the drain didn’t enrich the crops and the seas, too, and the hereditary upgoing and downcoming atmosphere, so what had been an invisible particle of a "you" wound up in the blood of an angry Indian with high blood pressure or in the womb of a terror-stricken adolescent in a suburb of perhaps Rome scared to tell her father or in the tip of an elephant’s tongue (they would laugh, the two of them, even hearing the grandson’s father calling from the porch) or the hind-mounted scent-gland of a nightmare-white-mouthed javelina during threatening weather trying to smell its way home to Mineral del Monte or a Mexico City alley or some impossibly southern pampa it retained only the faith of in its shins and eyelids that in turn reach the garnish of a fat, filmy king’s Egyptian table when the pastrami from New York didn’t fly in on time, but we were not meaning reincarnation by the book, from moral escalation (you white in you next life) or inclination upwards or downwards if there even was a ranking, and witness Owl Woman all in this life abstracting her angelic Body-Self into a hole in a saguaro cactus in time to sing to herself as if from far away and to other auditors from any angle and the illusion of many distances

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

which for a second gives pause to the exploiters of saguaro potential interrogating the unthreatenable botanist Marcus Jones preoccupied more with how in desert plants the green stem may take over the job of photosynthesis than with danger to himself, who will regrow a lost finger no more than a crocodile tooth sows the desert with the pitless prune, and all stop to listen to the cactus song, and the tortured but cheerful botanist is sure the plant is bearing animal fruit to yield peace on earth if not carried too far: while Alexander brings three cups of tea he says he steeped too long, three slices of lemon on a silver butter plate, six store-bought lemon-flavored cookies on another plate, and "No pills," observes Margaret ("only make you feel better," retorts the husband): until he leaves the old chums alone so they rejoin some dispersed twists of their old reincarnation agreement which seems to include a quite other agreement not to discuss Sarah: until (. . . something . . .) just before he left her to go (only downstairs, Gramma) to help Alexander peel the potatoes ("But you go downstreet and let your father know you’re alive"—"You mean, let him know I’m here?" for Alexander hadn’t answered the door before and Mel had gone away doubtless thinking his mother-in-law was sleeping), she told Jim her visit among the Indians had been dry and difficult, beautiful but hard-working, white man came by with a beard, and a child whom she sometimes cared for thought it was wool, and on being asked by him who her father was, the child said, "My father is unknown," and the man peeled off a couple of chili peppers for them to eat with bread, and the hot didn’t faze the child while when the man asked Margaret what she thought she was doing there among the Indians and she said, "Just living," the brave young man who was the chief’s son and who was her particular friend but was afraid of lightning and she wasn’t, came up and answered for her and never lost his temper; another time she was alone with the women weaving, and she got up and went wandering and heard singing from a hogan and was invited in, incredibly, and there was corn pollen everywhere and the people sang late and when she asked her gentleman friend’s aunt, Tall Salt, what it meant, Tall Salt didn’t joke with her as usual but said there was "a lot of story" in it she didn’t need to know but someday she would—and then was when Margaret reckoned they expected her to stay; and another time Margaret discovered she was thought to be a healer, they had seen this in her, and she had not known, but when Small Canyon Wind got terribly sick in his eightieth year and legs swole up so his bones got smaller and smaller like to burst, she was told by a voice she didn’t identify (for Navajos don’t go around telling each other what to do) to go to the old man and pray outside his hogan, a white Anglo girl darkly tanned in cotton skirt dyed red, and she went and prayed whatever of the People’s prayers she found she knew. They came to her and closed her eyes, these prayers, and she held out her hands and their trembling got uncontrollable, and she heard a man say, Yes, yes, and she held out her hands further and further, feeling a lightning or very white sun come down out of the heavens as if balancing things out that had been unbalanced, and her hands trembled with some force she then knew had always been there at rest and shown now only in the smallest quantity so she was afraid, and she found she was reaching out to one of the singers standing there outside the sick man’s house and he was being pointed out diagnostically by the hand trembling, and so this man went right inside having been picked by Margaret to sing and he did and the sick old man through faith or luck or magic or caring was genuinely healed that night, which prepared him for death the following week; and Margaret even helped the chief’s son’s mother who at her age still had a fontanel that suppurated like a saint’s wounds or from some possibly external sinister mysterious cause and didn’t heal when oiled with a secret vegetable and "actually bubbled with its own pulse which either drove her mad or was the sign of a distemper she had independently arrived at" (subtle differences quickly stated, for Margaret had a very good brain): and she had reached a "personality" there with those people where she was another person, she couldn’t describe it except as temporary, but got to believing what Tall Salt assured her, that like the lightning above them that she had an understanding with, a sacred life inside her guided her arm when she let it and made it longer at times and moved her arm-hand with a—"well, call it sympathy, Jim, I don’t believe I have it now, though if I did then, let it rest." Did she say that? Her voice came equally from all those distances, 1950, 1965, now from a nearby 1977 apartment Mayn hadn’t set foot in, lighting the way back to her love and personality, and equally back to 1893 and the epic easterly trek of ‘94, and the forties of his mother and his growing up; so that when he had become interested in Ernie Pyle’s war reporting long after the fact, he had run into an Indian bridge builder in Canada who laughed about the Navajo language, its fabled difficulty, and told Mayn what Mayn (quin-repente-quoian) instantly recognized, but from where? from the newspapers during the War (though he didn’t follow the War like Norma’s Gordon) or from a movie? till this night in 1977 he recalled circuitously the day in 1950 and, turned through the corner of his unchanging eye which was doubtless as empty as his repossessed apartment, heard Margaret: "They didn’t make up their minds if they wanted me to really know their language. It’s so hard they used pairs of Navajos as radiomen in the Pacific Theater, because who knows Navajo?"

No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown . . . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.

No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny. Special reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.

His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management —he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.

Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone—that sort of thing.

She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar—and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity—and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know—but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening—he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what?—yet Jim had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend—what’s happened to Anne-Marie?—but your little brother was another story.

Was she that bad off, Gramma?

Sarah? Well, we were all raised to get married and stay married, and she was ill with anemia though maybe that didn’t count, maybe it was that trip to France to the conservatory when she was only a girl.

But you went exploring when you were nineteen.

I almost went too far.

You spent three nights in jail for that woman who axed the painting.

Not when I was nineteen.

What was its name?

The Rokeby Venus, in London. There were demonstrations here.

Braddie accepted it, he knew she wasn’t coming back, he knew she was dead!

But he was so little, Jimmy, and so close to her; I told him all I could, he kept asking and I told him I held myself responsible for being too strict when she was in her teens and even afterward and she went abroad all right to study music but we didn’t let her stay a whole year—we kept an eye on girls in those days.

Did Brad want to know a whole lot?

Oh we got quite close the last year or so.

And you told him a lot?

Oh it’s all things you figured out for yourself, and, gracious, Brad’s just a little bit too nice, sensitive and all, but we don’t laugh much; we had serious talks about how people got to be very unhappy in their home life, and he sent me the most funereal flowers in the hospital.

He kissed her goodnight, he heard Alexander in the next room, he saw that Margaret did not expect him to stay or necessarily to pay her a visit the following morning, which was Friday, he never felt he had to explain himself with her, but wasn’t there then in ‘50 and now in ‘77 this gap a part of you was always passing through? Memory kept things from being over.

Go away and come back light-months later and you’re the same person, pulse back to normal, etcetera; nothing’s happened, where’ve you been? Alive there, alive here. But if dead here, get out fast. But he had been mad at her for talking about his mother in that way to Brad. All times were equal and the spaces between if you wanted.

He phoned Washington, early as it was, and realized he was thinking of poor old reliable business-as-usual Ted in a far-off time zone of California, but Flick wasn’t home. A friend had phoned a few days ago to say his wife and son—for he was legally separated—had had their apartment broken into and the super was threatened with a knife, and the thieves, like bad movers, had cracked a mirror; the man’s son had called his dad collect, secretly—the man was upset and Mayn had been too busy to talk and hadn’t called back but would. A film maker had phoned to ask him to play mixed doubles and to inquire how far they were into the lightning-mapping project and were they going to use U-25? Mayn had business in Connecticut and he had been up all night. Amy was not home or at her foundation where Mayn and Larry had talked to the watchman; and the Chilean economist didn’t answer his home phone at two a.m. And Mayn needed reading glasses, his eyes were tired, and the thing persistently existing in the corner of his eye would turn into Spence if he didn’t get some sleep but he didn’t have time, or into a mountain of mind-bending mineral slag Dina West had evoked with the merest of references: and all Mayn could think was that death leads us to reincarnation, and he had a glass of orange juice to prove his reality, and whereas normally he would have to have someone to talk to to think old things over, it was the reverse now, with Norma anyway, and he heard himself saying in answer to Ted’s "You’re pretty hard on that little so-and-so," "Yeah, we all have a little Spence in us" for Ted to carry on, in Mayn’s affectionate imagination, "Spence has more than most."

Where did he come from? Mayn didn’t even know. But maybe he would have to see. The phone rang and he reached it before the second ring to hear his daughter’s low-pitched, expectant voice identifying him.

"Just the person I wanted to talk to."

"Well, this guy Spence phoned me—"

"Long distance?"

"Here in New York. Who’s he with?"

"Himself, Flick. Stay clear."

1 ‘Well, I didn’t think it was a Senate subcommittee but I think he bothered you once or twice before."

"How come he knew where to phone you in New York? That’s more than I know."

Flick gave her father a number and said it was her friend Lincoln’s, the woman who had called him after being called by the obnoxious Spence. "But he must be on to something, Daddy."

The corner of his eye was full again. He saw the wastebasket by the desk before he’d half turned to find it empty. The hand-written pages of his letter to his daughter weren’t there. They’d disappeared during the night. He had been out for three or four hours.

"I wrote you last night, m’dear."

"O.K., that’s a good coincidence, but ... Daddy—you know everything—when your grandmother committed suicide—"

"What!"

"—you told me you were away camping with your girlfriend and having a fight the whole weekend and you didn’t hear until late Sunday night—"

"What has this to do with Spence?" Mayn intoned, but didn’t want to hear.

"Did an old teacher of yours come all the way from Minneapolis and show up at the cemetery and upset Alexander?" Mayn saw the children playing in the backyard in Windrow, their great-grandfather in a broad-brimmed straw hat about to let go of his lemonade glass when the girl with long, light-brown hair races over, giggling at her brother, and takes the glass as it slips from the fingers, which wakes the old man up, who insists on taking the glass from Flick. "Did she come all the way from Minnesota?"

It was drizzling and his bus didn’t get in till after the burial, and his grandfather was uncommunicative and Jim felt horrible at getting to the house when a crowd of people were eating deviled eggs and slicing turkey and a big glazed ham and he felt he still wasn’t there yet. He told his daughter this, and her voice coming back sounded flat, like after he had left his family and would phone Joy and the children and only Flick would talk to him but with a special unwillingness in representing the other two: "And did she meet someone in the group at the cemetery whose uncle had adored your grandmother and said he would have been proud of her decision?" His grandfather took him aside and told Jim that that woman Myles had been "bothering us" again, and Alexander had finally asked her very quietly did she want him to tell her what the gas smelled like and show her the identical messages all over the living room and the back porch saying don’t light matches? And Jim had been aware of listening indelibly to what was being said but in order to get it so firm that he could consign it right away from him, but it did not all get consigned, because he remembered, but did not tell his daughter, "This time ..." (said Miss Myles)—"What?" his grandfather said—"there’s no doubt . . ."—"About what?" said Alexander—"About why" was what Pearl Myles had said. The voices in the living room and dining room were not hushed and they drove Jim out onto the porch as if they were a clamor sifting him, dividing and dividing him.

"Spence might get himself buried," said the father calmly.

"And Daddy, I couldn’t decide if he was crazy or not, I mean maybe he’s dangerous but he’s sort of up front, obnoxious but I mean why didn’t he ask you about that printer Morgan who was mixed up with a relative of ours? I mean, what do I care about all those people, but there seemed to be Chilean fathers mixed up with Masonic lodges past and present and two daughters we’re supposed to be involved with, but I don’t believe it, any more than I believe that a German submarine had anything to do with me that surfaced one late afternoon off the Jersey shore and helped a person escape to South America who had a banned opera in her head and was either daughter or great-niece to a strong woman who nonetheless found time to listen to mountains think or knew some people who had—does that mean anything to you?"

"I don’t know a thing about Chilean opera, but I remember the story about the sub. There was a waterspout out there the same day."

"Chilean?"

His daughter had not said escape to Chile; if she knew this much she would have picked up Chile, but only if she had cared to. The follower makes up the followee, who reciprocates: but these cannot be Mayn’s thoughts: he does not know what they mean, he knows the poignant politeness of an unknown economist at Cape Kennedy in December of ‘72, his ex tempore remarks re: astronauts and their overnight bags disappearing into space for a break from domestic responsibilities, wives, secretaries, kids, even the bachelor geologist who, however, was not the one who did a brief dance-like hop before stepping up into the white van with the rusty tailpipe; a Chilean economist who spoke of a prisoner inventing a chemistry of thought or communal-think in the void of a prison Mayn found for himself.

"Spence has to be stopped."

"From what, Daddy?"

Only Norma had a key to "the wastebasket," and she would never have taken the letter. He heard questions answering his knowledge that what he had in his power he would use. But interrogations directed not just to him. Though passing through his head, signatures of lightning that when he heard of he thought they had been in his imagination already. So he didn’t figure where they were coming from.

"He listened to Ted and me talk years ago and then he started turning up in my life. He’s not even a journalist but he’s everything that stinks in this racket." But who was Mayn talking about? He felt his daughter angry, saw her lips puff, her eyes narrow and seem to go vague.

"I mean I don’t care about some old relation of yours or your grandparents’ who described a pistol in a two-volume diary so I couldn’t care less where the diary is hiding. But now the mountain: there’s something in the mountain, Daddy. It sounds—"

"I told you about that diary in the letter I wrote you last night."

"—but that mountain sounds like pure insanity but, like, when the fantasy gets really pure, that’s danger; that’s critical mass."

He was tired of big talk, but smiled at her "critical mass" and turned away.

"Don’t turn away, Daddy."

"I’ve told you about mountains that think—Mountain Capability—don’t you remember? I don’t remember where it came from, I can’t imagine Margaret referring to ‘Aimed Being’ as a form of thought, but I’m listening to you talk about critical mass as if you had any idea what it is. (Not that I do.)"

"Well, I don’t remember your telling me about mountains except Ship Rock in a letter but it’s not a mountain, but some of Spence’s information sounds right."

He had a heavy day and he told his daughter maybe he was the "reason" to Spence’s "rhyme" and asked her to come up to Connecticut with him, but she wouldn’t. She said, "I asked him where he was coming from connecting my family to some people named Morgan who used to carry diagrams across deserts that might be about sunspots and harvests or about pistols or railroad routes but were Masonic messages between the hemispheres and he said you were an old friend of his and he was worried about you."

Mayn saw a hand get hold of the four or five handwritten pages in last night’s wastebasket and pull them out carefully but he had never seen Spence’s hands.

"He’s no friend of mine."

"He said a dangerous character had phoned him in the middle of the night asking him about some of this information but he himself had known only what he had heard."

Mayn wanted his daughter to go up to Connecticut with him, the very first women’s interstate Bank; get her away from this.

She said, Business, Daddy? in that ironic way, and said she had something to show him that she had been writing, and he said, Can’t wait, and she said, It’s in the mail, What’s wrong with business? and they were drifting into an old fight in which he might say technology wasn’t demonic, not evil in itself, the machines were to serve us, the real risk was—but though she didn’t want to hear she asked, then, if he’d gone into this because of the family paper and he distinctly felt her mind reach to hang up her receiver, and he said No, and wished she could see how much he loved her but she sounded tired, the "tired" that would last only on the phone. She said, "He asked what I knew about the death of Mayga—he just threw her name at me like we were all friends. Why did it feel like extortion?"

"She was a Chilean journalist Ted and I knew. She did a kind of respectable P.R. more than steady reporting. Mixed up in liberal politics, working for the election of Frei, opposed to foreign involvement in copper. Interesting person. And there’s more to it than that."

"I know who she is, Daddy."

"Spence doesn’t keep information in his head long, it comes in and goes out the same day."

"Mom told me about her."

"Well, I’ve got to go to Connecticut and I think if you don’t come with me you should go back to Washington. What did you come up here for?" He could brain Spence.

"I think it was a mountain I didn’t know about till I got here."

"What on earth did your mother know about Mayga?"

"I don’t want to go into it, Daddy."

His grandfather’s words exactly: when Jim asked what Pearl Myles, who’d come and gone, had meant about there being no doubt this time.

Then Anne-Marie whom he hadn’t seen since a year Christmas phoned the house from upstate New York from college because her parents had told her about Margaret, and she loved Jim; she knew how to say such things and she found some ease or rest in him or put it there, though she used more words to speak now than in high school, so for a second the funeral lunch felt like a surprise party. And Sammy was there because he hadn’t gone to college but was learning the construction business. And Mayn, with his daughter’s words or some accelerating leverage in the phone line’s magnetic current, could not tell if, in 1950 he had a gap he saw back into that was his own ongoing mystery or stupidity, a congruence that memory teased you with, and that was also an absence of his grandmother, her strong shoulders, her eyes as largely observant as his wife’s, buried nearby, yet also a big nothing of his mother, who wasn’t buried nearby. Lunchtime voices rose in his grandmother’s home, and he felt himself swell or deform in one direction or another for the voices pulled him and rose like a classroom of voices when the teacher goes out of the room for five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes. And feeling inside out in the least dramatic of apartments in New York in 1977 where the elevator stopping and moving on sounded like the power supply accumulating, resting, practicing its power, circuit-breaking off into cerebral lesion as if the group house let a universe dissolve its walls and repointed bricks, Mayn didn’t have words to think the wordless panic bordering on absolute inertial not-caring with which (read congruently; read responsible for two suicides; read We) he had to know and absolutely had to know what his mother who had conveniently preceded both of them would feel about this rational death of his grandmother, her mother, who had had enough of "stretching" with or without anesthesia and wrote her letters and then her last multiple identical notes of concern for all who should enter the household before her death was known but especially her husband, who had cigars on the mantelpiece, Jim saw them, three lonely Dutch Masters, and would never light a match for any other reason except, on special occasions, red candlesticks in the andiron-heavy brass holders on the mantel in the living room or on the dining-room table—and howling to know, he thought that his difficult, remote mother, who would talk so directly to you sometimes when she felt like it that you thought you were remembering her words already, would have wept at her mother’s practical act and have admired the woman, and he could have given his mother his love at a time of shock and sadness for her, she would have been polite to all the people who came, and there were people in the house Jim had never seen before, and in his own apartment a century later he’s standing in all the angles of the house turned inside out and looking outward dazed into his usual ease and fair good humor but not alone—what did that mean?—but ready for anything, which was like being ready for nothing, afraid of people coming to him to say they’re sorry but seeing that they had come to his grandfather, the bereaved beloved, who materialized at the mantelpiece thirty feet away from where Jim was standing near the phone, and was actually smiling and nodding with Jim’s mother’s sporty friend whose speaking voice flowed over from his singing voice, and Alexander paused in his gentle amusement to light a cigar so there were only two cigars left there with the pewter ashtray and a small, pale-green Oriental bowl of flowers Jim knew had come from the cemetery. Then he saw Brad, whom no doubt he had been seeing, his half-brother who hated the devious, lunatic winds of January mornings, and he’s taller in a three-button gray flannel suit and more upright, with his girlfriend who’s touching him shoulder to shoulder until Brad greeting his half-brother raised his hand in the sleeve of his suit jacket, French cuffs and all: so that a quarter of the same century later hearing steps near his apartment door, and finding good old tears standing out in his eyes, he saw his half-brother come toward him so that he knew Brad was here in Windrow and he, Jim, was not, but wasn’t aware of the tears that had passed out of his eyes clearing them, until Brad shook his hand and did not know if that was why Brad had come over to him leaving his girlfriend talking to a tall, skinny man in khaki pants and a corduroy jacket and no tie, and to the Indian Ira Lee, who was working at the firehouse: "She wrote me such a tremendous letter, I got it this morning; I’ll show it to you."

He was telling his brother that he had spent all of Thursday afternoon and evening with their grandmother, but Brad knew this because Jim had spent Thursday night in his own bedroom down the street. He had gone away to Pennsylvania and everything had happened in his absence. He had gone away into the horizon of many years and standing in a city apartment hearing his buzzer go he blinked away the feeling that nothing had happened. "We talked about you, Brad." "You did?" "We talked about reincarnation." "You did?" "Hey, when you getting married?"

Joke or no joke, his brother took it serious and smiled sheepishly. "Grampa didn’t have her cremated. He couldn’t do it. Grampa’s writing the obituary for the Transcript." "That’ll be like an obituary for the Democrat." "Dad says Grampa made it ten times too long." "He’s already written it?" "You know him." "Where were you Thursday night?" "You were asleep when I got in. Where were you Friday night? We were trying to call you."

He forgot what he had answered—something like Asleep under the Allegheny stars, or had there been night clouds?—after supper he and his girlfriend got inside their tent. Which indeed was partly what Margaret meant once, twice, three or four times, by saying—

But it was reincarnation she meant, "Better get it now because you don’t after you’re gone," and yet he did not remember in so many words how she meant it, for what he recalled, like some sought-after obstacle, was all the reincarnation he and she didn’t mean: so that he knew then and now as if by an intuition which meant no one would have to tell him, for they could assume he would know: his hand was on the doorknob, eight-thirty a.m., Larry’s urgent voice on the other side: the door was open, the boy stood there alive with the attention and city urgency that covered all the other stuff: he was talking fast like they were standing in Mayn’s living room already: and in the gap of not knowing where his mother was and not wanting to know (any more than he would want to look at the cold face of his grandmother on this her burial day), and not wanting to think about an unthinkable (a record!) two suicides (in less than five years) which kept becoming one in his always grab-bag, humdrum head, in the gap of what you could talk about and what not, what report for sure and what not at all, for this was no politic time to speak to Larry about reincarnation or let into the open void the fact that his place had been entered and his letter to his daughter removed; in the gap of knowing his mother and grandmother were in both him and his fairly dull, illegitimate, love-child half-brother Brad clothed fitly in a suit inevitably from his girl’s widowed mother’s store, and in the gap between a long (read historic) obituary for your wife of fifty-odd years (read uxorquy; read obsequoias) and on the other hand an obit as brief as a weather report, he realized he had decided what he was going to do, as if decision were disappearing for a moment that might be years depending on your time of view, and surfacing like the very same person, yet with his grandfather advancing toward him to ask him if he was going to have anything to eat, the old man’s calm doubtless dragged out of him by the nearness of others’ very bodies, he absorbed the impulse to tell him what work he had just decided to go into and he grasped his grandfather’s arm, who said, "She loved you," and, in a better mood, remembered the slip of paper in the breast (or cigar) pocket of his jacket, for Pearl Myles had left two phone numbers for Jim to call her and he crumpled up the paper and, inhibited from trying a six-foot set shot at the square wicker wastebasket at a funeral luncheon, he went and dropped the ball of paper in, upon which his grandfather said, "My sentiments exactly," and, man to man, they shook hands again, and when Jim came out of the dining room later with a roast-beef sandwich on a gold-bordered plate, a few people had gone, though Brad and his girl were still standing together, now alone, enjoying themselves.

But hearing Larry now so upset about Amy because he now thought those keys were her only keys, and knowing as if from inside Lar’s skin that Larry was unhappy at having to suspect that Mayn, even in a friendly way, knew things about Amy or her work that Larry did not, Larry was tired because of anxiety—his father had gone out to the Island last night to see Sue, and hadn’t returned; and the people down the hall had been coming and going all night and Larry had twice looked through the peephole to see the opera singer and the guy in the pinstripe suit come back and later the guy in the pinstripe suit leave and come back in a matter of minutes—so that Mayn did not trouble Larry with any self-occupied speculations that someone had gotten into this apartment.

Larry’s repeating that he feels in his bones Amy’s in danger but maybe she was fed up with him and with being but a potential girlfriend, a chill though tender in the hand, a gray color at rest in the green of the eyes and then the green scaring the gray away as if he is the gray and according to her too much in his own head (and don’t say "one" the way you do even as a gag, One feels at times, One has forgotten, One remembers why one’s folks split but then one forgets)—but that’s a dumb way to walk out (and of her own pad); she could have felt they’re getting too close, y’know, she on the rug leaning back on her hands staring and talking, sure y’know you can get pulled away from yourself by another person in fact Amy herself had been saying that, and he felt it too so he agreed but couldn’t tell her it was her the light of his life that did that to him—

—all bent out of shape, Mayn murmured in the midst of the kid’s frank language, he didn’t know what Lar’ had asked of Amy; and Mayn took and shook Larry’s hand and Larry started across the threshold but had to get back upstairs in case of a phone call, he had his father’s new Phone-Mate turned on.

He was at the elevator. "I got the reincarnation thing all worked out. I’ll tell you when we have time, O.K.?"

The wind behind Mayn rattled the windows. "I think I had it figured out once, old man."

"We can compare notes." Larry’s real ready for the elevator.

"It’s lost. The field is yours, sir." Mayn had a breakfast meeting at a hotel uptown. Forget the whole shebang and go for a workout, take some steam and a massage at the mercy-killing hands of Manolo.

The elevator window lit up its diamond shape, and a lone rider might be inside. The door slid back. "It’s never totally lost, in my opinion. It comes back because it’s ... oh probably worthless, Jim." Larry shrugged and the elevator door might have been taking him away forever as he stepped in and was shut from view.

So that James Mayn, not half so sure of everything as this celebrated neighbor, Grace Kimball, well-known warm humorous influence on downcast and even suicidal women (Norma said) cum glad theories re goddess dispersing own flesh to heal patriarchal poison—all preached in an apartment in Mayn’s building that Grace had once shared with her (ne ex-) husband—James Mayn found himself left again where he’d about chosen to be: on consignment facing down the four corners of his one-time permanent shelter, unsure which was margin, which center—Women’s Interstate Bank, or a disappearing if potentially plural, non-curseproof pistol that came to roost bearing on it somewhere a worn emblem possibly miniaturizing a plan of sunspot economic cycles with a lot of 5s in it; droughts in the American West every twenty-two years, or the Great Spirit’s reportedly Four-Cornered Ear grounded somewhat as was the radiation fog of the coast-like Plains-and-Rocky-Mountain upslope challenging the Thunder Dreamer’s progress westward to give up the dancing pistol to an ancient survivor.

But margin and center turned out to be fact or lunacy, too: total-waste-use apartment-complex project, or some movable mountain’s mineral "bank" capable of, upon installation wherever it surfaced, literally brainwashing all those dwelling within its range so as to pan, like gold it could become, the illusion that it had stood there for centuries. Margin or center?—the hopelessly rigged, hawsered, shrouded, and convincing stories where that Hermit-Inventor figured, and the (well) real man, skinny old geezer who really died fifty miles away in New York City and whom Jim had asked Margaret about, and, after her death, did not ask Alexander about any more than Jim had even, over the years, had to struggle to keep from linking these old matters with his sudden interest in the U-2 fiasco and, from then on, during the sixties, its cover story’s subject, which was real weather reconnaissance, a fictional cover story made out of actual meteorology.

Margin or center?—Margaret’s Hermit-Inventor’s reputedly incarnate nephew carrying on original weather work; and some elder maverick in this later routine life surfacing twenty years later in the seventies, sometime employed in Texas and in a Colorado "center" then later as expert consultant on a New Jersey pirate TV station where he first voiced his "coastal" theories till he lost that job, released to custody of self (and social security), there visited by Mayn—but, if disemployed, now at his free work and with barely enough from a forgotten patent to support an old unrelated woman babbling someplace in that railroad flat with shit-eating old walls—

No problem, this original man unwilling to spend time (and living space) telling workaday newsman (covering he’s not quite sure yet what) differential equations for minute variables in evolution of atmosphere—for a weather conceived as scene for or product of a unified field locking together the four great forces: a new weather (according to this lone, unfrocked weather thinker) in that not only precipitation and cloud formation but the apparently local precipitation of wind might be indirectly radioactive in origin: you begin to get a reading on the overhead dynamics in the vicinity of some eastern coastlines—to be specific, vertically stacked interfaces, these possibly due to an oscillating radiance you infer from graphs of upper-air heat-swings and of shifts of cloud cover . . .

(which Mayn checked against the "pictures" done in black and red on opened-out brown-paper supermarket bags on the battered walls of the hermitlike maverick’s apartment; and heard the old lady’s continuing, rather musical talk in some next room; and found in an awful unframed window of understanding become his whole torso and head, that his elder host’s science-on-spec ("Oh, ‘guess science gets the halo nowadays—or am I out of date?") is tracing an old daydream seed of Mayn’s too long ago digested: so unthinkably far away from (apropos of future lasers penetrating storms and reflecting information perfectly back through turbulence) the old maverick’s humble mention of Lewis Fry Richardson (good English Quaker who resigned from the Meteorological Office when it was swallowed by the Air Ministry and who died—just three years after Margaret—having taken the study of wind distinct from its velocity so far as to have formulated a law of turbulent mutual dispersion of particles): and oscillating radiant (O.K., he’s hearing this succinct and separate man) energy product of relations between some near and stationary magnetism and some far and moving magnetism: these due to radioactive parcels or process, associated in some quirk-phenomena of the last decade, with coastline configurations themselves changing in some radical way measurable by image; meanwhile this radiance builds in intensity, mounts because of some mountain-like approach from the West.

Margin or center, or fact or term Mayn won’t yet make up. Two screens of material you don’t quite look at at the same time: old nephew of the Hermit-Inventor of New York who died and whose obsequies Margaret attended; and then this new, newsworthy actual person in an apartment with a face that looks broken and rebroken and complete, demoted to such contemplations as made Mayn contemplate some extra homework; and he had long since told his daughter of this maverick’s speculations, which made her nod moodily and say, O.K. but that word "mounting" made her think about the chance of radioactively produced weather threatening changes maybe due to some tide of slowly heaping government-sponsored wastes.

Margin or center? Mayn went on and on, angelic waste like education passing through him so he mattered so little he would just go on living contaminated to a ripe old age, the "rhyme" to Spence’s "reason"—think how, in quickly boning up what weather he could to at least grasp what the i960 U-2 plane was supposed to be watching while keeping the Soviet Union under surveillance, he could have discovered for himself why wind seems to us on Earth to curve like a bullet or anyway to the Anasazi Healer who could see whatever he felt was out there, but in fact blows straight as a latitude to any observer outside our rotation-obsessed Earth’s (God knows) inertial system— while failing to connect this after all fictitious (after some French mathematician) Coriolis effect with the Brad’s Day wrangle about curved winds—as if in condensing a news release out of California one weary day that, to wit, even forgetting our manned capacity to change the weather we might look forward to Canada and the U.S.S.R. turning hot and dry while some Third World disaster areas might turn into moist green savannahs, soft mountains, hectares of orange soil, black soil, we never connected this future with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and its itinerant clouds of acid droplets that caused the Little Ice Age by stratospheric blocking of the sun, not to mention the Hermit-Inventor’s symmetrical tornado of ‘83 which seems, within his inertial frame to have been the model for the monster of late ‘93 early ‘94 not reliably chronicled by the Navajo (though woven by Earth and sky) that coincided by convergence flow not strict causality with the afternoon of the long sunset when great forces came out—instead of "going home" and that one-in-a-lifetime alignment of clefts and the new post-mortem career launched all but weightlessly by the Anasazi healer’s will so much at rest among the disintegral dust remaining of him that he became a cloud whose name he had never known and, in his only shrug in honor of the reincarnation he eschewed (long, long before a woman named Grace Kimball was saying she disappeared into her workshop members like fragments of the goddess and then would resurface having swum through their circulations for days on end, and know that simultaneously she had never been away), he passed over Landbridge America aiming, if not before he died, so soon after as to be practically the same thing, to see what he had always been curious to see.