That was the motel that launched us, I remember that time. You weren’t so much of an interrogator then.

I have to know things if I’m going to pray for you.

Pray or pry?

Cry for you. You remember speaking to me of Nansen?

He locked his ship into an ice floe and tried to drift up the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Sure. Nansen.

It’s like nothing has happened since you told me that stuff.

Then there were the Norwegians who figured out weather fronts.

What is "93"? Is it the distance to the Sun in millions of miles?

No. It’s the year Nansen tried his stunt.

That isn’t quite what you said.

Well, I am subject to factual error. It’s the story of my life.

I’ll share the burden with you, Jimmy, but let’s include the mountain that compacted to next to nothing.

Let’s get back to us.

We are.

Feels more like me.

Your daughter, according to Amy—

—Amy doesn’t know my daughter—

—but works for a man who knows people your daughter does know—

Flick has traced toxic waste right into the conversation of mutual acquaintances.

Amy said Flick thinks the Indian pursuing your grandmother across the continent is a terrific putdown of native Americans and probably some old family legend.

I didn’t know she thought that. I did know that she had figured out two of the possible ways this mythical Navajo met his death.

Also, she wants to be called Sarah.

Maybe so.

You’re getting mad. Did you say Let’s get back to us?

We are.

O.K.

But we have had other curves to trace, trusting at times they would be parallel in their surprising ways like the pot calling the lid empty, or the lid we seek for our unconscious life mirroring with its dark storefront underside our incessant approach to it, uncertain if all this means People Matter or Are Matter, Are The Matter, or, by turn (potentially) of mind, first Equal (=), hence ARE (if not already Were), thus R (ARE’s real sound that hence turns back to us the (phenomenon, hence) law (of the letter) Rotation containing our now verb rotate) M—once the study of our child in the next room who went on beyond Rotation to other things, leaving us turning and turning in wonder and love at having been exposed to this multiple child, for, left alone now in a room that recalls departed tenants and so much major that by turns proves margin, we feel (or feel we feel) that, if less group-safe than Grace Kimball officially backed rape-proof group sex for being, our own group-shared discovery of a new reincarnation ensured that the Anasazi healer’s prophecy would not come true, for no one of us much less one "young person" (quote unquote) bears sole responsibility for discovering that wonderfully commonplace if mind-bent simultaneous One-into-Two, the S.R. that the Anasazi surely meant when, prior to the cloud he became, he predicted that the discovery of a new reincarnation would doom its discoverer (—though to what? for S.R. was always there) a l-screen-into-2 basis for that 2-into-l coup that might lead like Matter’s largely Rest Energy to Bad News as well as Good News, from knowing your spouse so well you might so become his attaché case or her bag and/or its absolutely familiar and known contents or, say, your spouse’s body and with it his-or-her desire to jump out of it so that at a moment’s lack of notice you’re willing to risk said spouse or spouse-hood (all the same thing) in a game of chance—all the way to, say, knowing a loved parent so ill with one power of your soul that you redo that parent inside you without first asking and wind up possibly legal tender (to recall the name of a famous Pennsylvania reincarnationist’s child) for a future transaction in which you lend yourself to that miracle witnessed by a ruddy-tan daydreaming adolescent lying bemused on his slightly sagging bed in an upstairs room of a New Jersey house whereby two regular people (maybe accustomed to twin candles at the evening dinner table) are trans-mattered (perfectly safely!) outward into Earth-Moon space arriving as one person, not two, at the destined pioneer place so as to give new sense to our question Where you coming from?, and since two persons, two personalities, have become one, should not their parallel warps of past come to rest in some new time? For how do we compound a deadfall animal trap set upon a western mountain and a treehouse nailed and wedged into an eastern maple? how mingle memories of an elder voice haunting you from behind as you stare at a dismembered Statue, and an explorer’s sight-unseen fantasy of that Statue’s harbor and that harbor’s city while the identical voice warns you not to embark eastward toward that fantasy? We already remember, as if we always knew.

His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare a shadow rubbing her neck along the sinew of a sky-gray tree like others recently seen. And a smell that nearly spoke to him, spoke like mist from this curious, long silvery cloud close overhead that had materialized above him at night containing waters of light. His bed a river edge of earth, leaf mold, cold web of boughs. His fireless camp tonight alone at such distances, yet many of them all one.

At a distance now from those farmhouse doorways he had been passing. A distance no different from where he might journey another day, rain or shine. Other farmhouse doorways, maybe Virginia under the same sky, or the territory whose name of New York was heard for a generation and more among his People through the tall and talking knower named the Hermit, Hermit of New York, who had lately described with his own hands steep, cloud-high houses of rock that would be built in the city of Chicago where the East Far Eastern Princess had been and would be built soon in his own harbor home of New York, and some of rock carried from mountains down to the water, and some of rock that could be mixed like adobe out of water, bricks laid so that the walls would give with the wind like sail. So that the name of Hermit must mean him who knows and talks much. Whose voice was now near at last, and with it the territory of New York, the place which the Hermit and his ancestor had left to come to the People in the Southwest so many summers to sojourn near the mountains that could think or dream.

Mountains that had always been there, not like that other mountainous Rock called the Ship, that most men said had sailed down across the People’s desert from the northern ice lands, but with no sail now except in memory, there in the desert where the People had walked and lived and that was theirs long before it was given to them by the white men of the East. Yet, No, some said—and he heard his mother say—that Ship sailed instead from the ocean to the west. Twice she had said it in his hearing, if it was even a ship. Once he had been in the Northern Arizone with the corn-eating people, finding at first power in seeds but then receiving a command to go away, to migrate.

The farmhouse-doorway people here along this river said, "New York," and pointed the finger of an outstretched arm east or north so the hand looked like a pistol. The smell of the low silver cloud this night held the softest, most inaudible voice. Through the forest to the further curve in the river, a farmhouse doorway always was: and coming from it, and from the faces, a current: coming out and through him and back through him and into the doorways: so he would not think about it.

Faces knowing, unknowing; the constant doorway not like the People’s doors. Distant, distant; so now his bed nearer the sky; the near lumen cloud lower than the sky. His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare softly stirring. His hunger forgotten for some moments now contemplating as he never stopped doing what his hand held warmly in his buckskin pocket, the dried, strong-warped cut of tongue he had had with him since he had left his people and before: cross-section of northern bison’s tongue, while now in the night of this rich, moist territory sloping always eastward toward that ever-homing white girl who was no more the one reason for his journey than were the pistol and its designs he carried after her and some more and more bodily part of his soul, this collop of northern bison’s tongue compacted such old forces that suddenly he knew himself not just here two arms’ length above a river for the night but also far away in motion across an isthmus thinly hinging the top of this one world to that other world whence mammoth and bison came to this; and the power secretly at rest in the dried, grainy section of tongue in his pocket came out and enclosed the meat like the skin of his own knowing hand, much as the pocket of cured hide held its source, the great deer that he had so trapped with his own advancing eye that he had felt himself to be the human form of that demon-timberwolf, and he killed with his hand that great deer and opened and divided it under the afternoon and all-night eye of the mountain lion that could turn itself into a huge timberwolf, it was said. Watched closely and with understanding by the mountain lion. Not with the haste today and yesterday in the eyes that stood in the doorways here in Pennsylvania. He would stand waiting until food would be handed to him that he never looked at as he ate it. Haste in the eyes of these farmers, these people, like what came from their doorways and passed through him where he stopped, then back through him into the doorways seeming to make them close up tight again, for they did then close, and the thing that had passed out through him and back through him and into these doorways was a current that could injure him if ever he woke up to what it was, a fluctuation he did not need to know of while, at the riverbank at night, his hand upon the bison tongue with all its waiting power took him closer every time to the doubled sight of that isthmus at the top of the Earth, where the two continents could not be looked at at once unless that isthmus could be seen for what it also was—a moving, a turning from there to here, a motion, a moving which, if seen, made the mammoth and bison and the hunters with foreign seeds clinging to their leggings, frost in their eyebrows, no longer move but wait like pictures carried by this perhaps-soon-to-be-broken land from the world out behind to the world here before, one sky behind (oh quoia, he hears, or more exactly, oh quay a, or even, oh quay), and one sky before: though the Great Spirit ought to be near either sky, yet some power in the Navajo Prince’s science said No to that: the Great Father was not always near, and then it came to him that that was why he thought "Great Spirit" ‘stead of "Father." Yet if ahead, where the East Far Eastern Princess sought her home, then the Navajo Prince might take strength and faith from his own hunger: not at the door of some farmer who did not even see the true figure of the Indian in front of him (for the Prince did not see that true reflection in the eyes of the farmer) but at some longer step the Navajo Prince envisioned far further ahead than the thing hanging over him tonight was above him, the cloud lumen with some shape in it, wheel yes, but wheels, but one many-wheel, as though a ring had blossomed laddering faint vines up and down its many rounds that now the Prince might spy only if he did not look at this tower-like shape for then it would not be there but it was in the cloud, shape of some memory of withheld storm or force-to-be that he would study if the cloud would come down; and for a moment as his blue Mexican mare’s neck abrading the gray-blue body of this river-tree he might name before he left this territory tonight or tomorrow seemed to take with the briefest sound a split of bark although his horse was not hungry enough to eat bark, whatever bark might be made into as you turn bison spines into jackrabbit traps and bison feet into saddlebag buttons and into such wind handles as only the Prince knew of though he their accidental conceiver did not yet comprehend their workings, he found himself across that ancient isthmus (so brief a hinge between huge world-islands yet also so puzzlingly long), found himself in motion there if he wished to see that way just as the riverbank here in Pennsylvania night he now saw might be what moved and not the river that it thus left behind, so the cloud that almost should not be there above him alone in a sky of broken Moon moved also and with him— and, crushed once again though for the briefest moment by what lay always around him and ahead in the person of the white girl he wastefully in love pursued together though with the other things all unequal he sought too, plus the anguish that if he let himself be in that far isthmus long enough to discover what he was doing there apart from witnessing and rooting forth what he knew from his own living and dead family forked world-dividingly from that point that the Hermit of New York when he’d once heard said was just the old Bering Strait, that’s all, when the Navajo Prince knew it was a place in motion and between—he now also here in the cold eastward night knew that the split-sound he’d just heard wood-like, bark-like, was not his horse again meeting the tree that he must name before leaving, but was of another presence nearby, and that if he slept and dreamed, he might lose his horse stolen into his very dream by night to ensure that he would not recall it in the morning on this bed of eastward riverbank he so nearly rises from, in impending sleep, that he wakes with a start hearing half in half out both a questioner deep in him saying, "Eastward? which was eastward? the river, the bank, the passion-slave’s Oh quay-a head? and what means ‘broken land’ and what will he someday use this forked force for? to speak dupely and find the sky’s light in the very Earth and weigh it and wind his way into it to speak out of both sides of his tongue?" and, "half-owr" (hearing) that split-sound again and the weight, then, of two steps he felt were a woman’s (but why? was it that she should at this cold moment come back to him? but how?—did she know where he was? had she not only the power to leave him as she had done the night after the strange storm, to go away into the land alone as if never to come back, but also the power to come back to him at any time?)—while he knows that whatever happens here, someone stealing his horse or even picking his pocket of the bison tongue, he must risk being elsewhere on that far-north icebound isthmus he has only heard about and never actually seen: for there he will be able to understand what he knows he has the spirit of inside him already; and he knows this as he knew before he met and heard tell from a Zuhi outcast under a red cliff that his own already storied departure from his Navajo home in pursuit of the East Far Eastern Princess had caused his strange mother to come to life again together with the demon-raw hole in her head that shifted from forehead backward and forth, and that had closed up when she had died but opened when she had, according to the report, come again to life following her son’s sudden departure. And he hears inside him and outside the words Go away, but mixed with other words as if he is mixed with other people, who recall him in honor and remember him as man and child, and the words are here near the riverbank yet on the lips of a medicine woman speaking out of a cactus while his mother, who has tried to tell how her chronic malady came upon her, is restrained by an old woman and a young woman while the lips windowed by the head-like cactus explain for her that the Prince’s mother went walking in the mountain and saw a hunter withered suddenly to his mere skull and clothes and saw another man who told her to go away for there would be another flash hailstorm and she would be broken by those rocks of ice if not sucked away into the mountain. But these words (interrupted by the small boy’s being taken away from the sick person’s lean-to though he heard more words for a long while after that were carried to him or reached by a wind where they already existed in him) in turn have come, this night in Pennsylvania, from that immemorial isthmus the Prince, who is only a would-be knower, cleaves to a knowledge of that he seems, under the night light of the strange-smelling lumen cloud above him, to have come all this desperate way to find mixed inside himself: and these men, these hunters crossing from one world-territory to the other following the mammoth and the bison feel the brief isthmus breaking up under their strong feet—"strong man," he hears, but asks, Where are the women?, and thereupon finds them tracking the brief but in some way unthinkably long isthmus, children on their backs, things in their dark hands, coming closer and closer to the men, from whom they are indistinguishable, falling back from the men as if drawn to the homes they left—"home," he hears, "Home is where one is," he hears, though the words come back to him from inside him where he has yet to go, if ever in this life, though "home" he hears as well outside him in the eastern night cold, holding still to the isthmus at the top of the two worlds breaking apart as the fur-skinned hunter people flow unconcernedly onto this world hardly looking back but he knows one man, no, one woman, no, a man and a woman near each other, turn away from each other to look back for each other and see only the isthmus dissolving into mist, reshaping all the other animals besides mammoth, bison, sheep birds of the long mountains bearing asleep in their stomachs the egg from which the whole rainbow range of most powerful snakes will uncoil upon and give motion to a heaven of new mountains and within grasses thickened by weathers not yet breathed: until this man and woman pair turn further and see each other and know it was each other they saw shaped and fluctuating and lighting up and glancing off the animal mist of the isthmus’s dissolution into sea.

But the blue mare snorted long, and the Navajo Prince who sometimes now began to think of himself as "prince" felt without looking at her off there by the tree that her neck was tense, and he felt her eyes roll, and the isthmus of the two continents withdrew before a woman’s voice: "Are you a strong man?" It was what his mother had said to him sometime after the hole had opened in her head but before it had begun to shift position. But he must hold if he could to the isthmus, or to the pair standing together on the shore of the disintegrating isthmus, who saw this developing bay of suddenly broken land, this Bering passage of mist-hung water, curve away from them, or so the Navajo Prince now in another age saw from his riverbank in 1894; and now above them all, all of them, he felt a cleft or clefts opening where the heavens dropped a channel of such light as devoured some thing in those fixed in its anchorage: so that, as he looked up—"Good heavens, there’s nothing here, why where’s your camp?"—he could see sun-risen that old hunting couple rejoined into one aim so that, with safe canyons to the south in their single mind they turned as one, turned to the south . . . that is, he could see what he found he had wanted to explore in his own memory maybe set off by studying forces ripe in the bison’s dark tongue both fresh-killed in the North where his mother had secretly, wordlessly hinted he must go away as if from danger, and later dried so that the forces had compacted and withdrew into such intensely sleeping force that he heard in his taste glands their vow to sow this Earth with food that would never make the People hungry again: "Where is your home?" came the words, his mother’s when he had returned from the North convinced that in the narrowest compactions even perhaps in his very mind rested some chance of food, of trees, of health, and even unity between his own old Athabascan ancestors now the Dineh known to outsiders as Navajo, and far away where tiny fires bobbed on the water the Yahgan and the Ona peoples he knew of from an old, old man the Anasazi healer who had not healed anyone in centuries and who had chosen to die precisely when the Navajo Prince needed him yet could sit quiet and remote in thought no matter who came to ask him questions and who was honest in his knowledge, ascribing it to those who had brought it to him, in this case the irritable and thoughtful woman with hands like desert crabs, Mena, who studied (and reputedly sang to) desert javelinas as the Navajo Prince studied bisons’ bodies and who reported with such exactness she would say two different things at once and had told the Anasazi of these peoples from the South where she came from who wore no clothes part of the year and slept in the cold and rainy beech trees, though she told as well of other peoples who made feather cloaks like sand paintings and split and hacked out and ground mirrors of obsidian rock and sailed as far up as an island called Cuba and studied the heavens as well as the pods of food bushes: and again, "Where is your home?" he heard, looking up now mto the long and quite friendly lumen cloud immediately above containing, he saw, lensed widely into liquid, precisely that part of the bright Moon that was darkly missing from the sky tonight, a cloud he saw he had just plain not admitted to himself had followed him for days to pause each eastward night like a miniature sky or giant trunkless tree, or some threat of cloudburst in these regions so much more watery than his own, for in the moist messages like those columns he had pondered as a child mushrooming out at the top to tell a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, he smelt now seared metal fleshing such welcome with as well a hunter’s breakfast-taste of cornmeal cake that the distinctly communal "Oh-quaya" or, so faint was the last sound, "Oh-quay" (not unlike the "Dee Quay" he had been told was the Hermit-Inventor’s (quick) Anglo for Dineh quaya, "the People always") that came to him seemed to be out of this bright break in the lumen cloud opening a Moon-reserve he knew to be at the very least his old neighbor the Anasazi healer’s will though not his body unless his expressed wish not to be reincarnated had been ignored by those self-breathing airs into which he had given his life—"Oh quay," though, was what he heard, and it was the same secretly painful current the farmhouse doorways had passed through him showing him he now saw just how far he was along their river, yet, in the outward and returning threat of that current, telling him what he might not catch onto without losing what? some portion of his sleep? some swath of pride that went with him on the way to that East Far Eastern Princess and other inquiries and studies and explorations he bore in mind? some bottomless power in the bison-body he held in the pocket sewn of the great deer’s skin? And yet this loss—of anything, of everything—of the Anasazi’s heart-voice dropping light down through the Navajo Prince so he must turn and face the woman voice that likewise said, Oh quay, but in the question "Are you oh quay?" turn away too from the Bering Strait hunter couple with one aim now bending south seeking not just food, but not each other either—this loss that divided him like one who bleeds from two wounds far apart came at him faster than the fastest attack, suddener than the Pressure Snake that drew the sky into the mountain as the second hunter man had said—his very last words to the Prince’s mother one afternoon before the Prince was born when she had wandered away up into the mountain like a lone visitor—and the loss came at him now in the "Pennsy" night (for he heard in his head and in the knuckle of his left, free hand the land’s name thus shortened) so he knew he was watched by what he watched and by, if not the Anglo girl Margaret doubled like the Moon, doubled as Margaret and the Eastern Princess, doubled as a strong-faced woman who endlessly asked about drying vegetables for storage and about crop-planting season and rainfall, and about irrigation, and about customs of rolling in the snow for strength and birthing babies by hanging on the branch of a pine tree (and many female questions to Tall Salt and other women) and about the use of cedar for houses and dead wood for fires, and must learn to weave and must think through thoroughly the cooking of what she named "less sweet yams," the fruit of the blue yucca, and make very small circle cakes with no middle so the women laughed at them and looked through the hole—this person who was also the soft-cheeked young mother, as he imagined her, singing, "Put on your old gray bonnet with the blue ribbons on it, and we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," this foreigner who toward the end of her stay gave him the name of Prince, Navajo Prince (their private name for him he wasn’t sure he liked, though drawn possibly from the plants he taught her) and kissing him like an animal he had seen in a dream with her lower lip and upper lip separately though together many times one night upon a mesa watched by the eye of a tall, ripe old cactus, while she softened like late light so he realized how tough and strong she had been, watched as he knew he was now, months later, at his poor camp on the bank of the Juniata, not just by the pale-haired woman standing urgent near him but by some pale-faced boy somewhere—in the smoke-bright cleft of the cloud overhead or in the dream-blink of after-image when he looked away, some pale-nosed boy lying—where?—wide-eyed but asleep behind those eyes, who was also a man and yet who was always dividing and dividing in the pound of the Navajo Prince’s ears and temples and eyes, pounding into two, into two boys: but, thinker and studier of things and of force—and of terrain reaching always behind him to mountains that, whether it was dream or thought they sent outward over the land, had changed and plagued and sickened his mother since before he was born, and terrain ahead, east and north . . .

east to the Susquehanna Iroquois who he had heard nearby would tell him the meaning of two dreams he had had after fighting to the death a Plains Cree warrior with six rifles lashed to his horse over the way he had wasted half the body of a great queenly bison in order to get her hide to paint his conquest of her on—in the middle of one solitary morning’s vast and silver dawn during the spring when he discovered invisibility both in the presence of his father and far away while watching a Thunder Dreamer at a campfire wrestle a many-fingered yucca-creamflower-eating mestizo until the two of them became one suspiciously looking for the young nomad Navajo studying them while chewing a local winter-loving plant like prince’s pine but up there called by the Cree pipisisikweu ("it breaks it up into small pieces")—though he felt so firmly his invulnerability to their single-minded search for him that he knew the leathery leaves and pink and dark-pink flower had dispersed his material appearance sufficiently for him to be quosi-quaia unseeable for a time . . .

and north to the Iroquois of the New York State where Margaret said a relative of her family had visited a league of Indian nations so devoid of poverty he had written her big-footed cousin Alexander that to be poor in America was your own fault in general and here was a society where no one stole, and white men in other worlds had heard of this and would copy it . . . the Navajo Prince, thinker and studier of things, will not put mere vision of one or two pale-faced boys over truth, guessing from the Hermit that, just before leaving, Margaret was with child: so it was way too soon for those two to be his own sons looking pale-faced up at the sky: nor need they be two! for suddenly they are one again in the face of the pale-haired woman wrapped in a green blanket here at what she pitied as not much of a camp at all, talking to him about being out of work and of a man who will lead an army of jobless soon and she was his beloved cousin near here along the Susquehanna but is not any more, while the Navajo Prince knows perhaps in her honest face that the vision of the two boys who were one and then one again is their vision and theirs is of him, here, and thinking of the waste of his forces wandering these continental paths in search of knowledge and the Princess and the eastern coast, he feels the sweat of his buckskin pocket’s bison tongue and wakes to such residue of that current that flew through him forth and back into the farm doorways he has visited that he is stabbed to understand that the hunter couple crossing that disintegrating isthmus were a nearly unthinkably long time past and the boy or boys seen by him are ahead in time so that while he cannot understand how that can be, for he knows that that boy is not yet born, he knows he is seen by the boy, watched in wonder, it comes to him in the midst of the woman’s words about a man named Jacob Coxey he doesn’t know and a cruel town named Chicago he does know though through the Hermit, who had watched over Margaret there and had studied the shadow of the wind blasting off the Chicago Lake and the secrets of new stone buildings in which people would work—knew of Chicago also through Margaret, who found it a wonderful meeting of all nations—meanwhile as that boy who is at once a man lying as if buried where he sleeps looks straight upward not over here toward the Navajo Prince in 1894, the Navajo Prince by some turn knows himself to be there before that boy’s eyes, light that glances off the boy’s speaking lips and that bends vision to oneself and gets bent and divided by it into other people’s stories that ours become, divided by it into the useful and the great, the colored and the penetrating, and is a mask through which the orphaned Prince recognizes the holes in his head, the eyes forming and the nose and mouth, holes opening even before the face forms in some time held glimmering within a cloud maybe like the cloud above him that he knows contains his old acquaintance the Anasazi in his interim and humorous compromise with reincarnation; and the Prince is glad that this future boy-man he has seen sees not only him but other worlds, other moons, other mesas, valleys, skies, new food sources that could keep hungry people from weakness (for Margaret’s circle cakes called doughnuts that she had said did not puff out well enough gave strength though made one want more and more, indeed like Margaret’s words), even new beings in those other worlds of the future that like the bison’s tongue-flesh could compact the past and life of other beings into power that the Great Spirit or all the gods dispersed in smaller scale could receive and return as creative force for living at peace; and the Prince now could read the very light on the lips of that boy who is somehow Margaret’s boy, and the lips meet and part, meet and part, was he recalling happily something eaten? was he saying Margaret’s name?, for the Navajo Prince can’t be sure he’s not finding himself on that dividing mouth, having found his creature self inside that glimmering cloud, with something like light running out of it which was only unfriendly when it came from farmhouse doorways that did not understand a stern, hungry Indian who refused to steal field roots or chickenhouse eggs, only unfriendly when it was that current that passed out into and through him and then passed back, returning into the farmhouse doorways from which it came so that he did not want to wake to what it was, lest he feel pain or die, until now he realized it was Time.

How long have you been here? the pale-haired vagabond woman asks and she sits down beside him tight and tall in her blanket as the cloud closes above them and his wrist presses the metal of his pistol and its designs.

How long is the future? he asks.

The future takes too long, she says. The workingman is forgotten every day. That is why Coxey’s Army will set out on Easter Sunday from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York to march to Washington.

The white workingman, the Navajo Prince replied, feeling in his right palm the sweat of unknown compactions breathing from the cut of bison tongue, word of him among his People, his going-away, his mutual teaching with an Anglo beloved whom he told of the original casa blanca not in white Washington but in sandstone Canyon de Chelly, oh word of him, his love for an Anglo and for his studies, his mother’s death, stories woven larger and larger in the future he now had a terrible belief in, or pressed smaller and smaller by ostracism and forgetting.

The woman opened her blanket and reached and gripped his shoulder to the bone. Tomorrow is what matters, she said.

Will they march from New Jersey? he asked, and wondered if the pale-faced boy who was not his son, yet was, and who he knew watched him here from years ahead in future but might not know he did, saw this night’s scene in his dream of the past or must rely on Margaret to tell him what he knew.

The woman said she did not know. She brought a loaf of bread out and asked if he had any food to go with it and asked him for a knife. The Mexican blue mare rubbed her neck along the shadow of a beech tree. The cloud, the night-lumen cloud, had moved. I have a horse, the Prince said, but then he said what he had meant: I have a woman.

He felt himself grow so sleepy the sounds of his horse were magnified.

What is Easter Sunday? he asked.

He was born on Easter Sunday, the woman said. It doesn’t matter.

The woman looked hungry and he found a potato and an apple in his bag and gave them to her. He got up and bade her goodbye. She was looking at what he had given her. She looked back over her shoulder at the horse, which snorted. You need to sleep, she said.

He changed his mind. He lay down beside her where she sat.

We too: that is, along the curve of our resolve to be just lying or just sitting, not think angelic we can do both at once regardless of that same old brother’s-keeper-type interrogator bent on making us toe a line while he painfully (read painlessly) unhinges one of our toes each time we say two things at once like that crocodiles when extinct will not be able to grow new teeth: when we already remember it’s best to be all the elements in a dream, the person bravely setting forth, the sea chopping at the gunwales, the pickle sweating in the wax paper on the thwart, the boat itself so regardless of the person said to be sitting hunched amidships that the boat can be seen as empty, all the elements we are, the Moon mistaking itself for the Sun (as Mel mistook Pearl’s telephoned dream for his own), or even the double Sun that the bodiless Anasazi healer on his post-mortal tour was amazed at the last to see when he arrived above the famed fog-towers of northern Maine and felt the sleeping light in the cloud that was his transitory form turn literally liquid to some point of his own happy satisfaction.

Is it feasible (read bearable) that we may never see these people again whom we already forget their names? Or may never have seen as we may never get to see our own heart? If they are parts and parcels of us, we must be biggish and can’t even see our knee. What is (read was) length, anyway, another shape of void? We are a function of our habit of periodic one-hood not to be confounded with that last-gasp or between-histories (read B.H.) sans-space sans-time sans-everything Singularity, a trans-essential Absence within, though, a non-rotating overall Absence inferable from accelerating activity in its vicinity threatening yet not, in turn, to be confused with Presence so deep, so far inside (± Y) our/your head that one has gone beyond the chance of coming out the other side until the rotation once taken like inertia for granted yields untold other sides coming to and from us: and we would tell the interrogator and his abstract incarnations that sometimes the distance between our eyes is two feet five inches so if he upped and tried to single us out, firing right between the eyes, he wouldn’t go far wrong if we were still there by the time the fire arrived.

For who knows where it will end? who the hell knows (I certainly don’t, ‘least since Schlesinger blew into Defense from the Atomic Energy Commission in ‘73 and dreamed up selective-strike target packages, says M. as Barbara-Jean has taken to calling him) that is, where this late-century last-minute course-correction reciprocity race will end (we thought) whereby the homed-upon target itself acquires shift capability and an entire town according to our pre-negotiated input can be moved off "Home-Zero" at the eleventh hour screwing up a multiple-reentry vehicle’s target-package program that itself can make multiple random course corrections at will: is this keeping things in balance or is this escalation (read speculation)!, especially when with research reaching breathtaking informalities or even small-scale intimacies of in-flight breakthrough, the other side’s disguised improvisations as word of them is fed in are capable of being countered by original "Command-Thought" within a real on-board micro-lab already launched weapon carrier’s and thus countered faster even than old Light itself could have moved with its still very special speed regardless of its late inclination to, incredibly, Change—change traced not only dawn to dusk in two pairs of lancet windows in a cathedral each showing, he was pretty sure, a man on another man’s shoulders with a fifth lancet in the middle with definitely Mary carrying her child on her left arm, but change of light toward Rest, which light heretofore has had none of but now seems ready to be given (given back? given back its original Rest Energy?) yet Mayn will settle for the dawn-to-dusk change of light in that cathedral he will casually visit again in this upcoming "business" trip he has mentioned to B.-J. (sometimes Jeanie)—if he can just get away (well, he has to) on time—it’s a non-official therefore maybe interesting National Technical Means conference (Barbara-Jean surprisingly didn’t know NTM, "means" of surveillance)—para-disarmament, para-national oh god a brains convergence (though for cause) in the French Alps near Grenoble (fly to Geneva), geologists and thinkers and a black CIA executive named Andrew B. (for Blue-sky) Jackson posing as a "close-look" satellite-camera designer, eee-und some happy gentlemen and ladies who interpret reflected-microwave signatures like uniquely readable wakes left by all manner of missiles passing through Earth’s already troubled ionosphere—National Technical Means to catch present and unknown future cheating within of course the Balance of Terror. Meanwhile Mayn’s deadline seems brought closer and closer by a prisoner’s message (incidentally floated upon his announcement that he is getting free of his personality in order to exist within his essence) that Mayn had better attend that fringe Shakespeare opera: that he had guessed independently from his daughter’s marginal but stubborn involvement with unreliable elements and his friends’ curious convergence on a local cluster of events including though hardly keying upon the opera production, all this regardless of how close the prisoner in question often had said they two already were through a (what he called) colloidal awareness (colloidal? said Barbara-Jean, thinking) mutually multiplying this fragmented dispersion of particles bonding their knowers one to another by this universe of surfaces and their concomitant surface-frictions (Mayn thought it was), but more than the message and the opera (and word from Flick, nee Sarah, that her brother, his implicitly estranged son in outer space up in Boston, had phoned her and was to appear in New York), there were these events surrounding (or surrounded by!) the surfacing of an old high-school teacher, and the nagging interrogations of a person (B.-J., Barbara-Jean, or, by her preferred, Jean, by name) whom he had come to love, plus the street death of a man he had talked deeply with on a pickup ride from Windrow to the City who it had turned out was coming back into his life and shifting some key point from Nowhere to a cemetery if not to the home of which it once had been a part or, ‘least, that home by its other name.

That was your name for the town? I like it.

My grandmother’s name for it. No, ours.

How do you make up a name together?

You just do it.

You have to be in love.

Well, she did teach me how to whistle.

Did your mother love you?

She said she was so frustrated by her life she could kill herself.

When did she say that to you?

I think more than once. Probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.

And you didn’t say anything?—or you told her not to kill herself?

No: you make me remember: I said it must be terrible to feel that.

What did she say?

I remember. She said, No it wasn’t. Because I said, O.K.

Did she accept that?

She said, Your father doesn’t approve of O.K.

What did you say?

I think I went out. I don’t remember where. I asked my grandmother Well, what about O.K.?

You always went to her?

Depended which way the wind was blowing.

What did she say?

My grandfather told me what O.K. came from, but something else— another meaning some friend of theirs . . . I don’t know.

Did your mother love you?

So much else has happened since then.

Didn’t she?

Yes.

I know she did. How did she?

By being herself. By telling me to be.

But she killed herself.

Even if she didn’t, she went away.

I know.

But the Interrogator, sleepwalking while on duty among his victims, must trace this albeit idiomatic "O.K." that he has heard. Secure in his victims’ relative dismemberment, he won’t settle for being just in or on someone else’s flesh, feeling himself them while at once himself. Absolutely will not settle for just living their informations, divvied near-sensually by their light, turned double and then back to single by their quaint myths of weather, cosmos, trajectory, charity—myths as gently sexual as

Oh Woman

Old Woman

scrape the sky

clear it up

make it good

all over

with your little knife

the copper one

scrape it down

good

but he must trace this "O.K." that he has heard because he knows in his ignorant heart that it is related to our long-aforementioned "D.K."

Yet in the dark thus, and, his torture workday over, gratefully so (despite games-theory mind-set employed in torture training to simultaneously tap one’s energy secret and auto-relax), he feels through his sleep some half-light coming off his would-be decaying victims as he strays across a next room stepping on our occasional flesh or going out (he smiles) on some strewn limb or steering clear of a passing clutch of bloodlessly extracted nerves beeping like Frau Doppler herself alone and seeing waves from a passing boat gather in frequency as they wash into the shore of a native Austrian lake which seems also to be moving (shore or lake?). Yet the interrogator is at least not talking in his sleep (whatever he might in his heart of hearts think), for we absolutely will not see ourselves as victims of voice-over for your reality is made by youse (the interrogator has heard) and is known as youse value or basic unit, nor need we be angels to know this, nor need we give off light to see him start tracing "O.K.":

first, to "O.M." (as in Open Marriage) from the Indian humdinger song about the "Oh Woman" with which the East Far Eastern Princess like Margaret the wife of Alexander was familiar:

thence to "M.K.," short for that volcano-of-the-decade that an implicated young friend of Margaret’s grandson James named Larry time-framed (we’d already forgotten) ninety-four years after Krakatoa’s mountainous eruption with the also circa 1883 locoweed-naming spree of the botanist Marcus Jones and the rhythms of his original bike tires congruent to all surfaces through some adjustably cogged memory of any landscape, but also time-and-space-framed in an elastic year with all the weather work that Krakatoa opened up, the new twilight effects, the layers of stratospheric aerosols, the staggered New Mexico sunsets protracted sometimes by the cosmic-cleft synchrony the Anasazi healer explained:

and from "M.K." (with its proven fallout of noctilucent cloud so influencing the Anasazi’s sense of his own resolutely non-reincarnational future that he, who in fact gave us our word "fallout" for a certain kind of mild and generous death, planned on becoming such a cloud—(at an experimentally lower level) the interrogator, dreaming on from wherever he is to New York, New Mexico, and from w/zoever he is to being a roving intelligence officer (naval in training like the lover de Talca, high-caste and broadly cultured in origin, individual in personality), double-shifts (codein) to "D.M."—which may be the Dreaded Modulus of Lar’ fame whose meaning the interrogator has temporarily forgotten, though more likely (since lives hang upon it) is DeMilitarized, without the "Zone," which has disappeared in a puff of once-up-to-date bomb that rules all acts to be transitive, hence, as a prepositioned hit man "offs" an approaching or receding contract, "disappears" zones (a "zone bomb") much better than simply demilitarizing, or witness the reciprocals P.M. and/or P.R.M. (shorthand), each derivable we now know from the other (like Some People) with or without we disappear the R (he knows by rote): he hence leans toward that "old friend" (as he puts it in his second language) the Dreaded Modulus by which one system can be turned like tables to another (though the Friend concept functions more really in terms of the white American males Mayn and Larry, himself the user if not proved discoverer of D.M.) by which the even slightest Nanosecond-degree Rotation normally needed to turn from one pivotal view to another may, in sleep or some alternate refiguring, be bypassed, so that, say, hearing what some bond teaches you to hear can instantly by Modulus mean not the duplicity of answers tortured (or not) out of interrogees, but a woman’s thrilling hunger for her lover in an aria betraying maternal hunger for a son sung by a curvaceous diva to a man in her life listening in a small theater, fellow national at heart who this afternoon arranged the release of her faraway father precisely at a moment when a news flash erroneously had him falling from the roof of his sixth-floor bayview casa de pisos—doubtless a victim who only thought he was her father, dreams the interrogator, and anyway in the southern hemisphere we fall upward, we already remember, which gives a lightness and unreality to events and whole centuries—and for a second he knows he is not dreaming but witnessing in his sleep facts and could move with that implicated white male, age eighteen to nineteen, from the either I or system-switch of D.M. to the twain egal individualized screens seen bothland, and thence to the theory this newly real interrogator can embody so why trace it as a dreamed-up substitution (occupying conveniently a position) in the way, which might be calculated for Through and Around, but better instantly (codein) shift M., whatever this constant scrambled or unscrambled equals, and, through the D. of dread and the K. of that volcano thinking through its dream to spread twilight effects into the air we see for years beyond, even unto the present, reach D.K.: but by now he imagines he is no longer himself but solely into the flesh of that other, de Talca, and can leave a Don’t Know, with, inside it, at secret rest, the knowledge that, like information shared, Don’t Know is the answer to two or more questions.

Because people often don’t answer the question asked, Grace’s friend Maureen had been fond of saying—who had been all for going ahead with the "spontaneous light rape" plan (first man to enter Grace’s apartment after a randomly set hour is to receive multiple, painless, nurturing rape by sisters assembled —"like the millionth couple to make it across the Verrazano Bridge get an instant free legal separation," Grace joked with Spence).

Spence himself, it transpired, would have been the man in question, that day, if the first candidate had not failed to ring and gone away; but Grace had called it off, and when Larry had come up to see her soon after Spence had left, she had taken Larry into the bedroom to get away from it all and to give him support for changing his life at least so far as leaving his father and that apartment downstairs and moving in, à trois, with Donald Dooley and his girlfriend not because Sue, Larry’s mother, would then be more likely to move back in with Marv (which Grace figured she was going to do anyway because Sue was too sex-positive to accept a pair-bonded hyper-romance-serious Lesbian relationship) but while men living together was healing because it opened them to each other’s bodies, an experience pretty much taboo’d in male heterosexual society—Larry was a natural Top, Grace was convinced, and had lately run a number on himself in habit patterns of misplaced loyalty and compassion and identifying with one parent or the other, and had faked himself into playing Bottom, when his father Marv was the natural Bottom, which was probably what Marv was going to his new girlfriend for and likely why he didn’t bring her home but stayed at her place (didn’t he?). So Grace had supported Larry’s moving out, getting into threesome sex and healing self-sex at a time when he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. But the upshot was that Larry had thanked her and said he most probably would stick around for the time being, which only proved he was still Bottoming out while closet-Topping.

It was late afternoon of dress-rehearsal/preview day of the Hamletin warehouse opera. Grace and Ray Spence contemplated Grace’s body. She sat cross-legged, small, wholesomely rosy all over, freckled along her shoulders and with a lovely, perhaps yoga-related light that curved across her very flat abdomen. Spence was not the same person as a week ago. He told of his sense that he might be brother of Mayn. Grace told Ray that when one of her workshop women Lincoln had told her months ago of the Navachoor Prince she had recognized through her own part-Pawnee blood and her sense of that strange Indian’s centuries-old need to grow beyond tribal/racial roles that she (she was smiling like she really but only half meant it) had been him in an earlier life that nonetheless included Now and partly because of the obvious S & M dogging his trip in pursuit of the pale, doubtless Oriental East Far Eastern Princess.

"Your abdomen," Spence said; "you could fly, I’ll bet."

Grace looked at him and said she was willing to believe, O.K., that he knew what he was talking about. Spence was enthusiastic. He said he didn’t know really why he was here. He had heard there was a new type of reincarnation that could be scientifically proved. Grace said he thought like a newspaper. Grace said she gave Larry a week in that apartment downstairs, he was such a great kid but was freaking out telling her a Chinese woman he had seen in a shop uptown sitting on some old phone books was real and then he had looked through his peephole into the hall and there she was but with a little boy who looked Puerto Rican ringing the bell of his neighbor the opera singer but still he knew she was real. There. An ordinary non-freaky person. Spence said there was a report in the Mayn family that the young person who discovered a new form of reincarnation was doomed. Grace said that was masochistic thinking. Spence said she was mixed up about whether it was good to go along with S & M roles or they should be exposed for the silly numbers they were. Grace said that was male thinking. Spence said it probably was, and he asked whether the Chinese woman had actually taken the Hispanic child into Ford North’s apartment. Grace said Spence was into intrigue like Larry. Spence said Well she was coming back as a Navajo scientist for God’s sake who died in strange circumstances apparently two thousand miles from home you know. Grace said, "Unless he turned into a slave cloud"—because a friend of Lincoln’s had said that was one possibility. "Well, his Princess evidently turned into a mist to give him the slip," Spence said.

"Oh I figure I’m a couple of thousand years old," said Grace. She had urged one of the women who could not let go of her grown children who were living back in Chile but they apparently thought the regime wasn’t so bad, to go with her husband to Past Lives Therapy, because Grace knew in her body someplace that Clara and possibly her husband had had such a hard time being born into a previous life that they felt hurt and guilty about it and had projected this onto their children who they thought (or maybe dreamed) were saddled with this terrible load they couldn’t see was blocking them.

"I’ll settle for just plain mcarnation," added Spence, and, they both knew, was surprised at himself.

Then Grace said—but Ray, too, then, and simultaneously, "We ..." and then again and simultaneous, "We . . ." they said and touched each other laughing, and then started all over again and all unexpectedly said "We" together a third time but then said together like a longer effort, "We’re onto—" but stopped and said, rehearsed, "something."

Where did we learn to do that?

We were together.

Let’s try it without sound.

We already are.

You rippling?

All ripple.

What time is it?—oh, two hours till curtain, but they’re doing it without a curtain.

That’s why you got a light in your eye. At least it’s gay so they won’t be doing that opera trip.

There’ve been some changes. The composer’s more serious than anyone thought. He might even be a crook. Historically speaking.

So we’ll go together.

One on one.

Let’s be nude.

You already are.

With the women two days ago at the moment the steps came to the door, we were in battle and it was long ago and we could have been seen by the future then if we had known how, and we were on the move goddess-like and by a dark river that moved like an isthmus between partially congruent globes, and to break the cycle now in the New York Body-Room one had to turn away from that well-meaning but reincarnated group and be alone, and time collapsed like the Goddess into one self and another person was at the door with whom one could turn away and be alone, younger brother-going-on-son, maybe not yet a natural Top but a Larry.

O.K.—and by like token wanting to tell about our life too but frankly not knowing anything about our life (except it was expensive especially our beginning that we didn’t know about)—we found ourselves in a mountain probably of flesh and trying so badly to get out that we seldom caught on that the mountain with this stumbling bloc of us inside it did not want us to, until our motion and the mountain’s mixed, like pulse, and, no less no more representative than that one life left at Krakatoa the heroic micro-spider not Mayn, not Ted, not Pearl, not acid-tongued de Talca knew we were at least as interested in as a Boston-born internal medic in live physics more far (worm-thread) fetched than the dark, flabby leaves we have heard about in some northern New England Indian swamp—spider so tiny that Krakatoa had not seen it, surviving ultra-privately under a horizon that was beyond itching and disease, just acres of ash and igneous and seismic junk ... we (O.K.) fought our strange way out head-first guilloteeny or feet first (we already forget) mutilated unit by unit as the clockless hermit notches his stick till the head (all that’s left) comes out and there’s only it with all its relations asking who that first comer was before Spence, and hearing what we did not know we knew that the man she’z shure she saw from her peephole, with one, two, three women and Maureen behind her, was walking away down the hall toward a dark-haired, much younger girl in a sailor’s pea jacket waiting at the elevator and seeing him like he’s her own grandfather, and we were born in that previous life dead and had to get over that while the mountain moved on.

He made ready to leave in anger and doubt. He stared into the paragraph his still-prospective father-in-law said might after all be usable and he could just about crunch it in his fist so it would crackle like fire. Anger that Margaret —Oh God what was going on out there along the footsteps or railroad tracks or horse trails of the continent! Anger that Margaret—for what was between the lines, was there any curiosity as to what Alexander had been doing all these months? he had had tea with a Senator’s wife in Washington and she had asked polite questions about the Democrat and had urged him to visit Boston, he had deplored the need for troop movements after the panic of last year, she had asked him if he knew the poems of Matthew Arnold, whom in fact he had read with this damned Margaret who he was sure had been sinisterly changed by her visit in 1885 to see the Statue of Liberty before it was put together, her father’s strictness seemed only to indulge her, while Alexander’s indulgence and intimacy ("Ah, love, let us be true ... So various, so beautiful, so new . . .") only made her more—more strict! (the only word for it) and now, instead of her at last coming home, this damned paragraph from Cincinnati. His cousin who was visiting for a weekend watched Alexander yank open a brassy highboy drawer. Anger that Margaret, who had his trust, could write so outrageously intimately this account of sleazy commercial types in a hotel parlor discussing paperworkers out of work in Chicago, a rein(t)arnationist spouting at the Chicago Fair last summer, the future of ballooning, the next world’s fair in St. Louis maybe, but nothing this time to Alexander about when she was actually going to be home, though something between the lines. Between the lines there was—"Look at this darn thing!" he handed it over to his cousin who was at the university in Philadelphia, who said, after a moment, "But this Jacob Coxey who’s organizing the march on Washington—if she’s really interested in what he’s doing—I mean, a self-made businessman who cares about the workers—" "It’s sinister," remarked Alexander, looking into an empty satchel on the bed, "a sinister history, this slowdown coming home." "Oh it’s probably her pre-wedding trip," said the other, who had amusing ideas undeniably and was going to Paris in July. "It’s one thing," said Alexander, "and it’s another thing, and which fits inside which I do not know." "You want to go to Paris with me," said his cousin, "that’s what you need. Get you out of your books for a couple of months."

Her father could bring Alexander the copy and seem worried to death and ask him what he thought, that bluff, bearded gray gentleman with a family mole on his jawbone like a dark stone beneath running current; and Alexander knew then that he was going to go after her.

"Uncle Jim will be glad to have word of those union people in Pennsylvania, but how far do you intend to go?" his cousin asked with a light of humor in his somewhat nasal voice. He laid the crumpled paper on the white bedspread beside the satchel that now contained socks and long underwear.

Anger—"Do you know that Mrs. Lodge asked me if I had seen any Venetian glass with that special exquisite crudeness. I took her reference as being to Ruskin and asked in turn if she found the living wage advocated in the Gospels, but she may not have taken my reference for she said God helps those who help others to help themselves, I think that’s what she said, maybe not, maybe not, and she asked me what sold newspapers and I said sometimes it seemed to me imponderable, but I had lost my wits because I felt she was telling me something I wasn’t comprehending, or making fun of me, and she said she would like to introduce a young man like me to Mr. Roosevelt."

His cousin laughed and straightened his necktie in the mirror. "An imponderable young man. A vendible imponderable."

"Oh dry up," said Alexander, examining a stickpin Margaret had given him a year ago Christmas and wondered if it was a real emerald.

"Are you really going to Pennsylvania as a journalist, Alexander?"

Anger at the imperfect curves and edges of Venetian glass, anger at Paris—for, yes, he might just go to Paris with this cousin with the square head and fat jaw—while between the lines and more finely still between the words, he felt his dear Margaret was in trouble and he didn’t know what it was and it might be his trouble, and, worse, it might not be his at all.

"A self-made sandstone-quarry businessman from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, indeed," he said. "Is that where his quarry is, then?"

"I know not a thing about Jacob Coxey," said Alexander’s cousin, "but his heart is in the right place."

"What place is that?" said Alexander suddenly and did not know why, but felt he was watched, no doubt by townsfriends and family who wondered with him what his supposed fiancee was doing between the lines of her less frequent dispatches—so he could not see in the great banks of leaves out the window anything but the future as if it already existed contemplating him with doubt.

His cousin was laughing at what he had said. "Where is Selinsgrove?"

"On a river," grumbled Alexander. ‘The Susquehanna, or anyhow close by it."

"What did you mean ‘one thing’ and ‘another thing’ and you didn’t know ‘which fits inside which’?"

"Don’t dissect me—I don’t know what I meant," said Alexander, looking toward the bedside table. "It’s between the lines."

"I wouldn’t read there if I were you," said his cousin.

"Hmpf," grunted Alexander, placing two small leather-bound volumes in one corner of his satchel. "I read wherever I go."

His cousin laughed and reached for his jacket where it lay folded on a chair. "I meant between the lines, not Selinsgrove-hard-by-Susquehanna."

"I will be near there," said Alexander.

"It should be an education," came the answer.

The river in late February was moving. A brown bird stood briefly on a miniature raft of ice. The town nearby was for a few tranquil hours a future that could not be rushed. He vowed that whatever happened he would come back to this point on the riverbank. He had a stone in his shoe.

In the wrong town you can still pick up news. Jacob Coxey dealt in scrap iron before he went into the business of quarrying sand for steel and glass manufacture. Now raised race horses in Kentucky, though didn’t live there. But didn’t live here in Selinsgrove either. Selinsgrove—more woods than New Jersey, but much like. But Coxey was only born here. Moved, at five or six: picture of small boy directing adults which bed to load into which wagon, the wide wagon, the narrow wagon. Settee and wash tub. Fire-irons and spade. Caned chairs sitting on top of crates. Somewhere a German accent. To Danville, downaways. But not far. And furthermore not where Coxey, with a growing name among Greenbackers and Populists, lived now. The farmer he asked, the storekeeper he asked, the man with the unconscionably high forehead he asked in front of the church did not ask him the question he asked himself, a young fellow with a black leather satchel and an already somewhat distinguished scalp: What was he doing in Selinsgrove if he was looking for Coxey? The question took him some miles back to the riverbank he had come from, but not to Danville—but not because Jacob Coxey was no longer there either but in Ohio, if Alexander had only asked, to begin with.

He had mailed an exemplary dispatch from Philadelphia. He had mailed another the next day to Margaret’s father from a place called Laurel Summit.

Some said armies of unemployed would take over the railroads. Constantly, it was only Margaret he had seen—Margaret on her way long since to interview—but who knew?—a man "of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania," as her written words put it. Alexander had waited for months for her, and now in motion himself had "waited" for word to come to him somehow as he had made his way into north-central Pennsylvania as if her word in print meant she must be there where Coxey was "of." But a most irresponsible way to seek her—as if he had bent his will or had needed for months to cut adrift in his own small way westward—to be not home if she arrived—his absence noted: while now he had uncharacteristically built himself a lean-to and produced from his bag shadowy food to eat beside the current of the shadowy river, arrived there for no good reason, but watched—by his children, it suddenly came to him, of which he had not yet any—for he had not yet his bride.

He understood only brief, separate things, like beginning nowhere. He was tired. No good cause explained his being here. The wistaria that he could smell but weeks away outside his bedroom window at home was named for the man who wrote the first American anatomy (two volumes, Caspar Wistar, honored hardly more than a year ago at the opening of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology housing the collection of anatomy he left at the University in Philadelphia). The night came around so mossy-cold and so blank that it was no different from the river at first, even the dubious head of the night’s body through the maps of tree branches, that moon tilted away far where things of true importance were going on while Alexander, instead, pursued some alien education, as his cousin the medical student predicted. Some new history, was it? A voice nearby, a woman’s voice, for a second seemed caused by the darkness but (no) came with it: "I camped last week by a river under a long shining cloud and a man there breathed in a dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed in a whole dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed it in and coughed and talked, and he was well-informed."

Alexander saw that he had already seen the blonde woman when she spoke and had trusted the human figure in the corner of his eye. He had predicted her appearance through some study of history; that was it.

Eyes closed, resting, he’s a very old man, his hat in his lap, the straw upon the heel of his palm, fingers resting in the crumpled crown, air sliding and curling like water over his skull; and he foresaw what is happening in the sun of a backyard the ownership of which hardly matters any more, only the people small and tall who use it, the little girl with long light hair throwing a ball up and up and up again and catching it in one hand nearer and nearer her grandfather in his chair; and he is not dopy, and knows his grandson whose daughter this little girl is knows he is not dopy and would not make anything of his not at once replying to the question his grandson asked; and when, with his eyes closed, he had an answer, he heard a powerful whoosh and did not open his eyes, it might be an exciting death coming his way and he heard a young gasp and knew his great-granddaughter had caught her ball practically in his lap, but he had the words in his throat answering Jim’s question: "In his letter that he wrote me when I was all of six years old, his last letter and he was up in New York visiting the Indians and the envelope had a bright red scarab seal on it, and he said he had dreamt of swallowing something, I know what it was, it was a storm he swallowed, complete with rain, thunder, lightning, what’s that other?, hail—the works—and then singing out his name in the dream which was Morgan of all things, but something else, Jim, I really forget but it had to do with the spelling."

"Oh Poppy, I’m not Jim; I almost hit you. What are you talking about, Poppy? I almost hit you. I stepped on your beautiful shoes, Poppy, did I hurt you? You have silver on your red socks, Poppy."

He opened his eyes and his mouth in the sun, and remembered how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been.

Their smoky fire held their faces close to it and kept the Moon’s clearer light far down the course of the tree-shrouded sky. The blonde woman gave Alexander an apple and wrapped herself again in her blanket.

"This Indian said he did not need to eat much. He had been followed by this cloud. I did not believe him at first. I know what work pays and what it costs to buy a blanket, I don’t believe in magic. But then neither did he. He said he knew the cloud contained an old friend. He said he himself contained spirits of ice stones that had come from the sky, and they were spiral—and he made the motion with his hands, and then he went to sleep. But later he woke up."

"He did not dishonor you," said Alexander.

The woman shook her head pensively. "Some mad Indian you mean?" she said. Alexander smiled into the blazing, smoking fire. He felt compelled. " ‘What work pays’?" he asked. "I don’t understand."

The woman ignored his query. "Your clothes, your shoes," she said. "Do you travel like this?"

"Almost never, but my cousin who is a medical student says I am part porcupine."

"He had a horse over by a tree. It looked blue in the river darkness."

"Near here?"

"Not the same river. A different river. The Juniata, south and west from here. He was on his way to consult with the Iroquois. He had come all the way from New Mexico territory."

"To do that?"

"He was on his way east. He said he was going to meet a woman."

"Going?"

"He asked me if I had seen storms rise up out of eastern mountains. He asked me if I could smell seared metal coming from the night-glowing cloud above us. He asked me if there were tall houses that cast a wind shadow."

"What did you say?"

"To all these questions I said I did not know."

"How did he swallow the dollop of night-glowing cloud?"

"He said the friend up there was hundreds of years old."

"Perhaps he meant that through his people he carried a long history in him."

"He was more of a scientist. But I liked him because he said he was studying secrets that would give his people more food to live and more water to grow their crops and he was looking for material to build with that would last. I told him that white workers did not have enough to eat either."

"Old Marion Hugo, your" (Yes) "in those journals, Granddad" (Yes) "Was he the one who mentioned a Morgan" (Yes) "a mathematician from" (Yes) "from Europe, an Alsatian, I think, who played the pickel flute" (Yes, yes, the pickelflote) "and did he know—did he know that zoologist gal who had the mother back in South America who wrote music? what about that, Alexander?"

Later he woke, and he reached at once into his pocket as if to see if something was still there. She herself never slept except when a dream was coming on and then she would find a place to sleep for the length of the dream. He told her he was going to the Iroquois to find the meaning of two dreams. This was a turning from where he was going but he had faith he would meet his beloved. She was carrying his child, he was certain, but she had left without telling him. There was a great emptiness between them and they were in touch with each other because there was a river like an underground river in their bodies, a river of blood and milk with a thousand invisibly small beings flowing in it and each was a thought of theirs in common.

Alexander felt like he was asleep and the campfire was losing itself in him. He asked why the Indian’s woman had left. The blonde woman said she had to go back and see her people, he said. The Indian loved her very much and he loved his studies. Alexander could understand that.

Yes, said the blonde woman. And she had in common with the Indian that she had a beloved who was apart from her.

How so? asked the young man with the black satchel and red socks and muddy shoes.

Her beloved was married and lived in Ohio, and she had known him once in Pennsylvania when he was only a boy working a stationary engine in a rolling mill. She knew what he knew. She knew how the ingot is rolled and rolled to become the right-shape sheet of steel. How the mills use sand from quarries. How much the owner sells the steel for. Her beloved knew the workers. He knew the farmers, too. He had General Grant’s love of horseflesh. He became a rich man but cared for the workers. He was leading a march on Washington at Eastertime. She was a fallen woman, but she did not care now. Her lot was cast with the real people who made the industrial clockworks run and who made the corn grow and who walked long roads to get to their work and to look for work as well. Her lot was not with the hundreds of Pinkerton detectives ferried by night up the Monongahela (Alexander nodded), but with the men who needed greenbacks to seed their fields (Alexander nodded, thinking that Monongahela was both an Algonquian name and the name of a whiskey). A river has two coasts, she mused.

He said, You are talking about Jacob Coxey. He is the reason I came to Selinsgrove.

The woman frowned. She told him that that was what she had heard in town and why she had followed him here to the river.

"No, of course you’re not your daddy Jim, sweetheart; I was replying to him ... but I took so long that . . ."

"Oh Poppy."

"Dumb old Poppy."

"Yes, you’re very old."

"I’m almost ninety."

"Sweetheart old Poppy. See how high I can throw the ball."

Two rivers, the Juniata where things were heard and the Susquehanna where those things were told.

"That’s very high, Flicky, very very high. Who taught you to throw that high?"

"Nobody."

"Where did your father go?"

"In the house. What’s the matter with him?"

"Nothing. I think a friend of his died."

"Is he going to the funeral?"

"I think she died far away in South America."

"Look at Andrew. He can ride his bike."

He said air came in vast sheets that water might ride on or ice or poisons, or bad spirits or mixtures. He said these planes controlled the wind and might raise water like a hundred buckets so it ran nearly upward into the great bush of a cloud and might well pass back above the river guided aloft by the river’s course and empty down into it so you could wash in the same water seven days later. He said he and his woman talked all night and each learned to hear new things that only the other had been able to before. Each bent the heart and will to the other. She told him of a Statue that was the highest in the world guarding an ocean harbor with light and she had seen it when its head and limbs were scattered over an island. When she went home she would go inside it. He must have been talking about the Statue of Liberty.

Yes, said Alexander.

He said his woman had a friend among her people whom she respected very much, and he had very big feet and was wise and went fishing in a lake where there were pine trees only smaller than the ones in the West, which was of interest because, as this man told me, they might be smaller because they were weaker or smaller because they grew for a different purpose. His woman’s friend back among her people went fishing because there were many lakes there. She must go back and see him someday, she would say. She called this cousin an angel.

Alexander was wide awake and got up to find more wood. He offered the blonde woman the apple she had given him but she shook her head and he bit into it. He brought a great branch and left it beside the fire and sat down.

He began to fear the blonde woman like sleep you don’t understand. She asked what was in his satchel. He showed her two books bound in calf; she shrugged, and said her beloved was now under the influence of a man who believed in reincarnation and was a dime-museum speechmaker and called himself the cerebellum of Christ but could not spell Calvary. A passel of rogues will try to make use of that good man Coxey.

Alexander asked where the Indian had gone. She said she had told Alexander this already.

He said, Two Indian wanderers, perhaps a child between them.

No, said the blonde woman. The woman was a white woman.

Alexander felt a long chill across his face. He threw the apple into the fire.

You throw away food? said the blonde woman.

Will Coxey’s marchers all come from Ohio? Alexander asked as if to say, Don’t talk to me about an apple—and felt terribly watched and cold and inflamed as well and felt the sweat in his smooth palms.

No, said the woman. They say marchers will come from all over the United States. Why do you ask?

Because I was thinking of something else, said the young man.

They say he is worth two hundred thousand dollars. One marcher for every dollar by the time they reach Washington. They will force Congress to help the unemployed.

Was the Indian armed? Alexander asked.

Well, she had thought he had a pistol in his pocket but it was a hunk of dried meat. Alexander contemplated the large, damp branch and the lowering fire. But he did have a pistol in his saddlebag, said the woman.

In his saddlebag, said Alexander.

We had been asleep, we already remember, but this might prove our patented way of being awake. As when a thing is done to us, and instead we are brought closer together and see some bend of will by which so far from our being acted upon, the responsibility belonged to us, and no hassle at that.

Big Foot Porcupine; or anyway, Big Shoe. The woman asked to sleep against him in the late February stillness. He said it was against his religion and at once corrected himself—those were not his words, surely. His thighs were resigned with cold, his mackinaw bulky. He felt behind him the tuck of her hard arms in the taut winding of her blanket, and after a mysterious time which was motion both absent and present she reached one slow arm around his ribs and he found that he took her hand between the thumb and palm of his woolen glove and she seemed to press a ring on his finger. They murmured with the soft, bed clarity of wife and husband. Where, then, was Jacob Coxey? Why with his family in Massillon, Ohio, three hundred miles from here, two hundred and eighty to be exact.

Anger, horror, pain, curiosity gathered him up into some darkling person and he knew he would sleep in the cold, despite Margaret, despite the Indian wherever his eastward frontier had gotten to. Alexander was thinking of geometry, of all things, and his loins felt better than he could have said. Have you borne a child? he asked the woman over his shoulder, the late winter and the undreamed solidity of near, dark trees cold against his eyeballs.

He asked me that, she told him. He said he had thought there was more time but he had been absorbed in his studies of secret force and of earth veins and mountain messages and mixtures and absorbed in this woman of his from the East, to the cost of his People, yet also forgetting this woman who was sometimes all he remembered from hour to hour. His studies are for his people, but his march is not revolutionary like Jacob Coxey’s which will be an army as great as any Union.

Your news overwhelms me, said Alexander. Your heart is with the workers, said the woman; trust it.

But Alexander had not meant Coxey’s march of the unemployed. But have you borne a child? he said. No, she said, I have not borne a child, though I would have done so for him, though I am a fallen person anyway.

Do you want to be married? asked Alexander.

He thought of what the future expected. New thoughts shifted this trip as if the land it was grounded on—a land of dreams, he had once read to Margaret—mattered no whit more than farmers clamoring for paper money or Idaho silver miners forcing recognition of their union or railway-car workers getting a company model-town to house their families at dubious rent. A curiously compelling map grew like land in Alexander’s mind containing it (but which containing which?) that moved—this diagram of distances moving if he chose but making him choose—and he could not tell the woman that Margaret over the magnetic slopes of this darkling state rested but was in motion restlessly toward home while talking to a Jacob Coxey whom this woman behind him loved and had brought to Alexander by converging lines from Massillon in the west and from some bank of the Juniata in the south or southwest, while Alexander’s various trek for news and for Margaret was west while hers, upon a parallel equally various, came east, pursued (no question) along another parallel by a man with a pistol who was ahead of her, and was between her and this Alexander who went out to meet her: yet what if even now, and east of here, she was fingering a Navajo silver buckle passing through Pennsylvania on a sleeping train whose parallels of track curved some collision course of war or the American continent atip toward unknown commerce (west or east, inertial calculi of ours could trick suns into dramatically dying in the direction of morning if our cost-benefit figures arrive at such results for the sake of World’s Fair or parallel answer to multiple question) —and when he said to this now silent woman, This Indian is not my enemy unless I choose . . . , and got no reply except a whole bodily pulse coming into his spine from possibly more than the woman ... in these coordinated parallels that could lean like a curve-fleshed parallelogram or converge into some terrific clusterhood, Alexander eased over to the quite exhausted woman he had not bothered to ask about her home and about what she, a "fallen person," did here in the vicinity of her at least former home of Selinsgrove where the beloved had been hardly more than born, according to Alexander’s information—and he tipped her dozing chin and smelt on her breathing raw potato’s moistly glimmering root, and kissed her lips, and turned back to, briefly, a diagram until sleep caught him up loins and all into that gathered voice that could include what the future expected, conferring with him as to whether (damn all this land of dreams that lacked light though not geometry which itself equaled or was in the way of geography and of seeing clear, so he wondered what Margaret looked like now and if she was big with child), conferring with that gathered voice as to whether he would go to Paris with his elegant cousin who wished to study epidemics—or, as an obvious possibility, would not go to Paris but live as he and the future tacitly had agreed he would.

The woman spoke and hummed and spoke in sleep, their sleep it seemed: "He said he carried in him unknown mixtures spirited from a mountain that moved with shapes fine as snakes and some said formed by them and through human flesh and weather that sometimes came down a long, long cosmic room from a North he had once thought timeless, yielding spirals grown dense and tight as the inside of a tree bole that might help us or end all weather or might bore holes in us as in his mother who had died of such a demon-hole that moved around her head from forehead to top and back—and these mixed spirits or rays (though not visible like sun) he carried some of in him—in him! (I nearly laughed, we were hungry, we had already forgotten why we were sitting by that tireless riverbank, and he brought out a potato and an apple, and later his saddlebag proved to hold a pistol with devices or signs cut into the metal so as to make the finger fear touching them could make the piece go off) until Alexander did not know who talked to who, but thought the woman would not steal from his old black satchel his shirt or his forgotten long underwear or his books, his three books—the two diaries at this long instant of embrace humanly useless with their neutral needlework reports of Chapultepec passion or sun-swallowing dream or, as yellowing perhaps as one of President Lincoln’s greenback salary-warrants, that strange sheaf of foolscap music with Italian words shaken by a Thunder Dreamer coolly under the nose of a lean bicyclist-botanist at a remote trading post—and always, money-getting Democrats from rude wigwam to Congress hall, easing past mountains of, what was it?, salt and iron, lead and silver; while in this woman’s orie-armed embrace he dreams of freedom, yet not from her, though he would never see her again more than he saw her now curled not so uncomfortably behind him: freedom in fact from those impediments of Margaret’s months, for let life start and let’s go home, to where (with what help from the person behind him he could not think, asleep or half-asleep) he heard himself read to a young girl he had named before her birth, words (words words) recited to her by her father, of motion that could not stop and so was stopped for, in some sense spaced so intimately far to one side current history that the name of this child came to him who looked at him from the near future bearing naturally the name of this poor, strong woman behind him humming like a cello in her apparent sleep now, and Margaret would accept that name, he would make sure of that.

Neither porcupine nor angel: yet with, between them, some relation that would be Us: so mightn’t we prove upon the twain drawing boards of everyone’s peripheral vision to be what rose from such thoughts as that not Matter became God, but God at’s own developmental pace became Matter, plus that the Whole seeking Parts to share, give way, and lose its mind-set force to, must force them Parts into being in its way.

We had first heard of relationship in the early forties. But of what century?

Or two burning eyes shared among four eyes of two driven people flowed with the greater burning stranded through Nature.

Regular coughing like that of Alexander’s one-night landmate so went through the body of his dreams that he, too, at his own slower intervals coughed his way at last out of a western mountain only to find, clear of the mountain, that the woman Sarah had left and that all this time the independent territory of the nightmare mountain with its luckily only internal contagion had been moving in another direction.

But we in our day have learned that we can accept other systems. Yea, incorporate them. We are about to forget but have not yet, that right in the middle of apparently major events we had been mispronouncing the hard T in Chinese Tao, which should mean "the way" but in practice embraces like the whole show/flo as if Nature, spied back through one of its own eyes, was stratified ocean or at least successfully liquefied. The Chinese invented T, so they should be allowed to sound it like our D if that is what they do, but if they then cannot accept the topological relationship with Dow the chemical concern, lest by western pun linguistic contaminant find its way into their Tao, they may in long run have to let the original source-compound go—i.e., DOw (Dual—Di—or two, Openings, or Obstacles, to each power of Waste), which reframes (for easy reference—in other emergencies other times when the older transformation equations got us through ethereal obstacles as if they existed or plotted our inequalities up L slopes and round R curves) to: either DOw (one unpredictably divided atom of waste—or was it water?—for each ho-muncule of reaction), or doW (where the lower d o designating the W’s "prior power" identifiable uncertainly as "di-obstacled" or as dioxide or -oxen or -xin, or the more and more widely used interhemispheric verb do) acts on a W which is Waste/We where if We will = Singularity Rotated to Unity or I, we’ll still get W but a new W shared between the Waste and the We in relationship not yet known, in part since relationship at the present time is reciprocal with whatever this We proves-out to be. For as with angel and porcupine, dream and its forgetting, relative viewing screens one in each of two next rooms reciprocally showing (if we would only get them together) no other responsibility than our own to end the agony (and at least half surprised that a leaf of music from one North American person should join by way of a soft pocket-in-motion the suddenly parted legs of a warm-hearted, calm, fine-looking South American person who has plunged toward a long sea whose choppy swells the moment fixes into rocks), so with Relation at large in the nutshell of Our sea-to-land base, it strives now inertially, now non-, to be a We we have been privately assured is us.

"We didn’t decide if your granddad actually went looking for her."

"I wouldn’t know; he never talked about it. I think he met with some union noise-makers in Philadelphia somewhere in there, maybe February of ‘94 (? I guess it would be) and fired off a couple of pieces to Margaret’s father at the Democrat—maybe a farmer’s group in eastern Pennsy, I’m not sure; he did mention a band of jobless vagrants at a riverbank campfire."

"In his sleep?"

"You’re in a funny mood."

"We haven’t decided if we’re staying there for the night or coming back for that silly opera."

"We could cover both."

"Let’s not divide the labor."

They stood toe to toe beside a turnpike phone-booth capsule, and, occupying unbudgeable a cleft that perhaps they themselves made and were, in the ambient oxides and simultaneously approaching and receding noise particles of happily stabilized vehicles-in-motion, the world that could not easily get lost for love (so close about them was it) still promised in their silly old bodies to be waiting for them when they got back. And he stepped aside from all this hotline lovingly between them whose telepathy he had known of long since with his wife but then only as they receded from each other—and had now a thought or two private to himself wondering if he could even reach his daughter (who might be on this same turnpike right now if she had turned again to some link between the death of that weirdly gifted Trace Window guy’s murder and the place where he had recently used that gift yielding however information that Flick-Sarah was unlikely to have obtained)—and then also accepting that he had not thought about his son by love or image-signal reconstitution in hours if not days.

But he would not stay within himself apart from imagining himself each of the elements of this scene according to her serious-hearted dream theory (that he would like to tell his old friend Ted if it would give him a remission from sickness)—so he came up with:

(1) himself as the turnpike cars en route to Windrow et al. running on automatic leaving fauna, flora, other machines to breathe what he gave off;

(2) himself as the glassed-in phone booth both target for relatively faster-moving eyes and slot relatively removed from a person who knew him and loved him and was not always charmed with his charm but would stand in his way like a guard fully exploiting the rules and with her lovely arms outstretched toward him;

(3) himself as her, as B.J., Jean: too strong to be split between resting here with him, marrying, living for this long moment, and winging off to an endless nutrition project in East Africa—as Jean? he felt her legs warm and conscious and knew that she was not telling him to go away along a warp of age differential as if he ever would die and come back either younger or in her body that he knew pretty well;

(4) himself as also his own (actually leased) car, accelerating like gravity from a city tunnel toward a past home (decelerating to then use the speed of sound to phone to check on a daughter’s safety and with marginal disloyalty to call an extended son, Larry, whose life and thinking had changed dramatically)—but this was not the mere car—it was him, it was Jim Mayn . . . part of a multiple scene but not any one answer to it: until he rather casually and humorously spoke: "If I put myself into each of the components here, the cars, the pike, the phone booth, you, it comes out pretty dreamlike." She laughed with a tincture in her throat of contempt, and shook her head and said, "Make your call, and let’s get going. I was talking about actual dreams. You’re bullshitting me for some reason. I mean, you don’t believe this is a dream, this is a pretty odd day, I grant, when we have to go to a thing in New York tonight and you think you have to visit your father and the cemetery which is O.K. with me even if I don’t know what’s going on and you’re bullshitting me; but I know you’re more serious about the not-dreaming than even you are telling me." "If I don’t tell you, does that mean—" "Oh shit, man, ‘holding out on me’? Yes! When it’s this important."

She was bitching him as if he hadn’t been through twice her life. Larry had given over his systems hunt and relative reincarnation hypotheses, but they lived on. Say this Obstacle Geometry made a middle term by association with life on one hand and on another with how paths of astral bodies—light itself!—got deformed by massive bodies they neared: how did you—how did Larry, who said he wan’t talkin’ like this n’more—get from that middle-term stuff to being in more than one place-time at once? Mayn wheeled into the booth and told the operator to bill it to his Manhattan number, glad he had never installed one of those singles-people answering machines, but Flick/ Sarah was not at Lincoln’s or Amy’s or a club her mother’s fiance kept up his membership in, and Larry was out also, and Mayn seemed never to have stopped facing Barbara-Jean (Jean!) as close as a shower, close as some trip he left in a mind bag of unsorted non-news, though facing her to say he did not really think he had been through twice her life, not even twice his own —hers was her own—"I dreamt my own death, I think, once," she quickly said, glad they were friends again—"No," he said, "I know we get along." And he conveyed to her without more than a touch that he could explain something maybe in the car, which she then said she would drive—asking suddenly and lightly what the pistol was doing half-concealed in the lower sidepocket by the driver’s seat. Oh he had forgotten it the other night, in fact got into a discussion with a police detective and forgot even that the pistol could just as well be returned to the man from whom it had been easily taken except he’s dead now.

"You sound thorny," she added—to what had gone unsaid. This thing down here beside her wasn’t the Mayn family pistol she had heard about, was it? That? he said. But she really didn’t care. The driver sees more along the road than the freer passenger and might talk and question more. She said that a bicyclist in her rear-view mirror back a half mile had been sideswiped by a car and had disappeared smoothly into a ditch. Jim suggested that turnpikes shouldn’t have ditches. She said that as long as they existed you might as well use them. She said she didn’t see anything moving along the ditch’s horizon. She put her hand on his.

Jim explained that he had given up trying to see recent developments as unimportant or as necessarily unconnected to mysteries and oddities he himself was marginally confounded with. She laughed and asked if this would interfere with his work on anti-missile particle-beam weapons. Work on? he said, and laughed. Oh sure, she said, why wouldn’t he dream up a missile or two on his own? Or an anti-missile, he said like a proposition to her knowing she would not confuse it with some old anti-missile missile. Made of anti-matter? she suggested. Too easy, he said. Anti-light, she said. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been downright fond of the modest short-range Sprint in its day, one of the only mildly threatening curiosities of Mr. N.’s regime, and it had been trotted out again after the ABM ban in ‘72 as a short-range tactical. You sound like a salesman, she said restoring her right hand to the wheel. For "enhanced radiation," he went on, finding her thigh with his left hand . . . low thermal yield, cut down on damage, leave motels and churches and the Congressional Office Building standing, kill the T62 drivers but leave their vehicles intact right there in the main streets of Dusseldorf and Paris— Livermore Labs were playing around with it for God’s sake in the fifties when she was having Babar and Little Miss Muffet read to her.

Men know so much junk, said Barbara-Jean (Jean!). Hey, he said, she could explain the fusion doughnut to him better than Lawrence Livermore himself, and she hadn’t even been there. Simple, she said, you get this ring of magnetic material, keep changin’ its field real fast so you induce an electric field that’ll give a bunch of particles a push and then another push and then another and oompa-pa oompa-pa, but there isn’t any Lawrence Livermore. Well, that’s a linear accelerator, he said, I can tell, and thanks—anyway that particular one was trying for fusion energy, which is more sanitary and peacekeeping. Oh, she sighed half-intelligently half-contemptuously, we all end up the same either way, right? But she was there with him, turning turning to him constantly though she never took her eyes off the "ribbon of highway" he briefly hummed. That bullshit about fusion makes me mad, she said, it’s so fucking expensive you know. Actually, he countered, he’d prefer to wind up ashes more than dust. She laughed and took one affectionate hand off the wheel: Angel dust, she added, to whatever he was thinking, if anything. He said he imagined she didn’t know what angel dust was. What are T62S? she asked. Russian tanks by the hundred was the answer.

Had bicyclist been resurrected? No, she murmured, without looking, but—can’t even see his ditch. Mayn reported a multiple-car wreck between Lausanne and Geneva along the lake road, in fact extravehicular and intramural (—what?—hit a wall), an acquaintance named Karl, this was a year ago, expert on arms-limitation protocols and on potential Russian cheating on the overall strategic-launcher ceiling, anyway he was declared by doctors on his arrival at hospital to be a miracle, and with that he died.

A miracle? Yes, that he had arrived in two pieces.

Why are you telling me this?

Because this is an arms negotiator who sat at the tables of our international power vacuum always armed with a small pistol.

What’s that got to do with your daughter and your grandmother’s trip west and your grandfather’s diaries that your daughter is returning to your father today and your grandfather’s briefer trip west, and dreams, and us?

Because if you don’t dream, you get something else.

What?