BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE END

We already recall what has just happened.

But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to be passed through, though this is due as well to the Obstacle penetrator’ s at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.

Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate within him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing)—but chemical contact—with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose initials, de Talca added, were his real name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news—personal and private news—that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired him were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the Hamlet story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you—I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.