#isbn 978-0-87074-462-4
#publisher Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, Texas)
#date 2001
#source 1<sup>st</sup> ed.
#topics literature, fiction, half-finished error correcting
#title Bombshell
#subtitle A Novel
#author Liza Wieland
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-03-29T07:17:16
#cover l-w-liza-wieland-bombshell-1.jpg
#notes Authors website: <[[https://lizawieland.com/books.html][lizawieland.com/books.html]]>

** [Front Matter]

*** [Synopsis]

“WHEN I THINK ABOUT my books come from, it seems to me there’s no such thing as the whole truth ... except in fiction. News, history, fact, all masquerade as
truth, but for me, they never tell the whole story. My interest is in
imagining the story complete. Anyone who pays attention to the news
knows the facts of *Bombshell*, but only fiction can get at its human
heart.

“The inspiration for *Bombshell* came from the real-life dilemma of
David Kaczynski, the Unabomber’s brother, though I have reimagined it
with several variables. I’m deeply interested in the choice he was faced
with, which becomes the essential issue in *Bombshell*: who do you
betray, and when and why? The book isn’t about what’s right or wrong,
but rather about what happens emotionally.

“And Las Vegas as a place to open the novel drew me like a magnet, its
strange seediness, its perfect impersonation of nowhere. Most nowhere of
all were the strip clubs, on those stages the bleary repetition of something that’s not sex and not love, and yet seems even
more familiar than these, like television, maybe. What I felt was that
it wasn’t dangerous to be in such a place, but it was dangerous to
leave, to be alone, to be my real self in the parking lot. Which is what
all of Las Vegas is like, maybe all of America. It’s more dangerous to
be your real self than anybody you might imagine.

“A third influence in creating this novel: my husband and I happened to
spend part of our honeymoon in Los Alamos. It’s not a romantic place,
except that it’s all about secrecy, privacy, but publicity,
too. A little like marriage. We know what happened at Los Alamos in
1945, and yet we don’t know anything about it. What have we made of
atomic science, and what has it made of us? The same question arises for
the characters *m Bombshell*—and maybe for the reader—by way of the
disparate elements the novel is trying to yoke together. What do the
atom bomb, striptease, Charlie Parker, willful destruction that is also
random, classical ballet, and forgiveness have to do with each other? I
hat s for the story to tell.”

<quote>
—Liza Wieland
</quote>

*** Other Books by Liza Wieland

*The Names of the Lost*

*Discovering America<br>
You Can Sleep While I Drive*

*** [Title Page]

BOMBSHELL

A NOVEL BY LIZA WIELAND

<quote>
SOUTHERN METHODIST<br>
UNIVERSITY PRESS<br>
*Dallas*
</quote>

*** [Copyright]

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously.

<center>
<verbatim>*</verbatim>
</center>

Copyright © 2001 by Liza Wieland
<br>First edition, 2001
<br>All rights reserved

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be
sent to:
<br>Rights and Permissions
<br>Southern Methodist University Press
<br>PO Box 750415
<br>Dallas, Texas 75275–0415

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the
following:

*The Poetry of Robert Frost,* edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright 1951 by
Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

*Collected Poems* by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc.

Jacket photograph courtesy of
<br>The Archives of Milton H. Greene, LLC
<br>278 Maple Street, Florence Oregon 97439
<br><verbatim>t#</verbatim> 541-997-4970 <verbatim>f#</verbatim> 541-997-5795
<br>www.archivesmhg.com
<br>©2000 Archives of Milton H. Greene, LLC
<br>All Rights Reserved

Jacket and text design by Tom Dawson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
<br>Wieland, Liza.
<br>Bombshell: a novel / by Liza Wieland.—1<sup>st</sup> ed.
<br>p. cm.
<br>ISBN 0-87074-462-3 (alk. paper)
<br>1. Bombers (Terrorists)—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3.
Los Alamos (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Fiction. 5. Women
dancers— Fiction. 6. Stepbrothers—Fiction. 7. Terrorism—Fiction. 8.
Bombings—Fiction.
<br>I. Title.
<br>PS3573.1344 B66 2001
<br>813’.54—dc21

<right>
2001020431
</right>

Printed in the Lmited States of America on acid-free paper
<br>10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

*** [Dedication]

*for Dan Stanford<br>
who knows it all by heart*

** I

*My father lived in the mountains alone, is how Jane would begin her
story, on a dollar a day.*

Then she takes off a glove. One glove, the left. It would be black, made
of a kind of fishnet material, like her stockings.

He was a physicist, a mathematician, sometimes a philosopher.

The other glove, then, more slowly.

He was fifty-seven years old.

There is a scarf, a boa, and she draws it along her shoulders. A man
watching her might imagine it was his arm on her body, his hand.

He wanted to live on his own, in nature.

A necklace next, paste and glass, a comet tossed into the darkness below
her.

*Wild* nature.

The top of her dress slides away, miraculously. There must have been a
zipper. It falls from her body. But still, nothing is revealed. A tattoo
on her back, hard to see, on her left shoulder blade. Perhaps a flower.
Nothing more.

He only wanted his solitude, peace, time to think, work on a project of
great importance, a treatise.

Her skirt seems to open out from her lower body and legs, opening like a
door. Briefly, it flares behind her like a cape, a black fin, a device
that might enable her to fly or float, disappear from view. But really
she is standing quite still. The clothes appear to have more life than
she does.

That was all he wanted.

What’s left of her is black décolletage and a G-string, stockings hooked
to a garter in a way that looks both old-fashioned and highly
mechanical—as if they might be undone by remote control. The appeal of
this intimate technology is universal. The men in front of her, men
everywhere, love it.

And then several years ago, he began to show some strain. He went
completely silent. Clamped shut.

When she unhooks the stockings, they slide down her legs like water,
black serpents, melting tar pooling at her ankles. Somehow, the
stockings Hit out of her shoes. She begins to reach behind her. There is
a nearly unbearable moment of hesitation, a question in her eyes. Men
think she will need help with this part. As women do in life. The men
are nearly out of their seats, almost rushing forward to help.

He began to make bombs, pipes at first, then packages, sometimes filled
with nails. He carved intricate wooden boxes to contain them. Beautiful
boxes, works of art, mysterious. Then he sent them. This is what Jane
has been told.

But then the brassiere is off, flung away, gone. Her breasts are
beautiful, men think, perfect, full and high. She is radiant, somehow,
with her body half revealed, her white-yellow hair like butter or
sunshine. She must know what a knockout she is, luscious hoyden, blonde
bombshell. It kills men to be so far away from her.

People were killed, maimed. She’s told her father did these things.

She is thin and muscular, her creamy skin stretched taut over her bones.
There is no womanly fleshiness. Her face is pretty, even under these
fights, her hair white blonde. The attraction is grace, something
inward, elemental, visceral.

One man was eviscerated. There were parts of his body all over the room.
The blast was so strong that evidence arrived at the coroner’s office in
paint cans.

She waves goodbye, or maybe not. It’s hard to tell through the smoky air
exactly what that gesture is. Then she’s gone. The darkness is total,
except for a few small red fires: fighters flaring, the hot ends of
cigarettes, the exit signs. Men in the audience want to chase after her,
find her.

She wanted to find him, find out for herself.

This is what she remembers, the first memory, she thinks, before that
blank descended, like a white searing, exactly the kind of blank her
father wants to be. But it is him, Daddy, she’s calling him that, riding
on Iris back in a kind of cradleboard he made for her, and she can flex
her tiny legs and stand on the metal support that rests over his hips.
So she can, if she wants, see over his shoulder. They are in the woods,
she thought of them later in school when she read, Whose woods these are
I think I know. What woods? Outside Chicago. Lake Forest? Farther than
that, farther away. She could find it in an atlas. Captain Daniel Wright
Woods. They walk—he walks and she rides—until she thinks it will get
dark. She believes this because it is getting darker as the woods
thicken over them, around them. He has something in his left hand, a box
she thinks. The shape of a present, maybe for her. Open it. *Open,* she
says and reaches out her hand, straining to get over his shoulder. No,
Janie, he says. *Hold it*, *Daddy. Open.*

When they can’t hear voices anymore, they stop. She thinks it must have
been winter. She remembers a lot of clothing, a coat and mittens she
might never ever get out of. She remembers wanting to take it all off.
Take off her clothes. *Pm too hot. Pm burning up.* She says that, over
and over.

Her father gendy sets the box on a fallen log. Sweeps away some snow
first, with a branch, swish swish. He moves the box a litde, with the
tips of his fingers, like he’s afraid it might bite him. Jane sees all
this because she’s attached to her father’s back. She moves with him as
if she were wings, folded in since he doesn’t need them yet. Not yet. He
walks backward from the box on the log, carefully, heel to toe, but not
even glancing behind. She looks down and sees this, takes note. It seems
precarious. She is just now getting the hang of walking and knows that
it’s hard enough without trying to go backwards. She’s amazed anyone
would think to maneuver that way. Now her father is counting, fishing in
his pockets. He stands still, shows her the rock he’s brought along, the
size of an orange. Let me have it, she says, but he’s not listening. He
lets fly with the rock at the package, suddenly that’s what it looks
like to Jane, a present you’d send to someone, hut it misses. He brings
another rock out of his jacket pocket, and she’s surprised. She wishes
she’d known about the rocks. She wants to have carried one. Her words
are starting to mix themselves in time that way: she wishes to have done
what she did not do.

The second rock misses too, and her father says, third time’s the charm.
Another rock. She will remember them all as the same size, the same
rock. This time he hits the package. Jane would know later that was what
must have happened, but to her infant self it seems as soon as the stone
leaves his hand, there is a roar and a flash and heat. Blue. The log
flies up in pieces and her father holds up his hands to keep off the
burning splinters. She sees brightness in the trees like sun flashing up
from underground. They run back the way they’ve come, and jane shakes
from side to side, shimmies in her cradleboard. She’s afraid she’ll fall
out, and so she begins to cry. *Sshhh*, *sssshhh*, her father says.
Behind them, there’s fire, she knows this, and a disordered silence. No
birds.

He blew something up. She understands that now. But she wasn’t going to
be the one who told. Charlie would be. And so it was a race.

<strong><em>She IS A dancer IN Las Vegas,</em></strong> Nevada. Her real name is Jane
Gillooly, but she mostly goes by Lulu. When she was a litde girl, just
five, her mother left her father and married a man named Robert
Gillooly. Later, she left him and married Sam Parker, who already had a
son, named Charlie. Charlie Parker, proof that a person eith er becomes
his name or fights it off his whole life, and in Charlie’s case, it’s
both. They lived in Santa Monica, California, three blocks from the
ocean, though Jane’s told she was horn up north, in Berkeley. She says,
to nobody, to the air, you tell me I was bom here, but I don’t remember
anything, yet when she goes there now and walks along University Avenue,
she feels something peculiar, she hears a kind of voice, a sort of
instruction, *see the pretty lights*, *Janie*, *see yourself in the
window*, *Janie*, *this is Daddy’s office.* Spooky. She looks around,
ducks in someplace for beer and then gets out of town. She hates it,
*Cal*, they all say, like it’s the only school in the state. She doesn’t
know why she was so drawn to the place anyway—all those smart kids, lost
kids, hippie kids living on the street and their families don’t even
know where they are. Maybe they’ve got fife by the tail. Nobody ever
noticed her, she’s just a kind of tall girl, maybe a graduate student in
philosophy, ha ha. She used to wander around the mathematics department
in Campbell Hall, then lounge on the steps outside Sproul, Sprawl Hall.
She thinks these jokes in her head, but can’t ever say them. She tried
to remember which one was her father’s office. She tried to imagine what
in the world she inherited from him. She has this idea there are places
where you can meet up with your past. If you hang around the joint
where, say, your father used to work, you’ll get some breath of him that
way, the scent of a coat he wore, a pipe he smoked—-Jesus, they all
really do smoke those pipes—or an idea will come into your head. That’s
more what she was waiting for, actually, his ideas to come flooding in,
still raveled together, still brand new. Driving into town, up Shattuck,
she’d say, okay, he saw this, and so if I set my features kind of slack
and open, I’ll get it, a notion he had, some deep thought about beauty
or truth or human nature, arcane mathematical ideas, formulae, recipes.
*There is something called an exotic atom*, *Jane.* That was all she
got.

And then, before she knew where he’d gone off to, where his cabin was
out in the wilderness, she’d look for him on the street, in the
bookstores. Because she thought if she could get her own face right, get
it just that empty, vacuous as his was, they’d be drawn toward each
other like magnets.

Let’s start again. It’s Jane Gillooly’s business to tell a story not
quite all the way, and then begin again. It’s what the dancers in Las
Vegas do, raise the temperature to a certain point and then start over
cold.

Charlie Parker came to see her is how all this got going, spinning
toward the end. He’d threatened to do it years before, just show up. And
Jane knew someday he would, so she always looked out on or down at the
customers first thing, like saying hello. If she ever saw him, she knew
she’d have to stop and walk off the stage, leave the tape going full
blast. There are taboos, and the territory between Charlie and herself
was always so shaky, unmapped. They were brother and sister, but they
weren’t. Stepbrother, stepsister. *Step.* Like part of a dance, the
smallest, most careful part. But when Charlie finally did come, he had
the good grace to appear after a show, and he didn’t ever say that he’d
been watching her. He just stood there in the doorway, with the unlit
stage behind him, and she knew who it was immediately, the black jeans
and T-shirt, sandals, a face out of all that darkness. He had green
eyes and straight brown hair that he still wore longish, cut as if
somebody had placed a bowl over his head and worked around it. He had a
long scar under his right eye, from a knife wound, that made him look
both mean and sleepy He was thin and nervous, something seemed about to
burst from him but he looked dead at the same time. Like he’d spent
months in a cave. Anybody would think, that guy’s a musician, no doubt
about it. Then it occurred to Jane that he might have come to Las Vegas
from Winchester, Massachusetts, to get married. She checked for a ring,
but there wasn’t one.

“Your mother told me where to find you” were the first words he said.

“Well, hello to you too.”

“I’m sorry.” He ducked his head a little, a gesture from their
childhood. “Hello, Bean. Good to see you.” His eyes were absolutely on
her face, no lower. Jane moved to embrace him, and his body felt sharp
in her arms, unforgiving.

She made him turn around while she got dressed, and then they went out
to get some coffee. She was surprised, as she always was, that they
walked into daylight. The club was so dark, and even though she didn’t
drink much anymore, she was never able to fix the clock in her body. Her
circadian rhythms. She used to know things like that, the real names for
processes, functions, machinery.

The Parkers were okay, Charlie said, and they laughed. “Mrs. Parker
especially sends her love.”

“And Sam Parker?”

“Sam Parker too.”

They used to call them that as kids, the Parkers, Jane’s mother and
Charlie’s father, like they were living next door. They saw the shell of
their parents’ lives but not the center, the way people mosdy see their
neighbors. The life the adults had together was always locked away
somehow, more than private, more like Jane and Charlie could ruin their
lives if they got too far inside, mess up their furniture, dirty their
carpets.

He told her about teaching school in Boston, teaching kids to write a
complete sentence, trying to get them to read. How he was getting used
to losing some of them along the way, sometimes a lot of them. He said
he was beginning to realize they’d look back later and understand what
he had been talking about. That was the thing about school, he said, at
any given time, most people were too young for it, too busy, too poor.

“So okay,” she said. “I get it now. You’ve come here to get me to go
back to school.”

“No. Aluch worse. Nothing to do with school.”

But he couldn’t tell her then, not in a diner in the middle of Las
Vegas, so they walked back to the club, got in their cars and drove out
to her house, out by the airport. She gave him directions and then led
the way, slowly so he wouldn’t get lost in the maze and hurry of trucks
and traveling salesmen on 1–15. She liked looking at him in the
rearview, checking his progress. She had the sense of the two of them
driving away from the rest of the world. Away from civilization and
toward some great empty space, white, hot, the desert, the loneliest
place on earth. She was leading him there, and at the same time, he was
driving her to it. He drove fast, even though he didn’t know where he
was going, and so she had to drive faster. It seemed like he might run
her off the road, like he was pushing her the way a parent pushes a
pokey kid out the door, the way a parent has to dog a kid who’s dreamy
or slow or baffled by the places where his kid-life has to intersect
with other lives.

Nobody has houses out by the Las Vegas airport except dancers and the
private pilots—it’s a neighborhood fall of people who mostly live alone
and keep odd hours. If they’re home, they stare out at the planes and
the desert and blow smoke and wonder how the hell they got there. Jane
knew that bringing a man home in the middle of the day, a man in a
rental car, would be good for some talk later. People’s drapes twitched
all up and down the block. She could predict which of the pilots would
be smiling at what they thought was her good fortune, and get up from
the old sofa by the window and have a beer about it.

The drive out of town had made her loose and happy, but Charlie was
shaky. He stood just inside the front door and his eyes seemed to roll a
little in his head. Then he focused again on Jane’s face and opened his
mouth to speak.

“No, no,” she said. “Come on in and sit down. You don’t look so good.
Something’s the matter, isn’t it?”

“Can I have something to drink?” He seemed to think she might say no.

“Sure you can have a drink. I don’t keep hard stuff around. But take a
look. Whatever you want.”

“Just water.”

“Rocks?”

“What?”

“Ice. Do you want ice in it?”

“I’m sweating,” he said. “I guess that means I want ice.”

When Jane came back with the glass, he took it and walked through her
house, pausing to look at the pictures, run his hand over the two or
three pieces of strange furniture she had. It was a quick trip though,
and then he setded back down on the couch. On the windowsill behind him,
there was an old photograph of Jane and her father. She was not quite
three but looked older, bigger, an armful in a pink sunsuit and a white
hat. The two of them seemed to be under some kind of tent, but there
were also tree branches behind her father’s head, so it was hard to make
sense of the place. They were smiling. Charlie picked up the picture.

“Can you tell where that was taken?” she said. “I found it in a box and
have no idea.”

“I guess I have to just say this right out, Jane. I had—” His voice
ground to nothing for a second. “Your father might be in a lot of
trouble. Do you know where he is?”

“Yes,” she said, and that was the real beginning of it all. Looking
back, she doesn’t know why she said yes so fast, not exacdy. She was
happy to see Charlie. It lulled her a litde to think she might not be
alone in the world, or less so anyhow. And Charlie had always loved her
in that peculiar way, that impossible adoration. It was calming to he
around. Jane felt a little powerful. She felt steady. Power and calm are
the same thing sometimes. “What kind of trouble?”

And so Charlie told her. A couple of months before, he had been helping
her mother and Sam Parker move. They were cleaning out their attic, and
she found a box of letters from Jane’s father. He wrote to her for about
five years after they separated, was silent for another ten, then wrote
again for two or three years. After that, nothing. So Jane would have
been sixteen, seventeen. The letters, Charlie said, were very peculiar,
especially the later ones, *diatribes*, *reactionary*, he used those
words. “But he’s against progress in general. He thinks it’s the death
of civilization.”

Jane knew this. She had letters of her own. “He says it’s the politics
of common sense.”

And loneliness, that was how he’d put it to Jane. The politics of
loneliness. His greatest quarrel was with God. It was personal. Private
but gigantic.

“No, Jane. It’s much bigger. Bombs in the mail, Jane,” Charlie said.
“The one two weeks ago in New Alexico. A letter bomb mailed to the guy’s
office.” And then he told her the details, that the man’s right hand had
been blown apart. It was an ordinary-looking brown paper envelope. It
was a miracle he wasn’t killed. There had been a staple on the end that
caught his finger, pinched it, so he had been in the act of dropping the
envelope when it detonated. The explosion sounded like an automobile
backfire and blew his arm off to the right, not off his body, though he
thought so at first. Charlie stopped talking, waited for Jane to take
all this in. Then he said, “You know all this. The person who claims
responsibility sounds familiar. It has us wondering.”

“Who’s us?”

“Your mother. Me.”

“That’s ridiculous, Charlie.”

There must have been something in her face though, something open and
half-believing.

“You know the kind of talk I mean, don’t you? You know the stuff he’s
always said,” Charlie pushed her a little. “The letters sent with the
bombs. They sound like him.”

“Mom just wants to get back at him. She’s still furious, even after all
these years.”

“That’s not true, Jane.” Then he said the words he ought not to have
said. He might have known it the second they flew out of his mouth, but
it was too late. “I know your mother better than you do.”

The whole world seemed to go silent. No planes took off and none landed,
nothing creaked or moaned or automated itself inside the house.

All that false platinum desert light flung itself toward them, into the
room.

“The light here,” she said to Charlie, “I just figured it out. The fight
here *insists.* Did you ever notice that?”

He considered. He would know what she meant, even if she only half knew
herself.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Tell us where he is.”

“So you can—what?”

“Just know.”

“It’s too difficult to explain, floo many twists and turns. Mountain
roads.”

“Then take me there.”

She told him she wasn’t taking him anywhere. She wasn’t going anywhere.
They sat still then, in her small bare living room, not looking at each
other. The clock by the front door ticked. As if she were Charlie, Jane
surveyed the walls, the two tables, the half-empty bookshelf, her maps,
Triple A tour guides, a collection of heart-shaped boxes. Who fives
here? she thought. She glanced at Charlie and wondered if this was
really about her father at all, or if Charlie wanted to save her from
what he believed was a terrible fife. But she didn’t want any other
fife. She didn’t and she doesn’t. Back then, Las Vegas suited her just
fine. She had that little rented house, and she could get up and walk
through its rooms at night and not meet up with another living soul.
Everything inside belonged to her. The front porch faced west and there
was nothing across the street but the end of a runway. She liked sitting
on the porch and holding her face up to the sky so she could be the last
girl those tourists and businessmen saw as they headed back east. She
used to wave at the planes and send them off with her blessing, watch
the sun set, watch the fight slide down the front of her house, her
neighbors’ houses. She liked evening in Las Vegas. WLen the sun’s gone,
the whole valley is shut away, left to its own devices, forgotten. Never
mind that the place looks plain ugly in daylight, never mind the clubs
and the fights and the money that can only change hands under the cover
of darkness. It’s not that. It’s more like a delicious isolation, the
perfect loneliness you can have when nobody knows where you are.

She knew she would have to go see her father. He lived in New Mexico.
Her father was right there. She’d read about it, the advertising
executive in Santa Fe, how his right hand was mangled, and there was a
large crater dug out of his forearm.

"There was blood everywhere, Jane,” Charlie said, “pooling on the floor
at his feet, on the desk. He felt blood on his face, something that
might have been a piece of his own flesh. All his fingers were missing
the first two joints, and his thumb was blown completely off. He didn’t
call to his secretary or anyone else. He sat down in the chair behind
his desk and waited. Of course there had been a lot of noise, so it
didn’t take long for the secretary and two of the senior vice-presidents
to come rushing in. His first words were *You’re never going to believe
what just happened.* And then he didn’t say anything more, not for
weeks. There were three separate microsurgeries to try to save the
nerves, but not much could be done, so his right arm was going to be
essentially useless from the elbow down. For two weeks he lay in the
hospital bed and stared at the bandaged arm without speaking a word to
anyone.”

“How do you know all this, Charlie?”

“There were other ones, too. A physicist who played the piano.”

“How do you know this?” Jane asked again.

“I’m interested. I’m an interested party.”

“In what way?”

He waved her question away with his left hand. He had, Jane thought, the
look of someone who was preparing a monumental speech, an earthshaking
pronouncement, none of which he could give away before it was fully
complete in his head. His eyes seemed turned inward, reading something
printed on the inside of his skull.

“Don’t you remember all these, Jane?”

“Some of them.”

“Didn’t you ever think of your father?”

In a court of law, Jane would testify that she does not remember whether
or not she thought of her father. She would say, *I do not remember.
I suppose I did*, *but what of it? I thought of him constantly. It always seemed like*

*I had just seen him and lost hi?n the day before. Of course I thought
about him.* Then she would turn to the judge and say, *Don't you think about your father eveiy day?* She would press him on that point. She
would make him admit that yes, he thought about his father—dead for
thirty years—every single day of his life.

<strong><em>WHAT Charlie SAID:</em></strong> I know your mother better than you do.

Jane Gillooly never wanted to know her mother, or live with her, though
when she left home, they both cried, and her mother begged Jane to stay.
She had heard, possibly, that Jane was turning into something, an
attraction. Though Jane did not see her, her mother often followed her
to school, watched outside at lunch and at recess. She sat in a parked
car across the street, wearing sunglasses, her hair swathed in a scarf.
The radio was on low. She smoked and hummed along to the music. Jane
made it easy for her though, at school—she always stood by the fence on
Sepulveda, as far from the classroom buildings as she could get.
Sometimes a boy or a couple of them would walk over and talk to Jane,
but mostly she was alone, reading a book, or dreaming that somebody
would drive by and honk, and she would magically drift over the fence,
ascend, and get into the car and disappear forever.

Her mother had become a Christian Scientist again by then, returning to
Mary Baker Eddy’s fold after ten years away. She would read aloud from
*Science and Health* and make up a kind of catechism for them, them
being Charlie and Jane. She was working to become a practitioner, a
teacher trained in therapeutic healing. So they learned to repeat back:
*matter is unreal*, *there is only God*, called Mind by Mrs. Eddy.
Jane’s mother said, *What you have to do is bring the unreal material
body into perfect harmony with the real spiritual condition. You were
made in God’s image*, she would say, *so you can be perfect. It’s just
optimism,* she said once when the children had exasperated her with
questions, and then, *It’s just that you’re mistaken. You’re fooled by
your body.* Charlie and Jane had looked at each other. They were
fifteen, sixteen. Their bodies were the truest things they knew.

You want to take over my body, Jane had said to her mother. My voice
too. That’s why you don’t want me to go. All you parents want that, she
had added, gesturing wildly toward Sam Parker, toward the empty space
her father occupied.

And maybe so. Jane’s mother had heard or seen that unlike many other
teenage bodies, Jane’s worked quite well. Maybe because she was Jane’s
mother, she understood how Jane felt, could see it when she walked,
maybe feel the pleasure of that body because it had once been partly
hers. Before she left the Parkers, Jane had been taking ballet lessons
on and off for seven years, depending on who she could cajole or tease
or threaten into it. Sometimes the Parkers paid, and sometimes she just
went to class. A woman who owned a studio started to let her in for
free, a woman from Spain named Carmen Gutierrez. Privately, she taught
Jane flamenco. She said Jane had the perfect soul for it. “Flamenco is
lonely,” she said, “and you know what it is to be alone.” Later Carmen
Gutierrez said, “The dance is your voice, Jane. You do not have a voice
of your own, and so the dance is your voice.”

She loved ballet because she was most herself and most completely no
one. She loved her body, and she still does—maybe she’s the last woman
in America to be able to say that. But it’s true. What her body could do
seemed boundless, only pardy knowable to Jane herself. As she got older,
she was able to do more, not less, push herself harder. She learned
dances and made dances in her head. She believed she understood how the
body could move, and why, though she could not explain it very well to
anyone else.

Mrs. Parker would have heard about Jane even after she left because Jane
taught dance in Santa Monica. Or she would have read Jane’s name in the
paper every so often, maybe seen a picture, around Christmas, from *The
Nutcracker,* recognized the severe litde face, closed up like a fox’s,
and the blindingly white hair. She talked to Charlie about Jane, or so
he’d told her, but she didn’t believe it.

“I know she loves you, Bean,” he’d said, using his pet name for her.

“And just how do you know this, Charlie?”

“I can tell.”

“Because you’re so good with women?”

They laughed, but Jane was unnerved, saddened to be left out of her
mother ‘s conversation.

“You were the one who decided to leave,” Charlie had said.

“I know.”

“You have your dad now/

“Nobody has my dad.”

“He calls you now. He sends you letters now.”

It was true. Jane’s father had begun writing letters, though she had
heard that he was dead. Her mother swore that someone had sent her his
obituary notice from Las Cruces, New Mexico, though she could never find
it when Jane asked. At first her mother believed the letters were some
kind of a hoax and wrote back to say so, but either she became convinced
or she was charmed by something in the letters because she began to
write to him regularly and secredy. Jane wrote too, copied the address.
Her mother made Jane and Charlie promise never to tell Sam Parker about
the letters, but one day after her mother kept her home from a dance
class for no good reason, Jane did tell. She showed Sam Parker where the
letters were while her mother walked down to the store to buy something
for supper. When she got back, there was shouting and slammed doors and
no supper. The next day Jane’s mother called a friend and asked if Jane
could live there for a while. Jane did, for a week.

In the spring of that year, her father turned up in Santa Monica. Jane
had written to him about her dance class recital and so he brought a
gift, a peace offering in the form of a costume: a wooden star on a
stick, a wand, he called it, covered in tinfoil. He made it himself, he
said, but everything else was store-bought, the rest of the getup, a
tulle skirt, new leotard with sequins and rhinestones glued to the front
and back. That year’s recital was a regular class, a sort of
day-in-the-life, so that the mothers and this one father could see their
daughters disciplined, straight-backed, but disguised as swans and
soldiers, sugarplum fairies and lost princesses, all those sources of
old wisdom. T ier father told her fairy tales don’t come from old
wisdom, they come from old foolishness, which was just as powerful. He
told her they follow rules of their own, numbers, he said, repetition,
all those spells. There aren’t any choices in fairy tales, and the
telling of them always has to be exacdy the same so that there is no
suspense, which is what the listener, who is always a child, wants. No
suspense. In that way, a fairy tale, which is about wishes, grants a
wish itself. With her wooden star, Jane was a girl who granted wishes.

She had a small solo moment in which she was supposed to turn and leap
blindly, almost over her own shoulder. It was a step she made up, part
Martha Graham, part pure classical dance. She was proud of its
strangeness, its impossibility, the utter concentration required. She
showed it to her teacher, just once before the recital, and the teacher
said it was the sort of move a dancer could only perform with her eyes
closed. It required pure being in space, floating in darkness.

But at the last minute, Jane looked. She saw her reflection and then her
father’s in one of the classroom mirrors, and she fell a little bit in
love with her body. But not like Narcissus, not with the surface—it was
more like how she imagined a man would love a woman—she fell into
herself like a well’or a bed or a deep sleep. In that moment, with her
father and teacher watching, Jane Gillooly became someone else, the self
she is now. But she didn’t understand this for another fifteen years,
until she tracked down her father again, and the rest of this story
wound itself out.

She felt her body beginning to want space, not room, but thin air,
loneliness, half-light into which it could disappear. She felt the bones
bend themselves almost to breaking, the flesh stretching itself lean.
And then she started to want too much: to leap up and smash the lights
into real stars, smash right through the walls of the studio. She
imagined it all cartoonish, the Tasmanian Devil or Wily Coyote, half
human, half beast, and how she would burst through a brick wall and
leave only an oudine, a jagged form, really no resemblance to the body
the world thought she had. More like a hieroglyph, truth written in
stone, in empty space.

When it was all over, the whole recital, Jane’s father kissed her and
said she had seemed lovely to him. She has always remembered exactly his
use of *see?n.* She thought of her mother and Mary Baker Eddy and how
the senses were not to be trusted and was glad her mother hadn’t come
because Jane would have looked to her like a dream, like sheer animal
magnetism. Jane was hypnotism, her mother would have said, she was
error, she was the mortal mind. After that she left dance classes for
good, left ballet and even modem dance, until she taught them later. She
moved out of her father’s arms, out the door, dropped her wand in the
garbage. She turned down the street, in the wrong direction.

“I’ll take you home, Jane,” her lather said, hut she told him she wanted
to walk for a while. He followed her, keeping pace. “You’re a good
dancer, you know.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“I wish you could come live with me,” he said. “But you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m falling out of the world.”

She nodded. Falling out of the world made so much sense. The world was
all mirrors and lights, so the trick was to close your eyes and hang in
the air. Still, it was easier to give in and just fall.

And when people fall, every one of them does it differently, with one
peculiar exception, which is the flinging out of the arms. Almost every
dancer who’s about to fall will push both her arms out to the sides or,
if she can figure it out quickly enough, in the direction of her fall.
But *away,* away from the body, as if keeping someone else back, at bay.
This is by far the most astounding truth about a falling body, that in
order to catch itself, in order to keep from being injured, it must dear
a space between itself and any other body that might help, that might
save it.

So **THEN WHAT TERRIFYING** apparatus keeps people standing up straight,
enables them to walk through the world? Jane wondered this when she
taught dance classes, but it ran through her mind at other times too,
that people have such a peculiar array of moves and stances and postures
they use just to get from one minute to the next. She was in a hotel
once, in a town in the Napa Valley, a place full of beautiful, tanned
rich folks, most of whom were slightly tipsy from touring wineries. The
night clerk was a young man with dark, oily hair, pasty-faced and
overweight. While she was sitting in the lobby, he told the same joke
over and over: *What do you call a person who speaks only one language?
An American!* But not him, he said, explaining that he knew Russian,
Japanese, Greek, French, German and she doesn’t remember now what else.
Then he sang a little song in Russian, something his grandmother would
sing to him when he was worried or frightened or upset. He said a couple
of times that he preferred blonde-haired women. She knew he had said all
this the night before, would say it again the following night. She went
into the bar and ordered a drink and then another and a third, got drunk
on behalf of this night clerk, toasted his fantastic buoyancy, the way
this man held himself aloft. His name was Adam, the first man. What
stories he must have told himself in order not to fly apart, to explain
how it was that he suddenly found himself locked out of the garden.

And what was Jane doing there, in the lobby of a fancy hotel in St.
Helena, California? Jane would say she didn’t know. Or it was a mistake.
An accident. She found herself ten miles to the south, by the side of
the highway, with a busted timing belt. She woke up and all of the above
had happened, and that’s what she practiced saying: “All of the above,
Officer.” Earlier she had been in Santa Monica, alone in her apartment,
planning a dance class. Then it was evening, days later, and she was
sitting quietly in the lobby of the Hotel St. Helena, listening to Adam
and waiting for the police to come. She stayed sober as long as she
could and still nobody showed up to fill her in on the details of her
trip north. She watched Adam’s desperate body stumble and bang behind
the front desk, and toasted his courage.

<strong><em>For EIGHT years, Jane</em></strong> taught dance to children, in Santa Monica,
when she was a drunk. Still, she was a good teacher. For an hour and a
half, at four in the afternoon, she could hold herself together. By then
she had usually made her peace with the evils of the night before and
needed something to do with her hands and feet while anticipating the
next cocktail hour. It never cost much, because men usually bought her
drinks, and for years no one knew because she did most of her drinking
out of town, in bars on state roads, between Costa Mesa and Laguna
Beach, which still does not exactly explain how she came to be in the
lobby of the Hotel St. Helena, listening to the multilingual Adam tell
his single solitary joke.

Before she said goodbye to her girls, in Santa Monica, her dance
students, she’d been drinking—before six in the evening, against all her
rules. She didn’t believe any of them knew, though a few of their
mothers might have spotted the concentration and strange cant in her
walk, might have recognized it from experience. The older girls cried,
the ones who’d been with her for a couple of years, and the litde ones
took their cue. Up until that day, she had never shed a tear in public.
It was a rule, like no booze before six. But she couldn’t help herself.
She sat down on a chair in the middle of the studio, and the girls came
and kissed her, one by one. It seemed later like a scene in a movie: La
Gillooly and her swan song. Even after all the mothers had taken their
daughters away, Jane stayed in that chair until it got dark. Then she
went out, around the comer to buy a few bottles of wine, came back, sat
in the chair for as long as she could actually sit, and later slept on
the floor. In the morning, the studio owner found her and she was fired,
even though she had already resigned.

When she was shaken awake, Jane was dreaming about feathers and breasts,
hers, and a topless birdlike costume. People told her she’d be able to
find work as a showgirl in one of the big casinos, no problem. She had
the body for it, the training in dance, the right kind of icy stare.
Nobody gets in, one man had called her look, and nobody gets out alive.
She heard topless showgirls make the big bucks, working evenings only a
couple of days a week. Men in bars told her this, men who wanted to take
her away in their fast cars. This was only one of the details they got
wrong. Strippers are the moneymakers because it’s all take-home. That’s
what she found out. And by that time there was nobody around to be set
straight.

Years later at work in Las Vegas, it often seemed she had just left that
moment on the street with her father, when he’d told her he was falling
out of the world. Blue and red fights flashed around her head and the
music was so loud, that same slow stabbing tune you can hear in any X-
rated movie. She would be almost naked and high up on the pole, but she
never felt it, not even between her legs, which is what everyone in die
audience got off on, not even the grip of her hands. There was just
impossible quiet and the muscularity of staying up there. That was both
the illusion and the truth: that the body’s pleasure could get you out
of this world.

<strong><em>Her FATHER didn’t have</em></strong> a phone, but he did have a post office box
in Los Alamos, so the best she could do from Las Vegas was to write him
a letter. She knew from experience she couldn’t just show up there—she
wouldn’t want him doing that in her life. And she wouldn’t tell him much
on paper, just that she was planning a trip, in his general direction,
and did he want to meet her halfway, or could she come see him. She
needed to get out of the heat, she could say, and she was having trouble
with a boyfriend. She wrote the letter, sealed it up, took it with her
back into town. Usually letters were left clothespinned to the mailbox
on the front porch, but something in her gut told her not to do that.
She could feel Charlie still in the air. Later she might say she was
warned in a dream.

She didn’t have to be at the club until nine that night, so she was
driving out west into Death Valley, where a friend of hers, a
photographer, wanted to shoot some stills. She’d known him for couple of
years. He did photography for the wedding chapels, one-hour developing,
risky he said, since sometimes the marriages didn’t even last that long,
and so he’d be out a few bucks. Jane liked him, Philip Exeter, which
he’d told her wasn’t his real name. He was like a lot of people who had
lived in Vegas for years: he’d found a place for himself, this
wedding-photo slot, and he got in there and then he started to unravel.
You could do that, figure out how to make a living, then how to do
whatever it was practically in your sleep, and then start to come apart.
There was something comforting about such a life, the privacy of it,
maybe, or the resemblance it bore to a real life, with none of the
responsibility.

Jane liked Philip’s work too, or the idea of it, how a person could make
light behave or appear to behave, how a photographer could get a human
subject to look good. What do you say to people, she asked him over and
over, how do you do it? Do you become invisible in a way, absent behind
your camera? She could take a decent picture herself, and thought

about doing head shots, those glamorous portraits that were so popular,
or professional photographs for actors. She thought there was something
confidential about that kind of work, like the camera and the image on
film were a kind of secret between the photographer and the model, the
*face.* People were always telling her their secrets in fife, and she
wondered if it would translate. And she knew she was going to need
something to do when her body started to go.

It was a cool day in Death Valley, only about ninety degrees, bright,
blazing sun, not nearly as desolate as she’d thought. She stared at the
horizon and told herself the old desert lie, that the beach started
*there*, a step or two beyond what she could see, the beach and then the
ocean, all of it just more glittering, more of the kind of fight she
already knew. What Charlie said about her father, Charlie’s sheer
presence, made her feel found, discovered, found *out.* She wished
suddenly she could get to a place that was purely empty like the desert,
and start over from there. Philip was talking a mile a minute, speedy,
and Jane recognized the look, the pace—some of the dancers got tanked
before they went to work, always the little girls, the ones who wouldn’t
last long. You could help them and talk to them, be their friend, but
they’d always run back to Portland or Dubuque or Philadelphia after a
month or two.

“It’s so *nothing* out here,” Philip was saying as he set up. “I love
the desert for that. Death Valley, all of Nevada, New Mexico. White
Sands. Nothing. The perfect place to test a bomb.” He stopped to take a
breath, “just imagine it. Being on the inside of that testing, one day
it’s *ka-boom* in the desert. Hey. If an atomic bomb goes off in the
desert and there’s nobody around, does it make any noise?”

“I think there was somebody around,” she said. “There was always
somebody around.”

“Imagine being one of those guys. Inventing such a thing, and having to
watch the mess other people made of it. Everything busted open. That big
white cloud.”

“Don’t you think they knew?”

“Science,” he said. “Maybe you get hypnotized by pushing the world
forward as fast as it will go.”

“You sound like my father.”

“Is he a scientist?”

“He’s a hermit.”

Philip looked at her a little more closely, then threw back his head and
laughed. “Well that explains everything,” he said, but Jane didn’t want
to know what he meant.

They waited for noon, for the least shadow, and then he began to shoot.
Jane felt strange. At first, being watched carefully by one person in
full daylight was more nerve-wracking than she thought it would be, but
then she forgot about Philip. Around them, the desert wind, stirred up
out of nowhere, sounded like a million voices, pattering applause.

“When you see a camera,” he said later, “you just light up. You’re a
totally different person. Then you kind of fall away again.”

“Really?”

He said her look was what the world loved and wanted most: beauty and
inferiority. A woman who felt some need, who wanted somebody somewhere
to think she was worth something.

“Marilyn Monroe,” he said.

“Let’s not go overboard,” Jane told him.

She changed her clothes once, from a white dress to a black dress of
almost exactly the same design, close-fitting, metallic fabric, thin
straps at the shoulders, too long so it pooled around her wetly, as if
she were melting into the sand or rising out of it. There was a breeze
kicking up, and Jane thought she smelled smoke. That seemed a terrifying
possibility of the desert, that fire could suddenly swarm over the range
of sand because somewhere miles away, wind had swiped a couple of sticks
together, made a spark and the boiling air just opened itself up.

“You know that couldn’t happen,” Philip said when she told him, “there
isn’t anything out here to feed a fire. But I smell it too. Maybe
another test. Right here this time. A new bomb.”

People had been killed. She knew the explosions Charlie was talking
about, bodies flung apart. The man who lived hut lost most of the
fingers on his left hand. The physicist who played the piano. He had to
give it up, forget about music. Except singing, he’d said. Jane
remembered this because he made a joke. He’d said, *I can still cmry a
tune, just not in my left hand.*

“How come you’re such a lost little thing?” Philip said then. “People at
the club talk about that, you know. How you don’t hang out with anybody.
They like you, Lu. They don’t want you to be lonely.”

“I’m not lonely.”

“Let’s go somewhere. Move away, you and me. Let’s just take off.”
“Philip,” Jane said. “You know I have to be at work. And you don’t
really want to go anywhere. Come on. We’re setded.”

“Nobody’s setded in Vegas.”

“Which is why we like it.”

“Well if you ever run away, promise it will only be with me.”

“I promise.”

<strong><em>The CLUB IS called</em></strong> Maison Des Girls, but no one who works there
uses the fall name. It’s a litde ways off the strip, at the end closest
to the Mirage. It’s the place men go when they get tired of all those
women they wouldn’t dream of touching because they’re dressed in litde
pieces of jagged glass and wearing three feet of feathers on their
heads. Even the topless women look like strange gawky birds. So the men
slurp down the rest of their watery drinks and come slouching toward
Jane’s side of town. From women they don’t want to touch to women they
mostiy can’t touch. That’s the rule, though for lap dances, necks,
heads, arms and legs are all right. It’s hard to say why men do this to
themselves, come in and have a couple of eight dollar beers and leave.
And that’s all it is for most of them. Sometimes Jane sees them go, if
she’s outside smoking a cigarette. They have the same look on their
faces, all of them, every single one—as if they just remembered they’re
somebody’s dad.

She does two dances a night, two sets. One is a basic gown-toG-string
strip, not anything new but involving several more undergarments than a
woman would actually wear, and stockings, which took her a long time to
learn. If you can’t put your leg up on a chair and roll them down, it’s
awkward. A few girls use stockings with Velcro seams, so they can just
pull them off, but Jane thinks that looks frightening. Like some sci-fi
movie where a person’s skin slips away from the viscera and bone.

She won’t use any Velcro at all—she would say, I’m a relic, I’m all
zippers and buttons.

Her second act is a pole dance, a rage for a little while in the clubs.
It came into Vegas right after aerobics classes got big, when all those
instructors needed a second job because gyms don’t pay very well. So the
clubs were full of strong, fit, muscle-bound girls who could dance.
Stripping wasn’t much of a challenge. There was a lot of speed and coke
around too, which made for incredible physical power. Nobody can
remember who did the dance first, but as soon as word got out, the owner
of Maison Des Girls brought in a metal pole, like in a firehouse, ran it
from floor to ceiling on the stage, and girls made up routines where
they climbed the pole, slid up and down. The trick is not to show any
strain, make it look effortless, fluid. No tensed muscles, or rather
only a line of them, on the arms and back, the legs. Girls would say
they had to move like water, but Jane thought the appeal of a pole dance
is that it’s not *like* anything. There isn’t a creature on earth or a
property or an element that moves the way a good pole dancer does. It’s
out of this world. You’ve never seen anything like it. And in a way,
it’s not about sex at all. She has a hard time imagining a pole dance as
a turn-on in the usual sense, though she knows it is. It seems like it
must be about escape, from gravity, for one thing. Maybe that’s what men
really come into a club for anyway. Or it’s like flamenco, a dance
against the gravity of death. There is the explosion of her heels, but
the dancer goes on, like flame, like fire.

And Jane likes it because of the concentration, that visceral
loneliness. She can’t see anybody or hear anything, except the music,
but only at first. She’s just a body, pure skin and bone, like an
amoeba, some animal life before complicated intelligence ever developed.
At the end of the dance, there’s usually a few seconds when she doesn’t
know where she is, doesn’t have a clue. The strip isn’t like that at
all. She sees too much. She can spot familiar faces in the first couple
of rows. For Jane, the point of a strip is eye-contact, making each man
in the audience believe she’s doing this for him and only him. And with
the right kind of direct look, she can even make a man feel like he’s
the only one *ever*, and she’ll quit this job tonight, quit the
publicity of it, and she never really saw any man before she saw *him,*
out there in the dark.

Which is how she came to find out Charlie Parker was still in town
because she did see him, in the second row He had a drink, something
clear that he brought to his lips every now and then. It was hard to
look at anybody else because she believed then that she could tell him
things with her face, her eyes. She could tell him to get out of town,
leave her father alone, she could say, everybody in the family had
suffered enough, that she liked this life and there was no reason for
him to try to save her from it. That she was never going to be what she
believed he wanted: a wife, a dance instructor in the suburbs somewhere,
the mother of his children. But in the end she couldn’t do it, couldn’t
manage the look that would tell him all that. She knew what was on her
face, knew it like a misstep that throws everything off. Longing. She
wanted to want the life he imagined for her. How simple everything would
be if she did.

She tried to get back into something like character, into the pose that
says *you and only you*, to infuse the air between her body and the dark
figures in the audience. She tried to remember that everything anyone
needs to know about the universe takes place in the air between a man
sitting in the shadows and a woman taking off her clothes in front of
him.

<strong><em>“WHAT YOU DO is</em></strong> interesting, Jane,” Charlie said later when she
sat down next to him at the bar.

“This is a great bar, don’t you think,” she said, her speech clipped,
her voice pitched a litde high. “It’s very French. We serve Vichy water.
You can get a pack of Gauloises. It’s this seedy litde French place
hidden away inside a seedy big American place. We keep French wines
around. There’s always a litde nouveau beaujolais in season.”

“Is there anything you really care enough about?”

“What’s enough?”

“Okay. *At all.* Is there anything you care about at all?”

“You have no right to say a word about what I do. Or track me down here.
Or accuse my father of anything.”

“People got killed—”

“Hush,” she told him. “Don’t say anything else, or I’ll get you kicked
out.”

“WTere were you today? I came by your house.”

“I was out in the desert. Death Valley.”

“Who was that guy?”

“What guy?”

“Driving the silver car.”

“A photographer. He’s an old friend.” Jane hated herself for adding
that, explaining. “Charlie. I think you better head on out now, okay?”
“I’m going. But why can’t you help me? If it’s not true, if it’s not
him, then what’s the big deal?”

“Privacy. That’s what’s the big deal. There’s nothing else in the world
he wants. He wants to be out of touch, away from all this. That’s why I
don’t think it’s him.”

“All right.” There was something in Charlie’s eyes then. Jane caught a
flash of it, even in the dark anteroom of Maison Des Girls. Ambush and a
kind of zeroing in she remembered from their intermittent childhood. A
funny phrase, but true. Sometimes they were children and sometimes not,
and on those days when they were made to grow up all of a sudden,
Charlie would watch Jane’s mother just that way, as if he would get back
to her, get back at her, later.

“Where are you staying, Charlie?” She wanted to be nice and he seemed to
want it also, and so he named the place, a not-so-bad motel on the south
end of the strip. She knew it from years before. A lot of mirrors. “Are
you sober enough to drive?”

“I can walk it.”

“Nope. Drunk guys walking in Vegas are a magnet for trouble. I’ll drive
you.”

But then sitting beside Charlie, Jane felt the pull of their childhood,
and when they reached the motel, she just kept going. Charlie started to
say something, then didn’t. They ended up driving out of town, west, to
the first place you can look down from and see all the lights, sitting
on the hood of the car with their backs against the windshield. The
night was warm and clear, with a slight, drifting breeze.

“I didn’t mean for this to get so personal, Jane. But there’s something
about seeing you. I’m coming apart a little. There’s this mission I’m
on. You look so much like your father.”

“I know.”

“I met this woman named Barbara Eberle. Barbara Eberle.”

Charlie said her name a couple of times over, more to himself than to
anyone in the world, and made a noise that was supposed to have been a
laugh, but sounded more like choking.

“She went to high school with us, Jane. Do you remember?”

Jane did: a shy girl, pretty. They never spoke. No, once. Once there was
a small kindness between them.

“I loved her name. It sort of burbles when you say it out loud. I always
called her by her whole name, for just that reason. It sounds so cool
and pleasant.”

It did. Like falling water. Water over stones.

“We were just married.”

“You got married? When?”

“And then she opened a package that blew up in her hands.”

“Jesus, Charlie.”

“You remember the one. At Harvard. She was the secretary.”

He told Jane the rest of it, how Barbara Eberle looked. Her face was
nearly unrecognizable, and so after a while he just gave up trying to
make sense of it as part of Barbara Eberle’s body. He asked if Jane
could begin to imagine what it was like to think you might know the
person responsible for such a thing. He asked if she could imagine how
you’d make it your whole life to find out whether what you believed was
true.

“It’s June 7<sup>th</sup>,” Charlie said. “I have this summer. And then I have to
go to work in September, go back to teaching. Get my life back. Or it’s
going to kill me. I’ll be a dead man.” He stopped talking and scratched
his head, the cartoon gesture for puzzlement. “I waited for that to
happen anyway. Until I left to come out here. I wasn’t careful, stepped
in front of buses, drove drunk on dark roads, all that. But I always got
saved, by a pedestrian, a cop, by just passing out. So I figure I’m
supposed to stick around and atone in some other way.”

“Atone?”

“Maybe that’s not the right word.”

Jane took hold of Charlie’s hand and they sat like that, clutching each
other’s fingers, tight, hanging on. She thought she could feel the
effort of his not breaking apart, feel its heat being generated right
next to her. They had always understood the same thing about telling
people your deepest secrets, which is that it was usually better not to.

Charlie left in the morning. He said he was going back to Boston, and
Jane believed him. For two days, she sat in her house while the light of
tite desert insisted around her. She went to work, but couldn’t look
anybody in the eye. She stared out over the heads and thought about
Charlie and Barbara Eberle and her father, and even her mother. She made
twice as much as usual in tips. She thought she knew how men wanted to
be looked at, that kind of undivided attention. Turns out it wasn’t true
at all. What they wanted, from Jane at least, was distance.

The fourth day after Charlie left, she agreed to something she swore
she’d never do: a lap dance for a customer. Even then she wasn’t
entirely sure why. There was a greater demand than the club ordinarily
had, and a man asked for her specifically. When he was told she didn’t
do lap dances, he persisted, but politely enough so that the manager
came to ask her about it, saying it sounded like she could make some
good dough. Something collapsed inside her, and she told him to give the
man a table.

It wasn’t horrible. Girls generally make their own rules, so it’s
possible that the customer won’t touch you at all. You can tell him to
put his arms by his sides, or on the arms of the chair, or behind his
head, which a lot of men do automatically. Then you just move for ten
minutes or the end of his patience, whichever comes first. It wasn’t
unbearable, Jane said that to herself later. The guy put his hands
behind his head right away. But then he wanted to talk, he wanted to
know where she was from, how long she’d been in Las Vegas, how long
she’d been dancing. He said he could spot East Coast professional
schooling a mile away, and if she said a few sentences, he could
probably guess where she was from. Within a hundred miles, give or take.

It spooked her, first that she’d agreed to do a lap dance at all, and
then that she was listening to half of a personal conversation, like
walking to the edge of a cliff and slowly some rock or a bit of sand
starts to slip out from underfoot. She didn’t say a word, took the bills
he handed her, and gave notice, wrote it down, as if she’d lost her
voice, on a cocktail napkin. She felt deaf to questions, saw mouths
moving in faces. Went home and started to pack, just like that, no
goodbyes or forwarding address. She rented a trailer big enough for
clothes, pots and pans, the fold-out sofa. The landlord would figure it
out. It took two days, but she sold the table, the chairs and a couple
of lamps to the pilots and dancers up and down the street. The last
night, she bought a six-pack and sat out on the porch looking east. It
seemed to be a quiet night at the airport, the middle of the week. She
thought, you could run a perfectly straight line from where she was
sitting through Lake Mead, across the south rim of the Grand Canyon, to
where her father lived, outside Los Alamos, New Mexico. You could maybe
drive it, that straight line. She was going to find out. It was too dark
to see the atlas, but she ’d memorized the route. Easy to 93, to
Interstate 40, like a shot. You could drive it in your sleep.

And so Jane went inside, to bed, and dreamed that she was driving with
all the windows open and there was a deck of cards on the seat between
her legs, and one by one the cards flew out the window, until there was
a single card lying on the seat face down. She didn’t want to know what
it was, but of course she had to look. And so there ensued one of those
long dream-struggles, to drive the car and turn over the card at the
same time. She tried to do both until she realized she would never be
able to see that card, that she’d have to keep her eyes on the road and
her hands on the wheel. That was the choice she’d made and there was no
going back.

When she woke up she knew what to do. She would drive direcdy to Santa
Fe and look for work. June was the beginning of the tourist season, so
there would be plenty of jobs waitressing, cleaning motel rooms, dancing
if she had to. There would be people moving on who would give her their
old jobs—an employment fact in the West. She’d learned that women were
always better than men for this. Women didn’t expect anything in return.
Then she would find a place to live, get a telephone. She would write to
her father again, give him her address and phone number, tell him he had
two weeks to tell her not to come up to Los Alamos, and if she didn’t
hear from him, she’d go. She still remembered how to get there, which
trailhead southwest of Los Alamos, the place where the trail ended and
you had to keep going. She’d heard about that part of New Mexico lately
on the news because there’d been forest fires there.

Three years before, he wouldn’t let her inside the cabin. It was too
small, he said, we couldn’t both be inside at the same time. She brought
him cold cuts, bread and cheese, botded water. He wouldn’t eat any meat,
said his body had forgotten what meat was and how to make use of it.
*I’ve lost the enzymes*, he said. They sat and ate outside. There was a
wooden table he’d made, and Adirondack chairs that looked like he’d
ordered them out of a catalogue. But he’d made those too, without plans,
freehand, he told her.

He looked terrible, skin and bones. She knew he’d washed and combed his
hair for the visit because the cleanliness seemed to make him
uncomfortable. He looked like a scrubbed kid about to go off to church.
He seemed a litde dazed, too, at first, and Jane wondered if it wasn’t
from hunger. She asked him what he was living on, and he told her when
he needed money, he went down into Los Alamos or Santa Fe and did a
litde work, pumping gas, clearing tables, sweeping up stores after
hours, whatever he could find. A couple hundred dollars, he guessed,
might last him six months. She had asked him what he did when he wasn’t
working.

“I read,” he had said. “I build things, like those chairs. I do a litde
writing.”

She had asked if he was writing the great American novel, and she
remembered that his whole face darkened for a moment, and then he said,
yes, he supposed he was.

“Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“Nature,” he said, “is the opposite of history. It’s about that.”

She had asked him what he meant.

“What about that don’t you understand, Jane?” he said.

“But what happens? Does Nature meet History, and they duke it out?”

He smiled just slightly, and she thought she’d won herself back into his
good graces.

“They do,” he said.

“Are there people in this book?”

“Millions of them. Billions.”

She had asked him then if he ever talked to anyone, and he said not all
that often, only when he needed work. The last person he had much
contact with, he said, was her mother, until she started back with the
Christian Science.

“Are you lonely up here, Dad?”

“I think,” he said, “loneliness is my steady state. It’s a talent
almost. I’m better at it than anyone I know. Individuals ought to
cultivate their talents. They have to. Otherwise they’re being wasteful
and dishonest.”

She had asked him why he put up with her, and he said because she didn’t
come to see him very often and didn’t bother him with her wants or
opinions. He liked her, he said, because she knew what her talent was
and was circling in toward the best use of it. He said he was surprised
by her prettiness. He wondered how he could have helped to make such a
lovely woman.

She had not known what she wanted from him, not then and not three years
later, moving her whole life to be near him. He needed protecting. There
was some kind of terrible threat in what Charlie had told her. It seemed
to be all around, that danger, even in the darkening, smoky skies. As
she drove closer to Santa Fe, the scent of wildfires drifted into the
car, intensified until it became ash, a thin dusting on her clothes and
skin, on the dashboard, the empty seat beside her. Finally, at the Santa
Domingo Pueblo, there was a forest ranger stopping motorists, cautioning
them. Up ahead, the ranger said, the fire was about to jump the highway.
His face was sooty. He told her, proceed at your own risk.

“Fen or fifteen other people like Jane, those with nothing to go back
to, had camped along the highway for two days. They talked and played
cards and cooked food together, and after a few hours, nobody even
noticed the mask of ash they all looked out from, the sheath of gray
dust that they moved inside of. Sometimes the sun half broke through the
fog of smoke and people saw that they all gave off tiny puffs of dust as
they walked or talked or ate, as if they were perfumed, and how this
blurred everyone’s outlines and made people seem unutterably graceful.
They were all so kind to each other, she noticed, faindy amused at their
situation. In a few more days, they might have become a commune, a
colony, pooled their resources, divided their labors. They reminded Jane
of runaways, the teenagers she’d seen in Berkeley. Packs of them lived
in Vegas, too. She could see the glow from their fires near the freeway
underpasses just outside town and imagine the rise and fall of their
little civilizations, how much they hated the world that had driven them
out.

And so, locked out of Santa Fe by fire, these people under this highway
railed against the place.

“Rich liberals,” one of the women said. “They come into Santa Fe and
Taos looking for culture because they don’t have any of their own. We
should get the natives safely out of downtown and then blow the place
sky high.”

It was a strange thing to wish for, and the woman who said those words
was immediately sorry for them. She looked around, shrugged and walked
away.

“She’s right though,” a man said. “There’s a lot of flight. People whose
families have lived in town for fifty years. Everybody heading for the
hills. Wiich should certainly scare the hell out of the rest of us.”

"Circle the wagons,” someone else said.

Jane was beginning to realize how long it had been since she’d talked to
anyone out in the world. Las Vegas was in no way the world, which was
why people flooded into its dusty, glittering bowl. Sometimes she was so
thoroughly her father’s daughter. She suddenly felt a great need to see
him, right then, be in the quiet calm of his life. She walked back to
her car and spread the atlas on the hood, trying to see if there was a
way to get around the fire and up to Los Alamos. The inside of the road
atlas, the New Mexico pages, had not a single bit of ash on them. She
noticed this, and it seemed important. She calculated she would have to
pass right through the fire to get to her father, and for the first time
it occurred to her to be worried about him. She wandered around until
she found a ranger, who told her the fire was still some distance south
of where her father was. And besides^ he said, there were forest service
crews and smoke jumpers in planes who could get in and rescue somebody.

“But what if nobody knows he’s there?” she said.

“Well, you do,” the ranger said.

When the highway opened later, there was a shrill little cheer. A man
pulled his pickup truck in front of Jane’s car and led her straight to
an apartment he knew of, which she rented immediately. He loaned her a
blanket and a couple of candles. Jane thought he was about her father’s
age.

“The kindness of strangers,” she said.

“People ought to help each other more,” the man said.

“They should,” she said.

And then she never saw him again. The blanket was wool, military issue.
Two identical tags on it read *This blanket has not been treated with*
DDT Jane still has it.

That night, she slept in and out of shifting sounds in the building, a
car being put in the garage below, and a kind of dream she’d never had
before. Her eye was behind a camera lens, and her vision moved around a
room, a dining room. Charlie was there, along with several other people
she both did and didn’t recognize in the half-logic of dreams. They were
sitting at a table, and in front of them was the remains of a meal. The
speed of her dream vision slowed as the camera eye moved to the person
sitting next to Charlie, a small, pretty, dark-haired woman. In the
dream Jane was sick with jealousy and then with horror: this was
Charlie’s wife, and her clothing was on fire. Then Jane was trying to
show her how to take off the burning dress.

The bridge between dreaming and waking was that she didn’t know she
cared so much. It scared her, the inside of that dream. Driving away
from Las Vegas had been like driving away from Charlie, and yet in the
first moments after waking from this dream, it seemed he’d found her on
down the road. He was in the air, in that tiny apartment, miles away
from where he ought to have been.

It was nearly six o’clock, the sky just starting to lighten, so she got
up, washed her face, walked outside and down to the car. She didn’t know
where she was going or where she wanted to go. Fast food joints were
opening at that hour, so she could get a cup of coffee at least, sit
somewhere and sketch out a letter to her father, come frilly awake in
the kind of artificial light she was used to. Already, she missed it,
the clandestine glow of Las Vegas. That night camped on the closed
highway outside Santa Domingo had been so utterly dark. The forest
service provided a few propane lanterns, and all night long, the dome
lights of cars would click on up and down the line of waiting vehicles.
People woke up to check their watches and to wonder why they’d fallen
asleep in their cars until they smelled the smoke and tasted the ash in
their mouths and dropped back into oblivion. But she wasn’t used to
sleeping in a world that dark. In Vegas, there were always the airport
lights, and beyond those, the knowledge that the strip glittered and
throbbed, and she could get to it if there was something she needed to
see or to make certain of.

It’s hard to get anything to write with at a McDonald’s these days,
where everybody’s order is automated, punched in, read off a computer
screen. Jane could hear her father’s voice: *Billions and billions
served, and not even a pencil in the whole dawn place.* But a man next
to her, traveling with his small children and weary of it already,
loaned her a pen, and she began, on a napkin, *Dear Dad—It must get
pretty dark where you live.*

She told him where she was, what she hoped to be doing, and drat in two
weeks she would come up to see him. She set a date, June 25 th, and a
time, about the middle of the afternoon, and told him she thought she
remembered pretty well how to get up the mountain to his cabin. She said
if he didn’t want her to come, he had to let her know, and wrote out the
address and phone number, in case he got down to a phone somewhere. All
of which made her sit still a minute. *But,* she wrote, *I have
something very important to tell you,* then went back and underlined
*veiy important. Earth-shattering.* In the dream, Charlie’s wife’s dress
was burning, all the way down her body She had been smiling, but her
face changed as it fell out of focus. Barbara Eberle was reaching down,
her hand moving toward her chest, to find out what the matter was, to
discover the source of that great heat around her heart.

<strong><em>That old question:</em></strong>

What terrifying apparatus keeps people standing up straight, enables
them to walk through the world, or run or kick one leg waist-high, or
step up onto a plastic platform over and over? She asked herself this in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, a cordless microphone on her head, yelling
aerobics moves to a roomful of struggling bodies in a suburban health
club. What the body won’t do to keep itself from falling. Wliat
heartbreaking last-ditch efforts. She thinks her heart was broken every
single day, by overweight teenagers, women with unfaithful husbands and
men with nagging wives, scars and limps, breathing problems, too much of
the body.

“Careful,” she told them all. “Start slow.”

After class, they talked and talked. On the vinyl couch in the health
club lobby, Jane fell asleep and woke again, and they were still
talking, not necessarily to her. Nobody ever seemed to expect an answer
or a solution. And the truth is, she loved it, the sense of being
alongside someone’s world, instead of the center of it. A lot of the
time, these men and women, sweaty, red-faced, didn’t even look at her,
but she was tired of being looked at, the isolation of it. The modern
word is *objectify*, though she thought there were equal amounts of
objectifying going on at Maison Des Girls. But all her aerobics
students’ chatter was like a vacuum, which, everyone knows, nature
abhors. Like a vacuum, they pulled the whole world in toward themselves.
They made it impossible to feel alone.

Even so, Jane started to look for another job in Santa Fe, teaching
dance. What she always missed in Vegas was real choreography, the idea
that music needs dance, like a glove needs a hand inside it, or clothes
need a body wearing them in order to do their job. In her head she could
sometimes make it work, trace music with movement, make an embodiment of
its line, its development. Strip songs are all bass guitar and snare
drums, over and over. There is no development because it’s a dance about
being broken down, taken apart piece by piece to reveal only what
everyone already knew was there. The point is to already know, to be
already known. The dancer knows and the men know. There is the lie of
mystery, the whole dance of the seven veils shtick, but it’s not true,
buddy, it’s only anticipation. By definition, a mystery can’t be known,
only contemplated, and sometimes adored.

Jane’s father, for instance, is a mystery.

**WITHIN TWO WEEKS, THERE** was an answer from him. *Come on,* it said.
*You remember the way.* And then there was a short list of groceries and
five one-dollar bills. No return address, which is how she knew it was
from him. He wanted rice, flour and sugar, powdered milk. She wondered
how long it had been this time since he’d eaten meat, whether she should
bring steaks, if he could still eat such food, if he’d had a quarrel
with cows or farmers or the entire meat-packing industry.

She thought she ought to tell someone where she was going, her boss at
the gym maybe. They had fathers in common, or fathers that needed
talking about. His father had just finished three terms on the city
council. Before, during and after, he was in real estate. He was
appalled by his father. He told Jane that even dreaming about holding
public office constituted conflict of interest on his father’s part.

“He has nothing *but* interests,” her boss said. “All over town. He
changes the pronunciation of his name depending who he’s talking to. On
this side of town, he’s *Hor-hay*, and the next minute he’ll be calling
himself George, saying it the gringo way. He’s a glad-hander. Bom to be
a politician. I have no idea why he wanted to retire.”

“Maybe even those guys get sick of it after a while,” she said.

“I doubt it. Actually, I think he’s just going to work from the other
side for a few years. He’s in deep with the timber people and the water
people. I try not to know too much.”

“Don’t you find that unbelievably easy?”

“What do you mean?”

“To be in the dark about your parents. Aren’t yours just completely
mysterious to you?”

He didn’t understand what she meant, though, she could tell, and so let
the subject drop. He talked on about local politics, then about what
roads she should take over to Los Alamos.

jane did her father’s shopping and added substantially to his grocery
list—instant soups, canned goods, a bottle of whiskey, provisions she
drought he could get but would never indulge in. She consulted a road
map, but knew she’d have to depend on her memory to get up into the
mountains and find the trail to her father’s cabin. She has a strange
memory for landscape, dependent on smells and sounds, and a good sense
of direction. As soon as she was headed north on US 84, she recalled the
landmarks perfecdy. Also, there is some lucky intersection of light and
memory in northern New Mexico. This light is in fact a whole supporting
corner of the tourist industry: soft and silvery, pinkish, too, in the
way some champagne is. The light encourages beholders to mistrust their
own eyes, to believe that what they see is not all they could see. At
some hours, dusk especially, it’s like looking through a veil at what
all the brochure writers call beautiful and savage country.

Her father once took her to see Valle Grande, the driven-in cone of the
old volcano that made the landscape in the first place. It’s empty
territory, except for the crazy sashay of the east fork of the Jemez
River. A few scrubby plants hug the ground, but mostly there’s just
space. She thinks he liked the place because no one could sneak up on
him. What he wanted was to disappear inside a kind of emptiness where
even the air is forbidding—there’s a heavy, medicinal smell, like
chemicals smouldering. Oppenheimer is in the air too, Fermi, Leo Szilard
who once said that nobody would be able to think straight there.
Everybody who goes to Valles Caldera to work on the atomic bomb will go
crazy, he predicted. Her father said that, told her the place felt like
the radius around a point of explosion, drenched with neutrons and
uninhabitable.

And maybe because of that history, Jane couldn’t shake off the sense of
being followed. She felt the same sometimes in Las Vegas: the more
emptied and barren the landscape, the more populated it might be by
invisible life. The eyes of rattlesnakes flashed from their burrows, the
hard dry music they make along the ground as they go about their
business, the scrape of it hung somewhere outside the noise of her car’s
engine. She knew there were coyotes flattening themselves into the mesa
shadows, spiders were so still that their legs looked like the petals of
a flower, hawks flew at such an angle that their wings seemed to slice
against the sky and then disappear inside the tear they’d made. She
drove with all this for a while, and then there came a point when she
had to stop the car, mrn off the engine, get out and listen. She had to
talk to it, the ghost following her, say okay, I know you’re out there.
Just so you don’t think I’m not paying attention. She stood by the side
of the road and waited until three red cars passed, which took twenty
minutes. A kind of spell: three lone drivers encased in fire—third one’s
the charm, only this one even slowed down—hunched over their steering
wheels and then racing on ahead of her toward trouble. They would all
get there first and clear her a path. Her father’s cabin was in the
Jemez Mountains, where forests of aspen and fir tower beside the
highway, threatening to fall towards unsuspecting drivers. Expansive
views open southeast, and so Jane wanted to look over her shoulder,
behind her. The ghost again.

The cabin emitted a thin scarf of smoke. And then a man.

He would have looked awful to her, painfully thin, walking with a little
roll and catch, as if he hadn’t been on his feet for a while. His hair
had turned completely gray and shot up all over his head, in curls, but
oddly kept, as if he carefully brushed his hair upw ard, not down the
way most people did it. He did not smile and she made herself believe it
was because he did not know her, didn’t know at first who had found his
hiding place. For years she couldn’t get that vision of him out of her
head, the captured stare and then the one slow blink of his eyes, a
parody of the man regaining consciousness. Then he turned, she
remembers, he seemed to reach back to his left with his right arm, and
for a split second she believed he was about to blow her a kiss, with
his whole body, and her heart warmed quickly to it, blazed up until she
realized he was going for some kind of weapon, a knife or a gun.

“Dad,” she yelled. “It’s me. Its Jane.”

“Oh yeah,’ he said. He jammed his hands down into his pockets and stayed
right where he was. “Jane.”

He stood there, making no move to put his arms around her, so Jane also
hesitated. But then she walked over and held onto her father anyway,
even diough it felt as if he would crack from lack of use, or scramble
to get away, or try to claw her eyes out. She said he seemed kind of
thin. She breathed in his smell, which was musty, like old books. She
thinks he finally patted her back, but she’s still not sure.

“I brought your groceries, Dad. And some steaks. I didn’t know if
you-—-but you know I can keep them iced and eat them myself. Later or
something. I brought some other stuff for you too.”

“There wasn’t enough money for anything else.”

“It will be a present. House guests bring presents.”

“How long are you planning to stay?”

“Just tonight. Don’t worry. Just long enough to talk. Just the evening.”

She wondered how many times she would have to tell him not to worry. He
got down to the business of building a fire. Like fathers all over the
world, he needed to be doing something. He’d constructed a brick-lined
pit in the ground, already years-blackened by smoke and ash. There was a
grate lying over the wood, a surface to cook on, and she had the
impression that it had once been part of some other machine. She asked
if he needed help, but he didn’t so she unwrapped the groceries onto a
wooden tresde table. He’d made that too. It seemed that entire world was
of her father’s own making. She thought, oddly, *me too*. *He made me.*
But really she was the only part of his creation not wrought solely by
him.

She saw a dark slash in the wall of the cabin where the door was ajar
and she moved toward it, calling over her shoulder that she needed a
knife, that she could find one. But at once his body was between hers
and the door, like magic, even though she hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t
felt the air move to let him through.

“No,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

“Is it messy in there?”

“No.”

After he went inside, she had the feeling she might never see him again,
that the door would close behind him, which it did, and she would have
to stand there waiting and calling through the night. But he was right
back out, with a sharp knife, a bottle of whiskey and two delicate
little glasses, footed and gently opening outward like flowers. Jane
took them up, held them to the fading light.

“Did you make these too?”

He laughed, maybe happily, and shook his head no.

It turned out the fire was for warmth, she thought even a little for
annosphere—the night fell in around them and chilled quickly. He did the
cooking on a propane stove, two burners, one for the steaks in a flying
pan, and one for a pot of boiled rice. They ate without talking, except
to ask for salt and pepper. Then her father broke off a square of German
chocolate for each of them and made coffee. He’d been drinking the
whiskey for a while. She was surprised by the chocolate and said so. He
told her it was a habit he’d acquired in Berkeley, probably the only
good one, the only worthwhile mark left on him by the place. The
destruction of the earth would come from Berkeley, California, he said,
and up from Silicon Valley, the West would roll back over the East like
a tidal wave, and that would be the end.

“A whimper,” he said. “That’s all you’ll hear.”

There in the firelight he was a fortune-teller, an ancient sage. The
shadows made his face look wooden but miraculously brought to life, a
toy that talks and moves when the household is asleep.

“Don’t you feel powerless, Jane?” he said. “Don’t you feel your life is
being led by someone else?”

“Who?”

“Exxon, the Department of Transportation, the whole computer science
machine.”

“You left out television evangelists, and the government, didn’t you,
Dad? And Hollywood and R. J. Reynolds and William Morris.”

There. It made him look at her, take notice really for the first time.
If his skin had been transparent, she wouldn’t have seen it any more
clearly, rage rising from his gut, through his chest and into his
throat. His eyes bulged a little, and his fists clenched.

“I guess nobody argues with you up here, do they?” she said. “I don’t
feel all that powerless. I just left a job in Las Vegas for a better one
in Santa Fe. Nobody did that for me. Nobody made me do it either.” As
she said the words, she wondered if they were really true. She watched
her father calm himself, close away from her again.

“What are you doing in Santa Fe?”

“Teaching dance.”

He stretched his arms over his head and joined his fingertips in the
gesture of a pirouette.

“Right,” she said.

“Why did you leave Las Vegas?”

“I worked in a strip club.”

He smiled and shook his head. She had not told him this the last time.
She said waitress, and *croupier*, thinking the French would please him.

“You wouldn’t have done that on your own,” he said. “This is precisely
what I’m talking about. Something terribly wrong in the world forces a
woman like you to take a job like that.”

“I think I did it all by myself.”

“You think so, but you don’t even know your own motives anymore. Nobody
does.”

“Do you?”

“I try to. For the most part, I succeed.”

She thought she would have to say something before he drank more, or
fell asleep.

“Dad, listen. Charlie, Charlie Parker. Sam Parker’s kid—”

“Did you ever notice that it always takes three pieces of information to
identify anyone associated with your mother? Why do you think that’s
so?”

Jane had to laugh at that. She knew her mother stood three passes away
from direct contact with the world. But so did he, at least three.
“Charlie thinks you might be in trouble.”

“In trouble?” His voice steadied, glossed over, lilted oddly. “What do
you mean, in trouble?”

“Like maybe with the law.”

“Why does he say that?”

So who do you betray? Jane was getting a little too tired, a little
muddy in her thinking. It was inky dark, and there was no world behind
her, beyond the reach of the firelight, nothing to see except the welter
of stars overhead, like an explosion had just taken place in the sky,
like the Big Bang had sounded only seconds before. The world was new and
she and her father were the first people in it, a mismatched Adam and
Eve. She knew the truth about her father then but could not let herself
believe it. To have believed what Charlie Parker believed and be sitting
alone with the very man, in that vast darkness, the fear would have
killed her. Still, each could have made something happen just then. The
lilt, the tease in her father’s voice: this was a new game. She heard it
but didn’t listen.

“I don’t know why he says that. There was an explosion at Harvard last
year. He came to see me before I moved. He thinks he might know
something about it. He thinks you might.”

“Is that the *veiy* important thing you wanted to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Was that all?”

“I wanted to just see you too.”

He held out his arms. “ *Voila*. Not much different.”

“Yes, but I think Pm too tired to find my way home, so you’re going to
have to let me stay the night. I brought a sleeping bag.” She was sure
he was frowning, over there on the other side of the fire, so she didn’t
look up. “Is that okay, Dad?”

“It’s okay.”

She stood up, unrolled her sleeping bag, and lay down by the fire, which
her father seemed determined to keep bright and hot. He talked more
about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, about the government and its failure
to govern while she dozed and woke each time to his voice running on
evenly, carefully. It was like a lullaby, like falling asleep with the
tele\ision going.

Then Jane was fully awake, and her father was talking about her mother,
about Christian Science. “I read Mary Baker Eddy’s book,” he was saying,
“cover to cover. Studied it for her sake. Such delicious abstraction.
Very cunning. You had to admire that in Mrs. Eddy. She knew how to twist
a tale. Kaspar Hauser, you know, locked away in the dark until he was
seventeen, and all he wanted to do was go back there, back to the dark.
Sunlight hurt his eyes. Noise rattled him. Anything more than a bread
crust made him sick. And Mrs. Eddy says it proves the senses are a
fallacy, a belief formed by education. It doesn’t ever occur to her that
the world can kill you, that Kaspar Hauser could have survived if he’d
only learned to live autonomously.”

“He couldn’t though,” Jane said. “Somebody had to bring in his food,
right?”

“It could have been provided. Like mine is, by nature.”

“And by me.”

“And by you.”

Before she drifted off to sleep again, she asked him to be careful. She
said she didn’t know what was afoot, but she had gut feelings.

“Things are out of control,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “They most certainly are.”

In the morning, when she woke, the sun had just tipped over this side of
the world and directly into her eyes. It came like a blow and she woke
with the sense of having been smacked across the face. She sat up fast
and looked for her father, thinking he had hit her, but he was gone. The
fire was out but still smoking. She called out, *Dad!* but there was no
answer.

The cabin door was shut, padlocked from the outside, but she didn’t
believe its message. A person can feel the heat given off by another
body, even if he can’t see it. Animal magnetism. Why did Mrs. Eddy call
it that? It is so utterly true, that the body exerts a purely physical
force, you can’t possibly argue against it. He could have locked the
door and climbed in through one of the windows, which appeared to be
boarded up. She knocked and called, shook the padlock, put her ear to
the door and listened for the secret of his breathing, sniffed for the
smell of his cooking, used all her deceptive mortal senses. She left him
a note stuck to the tresde table with a knife he’d left outside, saying
she’d be back in two weeks, and like before, he should write if he
didn’t want her to come. Then she found her way back to the trail and
hiked down to her car, thinking she might see him on the way.

“He didn’t do it,” she said out loud. “He’s too crazy. He’s too calm.”

But after a while, she gave in and wept, the way children cry over a
dream, because it isn’t real, or because no one in it can be saved.

<strong><em>In Santa Fe, SHE HAD</em></strong> a job interview. The director of a dance
studio called Movement Arts asked her to prepare a class on
improvisation. And then she had smiled, this director, who was named, of
course, Grace.

*“Prepare* improvisation,” Jane said. “Tilt’s the real test, isn’t it?”

Jane was thinking of this all the way down the mountain, when she wasn’t
thinking about her father. *Discover a chai?-,* a teacher had said to
her, years ago, bringing a folding chair out into the middle of the
studio. Jane, she had said, crooking her finger, come here and sit.
Shape your body to this chair, to its design. Yes? Good. Now assume the
shape of the chair in other places in space, without using the chair.
Find different sitting positions on the chair. Choose four and move from
one to the next varying fast and slow actions and transitions. Then move
around, under, over and through the chair. How can the chair move? What
are its possible relationships to the floor? How can you move through
space with the chair?

In college, her father studied physics and math. He told her this over
the telephone when she was a young girl, after the divorce. She knew
what math meant, or thought she did: he added, subtracted, multiplied,
and divided. But physics? She asked him what that was, and he told her
it meant wondering about the universe, what it was made of, how it
worked, where it was going. Oh, Jane said, you just *wo?ider?* That’s
right, he said. He gave her Einstein’s explanation of physics as a man
looking at a closed watch. The man will try to understand the mechanism
from what he can see, the moving hands, and what he can hear, the tick
tick tick, and what he can feel, the knobs that set the hands. He may be
able to form a picture of what’s inside, but he can never be sure. He
has to improvise. He cannot even imagine being able to compare his
improvisation with any objective truth.

Tick tick tick. Jane heard it in her head all the way from Los Alamos to
Santa Fe, saw the impenetrable watch face. She thought in the other
language her father had taught her years ago: mass can explode into
energy, movement is the articulation of energy Improvise with a partner.
Face each other as you would your reflection in a mirror. Establish a
line between you to represent that mirror. Improvise slowly, being
sensitive to the shapes being made, to your relative distances from the
mirror, and to the fidelity with which you reflect each other’s image.
Let the initiation of movement pass from partner to partner with no
verbal communication. Try to move simultaneously. Then, with your
partner, improvise on the premise that you must maintain physical
contact at some point throughout the improvisation. The contact point
may change, but explore the possibilities of each one thoroughly before
changing. Begin with your eyes closed, and sense each other without the
aid of your vision. When you are sufficiendy tuned in to one another,
open your eyes and continue.

Open your eyes, Jane, she whispered. And then answered herself: *I am.
They are.*

She went out for a beer with her boss at the gym, which turned into five
beers. He worried her, obscurely. Still, she did not forget anything
that happened, or anything she said to him. She didn’t say anything she
didn’t mean. He told her about a town thirty miles north, called Chi-
mayó, and a sanctuary there, and inside, a shrine to Santo Niño, the
divine child saint responsible for many healing miracles. He said there
was also a self-replenishing font of healing dirt. He’d heard you could
make a paste of this dirt and apply it to the injured part of yourself,
and you would be healed. He’s interested in this, Jane thought, because
he already believed bodies were miraculous, wonderful, there was nothing
a body couldn’t do.

She was trying to make herself fall in love with him, all the
musculature of him, but she couldn’t. It would have been so convenient.
He lived a few blocks away. He wanted, she knew, to fall in love with
her. Fie could talk and talk. His eyes were the same color as hers, she
noticed as she sat listening.

Outside her apartment, she put her arms around him and then turned her
head wrong to get away, lost her balance and found her mouth on his
cheek. She knew she shouldn’t have done it, not that kind of half-kiss.

When bodies touch in dance, there is always so much air still between
them, so much space. It lasts only seconds and dancers’ faces are always
turned away from one another. It’s all about balance. Improvise with
another person, both of you working in positions of precarious balance,
using each other for assistance. Realize the tremendous sensitivity and
care necessary in maintaining this double balance. Jane and this strong
man were standing under a tree, half in the street because of planted
trees and parked cars, huge objects, much too heavy to move.

He asked her then if she knew, had any idea, how attractive she was. And
what can any woman say to such a question? She thought of her mother and
fadier making her, not the act of it, but the parts: her father’s long
legs, her mother’s nose and mouth, not exacdy her mother’s eyes but not
exacdy her father’s either. And then everything that was more
complicated. His solitary nature, her physical grace. She wanted to say,
don’t praise me for that. It’s just dumb luck. So instead she said, no,
I have no idea, and he said he would tell her every day. And right then
it seemed that loving someone, anyone, was the greatest lie on earth. It
was all about what you could make the beloved into, how he or she could
be made to fit into that litany of wants and needs you’d been reciting
since childhood. Loving blood relatives was only a little less
ridiculous: you did it because on the cellular level, these people were
very like you. At least that was simple. A strong man was going to fall
in love with Jane because she was attractive and a good listener,
because they got along. But she could get along with anybody.

It gets cold at night in Santa Fe because of the altitude, and Jane
started to shiver there between the parked cars and the unnatural trees.
Her body felt metallic, hollow, like a tin can that would absorb the
cold, its empty center like a magnet for cold, a sponge for it. She
thought of her father, due northwest, taking refuge behind the ghosts of
the ancient Indians and the atomic scientists, maybe back in his cabin
tonight, having avoided any scene of departure by getting away first. So
much love goes spinning off into the dark, like a meteor, bits of
something much bigger, now broken away and rushing blindly toward
anything that will stop its heedless motion, make it lie still.

<strong><em>For THE audition AT</em></strong> Movement Arts, she was given a class of
twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls in pink leotards, and a garment bag.
An expensive one, she thought, but old-fashioned, maroon, *oxblood*, the
old-fashioned name for that color, which Jane remembered from flat cans
of shoe polish at her mother’s house. She asked the class to use the
garment bag in the proper way for a while, carrying it full of clothes,
or empty, then loading it with rocks, with feathers, with three girls
riding on it like a flying carpet. Then she asked them to make a dance
out of the noise of the zipper, exaggerating the force and duration,
imitating the sound with their voices. Finally, she helped them carry it
like a body bag, a coffin, they used it as a shield from the rain, a
sleeping bag.

The girls were marvelous, a few quite talented, all of them attentive as
flowers. That was what they reminded her of, their upturned faces, their
serious loveliness. Their teacher had not warned them or prepared them,
but the presence of the rest of the faculty in their class was warning
enough that they were part of something important. Jane did not believe
she would have won the job without them, her first class in her second
fife as a dance instructor.

She put them through a range of exercises and steps, beginning with
breathing and ending with a fall. She loved falls and recovery. Pretend
there is suddenly too much gravity! Pretend gravity is sneaking up on
you little by litde! They fell and fell, pink bodies crashing
everywhere. Fall off a bike, she told them, fall off a step, fall out of
an airplane. And then she surprised them: fall out of love.

The room was suddenly filled with swooning and moping, but also a kind
of hush that comes with inspiration. One girl performed a series of
*jetés entrelaces,* little leaps in all directions and in a circle,
punctuated by sudden stillness. Most of the class stopped to watch her.
Jane could not see the faculty, or rather she did not want to see them,
though she could tell they were paying close attention. Then a tiny
polite bell rang to signal the end of class, and she asked the girls to
begin their final stretches.

Afterwards she spoke to the faculty and the board of directors about the
classes she might teach. Classical ballet, for certain, but how about
choreography too? What other interests, they wanted to know, and she
said, flamenco. O/ó, said the only man on the board, and then *we’ll
see.* They asked her to talk about her training and background. They
were intrigued, they said, by her time in Las Vegas, believed she would
bring something *unusual* to the studio, but would prefer that it be
kept out of the publicity materials and out of her conversations with
students and their parents. She told them that was fine, she didn’t have
much to say about it anyway. Even as she spoke the words, though, she
realized there was something about Vegas she already missed. Night,
maybe. Being nobody anyone knew. Having another name. She missed Lulu,
and her nakedness and the life she lived apart from everyone else, even
while seeming to give herself to them completely. She wondered if she
missed her body the way pregnant women said they did, women who were
welcoming what would change them forever in ways they could not yet
begin to understand.

<strong><em>The NEXT WEEKEND, Jane</em></strong> decided to go see for herself, the miracle
cures, the healing dirt. So she drove to Chimayó, where in 1810 Don
Bernardo Abeyta had a vision of a light shining from the earth. When he
brushed away the dirt to find the source of this light, he found the
crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas. Three times the crucifix was taken
from Chimayó to Santa Cruz, and three times it disappeared from there,
only to be discovered back in its original dwelling spot. Everyone
understood that the cross had a mind of its own, that it wanted to stay
in Chimayó, and so a small shrine was built for it. Then the miraculous
healings began, and six years later, the litde chapel had to be replaced
by an adobe church.

Visitors first pass through a dusty junkyard which is the town of
Chimayó, and then just beyond it the Santuario stands behind an open
wooden gate that looks as if it could never be closed, or it would pull
off its hinges. Inside, the church is narrow, with plaster walls and
rickety pews, painted saints and members of the Holy Family, their
colors still surprisingly bright after more than 150 years. A long room
off to the left of the altar is devoted to Santo Niño, a glass cabinet
filled with letters and photographs of the faithful, petitioners and
those whose prayers have already been answered. The room is decorated
with hundreds of tiny pairs of white shoes, because Santo Niño walks the
countryside at night, doing his good works, and so he wears out his
shoes at an alarming rate. He has to his credit a startling number and
variety of miracles, performed all over the world, and Jane had never
even heard of him before.

The fount of healing dirt, El Pozito, is in another, smaller room. When
jane entered, she saw a tour bus driver handing out small plastic bags
to his passengers. She could imagine the scene, later in hotel rooms all
over Santa Fe, and what the maids would find the next morning: mud in
the sinks, in the drinking glasses, on pillowcases and between die
sheets. They would know, of course, what it was all about. One might
even dab a little off a bathroom counter, unbutton her uniform and
smooth it over her own heart.

There were milagros for sale in the gift shop next door, all kinds of
silver charms to represent a person’s injured parts: hands, eyes, heads,
feet. Jane found whole figures of men and women, animals too. Thurists
bought these and then dipped their milagros into the mysterious dirt.
Jane picked out a heart she liked, made of pounded tin, etched with
twining ivy, but then she put it back. She found the charm of a severed
hand, for the physicist who couldn’t play the piano anymore, and she
bought that one. She remembered she would need another one, for the
advertising executive. A charm for Charlie’s wife, Barbara Eberle. And
the others. Charlie said there were others. Jane looked into the box of
milagros and wondered if she should buy them all. She pressed a couple
of the charms to her lips, dropped them back into the box, and stepped
outside.

Behind the church, a stream runs downhill and west, cottonwoods shading
it and benches for outside worship or some other sort of public
gathering. Between the church and the stream, fires burn all day and
night in huge vats for no one knows what reason. But what is most
remarkable are the wooden crutches leaning against the outer wall of the
Santuario, a dramatic testament to the cures believers may be able to
find there. One would remember them as crutches but also as crucifixes,
hardwood beams crossed and waiting. Jane wandered towards the stream,
near one of the flaming vats. Tourists moved in and out of the church,
each in a private daze of injury and penitence, waiting for transfi
guration. The morning light fell thick and pink, lazy and full of slow,
humming insects. She thought it would be hard to imagine a place more
outside of time. Las Vegas felt outside of the world, but in Chimayó, it
was as if Jane had stumbled backward hundreds of years. Jane thought
something like *the world is peeling itself open,* but she wasn’t sure
what it meant. Two people rode by on bicycles, a man and a woman. He was
saying, calling to her against the wind in their faces, *because of the
miracle*, and she said, *because of the weather.*

She sat for another twenty minutes among miracles accomplished and
miracles hoped for, listening to the sparrows flirt and argue. Somewhere
there was lavender in the air or some other perfume that comes to
consciousness that way, chalky and in tiny brilliant pieces. If there
was wild lavender growing nearby, Jane wanted to find it, dig some up
and take it home, plant it in a pot on her balcony. She thought
suddenly, how would somebody do that if most of one arm had been blown
away?

And then there he was, Charlie Parker, making his way around the church.
He was looking at something in his hand, and dien at his watch. He got
quite close to Jane before he raised his eyes to her face. She saw that
he had expected to find her. Then he stopped and put his hand to his
forehead, even though they were both in shadow, cottonwood and
eucalyptus. He did not move forward for a few seconds, though his body
shuddered, as if he were cold or afraid. She made the same gesture with
her hand to her forehead, then turned it into a salute. Charlie walked
over the rest of the distance and sat down beside her.

“You followed me, Charlie.”

He said nothing, and so Jane knew she was right. Finally he laughed a
little and shook his head.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“I moved to Santa Fe.”

“Really?”

“So we both moved to Santa Fe,” she said.

He took in air, a deep breath, as if for a long speech. He looked at her
once, quickly, checking.

“I lost you on the road to Los Alamos,” he said. “You stopped and I
passed you, and then somehow I just lost you. But I found you again.”

“What are we going to do about this, Charlie? I told him, you know. I
told my father what you said to me in Vegas.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, did I notice it always took three pieces of information to
identify anyone associated with my mother.”

Charlie glanced at her again, considered, then laughed weakly. And then
he said, “That son of a bitch.”

Jane reached across his body and unfolded the fingers of his right hand.
In his palm was a silver charm, a woman’s body, a stick figure with a
swollen belly, the milagro for pregnancy, for a safe delivery.

“Barbara,” he said.

“Was she?”

“I think so. I don’t know for sure. She was having a test that week. I
won’t ever know.”

She put her hand over his, with the milagro between them.

“Where’s yours, Jane?”

“I couldn’t find one,” she said. “Not for myself.” She reached into her
bag and drew out the charm she’d bought. “It’s for the man who can’t
play the piano. I guess I’ll keep it for him.”

“You need one.”

“I know.”

Is there a milagro for disappearance, for silence, for father? That’s
the injured part of me, Jane thought, my father is the injured part of
me. Maybe he’s the injured part of a lot of people. The wind had changed
direction and the air warmed so that smoke from those strange fires blew
between them, and the heat made Charlie’s face appear watery, uncertain,
like a mirage.

“Everybody needs a milagro,” Charlie said after a while. “You and me and
everybody. Don’t you think?”

“All right. You pick one for me, then.”

“All right.” He said it again, as if the words brought him some peace.

He stood and walked off toward the gift shop, up the hill around the
side of the Santuario. For a second, she hoped he wouldn’t come back,
that something would occur to Charlie, some truth about her or them, and
he’d go get in his car and leave. Jane thought maybe she should make a
run for it, abandon her own car so he couldn’t follow. It wouldn’t be
hard to get a ride back to Santa Fe, half the people she saw were headed
that way from Denver. But no, she’d walk. It was a wild notion, but the
world was full of them, the world was brimming with everyone’s strange,
impossible plans. She’d wait until evening and go with Santo Niño, on
his nighdy rounds, his mission of hope and surprise.

** II

I knew where she was because I was a little in love with her. I was, all
right, had been for years. Yep, me Charlie Parker, an improbable name
for an improbable guy, I used to say. Bird, though, that was me, up
above the highway, tracking her. She was what I had left behind and all
I had left, that body of hers. You need to have a body left or else
there’s no end to it, man. I’m telling you. Nothing to identify, no ears
into which you might pour last words, no lips to kiss one more time, no
eyes that might, just might by some fucking miracle, open and blink once
and see it’s you. “It’s you, baby,” she would say, Barbara would say,
“where you been all this time?”

But before Barbara, there was Jane, “The Body” they called her in high
school, summers sprawled in Palisades Park, her body like a complete and
un-ditchable anatomy class, always walking away. In the middle, between
before and now, there was Barbara, no body no more, only bone dust and
blood. When I asked at the hospital, could I keep some of her blood,
please? everybody looked at the priest. How about it, Father?

Blood was his territory, blood and its awful intoxications. I saw that
look to the man of God because I saw everything and still do. The body
of the beloved makes your vision mortal, brother, held back. You don’t
want to look any further than her sweet body. But without it, the eye
moves like a wild thing over the world, and the world has no end.

<strong><em>JANE Gillooly and her</em></strong> crazy mama came to Uve with us when Jane and
I were both thirteen. My father married Jane’s mother, and it’s been the
one decision he has never regretted, not ever. The first morning I saw
Jane was a Saturday, and I was watching television. I remember this
clear as a bell. She was a tall drink of water then, already, much
taller than I was. I thought she was the babysitter and I was working up
to a fit about having one at all, but then I felt her quiet come into
the room, and I made space for her on the sofa, gave her the best comer,
where she could see the television perfecdy. But she had her nose buried
in a book and she didn’t say a single word to me, not for at least an
hour. Through all those many minutes, I was on the floor at her feet
like an acolyte and feeling the spirit of her behind me, the heat of it
and the silence between us building up like a wave. I came to believe
that the force of the first sound she made would blow a hole in the back
of my head. She was working up to it, through sweet breathing and
sighing and pages turning faster, then her held breath like arriving at
the end of the line. Incredible heat from that comer of the room,
blazing over my clothes. But I was cool, calm, tingling. Then I got it,
this was Jane, *the* Jane, the girl my father had been talking about.

“Well,” *the* Jane said then, slamming the book shut. “We’re going to
have to call them *haricots ve?as.* If I’m going to live here, you’re
going to have to learn to say it. *Haricots verts.”*

“What?” I turned to look at her. She held up the hook,
tapping at the title with her long index finger. The book was called
*The Young French Chef.*

“String beans,” she said. “With butter and almonds.”

Which is what I’ve always called her, for years now, through whole lives
and deaths, and my father calls her that too, though she hates hearing
it from him. Bird and Bean, that was us, sky and earth, eater and eaten.
It was Barbara who died, but Bean who got swallowed up somehow, chewed
up and spit out.

She had already been dancing since the age of six, and it was so fine,
the way she moved. She was good, very good, but she was also very bad. A
week after they moved in with us, Bean and her mother, she ran away, and
then she did it again, and three more times after that in the first damn
*year.* The day after her fourteenth birthday, my old man and her mama
threw up their hands and sent her to a group home. “I’m going to go five
with the bad girls,” she said as she carried a small suitcase through
the kitchen and out the back door. She shot a look at my father who was
reading the paper. I was sitting in front of a bowl of cereal I couldn’t
eat, so I saw it, that look, how much she hated him and how much she
wanted him to love her. Years later, a guy I lived with was having a
fight with his girlfriend, and I heard her yell from his bedroom, “I
don’t know whether to fuck you or kill you.” It was that look on Bean’s
face before she went off to the group home, that awful dilemma.

“I’m going to go five with the bad girls,” she said again, only much
louder. “So I can learn to be really bad.”

My father sighed but he didn’t move a muscle, just kept taking in all
the news. “Charlie,” he said, “just eat your breakfast.”

It lasted maybe a week. Her mother wanted her back. “I miss Janie,” she
wailed, and we believed her. I know her well now, Jane’s mother, whom we
called Mrs. Parker, and I know she loves Jane. She just doesn’t know
what to do about it. So that makes her like the rest of us.

Who Jane kept running away to, I found out a little later, was *her*
father. He was a professor of mathematics up at Berkeley then, some kind
of rare genius was really about all I knew at the time. But she’d
usually only get as far as Santa Barbara and be dragged back kicking and
screaming. The cops liked her because she was pretty, and because she
had a sharp tongue—they liked that, being dressed down by a little
chick, statutory-aged. Scrappy they called her. One of them told her
mother they all drew lots for her case, that she’d never succeed in
getting away because the whole police force was interested. He came to
the front door and said those very words. I was right there, waiting to
hear the fate of Bean, and I could have killed that guy on the spot. He
had the same puffy, smug look as those cops who beat up Rodney King,
like he’d never missed a meal in his sorry life and was thinking about
little girls whenever he wasn’t thinking about food, like he would know
a joke that began *What’s the difference between a fourteen-year-old
girl and a pastrami sandwich?* And then shrug.

She got all the way north one time, when she was fifteen, and it was
awful. She called me from a pay phone and made me call her right back.
When I did, she said my name and started to cry. She told me that all
over town, there was nothing but university students and runaways, most
of them younger than she was. “The students too?” I asked her, and she
laughed for a second, a wild hiccuppy caw into the phone. She said she
knew she could disappear into their sinister, dreamy underworld and
never be found, and nobody would care. There was a sixteen-year-old girl
who’d been haunting around the streets there for four years. She did
favors for taxi drivers and graduate students, Jane said, and I imagined
running to the comer grocery and making copies of term papers, idiot
that I was then. “I don’t want to just disappear,” she wailed. I asked
if she found her old man, and she said yes. She said she found the math
department and then stood in the open doorway to his office until he
looked up and said, can I help you, Miss? She waited, not saying a word,
waited for him to recognize her. After a while, he shook his head and
went back to work.

I drove up to Berkeley to get her. I couldn’t really drive, not
according to the letter of the law, but I borrowed a neighbor’s Dodge
Dart and took it real slow. We met at the Claremont Hotel because Jane
said I could see it big as life in the hills to the northeast as I was
coming up. Big as life, and it was. White and dramatic and the perfect
place to get saved if that’s the effect you wanted. And when she saw the
car, she opened her arms toward it, and her face worked itself hard not
to fall immediately into crying. I parked on the first piece of level
ground I came to and we went inside, and that time, we both said it,
talking about the lobby, *big as life.* It was a stupendous place, the
people as much as anything. Rich, tanned, a little vacant from being
surrounded by so much pleasure. Nice-seeming, though, indulgent. Even
unwashed for a couple of days, Bean was gorgeous, and couples smiled at
us while we stood in the lobby’s cool filtered fight, waiting, they
guessed, for our parents to finish lunch or their exquisite game of
tennis. It seemed that something warmed in her, while we took in all
those sights, and when I think of it now, it’s no surprise she landed in
Vegas for a while. They’re day and night, the Claremont Resort Hotel and
Las Vegas. People always use that phrase to mean *opposite*, but it’s
the same world they’re talking about, with the same usual suspects
roaming through it.

She slept almost the whole way home, and I watched her face and body
thinking about, I got to admit, genetics. How we weren’t related by
blood and so it was all right that I was falling in love with her. I
went over it again and again in my head, feeling like a non-native
speaker, learning the words for the different relatives. Her mother and
father, my mother, who lived up in Lampoc with her second husband, and
my father. No shared parents, no way, no how. She was then and still is
somebody I would do anything for. I told her this, and she said I was
too good for her, too right in the head. She was already sleeping around
then, with stupid brute assholes, star football players, guys who
graduated high school and then just hung around basking in their dimming
fight. Somebody who hit her, but I never found out who that one was.
Most of them had other girlfriends, the light-of-day-girls, she’d call
them, or his-Sheila-from-St. Stephen’s, which was the Catholic school.
She’d tell me she didn’t really love these guys, but then the phone
would ring like a fucking summons and she’d be out the door. “Where are
you going?” my father would yell after her, and she’d yell back,
“Crazy!”

A few times before Bean left for good, she involved me in a strange
little drama. I’d be in my room reading or doing homework. I’d remember
later that the phone had just rung, but it hadn’t been for me. Bean
would appear behind me, as usual I could feel her, the great heat from
her body, before she ever made a sound. The one time that has now in my
mixed-up head become both times, I saw her eyes were shining with tears,
and she said, “Charlie, that was *him.* That was my dad. He’s in San
Luis Obispo. He’s giving a speech or something at Cal Poly. No. Wait. He
said it was a *paper.* He’s giving a paper at Cal Poly, and he wants me
to come meet him there.” Then she’d crumple a little, sit down on my
bed. She’d wonder why, all of a sudden, he’d surfaced, after all this
time. How he knew where she was. But she’d told him she would be there,
we could make it, in three hours, would I drive her? And then she’d
shake herself—it looked like she was literally adjusting the contents of
her beautiful, lonely heart, moving it all around like a box full of
game pieces. She’d say, No way I’m going. The nerve of him. The
*bastard.* Playing with me like this.

Then there would be a great, deep silence. I waited for her to weep. I
was terrified, too, for myself. What if he decided she should come live
with him? What if he saw her and was transported and wanted her back?
What if she moved away? Then her eyes would fill again, get greener than
trees and leaves and the ocean, greener than any human could bear to
look at. She’d look at me, give me her smart look, shoulders squared up,
tough-girl. I have to go, don’t I? she’d say, and I, like the fool I’ve
always been, would say yes.

That first time up to Cal Poly, we stopped halfway there and bought a
bottle of Southern Comfort. She was too nervous, she said, whatever had
possessed her to do this? What would she say to him? I drank a little
from the bottle too, not much. I could still drive just fine, walk a
straight line if I had to. But drinking that way made Bean cut loose.
She sang along to the radio—she always had a wonderful voice, smoky from
cigarettes, full of all those tears she held back every day of her fife.
She got all loose-limbed and flushed, and funny. She is really very
smart, so her humor was clever, all puns and brilliant digs at our
parents, at least three of them. She hardly mentioned her father at all,
as if she’d forgotten what the trip was all about.

When we got there, to the joint in San Luis where he had said to meet,
he wasn’t around, had never showed. Yes, there were reservations in that
name, but they’d been canceled. Nobody knew when, and there was no
message left.

I don’t know that I have ever seen such despair. I had to carry Jane
back to the car. In my arms, like dead weight. Her knees buckled, she
reached out for something to hold onto. Then she cried, she said *Daddy,
Daddy,* in the most pitiful way, and stopped talking just as suddenly,
turned to wood. She stared straight ahead and her hands clenched into
fists. I asked her what we should do and she couldn’t speak. I could see
it, that she wanted to talk, wanted to tell me what to do, but the
muscles and bones and viscera wouldn’t work. It was the most profound
grief I have ever seen. More, I sometimes think, than mine over Barbara.

Years later, in college, I ran into one of Jane’s old boyfriends, the
nicest of them, and over a couple of beers, he told this same story back
to me: a telephone call out of the blue, a speech being given at Cal
Poly, a different restaurant, the same canceled reservation, and no
message.

She moved out of the house after high school. She was seventeen. I went
to college. Her mother kept a sort of lazy tabs on her: Jane’s doing
*The Nutcracker*, Charlie, Jane stopped by over the weekend. I got it
all second-hand. Jane’s teaching dance, Charlie, what do you think of
that? And then Jane’s not around much, Jane’s disappeared. No we don’t,
but the woman who does my hair says she was fired for drinking.

When I saw her again, it was more than ten years later, and she was
dancing in a strip club in Las Vegas. I always knew where she was,
though—Barbara was responsible for that, Barbara said, don’t lose your
family, keep track. They’re all you have, they’re the only ones who will
truly know you. I went into her club, *Maison Des Girls* for Christ’s
sake, and saw it was Jane, recognized that body immediately and went
back to the bar. I didn’t want to see her routine, but more important,
she would trust me not to have watched. And having old Bean trust me was
going to be the name of the game.

A woman, a hooker I guess, put her slim hand on mine and said why so
sad, honey? I could imagine myself telling her the whole story, showing
her the ring, which was all I had left of Barbara’s body, all that could
be found, the ring and the teeth and some longer slips of bone that
looked like ancient cooking tools. I’d take it all out of my pocket,
real slow, piece by piece and fine it up on the bar, and say, this is
it, Lady, this is what’s left, and I sleep with these things at night,
the ring on my finger, the teeth under my pillow, bone shards arrayed
next to me, carefully, as they would lie in her body if her body lay
anywhere. When I sleep like this, with these cold artifacts, I can’t
ever get warm enough, so I don’t sleep well. That’s why so sad, honey.
Though she, the inquiring woman with the slim hands, would have left
long before. She would not have cared for my voodoo on the bar at Maison
Des Girls. It would have suggested to her a long night of peculiarities,
strange predilections, dangerous, dangerous. There’s a scar under my
right eye too, a pale crescent. She would see that and go husding down
the next block, down the back alley, telling her cat-eyed sisters to
watch out for me, Bone Man, she would be calling me, baptizing me, or
The Archeologist, or Dental Work.

So I said, *It’s nothing. Thanks.* My jaw tightened, and a growling,
animal rage gathered in the back of my throat. *Thanks for asking,
though.* I waited for Jane.

<strong><em>SOMETIMES, BACK AT the</em></strong> beginning, I was dead for a little while
with Barbara, sometimes I slipped completely out of the world and tried
to go where she is. Sometimes it seemed like the one thing coming
between us was God. He was standing at the gates with a flaming sword,
like the angel in the picture books, outside the closed-off Eden. Closed
for repairs, it said, in my dreams, and there was the plastic clock you
see on shop doors, *sorry we missed you, will reopen at:* But on this
clock, the movable hands were always missing, there was no more Eden,
only God giving me that look of his. I think he was making a deal with
me. I think he was promising that if I did something, if I acted, then
maybe we could come to an understanding regarding Barbara. God
occasionally talked to me like a lawyer. She had only been dead seven
months, and it was beginning to feel like the pain was growing more
acute and piercing instead of lessening, as everyone told me it would. I
heard a voice crying at night, a keening that rose to the top of a
fucking mountain of grief, a wail that stopped and then started over
again. After a month or so, I realized the voice I heard was mine.

<strong><em>Of COURSE, Jane DID</em></strong> not believe me. I guess I had counted on that.
Or else it would go like this: she would believe me, and she’d tell me
where he was, and like the bad old times, we’d drive up to meet him.
Either way,

I couldn’t lose—she would contact him and I’d intercept it, or she’d go
to him, which she did, and I’d follow her. What I didn’t count on was
her small, careful life in Las Vegas. I mean, I didn’t expect to be
interested in her life, or moved by it, or anything like that. But what
I saw was that we had the same life, identical. We had nothing. We had
made a home out of absence, put furniture in it, locked it up every day
when we went out like there was anything valuable inside. I wanted to
say to her, look old Bean, we really need each other now.

When the fire closed the highway, I was ahead, one of the last cars to
get through. So I pulled over and waited. It’s beyond anybody’s power to
imagine, a highway not traveled for three days. Sitting there, I thought
how that highway was the very picture of grief: you’re waiting by the
side of the road and there isn’t a single solitary car, only ash
settling on you, ash and half-burnt forest life streaming by. The
culvert I parked in filled up with snakes on the first night, a river of
serpents flowing north. On the second day, a doe with burns along her
right flank came racing out of the woods, desperate for water, for the
hours-long drink that would then kill her. All day long, there was
scuttling in the undergrowth to the east of the road.

Then finally, the traffic started to come through, and I mixed with it
until I found her. I had a different rental car, a baseball cap,
sunglasses and a few day’s growth of beard. My hair was getting longer.
I thought I looked nothing like myself. When we got to Santa Fe, I found
an apartment a few blocks from Jane’s, joined the gym where she taught,
laughing at myself a little. She certainly wouldn’t recognize me all
shaped up. I found out what her hours were and managed to pass her a few
times, coming and going.

The thing is, I’m not even the crazy one.

It was still only June, and already I had a whole new life. When I first
realized that, it nearly killed me. I’d been working so hard to hang on
to Barbara, to be careful with her memory, not to jostle it, transport
it like you would a sleeping child. But one day, it seems like, I looked
down, and Barbara wasn’t in my arms anymore. I found her again, quick,
of course, as quick as I could, scutded around with her burning remains
until the pain was all fresh and raw again. I missed a couple of days at
the gym, and when I went back, I noticed Bean was gone, and asked about
it, and they told me Jane Gillooly had quit. She got something better,
but nobody knew what or where. *She never hung out much*, one of the
trainers said. No, somebody else said then, the boss, she didn’t quit.
She just went up to Los Alamos for a couple of days. Off I went, eating
her dust.

When I drove by her on *that* road, I really thought the jig was up. She
was standing just off the shoulder, taking a break, I guess. I slowed
down—maybe she was in trouble—but what would I say to her? Jane, you’re
in trouble. Are you in trouble? And she’d say, Charlie, tell me
something new, how about it. Tell me something I don’t already know. I
tried to find her after that, but she’d taken some turn, some road that
swallowed itself up and didn’t even spit out any dust. Up to him, I knew
it, up to see him.

And the truth is, I was scared. I still had on my gym clothes. I hadn’t
eaten. I didn’t have anything like a plan. I thought about having the
word *vigilance* tattooed on the back of my right hand. So I waited
until she came back, and I followed her to Chimayó. I needed that
healing dirt, too, I most certainly did. I needed to have something, a
sign or a piece of clothing or a mark that would remind me of Barbara
all the time. A charm.

I just can’t see her, I guess, can’t bear to see her. Jane, I mean. If I
do, I go to pieces, I get weak in my resolve. I want to hold her, just
hold her body to mine and say, Bean, I lost the love I guarded and
cherished, and you have to lose yours. It’s an eye for an eye, I’d say.
I’d show her my voodoo Barbara, a tooth for a tooth. But she’d say, that
clever Bean, she’d point out my two good eyes, all my straight white
teeth, my ten fingers and toes. She’d say, Charlie, both our hearts are
broken. We’re even. Let’s call it a day.

This is the true history of the world: we make our lives easier, and
then we are in despair. There are too many of us. You can go off to live
in the woods and no one will try to bring you back, no one will even
miss you very long. No one will pine for your company. You live in a
crowded middle-class neighborhood that is absolutely silent at 7:30 on
Thursday morning. Because everyone likes it that way, insists on it.
Why? Why? At that hour of the day, shouldn’t all the men, women, and
children on your block be waking up, throwing open their shutters,
calling to each other, look! Look how beautiful it all is! Just take a
look!

Jane’s father wrote this to me in a letter when I was twenty years old,
a junior at Berkeley, studying English. I was going to go on, get a
doctorate, become a university professor and talk about Shakespeare and
Yeats to rapt undergraduates all day long. Yes sir, I was. I was going
to live in a house in the hills, a huge joint designed by somebody
famous, and wear corduroy jackets with patches on the elbows, smoke a
pipe, marry my most promising student but not thwart her career. Jane’s
father put this letter under my door, the door of my apartment. What I
mean is *inside* the door. Already he was ghostly that way, coming in
and out like fog. Already he mistrusted various government agencies, the
postal service for one, although he would make good use of it later. His
letter to me was a kind of summons, the rest of it masquerading as an
invitation, to come to his office hours the next week, later in the
afternoon, and then we would go have a drink. He phrased it so that for
me to decline would have been impossible: he said he needed to talk to
me about Jane.

He already had a certain reputation on campus, as brilliant, but a
loner. He was tenured in the mathematics department, their earliest and
youngest tenure ever. He worked in a mathematical specialty called
boundary functions, which I didn’t understand, had never even heard of.
He spent every other semester on loan to the physics department—just
like a university to figure that one out, how to get two for the price
of one. Sometimes he taught a course in philosophy, on Kant, on
Wittgenstein. He was supposed to be almost impossible to talk to, and
there was a story that sometimes simple English completely eluded him,
and he’d walk into the cafeteria and not be able to say that he wanted
coffee. He’d end up pointing at the urn, performing a pantomime in which
he raised a cup— a theoretical cup—to his mouth. Later he brought a
thermos from home and stayed in his office.

Sol went to see him, as requested. I knocked on his office door at five
o’clock on the following Tuesday. Actually the door was open, and
although I had seen him before, seen Jane’s pictures, I wasn’t prepared
for the fact of him at such close range: his great height, six feet six
inches, the strange pillar of his dark hair that looks as though he had
carefully combed it upward and then released it from gravity. He was
extremely thin, though, and the combination of height and narrowness was
made to seem even stranger by the lumpy moss-green suit he wore. I
thought it might be impossible to locate his body, as if the physical
body were floating somewhere inside his clothes. So different, I thought
even then, from his daughter’s so very present body. I couldn’t see his
feet—he’d stood up behind his desk and extended his hand across—but I
felt quite sure they weren’t on the ground. He seemed like an
abstraction. That impression of him is very clear. I remember our
conversation less well— it was awkward, and I know I have made him into
somebody who was always trying to prove his brilliance. He is not a
living person to me anymore, or even a dead one, but a kind of sucking
wound, a vacuum.

“Charlie Parker,” he must have said my name the way most people did,
repeating it a couple of times. “Bird. Do you know anything about the
Birdman of Alcatraz?” He laughed. “Isn’t it funny,” he went on, “that
Charlie Parker was playing some of his best nights while the atomic bomb
was being invented? Why were those two things going on at once, do yon
suppose?”

I said I didn’t know, but that I thought he must have some idea.

“Quantum mechanics,” he said. “I mean, to oversimplify—objective
properties jump in a random way. You have to improvise.”

“I’m an English major,” I said. It seemed like the right response.

“I know,” he said. “I looked you up.”

“But I’m thinking of taking something scientific and introductory next
year. There’s a class people call Physics for Poets.”

“Are you a poet?”

“No,” I laughed. “I can memorize them is about all. Maybe explain them a
litde. Only on paper, though. Not in front of anybody.”

“Who do you read?”

“Yeats these days.”

“Do you know any Wallace Stevens?”

“Figures you’d like Wallace Stevens.” It leapt out of my mouth before I
could help myself.

“Why is that?”

“Abstraction.”

“That’s not very discerning of you.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Why don’t we go get something to eat?”

We did, and so now I am back on solid ground a little in my memory of
him. We walked to a Chinese restaurant on University where the food
wasn’t supposed to be very good, though everyone ate there anyway.
Somehow I knew he would suggest the place even before he did. I knew he
would because it was *reliable* bad food, like McDonald’s is. You know
what you’ll get. I decided he probably didn’t care much about eating. He
ate to keep the machine working, and that was all. He walked fast on
those long legs, and I had to hurry to keep up. People passed us going
the other way, said hello or smiled, and he did too. There was always
this sense about the scientists and mathematicians at Cal, that they’re
already, all of them, on the short list for the Nobel Prize, about to be
rich and, in their own little comer of the universe, famous. A female
colleague of his stopped us briefly, to tell him something about a
colloquium. I don’t really remember. He listened and nodded. I do recall
that he wasn’t saying a single word, just nodding, nodding.

“Whew,” he said when she’d gone. He smiled, not at me, but at some point
in the middle distance. “She makes me nervous.”

“Why?”

“She’s so *smart”*

I saved that one to tell Jane later. I thought she would like it.

We ordered Chinese beer and he seemed to get drunk right away, after
drinking just half the bottle. I kept waiting for him to introduce the
subject of Jane, but he seemed not to remember that she was the reason
for our meeting.

“So what will you do after college?” he said after we’d ordered.

I told him I thought there would be more school for a while, then
teaching, at least I hoped so. He shook his head.

“Sometimes I wish I’d done what you’re doing,” he said. “Literature. But
boys like me did science. If you were a smart girl, you could escape,
but the smart boys were all doomed.”

He drank another beer and said he was thinking about leaving teaching.
He said he was beginning to feel like part of the problem. He said he
thought sometimes he was teaching the students to feel more helpless, to
put their faith in things they didn’t really understand completely. A
waiter brought our food. I remember that Jane’s father was very good
with chopsticks. I used a fork. He said he was quoting someone, I looked
it up later so I’d get it right, Weizenbaum from MIT, quoting him very
badly, but something about science being power, and the price of power
being servitude and impotence.

“I’m telling you this,” he said, “because you’re family. My wife is your
stepmother. I think that must make us related somehow. Pardon me.
*Exwife”*

The beers made me braver, or more stupid, depending on how you look at
it. I said to him, “Do you ever feel as if your brain is going to
explode? I mean because it’s so crowded with facts and notions and
stuff?”

“All the time,” he said. “Every minute of every day.”

“Maybe you need a rest.”

Somehow my saying that seemed to sober him up. His eyes widened a
little. He ate some more of whatever it was he had ordered, fried rice,
a shrimp dish because he did not eat meat. He fell silent and I turned
to look out the window, watch the comings and goings on University,
everyone on their way somewhere, peculiar, private thoughts in their
heads. I saw a group of teenaged girls and remembered driving up to
rescue Jane when she was fifteen. These girls were as lost-looking and
dirty’ as the ones who had scared her five years before. I wondered what
they thought of science and power and servitude.

“Jane is brilliant,” he said. It seemed possible that he might be able
to read my mind. “Isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said, and then in language I now use all the time: “She doesn’t
apply herself.”

“Is she still dancing?”

“Yes, and one of the reasons she’s so good is that she’s smart.”

I’d said it, and then I was trying to understand what exacdy I meant.
She knows what she can do and also what she *might* do. She’s always a
step ahead of her body.

“But she doesn’t apply herself?” he said.

“She was a hard case growing up. You missed most of it.”

“Not my fault,” he said.

I was supposed to let it drop there, but I couldn’t. “Sure it was,” I
said. So I wasn’t going to get invited to any of the Professor’s Nobel
parties. “You could have come by once in a while. Or called. She was a
mess.” I told him about the time she hitched to Berkeley and stood in
his office doorway. I don’t know if he believed me. He just stared. “Is
that pretty much what you wanted to know?”

“What’s she doing now?” he said, quietly, I seem to remember. “Where is
she?”

“She’s back in Santa Monica, teaching dance. I think she has a drinking
problem.”

That was it, that was all he could take. Dinner was over. He pushed back
his chair, stood up, took out his wallet and put a twenty dollar bill on
the table.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m late. This should cover it. Nice to meet
you, David.”

I don’t know if he called me the wrong name on purpose, or if he was
confused, undone by what I’d just told him. I’ve learned since that this
is what those academic types do when they want to insult you—they call
you by the wrong name, or pretend to forget the name you’ve just told
them. As if that’s all a person is, the sum total, a few letters
arranged and rearranged by his parents in a weak moment. But I think it
was around the same time as my meeting with her father that Jane was
starting to call herself Lulu, which I always heard as a kind of racy
slurring of Gillooly. I should have told him *that*, how his daughter
had renamed herself *Lulu* for Christ’s sake, and she was working
nights: a bachelor party here, a stripper-gram there. Yes, a
stripper-gram, there is such a thing in this crazy world. She told me
she got paid extra if she sang the message, double if she sang “Happy
Birthday, Mr. President.”

I saw Jane’s father out in the world twice more before we left Cal. I
graduated and he did exactly what he suggested he might do—he resigned
his professorship and disappeared. I got a glimpse of him across the
theater at a production of *Othello*, and then a couple of months after
that, we actually reached for the same carton of ice cream at the
Safeway market on Shattuck. Rocky Road. He would have pretended not to
notice me, not to know me, but I made that impossible for him. I fucking
tempted him with knowledge.

“Let be be finale of seem,” I said.

To which he could only reply, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice
cream.” And then he said, as if I were a fool and a dolt, “Wallace
Stevens.”

I had learned that already about academics: more than anything, they are
vain, vain, vain.

*Much later, I wished I had said, The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
of improvisations and seasons of belief Ideas are men. The mass of
meaning and the mass of men are one. Chaos is not the mass of meaning.
The assassin sings in chaos, and his song is a consolation. It is the
music of the mass of meaning. I wish I had told him all of this, but I
had not read the poem yet.*

And then, in the semester he resigned and disappeared, before he did, I
took his introductory physics course. It wasn’t called Physics for
Poets, not exactly, but something like that. There is no question that
he was brilliant: somewhere in the middle of his first lecture, it
occurred to me that he might well have read most of the books ever
written by man or woman, seen every great work of art, traveled the
whole world. But there was, too, the sense of shit about to hit the fan.
Sometimes he would come into the lecture hall—it was a huge class, maybe
five hundred students— and without taking off his jacket, his raincoat,
I mean, he’d just start talking. Lucidly, pretty much, and without
notes. Everything he said was important, seemed important, all
information imparted with a terrible urgency, but at the same time, it
was all in a kind of gag and spew, not directed to anyone in the room.
He looked out over our heads, and because the podium he bolstered
himself behind stood at the bottom of a deep well in the lecture hall,
his gaze had to rise and rise. Very often, it appeared that he was
talking to God.

He taught the class for only three weeks, six sessions, and the first
lecture was, as I’m thinking about it now, better than brilliant. Two
weeks passed, though, and we seemed to be drifting away from physics,
from any kind of science toward, I don’t know what to call it,
sociology, maybe.

He told a long story about the Japanese emperor Hirohito who devoted
himself to marine biology instead of sinking, like those around him,
into decadent hedonism. He listed the repercussions of the Industrial
Revolution. He read from the works of Wallace Stevens and Immanuel Kant.
He said this was all we really needed to know.

At the beginning of the fifth lecture, he raised one hand for silence
and said this:

“Quite simply, it is not possible to observe reality without changing
it.” He paused, long enough to make everyone uncomfortable, until little
twitters started up all over the room, throats were cleared, people fell
asleep or woke up. He raised his hand again. “Subatomic particles are
not objects but tendencies.” Silence. “There are millions upon millions
of subatomic particles.” Again, silence. “The mind is such that it deals
only with ideas. It is not possible for the mind to relate to anything
other than ideas. Therefore, it is not correct to think that the mind
can actually consider reality. All that the mind can work with are its
own ideas about reality. Therefore, whether or not something is true is
not a matter of some absolute truth, but of how closely it matches up
with our experience. To which Einstein replied, ‘The most
incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.’ ”

I only remember all this because I read it later, or heard it, and
remembered and wrote it all down.

He was trembling, we could all see it, the palsy in his hands, the
thickening of his voice, close to tears, but he went on, quoting again,
I remember now, his hero, Joseph Weizenbaum: “Science promised man
power. But as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of
power, the price is servitude and impotence. Power is nothing if it is
not the power to choose.”

Then he dismissed us. He told us to go home and give a great deal of
thought to what he had just said. He assigned some reading, which
happened to be about Max Planck and black body radiation. He said we
should imagine Max Planck’s wife. And then he left the room.

No one had any idea what he meant. That was a Tuesday, so the next class
would have been Thursday morning. When students arrived at the lecture
hall, the Professor was already there, looking more rumpled and unwashed
than usual, and stiff, like he might have spent the night curled up on
the floor behind the podium. His hands shook, his eyes were red-rimmed,
bleared with exhaustion. I moved up to the front row after someone
whispered he was in a bad way. I felt sort of responsible, I guess. I
remembered what he had said about his ex-wife being my stepmother and
how it caused us to be related. At that moment, he seemed not like an
arrogant intellectual but a lonely crackpot.

He said, “Today I am going to speak to you about the end of beauty.”
People in the room put down their pencils and sat back. You could hear
five hundred clouds of thought, some amused and cynical, some entirely
sympathetic: a very big mind is about to blow and we are getting to
watch it happen. I seem to remember that the woman next to me, who I did
not know very well then but would later, started to cry softly. The
Professor started to talk, but he spoke so slowly that I was able to
copy almost all of it exacdy as he said the words, all the bits and
pieces, like he was talking in paragraphs:

“When rich nations start to indulge their whims.

“The desire for the primitive.

“Nature is the opposite of history. It sanctifies the individual and not
the mass.

“Innocence of childhood might be preserved into adulthood. Einstein said
so. From which came the theory of relativity. A normal adult never stops
to think about problems of space and time, these are things which he has
thought of as a child. But Einstein’s intellectual development was
retarded, as a result of which, he began to wonder about space and time
only when he was grown up.”

The Professor paused. We could see he was making a huge effort to get
his voice, all the apparatus and effluvia of it, going again.

“Pursuit of nature,” he said, and finally, “It would take thousands of
pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”

There was a small group of students in that class who were farm kids
from the Central Willey, and they knew what the Professor had just given
us the recipe for. I heard a couple of gasps or cries and then somebody
yelled from the hack of the room, “What the hell are you talking about?”

The Professor gathered his papers or whatever he had stacked on the
podium and left the room through one of the lower exit doors, not in any
great hurry. I don’t believe anyone followed him. I thought about it,
but then I didn’t move. What would I have said to him anyway? What would
I have done? I ask myself those questions now, only I wonder what
difference it would have made, if somebody had seen to him that day,
tended to him. I tried to call Jane that night, but she wasn’t home.
Then it was the weekend. There was a football game, I think, an event
that consumed me, something large like that, and stupid. On Sunday
night, I got off the bus in Oakland, and a man stepped in front of me
and demanded my wallet. I gave it to him, and then there was a flash in
front of my face, a tug under my right eye, a kind of sear, wetness on
my cheek, the taste of blood. I sat on the sidewalk for a long time,
thinking how I could have died, could have been blinded. On Monday,
there was the official announcement in the newspaper: the Professor had
resigned. No details, just a sentence like that. On Tuesday morning, we
had another instructor, one of the graduate assistants, and then a
visiting professor from Davis, and then another from Santa Cruz. There
was a joke for a while—how many professors does it take to teach physics
at Cal, but I forget the punch line. And I remember almost nothing else
about the course except that somehow I managed to pass it.

When I finally got hold of Jane, two weeks later, it seemed mean, cruel,
to tell her the details about her father. More than cruel, it seemed
dangerous. There was something that ran in the family, this precarious
brilliance. Jane probably already suspected. I told myself I would go
see her at Christmas, see what I could do for her, try to get her out of
Santa Monica, away from her mother’s refreshed romance with Christian
Science. But I didn’t go. I had fallen in love with another woman, the
woman who was crying in the Professor’s last lecture. A week before
Thanksgiving, we ran into each other at a fraternity party. People who
knew each other from that course sometimes, after a few beers, clotted
together like disaster victims, survivors of unspeakable tragedy. We
greeted each other with the usual “What a class, huh?” Our eyes stayed
locked.

“One thing, though,” she said to me. “There was this kind of strange
loose end.”

“There was?” It sobered me up instandy, the thought of the story not
quite over.

“Did you ever think about Max Planck’s wife?”

“Nope,” I said, relieved. “I have to confess. I never did.”

“I did,” she said. “I imagined her in the dark.” The woman told me she
imagined Max Planck’s wife in a totally dark room, and his hands on her
making friction, making sparks. She said she could see it perfectly.
That it all made sense. Red sparks at first, then blue. Then they’d
start all over again.

I spent Christmas with this woman and her parents in Santa Cruz. We, she
and I, took long walks, freezing, holding ourselves together with the
sheer force of cold wind, hanging onto each other against that wind,
talking about the Professor’s last class. I called Jane when I got home,
asked her to come up to Berkeley and stay, and was relieved when she
refused. Her father’s name would have most certainly come up between us
in that conversation, but we didn’t talk about what had happened to him,
why he had left Cal. I didn’t press her to move. I guess I knew somehow
that Bean would have felt even more at a loss up north, even more ganged
up on than she did living with her mother.

I think now: if Jane had come to Berkeley, she would have started
looking for her father again, and maybe she would have found him, and
some sweetness would have been planted inside him, taken root, filled up
his hollow soul.

But as I said, I didn’t push, didn’t press. Something was shifting
around inside me that December and early January, I was losing a kind of
momentum, the start of which loss I still date from getting mugged in
Oakland, but mostly from the Professor’s grand exit. All that genius and
all that schooling, all that esoteric knowledge, and look at the wreck
of him, I thought. Of course, I didn’t have to turn out that way, but
his talk about being related through my stepmother spooked me some, I
have to admit. I hiked Mount Tamalpais, borrowed cars and drove up the
Mendocino coast, waiting for some lightning bolt answer to strike me.
Always alone, I’d take a jug of wine and a sleeping bag and camp out on
state beaches, most of which were closed. I’d wait for the fog to settle
in. After a while I figured out that’s what it was, I was *going to the
fog*, the way people in the Valley pack their cars, head for the Sierra
and say they’re *going to the snow.* I wanted to be lost, I wanted to be
nowhere, in a sort of waking sleep. There was some garbled message
coming at me, a hint of direction. I was beginning to understand the
Professor’s flight, and even pieces of what he had been trying to say.
*The world is too much with us.* It’s Wordsworth, though I never met
anybody who could recite the rest. I bet the Professor knows it by
heart, the part about getting, spending, and laying waste. Not seeing
anything in nature we understand. Giving away our hearts.

I finished the school year and hitched straight back up to Sonoma, the
coast, started living in caves there, by the beach. I had made good
money earlier in the spring delivering newspapers and tending bar, but I
found that summer that I could five on about a dollar a day. I scavenged
and walked, kept a journal, bought used books in Petaluma, read them and
sold them back in Santa Rosa or Healdsburg. I wanted to know, I think,
how far you can get out of the world and stand it, how long you could go
without speaking to another human being and be able to recover. For me,
it ended up being two or three days, and then I’d be in the grocery
store in Rohnert Park and my hand would brush the cashier’s, or she’d
call me honey, and my eyes would fill with tears. I’d go in somewhere
and have a beer and talk to the barkeep or the guy next to me, and then
I’d be okay for the next little while. All that time, I was having these
big cast-of-thousands dreams too, and I got so I could always remember
them in the morning. Very busy dreams: airports, sporting events,
college registration, China. Jane was in a lot of them, usually very
still and quiet, though often the dreams themselves had sound, a kind of
low murmur, the steady hum that you might imagine a crowd of people
would make if they were always a long ways off. The fog came in thick
like rain some nights, and I figured out later that pattering drift was
what I was hearing through my sleep.

What living by the ocean can do for some people is make them more
certain. The beach, that meeting of water and sand, was like having two
good, solid, happily married parents. At least, I think it was—this is
what I understand from people who grew up in such a household. The ocean
there, near Jenner, Albion, Elk, Manchester, Stewart’s Point, Gualala,
all those *theres*, the ocean was so predictable, so reliable, so
majestic and distant and generous in its love for the coast. It would
always come back. The ocean would always lie down by the coast and mosdy
ignore the children playing nearby. If I needed something, the ocean and
the shore would conspire to deliver—if it was wise, if the thing I
wanted was what I ought to have, food for instance, or a bath, firewood,
a pretty trinket to amuse myself with for a while, a botde, a shell, a
necklace of kelp. Because nature was generous with me, I could be
generous back. And without dunking very much about it, I took myself
away to the kind of landscape in the season where and when this would be
possible.

In the fall, I moved back south, to Santa Monica. The summer on the
coast had kindled in my heart a strange longing for my father, and
Jane’s mother too. They were, after all was said and done, happily
married. Between them, it had taken five tries to get there, but they
seemed to have found the safe place they needed in each other. There was
always peaceful sleeping going on in that house. You could feel it, the
perfect fit their two bodies were making in that bedroom at the end of
the hall.

Jane was living in Westwood, and I started taking teacher certification
courses at Los Angeles State University. I’d decided to teach high
school English—this was the strange wisdom that took shape out of the
fog on the Sonoma coast, that high school students exactly suited my
temperament and intelligence, such as it was, and that I could live with
the busywork.

So I didn’t see Bean much, and she mostly didn’t allow herself to be
seen. She was sober enough to give dance classes in the afternoons, but
before and after was a consuming oblivion, the long slide in and the
steep crawl out. It was still true, the thing I told her father a year
before: she knew what her body was capable of. She never missed a class.
From September to June, I saw her maybe three times.

We went out on the Fourth of July, to dinner and then to watch fireworks
from the Pier. At first she was careful in her drinking, a beer while we
waited for a table, though I suspected she’d had something before I came
to pick her up. We drank a botde of wine with dinner and then she picked
up a pint of bourbon for the fireworks. We held hands. I loved that
feeling of being with her inside a crowd, a kind of still center in the
middle of all diose swirling, excited, fit-up strangers. Never mind that
she was beautiful, that she walked like something priceless was balanced
on top of her head, her heart, maybe. People looked at us, envied us.
For the first time, I had a certain feeling—I had it again, later,
walking with Barbara—that we were breaking people’s hearts with our
loveliness, with what appeared to be our love.

As we were walking back to the car, she squeezed my hand and said, “You
know, Charlie, Pm thinking I’ll go to Las Vegas for a while.”

“What? Las Vegas?” I must have said. I remember I had a falling away
feeling in my gut and that my free hand went instantly for something to
hold onto, but all I got was a fistful of sweet night air.

“I know,” she turned and patted my cheek. “Kind of sudden. Kind of
*strange*.” She said the words like she was hearing them herself for the
first time. “But I’ve been here too long. I’ve heard that trained
dancers can get jobs as showgirls and make a bundle. Feather
headdresses. Nobody touches you. Everybody is miles away.”

“A showgirl?”

“It’s clean. Dancers have families, kids. It might be”—she waved her arm
slowly, like Vanna White, swept her hand over all the prizes you could
win—“more real. More real than this.”

“You’d just pack up and go? Without a job?”

“I have a few leads. Phone numbers.”

“But you don’t know anybody there.”

“I don’t know anybody *here*. The last resort. I have to go somewh ere.
I have to *move.* Charlie, I feel like I’m about to get into a lot of
trouble.” I told her I would help her.

“You can’t,” she said. “Nobody can.” She was quiet, eyeing me. “You know
I heard about what happened to my father at Cal. How he cracked up and
left. Weren’t you in that class?”

“No.” It seemed easier to tell this litde lie.

“I thought you were for some reason. Maybe you just talked about it or
something.”

“I talked about it. I think I did. Though probably not much.”

“Shit, who cares anyway? But I heard. And I have this feeling, like it’s
out there waiting for me too, that whatever he feels, that crazy lonely
thing he has. Like I understand why that whole weird scene happened, I
understand why he did it and moved away by himself. Your whole world
crashing down on you. I know all about it. And I want him to know that I
know. I don’t want him to feel like he’s alone with it. All that crap.”

“So why are you going to Las Vegas?”

“I think he’s near there. Somewhere, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure he
went easterly.” She laughed and pointed over her shoulder at the Pacific
Ocean. “No westerly to go. Except Hawaii. Isn’t there something about
atoning in the desert, Charlie? You know all that stuff. I think he went
to atone in the desert.”

As did Jane, within the week.

It seems to me there was that Fourth of July holding Jane’s hand, and
then there was Barbara, the next day even, Barbara, and I recall her
from this distance as a series of moments and touches, all disordered.
It seems to me sometimes that grieving must be the process of making
order. Chronologically, maybe, I’m still new enough at it to believe
that kind of order would bring a little comfort. It would work like
this: you go over the life together again and again until it moves
riverlike in your head, until it sings in a way, like musical scales,
you can run effortlessly up and down from the first to the last. Having
that perfect pattern in your head will release you somehow, free you
into happiness again. That’s the first stage of grieving.

God, how could that possibly work? I am a goddamned fool. In my sorriest
moments, I think if I were less a fool I would still have her. And yet,
everybody tells me in ten years I’ll be saying all this differently.
People smile, nod. They’d chuck me under the chin if I were smaller,
say, *there*, *there.* All those sympathetic faces seem like a light I
can’t get to, moon behind clouds, lit-up windows in the next block. And
their voices, all of them saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s still
always her voice. Barbara’s.

This is the history of the world: a person tries to make life easier,
fill his days and nights with joy, and then he is in despair. But what
else could I do? I knew Barbara in high school—I should start back that
far, and I liked her then, but she didn’t have much time or use for me.
She worked hard, she did everything, sports, chorus, the school
newspaper, all kinds of clubs. She was a good student and had a lot of
friends. She was invited, I’ll never forget this, to be an honorary
member of the *Latin* club, even though she didn’t know any Latin,
because people liked having her around. She knew *veni, vidi*, *vid.*

But Barbara, she told me later, was busy having crushes on boys who
didn’t notice her, and I was taken up with Bean and all her beautiful
mystery. Barbara’s sister Lorraine went off to Harvard, and then Barbara
did too. We met up again at a class reunion the fall after Jane went to
Las Vegas. I didn’t even intend to be there. I was on my way to
somewhere else and got lost and stopped in the restaurant to make a
call. It was like wandering into a surprise party that had just that
exact moment assembled in your honor. Even the guests are surprised to
see you so soon, everybody yells your name and then, *who the hell
invited you?* they bellow and slap you on the back or kiss you, if
they’re women. One of these women handed me a beer, and something
snapped to attention in my head. Listen up! it said in the voice of all
my old coaches, basketball, football, track, all of whom were present at
the party, and would later, in the presence of this same woman, who is
of course Barbara, tell stories about heroic touchdown passes I never
made, three-point shots I never hit because there was no such thing as a
three-point shot when I played basketball.

I believe I am warming to my memories here.

What were we thinking? Barbara and I asked each other, why did this take
us so long? where have you been all these years? Now nothing hurts me
like these questions do, these same ones, and different ones too, how
did it happen? Even that one, how did it happen, which is so goddamned
answerable: someone sent a bomb in the mail. Someone blew her up so
utterly that she was only dust and blood the priest would not allow me
to collect.

The second stage of grief begins when objects come to mean something,
anything, again. So that’s good, right? You can drive a car, say,
because you’re again able to identify boy-on-bicycle as an object that
ought not to be hit. But then comes the rushing forward of all those
other objects: books she loved with the comers turned down to signify
what she loved most, a photograph, a sock, a canceled check for Christ’s
sake, a fountain pen lost months before, lost before she was lost, the
harbinger of loss. A matchstick, half-burned, used by her to light a
candle and then fallen in the wax. She did it, she touched it. Why is
all this still here? The day itself, if she had not awakened, risen,
peed, brushed her teeth, if there’d been no milk for her coffee, no
coffee, no cereal, no hot water, no dental floss, no clean clothes, no
gas in the car, no car. If only I could take things back from the
universe, no Henry Ford, no Chevron, no Maytag, no Colgate, no New
England Power and Light, no Batde Creek Michigan for Kellogg’s to come
out of, no Colombia for coffee beans, not a single cow. ffo grieve is to
organize, over and over, until those cows come home. If we and those
cows had never left home in the first place. If we’d stayed in
California.

The third stage is never being alone, when every spider, every fallen
leaf is an emissary from her, all mute, all untranslatable.

The fourth stage is dreaming. Of course, in the dreams, Barbara is
always still alive. What’s strange is that this stage always involves
the physical body, too-phantom pain, weather in the joints, the nuisance
of the body, the uselessness of particular organs. If she doesn’t need a
body, why should I? Which takes you back to the questions, the second
stage.

The fifth stage is going to get him, the one who might have done it—
*who did it*—knowledge and revenge. You must be calm and appear sane, or
else no one will believe you. And I must have been because Jane did
believe me. Old Bean, as ever, leading me a dance, taking me to see the
Professor. I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him what he’d done,
though it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. I had a feeling he
wouldn’t even understand what I was saying, not the words, not the look,
not the break of my heart. For a while I wanted him to kill me too. I
don’t anymore.

I knew a woman in college whose boyfriend had been killed in a car
accident—not right away though, he lingered long enough to ask his best
friend to take care of her. This had happened years before, and she was
going to marry the best friend when I knew her. They thought, she told
me, that her dead boyfriend had married them, right there in his last
breath. She said the dead are better than we are.

Now Barbara is better. When I heard you could only take a handful of
dirt at Chimayó, I almost turned and left. I needed a truckload of that
shit, I knew I did, a ton. But I didn’t leave, did I? Something kept me
there, and then I saw the milagro for pregnancy and safe delivery, and
then I’d paid for it and I found myself in some seventh or tenth
uncharted stage of grief, which must be contemplation of the unknown,
never to be known future. I do not want there to have been a baby—I
couldn’t fucking bear it. And yet, and yet. T) think about Barbara not
having to go it alone, go alone, wherever she was or is. T) think of her
accompanied, holding a tiny, tiny hand, saying watch your step now,
that’s it, upsy-daisy. It gives me the strangest comfort. So I was
praying to make it so. I don’t want to be alone either. I went out into
the cottonwoods behind the Sannrario to find Bean.

I don’t know if she couldn’t see it, or if she wouldn’t, the truth about
her father. In the end, I guess, they amount to the same thing. But I
felt, driving back to Santa Fe, the Professor had called me himself, or
more like him, left a note pushed under the door of my apartment,
confessing to all his crimes. It was a great weight lifted, my sense
that he was riding in the car with me, an arm’s length away, telling me
what he’d been doing all these years and why. We were talking man to
man, like they make it look in the movies, long silences, each man
staring into the distance, down the long road ahead. But the main thing
was, *I had him.* He was my captive audience, or rather, I was his
audience, but he was my captive. Oh captive, my captive. Wlien you teach
that poem to eleventh graders, if you have that kind of courage, you
have to admit to them it’s a love poem, an elegy to a beloved. You have
to say something about *captive* and *captain.* It came clear to me on
the car trip back from Chimayó that the Professor had been in one way or
another driving my life for a lot of years, when I took Jane to see him,
rescuing her from him before drat, being in love for a litde while with
a woman who cried over his breakdown, trying on the Sonoma coast to get
out of the world the same way he had. For the briefest instant, I lost
sight of Barbara, or she became part of the wider landscape, instead of
the ghost who’d been riding with me in the past months, and before that,
the living, breathing woman next to me, a seat’s length away. Up until
that instant, all my attention had been taken up by her death, by
revenge, by this kind of strangled vigilante justice. It was a litde
like coming to the end of a narrow road and seeing that it opens away
into plains or desert, or the ocean. Hard territory that needs crossing.

And so what the Professor was saying to me in the front seat of my car
was this: we know each other, we’re like each other. You understand
everything about me except this one violent hairsbreadth, and it’s a
gulf, he was saying. I dare you to cross it. And I bet you can’t. He was
holding out his hand, thrusting it toward me, for a shake, saying,
*Bet.*

All around me, the desert was desolated with light, the peculiar direct
bearing-down of the sun out there that doesn’t ever illuminate anything,
but only makes distances seem greater, more threatening. You can see
your way to the other side, desert light says, but you will the trying
to get there, you’ll shrivel to dust. There were people I could call.
Barbara’s sister was a lawyer. The authorities. You could call a number
and rat on somebody and never have to leave your name—I believed this
from television. Suddenly I wished I had children. I think they
galvanize your thoughts, your will, make a man mindful and mindless at
the same time. The presence of children makes people act. Barbara’s
sister Lorraine had a daughter named Frieda, a lonely little girl, I
always thought, already she had that deep solitary ache nothing in the
world can relieve. Frieda’d told me over the telephone that she was
writing a novel about her life. She worked on it every day, sitting
either in or under a tree with a pen and a pad of paper. She said she
was afraid the years were going to catch up with her: that the novel’s
heroine would turn eight and then she wouldn’t know the rest of the
story. Lorraine told her that was what most people who wrote novels did:
they came to the edge of what they knew and then they had to jump. “Like
out of this tree?” Frieda had said. She was skeptical, and so Lorraine
suggested they call me for a second opinion. Alter I’d talked to Frieda,
Lorraine got on the phone and said that, that children make you act.
Maybe, she said, I should borrow Frieda for a while.

On the way back to Santa Fe, I turned on the radio for some comfort, and
one of the first things I heard was the date: June 21<sup>st</sup>, the solstice,
and a full moon. There were announcements all over the airwaves for
solstice parties, at bars and restaurants mostly, and solstice sales.
You had to laugh or you’d cry, people seemed so desperate for an
occasion. Where did it come from, this American urge to celebrate, make
a party out of everything, or else a shopping event? I’d been invited to
one of those parties myself, by a neighbor who must have taken note of
my furtive move-in. I didn’t want to make any new friends, talk to
anyone, rehash my story, but as the day wore on, I wanted noise, music,
cigarette smoke, something to drink. I thought I should call Jane and
ask her to go too, but I didn’t know, she might have had a better offer.
I saw how that guy who manages the gym was looking at her. I pictured
them together, some evening when they were alone, and then my imagining
of it gave way, it was that visceral, gave way like an old roof or weak
flooring, and I crashed in on them together, really together, Bean in
his arms, the whole bit. In a movie: a guy walks through the wrong door
and there’s a couple in his bed. I felt kicked in the gut and ashamed at
the same time. Here was a woman who’d been my sister. We’d lived in the
same house. I’d heard her sad story, hell, I’d seen it, tried to get her
out of trouble, tried not to see her naked. Taboo. And now, as big as
life, a thought I couldn’t rid myself of, an idea whose time had come.
There were all kinds of reasons to get Jane back, be in love with her
again. It all fit—we’d been brought to this high desert, this
sacrificial mountaintop, where the air was filled with spirits and dust
and the smell of burning.

<strong><em>If you’d BEEN named,</em></strong> by accident or by design, Charlie Parker,
would you have any business *not* taking up the saxophone? T) learn to
blow saves a lot of time, liberates your sorry ass from all the stupid
jokes. When you’re first introduced, say at a party, and a drunken but
attractive woman says, I’d sure like to see your sax honey, you can tell
her, hang on baby, it’s in the car, and you can walk out the door, down
the stairs, and bring it back to her. Then you can play. Of course
that’s not exactly why I took it up. But there was something about my
name, some sort of crazy legacy. Catholics name their kids after saints
with the hope they’ll behave in a saintly fashion, live up to the story.
In my case, I think my father and mother weren’t paying attention. After
that, it was a chicken-or-egg thing—I don’t know which came first, the
name or the music. I read a biography of Charlie Parker and found out
that his first sax was a retooled alto, made in Paris in 1898, and his
mother sewed a case for it out of pillow-ticking, white with blue
stripes. That one detail hooked me into a whole web of details: his
mother, a sewing machine, literally a pillow *case,* it would have been
so useless and so intimate at the same time. I wished I could have had a
mother to do that. So maybe here we have the dark underbelly of my sax
playing: motherlessness.

But it’s also still like having a date at a party, the one and only
spontaneous act I can always perform, which is to walk into a room full
of strangers with my saxophone, now in a real case, beat-up black
plastic, set her down in a corner where I can keep my eye on her, get a
drink, get another, and wait for the invitation that almost always
comes. People like it, unexpected, free. I play low, fool around,
standing off to the side of the room. Anybody at the party
can listen or not. I’ve figured out since Barbara died that this is my
way of entering the world of the living, which is through a side door,
and then settling my body slightly outside the circle, looking in
without seeming to. Sharing air. Lester Young could outline notes with
air space, is how somebody explained it to me, a perfect column of them
running from the bottom of his lungs, clear out through the bell of the
horn. I liked the picture of that, and I still do, music riding on its
own, not attached to or touching anything. The lonely independence of
it, that’s what I admired. I taught myself to do something Barbara
called *the sparkling conversationalist*, which is to work quotations
from one song into another, into the changes, bits from “Begin the
Beguine” into “Them There Eyes,” from “The Man I Love” into “Goodbye
Forever.” It was more than segue, or less maybe, a little clever fun,
though I never remembered to look around and see who noticed. And that
kind of quoting has a strange effect on the musician. It seems like time
is doubled, both mathematical, musical time, the time a musician taps
out with his

foot, or with nods of his head, and time as in on the clock. I don’t
know if I can explain it, really. The universe opens up a litde. You can
seem to do two things at once. The universe opens up a litde and you
kind of fall through. After two drinks, I get sealed off, become
self-contained. I used to think that word *courageous*, but I don’t
anymore because courage has to do with other people. In the days when I
wanted to be a writer, all six or seven of them, I was after this same
feeling, but I couldn’t quite get it, that sense of being a smoothly
operating, solid *machine*, my best self. Though what Barbara taught me
was that my truly best self was out in the world.

So that’s what I took to the solstice party down the hall, my sax and a
six-pack and a whole headful of thoughts about Bean and her father, all
these crazy notions I wanted to play away, get away from for the
evening. The husband of the woman who’d done the inviting met me at the
door, took a look at the black case and raised an eyebrow.

“Charlie Parker,” I said, holding out my hand, which he took, warmly, I
thought, instantly. He laughed.

“Art Tatum,” he said, but of course that wasn’t his real name. It was
Nathan, I later found out, Nathan Pierce.

“No shit,” I said, and he got it immediately—something in my voice.
“Your name really *is* Charlie Parker.” He drew me into the apartment.
“And you’re meeting it halfway.”

“Right,” I said. “Though sometimes it meets me.”

Just then, Nathan’s wife came out of the kitchen. We recognized each
other, and she stepped right up, made sense of things, told Nathan who I
was, said *my husband* of Nathan and squeezed his elbow, a gesture
between a man and a woman that still causes me acute, jealous pain when
I see it. Nathan led me over to the bar, got out a glass, saying he
always made the first one, but after that, guests were on their own.

“So what brings you to Santa Fe, Charlie Parker?”

“I teach back East, so I have summers off. Never been here, so I thought
I’d visit. See the place.

“Teaching’s a good gig that way,” he said. “High school?”

“It’s a dirty job.”

He smiled at me again, in that *I get it* way. You never had to say much
to Nathan, I realized in the short time I knew him. He was perceptive,
mysteriously so, almost saindy.

“Good for you. What subject?”

“English.”

“Nice.”

“And you?”

“The law. Lawyer. But I always wanted to be one of you guys.”

“I think a lot of us guys wish we were you.”

“Nah,” he said. “Let me introduce you around.”

The gathering, Isabel Pierce had forgotten to tell me, was a costume
party, the true description of which was never completely given to me,
but I guessed it must have been something like, come as your favorite
animal, vegetable, or mineral having even the vaguest connection to the
solstice. A lot of druids. White sheets and flowers in their hair,
garlands around their necks, a lot of people with suns, moons, stars on
their clothing. Nathan explained to me that he, dressed in a white lab
coat, was a scientist. Once he and Isabel had visited Stonehenge on the
solstice and were amazed and delighted by the presence of both
scientists and druids, neither of whom seemed aware of the other.
Astronomers, he guessed the scientists were, charting the sunrise over
the central monolith. It was the whole world, he said, right there, the
sacred and the profane, only nobody should try to say which was which. I
liked it that he used the word *should.*

“This is Charlie Parker,” he said to a group of people standing in the
dining room. You could see it on their faces, a mix of confusion and
appreciation for what must have been my mysterious wit.

“That’s my real name,” I said. “No solstice connection. Not that I know
of.”

“Though he does play the saxophone,” Nathan said. “At least I’m assuming
that’s what’s in the case.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

Although I saw only a few of those people ever again, I remember Nathan
Pierce’s solstice party as one of those troughlike experiences of human
kindness. I went there, and it was full to the brim with kindness and I
drank of it. As the afternoon deepened, I played some—old stuff, “Blue
Champagne,” “T’s Autumn,” “Old Folks,” “Skylark”—and a beautiful girl I
never laid eyes on again, about eighteen years old, attached herself to
me for the rest of the night and then disappeared at the stroke of
twelve, as if whisked away by her watchful, proper fairy godmother. I
think her name was Helen because I seem to remember giving her the old
line about launching a thousand ships and receiving back from her the
loveliest blank stare I’ve ever seen.

Sometime after supper, another woman, one of the druids, named Annette,
brought out Tarot cards and began to do readings. The first guest who
sat down in front of her reached over to pick up the box of cards, and
Annette slapped her hand away, barking out that it was the worst kind of
luck to pick up another person’s Tarot pack without asking permission.
But you could see why the woman had wanted to touch those cards. They
were gorgeous, an original design, Annette said, called the Grand
Etteila. She searched through the pack for a card to show us, the ten of
pentacles, pink disks like hot cross buns stacked in a triangle and
below that, and upside down, a kind of compass with its central leg
between the sun and the moon. The buns were La Maison, house or home,
and the compass was La Loterie, or chance.

“So the opposite of house is lottery,” she said, and everybody laughed.
Nathan leaned toward me and explained what the joke was: that Annette
had made a sort of career of chance house-sitting jobs, and everybody
who knew her was waiting for her to setde down.

She asked Nathan if the fights could be dimmed, and then Isabel brought
in candles and Annette set them around in a circle big enough to contain
herself and the questioner. She asked me if I would play something, low
and slow, *haunting,* she said, and so I did, messing around, drifting
through the slowest music I knew. Her cards were wrapped in a piece of
black silk inside a wooden box, and when she opened the box, a startling
perfume drifted out into the air, something sweet I’d smelled a long
time ago, associated with Bean, though I knew I would never be able to
remember its name. That was how it all felt, that entire first evening
with Nathan and Isabel, like a lesson in forgetfulness, maybe, even an
advertisement for it, what a pleasant state, a glossy magazine ad of an
evening, the definition of airbrushed. The big windows on the front of
die apartment were open, and there was a view north, toward Taos and
Chimayó, the mountains I’d just come out of. It was too dark by that
time to see anything but the lights glittering in the hills, looking as
if they must be suspended over the rest of the darkened world.

The woman who’d tried to touch the Tarot pack wanted to know if she
should take a spur-of-the-moment trip or stay home for the rest of the
summer, and Annette laid out what she called the alternatives spread,
three cards arranged in a triangle above a central card, and below that,
three more cards in an inverted triangle. She explained that the upper
three suggest the safe option, the middle card is a summary of the
situation, and the lower triangle represents the more adventurous
option.

“What if you have a dilemma where you don’t know which is the more
adventurous option?” someone asked.

Annette thought for a little while, and then she said, “Don’t you always
know? Don’t you always have kind of a gut feeling?”

You could see everyone consider the question. I was playing a weirdly
embellished version of “Summertime” with long pauses between the
phrases. It’s a very odd song on the saxophone, sadder, and bumbling in
a way, more of a lie. The livin’ ain’t easy.

The middle card in this spread was the knight of swords, intrepid,
courageous, but sometimes impatient. Annette said the top three cards
suggested security was really stagnation. The eight of swords showed a
woman blindfolded and bound, imprisoned in a forest of swords stuck in
the ground around her. The four of pentacles showed a different woman
holding huge gold coins, but Annette pointed out there was a look of
blankness in her eyes, an empty, impassive stare. The third card on top
was death: the grim reaper with his skull face, a scythe and a white
rose. The adventurous option cards were the king of swords, flanked by
the nine and the six of wands. The king, I remember, exercises firm
judgment but likes new ideas, and the two wands mean success and
determination. “So you better go,” Annette said. “See how clear that
is?”

“Hard to miss,” the woman said. “Bet I wake up tomorrow and find I’ve
already bought that ticket.”

“Nathan?” Annette said. “How about it?”

“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I want to know.”

Now that it’s all over, I sometimes think Nathan should have had his
fortune told. But it was hard to believe that night that anything other
than good fortune had befallen him, or Isabel, ever in their lives. For
one thing, they were beautiful people, out of a magazine ad or a
catalog, no blemishes, no weight problem, no awkward tics or habits of
speech. They seemed *bred,* rather than just plain alive. Nathan
had the darkest hair I’ve ever seen, a mass of it curling over his head.
He had a perfect triangle of a nose and full lips—a little pout seemed
to appear on his face when he wasn’t smiling. He seemed to be in good
shape, had a broad-shouldered, ex-football-player look about him. He
struck me as capable—even in the way he moved across the room, mixed a
drink. You would trust him with your life. And Isabel too, less
classically beautiful and the least made-up woman at the party, was
still a kind of goddess presiding over the ritual of the solstice. She
had long straight dark hair, shot with a little gray, and a long
hawklike nose. She looked Egyptian to me. When I think of her now, I
imagine Queen Nefertiti, locked away, too, in her pyramid of grief.

Later, they stood together saying goodbye to their guests, and I
couldn’t help thinking these people would make beautiful children. I
hoped they would get started on it that very night, the thought came to
me warmly, boozily, and without the usual sadness. I remember thinking
their place would make a wonderful nursery, with its big windows and
bright colors, big abstract paintings on the walls. I imagined their
children loving me, rushing down the hall to my cool, spare, dark
apartment. I thought all this while playing a sort of goodbye tune, the
Pied Piper in reverse, sending everyone home. I was happy. I was so
happy.

I was there all night, stayed long after all the other guests had left,
drinking port and then I don’t know what else with Nathan and Isabel,
and later just with Nathan. We hit it off right away, we had from die
front door, fell into that deep immediate trust and groove the way you
do with only a handful of people your whole life. We had Berkeley in
common, Nathan’s law degree was from Boult Hall, and we figured out we’d
overlapped two years. Even though it was an unlikely possibility, I
found myself looking at him more closely, trying to remember if we’d met
up in the library or on the street somewhere. And that night, I had for
the first time the sensation of coming just to the point of recognizing
him, of remembering some chance encounter, and then a screen dropped or
a window darkened and I wasn’t allowed to see further. It felt that way,
not allowed, not permitted. I was spooked by how acute the sensation
was, like a flash of déjá vu, a wrinkling of the brain, a moment when
you could forget who you are.

“How’d you get to Santa Fe?” I asked him.

“My first wife was an artist. Actually she wasn’t my wife yet. We
decided to check out the scene here. Turns out it *was* a scene, but we
liked the look of the land.”

I waited for the rest of the story. I remember thinking, don’t press.
That he’d tell me if he wanted to. Isabel came back into the room then.
I thought her presence might be the end of it, but she seemed almost to
nod, and he went on.

“Then she died. Boom. She was healthy one day, and then—” He shook his
head. “She had a hole in her heart, for years, and we never knew.”

“That’s awful.” I didn’t know what else to say. For a split second, I
wondered if I had been talking.

“She was thirty-six. It was the craziest thing. She’d had a cold, and
she was washing the car, bent down to spray the wheels, and that was
it.”

He said he was a little in awe of it. He knew this was hard for people
to understand, but I told him, no, I knew what he meant.

“So I can’t bring myself to leave yet.” Nathan looked at Isabel, took
her hand around the comer of the table. “But we’re working up to
leaving. Right, Iz?”

She nodded. “We are.”

We all three seemed to notice morning at the same time.

“Well good,” Nathan said. “We made it through another solstice. The gods
allowed it. We must have said all the right prayers.”

I got up to go, and Isabel asked me to come hack for dinner. I think
there was a moment when she might have said, *Just sleep here*, *why
don’t you?*

I did go back for dinner, but I didn’t tell Nathan and Isabel about
Barbara right away. I was still guarding her in a sense. She was my
secret, impossible treasure. And any way I thought about telling the
story seemed like one-upping Nathan. Still, I think they knew, all
along. They invited me for dinner every night that week. Isabel was a
wonderful cook. Over her food, something happened that was like faking
in love, all three of us with each other.

Sometime the next week, I did tell. I didn’t eat with them every night,
just once, but when I got there, Nathan wasn’t home yet, and I sat in
the kitchen while Isabel stirred and chopped. For a while she talked
about her day—she managed one of the galleries out on the strip—in a
distracted sort of way. Then she put down the wooden spoon, turned to
face me, and set her hands on her hips. I thought at that moment she
looked angry.

“So what’s your story, Charlie Parker?” she said. “I know you must have
something going on.” She laughed. “I can tell because you’re trying so
hard to make it seem like you don’t.”

“Nothing much,” I said.

She shook her head. “You know it’s just plain rude,” she said, “to suck
up other people’s lives and never spill your own guts.”

So I spilled. Talking to women is easier for me, I think. Talking to a
woman, in her kitchen, late in the day. My evenings with Barbara always
went like this. I closed my eyes and tried to let it be her, and when I
was quiet, making up the words, choosing the words, it worked. But when
I was talking, it was about Barbara, and I knew she wasn’t there or
anywhere nearby.

“Man,” Isabel said. She turned back to the onions. I think onions
because later she was wiping her eyes. “It’s a wonder you’re walking
around, Charlie Parker. It’s a wonder you’re sane.”

“I know.”

“When Susan died, Nathan went into their house and didn’t come out for
days. He didn’t answer the door or the phone. Finally, somebody broke
in, his brother, and found him in bed. He’d taken Susan’s wedding dress
out of the closet, tried to put it *on,* but then laid it over himself
like a blanket. It was three months before the wedding. People took
turns sitting with him and he got through it. He might tell you all
this, I don’t know. He might not. But it would be good for him to know
about your wife. I’ll tell him if you don’t drink you can.”

I told her okay, and when I saw them next, she had.

Gradually, the rest of the story came out: Bean was in Santa Fe too.
Bring her around, they said. She doesn’t want to see me. Oh. Silence.
But Isabel always asked, it was her nature to bring people into the
light. Why doesn’t she want to see you? Well, I said, there’s this
business with her father.

“Come on Charlie,” she said. “Out with it.”

And I was suddenly tired of having to keep all the secrets, sick to
death of it. Sick unto death. So I told them. I called him by all his
names, the mad bomber, the Professor, my sister’s father. I told them I
wanted to be sure. It seemed so easy to ruin someone’s life. I told them
that Barbara’s sister Lorraine knew too, that she was conducting a quiet
litde investigation of her own.

“She thinks I’m right. But she’s Barbara’s sister. So she has a vested
interest.”

“So take your stepmother’s letters,” Nathan said.

“She burned them.”

“Who?”

“My stepmother.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She knew I’d go to the authorities, or else she didn’t think. And
anyway, he’s Jane’s father. I want her to agree. I want her to believe
me. Fool that I am.”

“You have to talk to Jane.”

“I know,” I said. “But she won’t listen. Or hear. I mean, there’s a
difference. She’s like him. I’ve decided that, after all these years.
She’s his flesh and blood, so of course she’s like him. But it’s that
she can get completely out of the world. That she *wants* to, in a way.
So the place that you need to latch on to her, the thing you need her to
see about him is too close to what she is. She can’t focus on it. It’s
too much her. I wonder if that makes any sense.”

“Some,” Nathan said. “But I haven’t been following this story as long as
you have.”

“I know,” I told him, and then I think I repeated it, *I know*, over and
over and over, until suddenly it was daylight again, or starting to be.

Isabel always said—I’m sure she still says it—that Nathan was too good
for this world. Looking across their dining room table at him in the
thin yellow morning light, anybody could see the truth of it. It’s a
vision I can never, ever forget: we were both sober and, though we’d
been drinking coffee for the last hour and a half, dead tired. But
galvanized too. That word Lorraine used. Nathan held his head to one
side and watched me, like a healer watching a patient is how I remember
his look, or an amused parent watching a child make his way out of
trouble, out of dense worry. The light bathed him, his face in the exact
meaning of *galvanize*: something electric moved under his skin, burned
in his eyes, which were light blue, almost transparent. You thought
maybe you could get a look through them into his head, into his heart,
but nothing doing. He was zipped up tight, compassionate, sure, but it
was never easy to tell what he needed. He seemed apart from the world
too, like Bean and the Professor, but in a different way, untarnished by
the separation. Isabel was always afraid for him, she said, and that
morning, I knew exactly what she meant. You thought something awful
might happen to him. Because he was so good. Because the world needed
him so much.

The days started to get shorter then, as they are supposed to do after
the solstice. Nice to know you can depend on that. I fell into the
routine I followed for years and probably will for the rest of my life,
the solitary comings and goings of an old fart: an early morning walk, a
day’s work, a drink or two, something to eat, an evening of reading.
During the school year, of course, the work day is teaching, and the
evening is class preparation or paper-grading. I think I have always
been old. The youngest I ever was was on the beach in Sonoma County and
then I called it quits. Enough of youth, I said, and it’s why I’ll never
be a good jazz player— enough of searching and fooling around. Even
before that, though, Bean made me old. Watching her torn up by her youth
cured me of mine. I’m talking like it’s a disease, and a lot of the
time, I think that’s what being young is, a sickness most people manage
to recover from. I used to try to help my students through their bouts
with it, the aches, the chills, the cold sweats, dizziness, slurred
speech, and so many times, I wanted to say this too shall pass, but it
doesn’t seem fair. And no self-respecting youth would have believed me
anyway During the next couple of weeks of that summer, the end of June
and into July, I missed my students more than I ever have. After Barbara
died they helped me through so much waiting, waiting for answers, for
revenge, for justice. They came to her funeral furious, they wept in
class. It seemed like they should have been there, too, in Santa Fe, to
bear witness.

I spent every evening of the following week with Nathan and Isabel,
talking over the facts. We’d eat dinner and then I would start, and
Nathan took careful notes. Isabel usually left the room. Nathan told her
the shortest possible version of the story, and she said herself it
scared her to know too much. But the more I told him, the more clearly I
saw I didn’t have anything, only suspicions.

“We need Jane,” he said, and closed his eyes. It was Friday and we lit
candles to begin the Sabbath. The house was suddenly filled with peace.
I had not known that Nathan and Isabel were practicing Jews and so this
took me by surprise. Nathan said the prayers in Hebrew and we all drank
from a cap of sweet wine.

“Thank you,” I said in my turn, “for helping me out.”

“The Jew,” Nathan said, “is responsible for everything, including God,
since his activity is crucial for the welfare of the cosmos in general.
So I’m just being a good Jew. And I think I see the big picture.”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said, and turned to Isabel for help, but she had
a kind of secretive look, sphinxlike.

“I’ll put it in terms of bombs, then. I think people have to descend
into the broken shells in order to liberate the sparks. I mean
redemption comes through sin. That’s what Jane’s father is doing. That’s
what we’re doing. It’s the only way.”

I nodded, though I understood only a part of what Nathan was saying.

“Next, when this is all over, we’re going to find a matchmaker for you,”
Isabel said. I stared at her, and she laughed. “I say what’s on my mind,
Charlie. You’ve suffered enough. You need a woman to look after you.”

“You could be all wrong, you know,” Nathan was saying to me. “Maybe it’s
time to get the big guns involved.”

“No, no,” I said. “Not yet.”

“I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to do,” he said, “but
I’m starting to feel a litde responsibility myself. Or a lot maybe. What
if I just mentioned all this to a friend?”

We stopped talking then, maybe for half an hour. We were eating but
there was something else in the air too, though I didn’t know exactly
what Nathan was thinking. His silences, I had learned already, could be
very deep, like he’d left his body behind in the chair across from me.
He could wait, just like all the best teachers I’d ever had, wait for
you to come up with the answer yourself, because he knew the limits of
your intelligence. They all know what I think the Professor didn’t ever
know: that intelligence responds not to more of itself, but to faith.

And I, for my poor part, tried to keep my thoughts focused on Barbara,
tried to see her face, eyes brown like root beer, she once said, or
velvet or even some sweeter, softer thing, the slant of her cheek when
her face was slightly turned from me, the exact curve of her mouth, the
feel of her lips on my skin, the sound of her voice, the way she laughed
all the time, at everything, the way *delight* was her view of the
world. It disturbed me that I could see her less and less clearly, and
even this fed my anger and resolve for a while, but I was losing her,
losing some elemental connection to her that kept me dogging the
Professor. It came over me in a very dreamlike way, the presence of a
gulf between us. In bed at night, just before I fell asleep, Barbara was
on the other side of the room, or just outside the window, holding the
baby, and reaching out her hand to me. But the words I’d say back to her
were crazy, from my mind’s night jigsaw: *Fll do the shopping*, I’d be
saying to her, or, *Where are your roller skates, the oil needs
changing, use the dictionary in the cabinet,* as if she’d asked me
questions from the most unremarkable days of our life together.

Nathan’s idea, at the end of the week, after sundown on Saturday, was to
go find the Professor ourselves, though not *as* ourselves but as
hikers, two guys who’d got lost. It might turn out to be true anyway,
the lost part, he said, since it had been so easy for J ane to shake me
off her trail. Nathan and Isabel knew the landscape pretty well, the
hills outside Los Alamos, and they’d already stumbled on a couple of
remote cabins during various hiking trips. Both of these places had been
abandoned, or looked abandoned, but they’d passed them at some
distance, and any occupants might just have been inside with the door
and windows shut.

“Or making pipe bombs,” I said.

“Or that.”

Isabel asked if she could go with us, and Nathan said immediately he
didn’t think it was a good idea. I wondered at his tone of voice, which
was really a lack of tone, a machinelike ratcheted voice which must be
what he used for his clients. It struck me too that he didn’t even
consider allowing Isabel to come along, and for the first time I thought
about danger for myself. Though that isn’t stricdy true. I’d thought
about it before coming west and decided there wasn’t anyone to save my
life *for.*

I’d been calling Jane and there wasn’t any answer. I wondered if she’d
left Santa Fe, though I didn’t think so. Her move out of Las Vegas
seemed so full of intention, the most put-together thing she’d done in a
long time. I drove to her apartment, knocked on the door, rang the bell,
in general made myself a nuisance. I did this for a couple of days, and
mosdy all the shades were drawn and stayed that way, but one afternoon,
the kitchen blinds were startlingly open, pulled up, so that I could
lean against the cool glass, cup my hands around the sides of my face
and take a good look at Jane’s domestic life. Which seemed, from that
vision of it, very small and clean. There was a white porcelain bowl in
the sink, and a spoon beside it. The water in the bowl was opalescent as
if it had displaced a litde milk left from cereal. Next to the bowl was
a mug, corresponding to the tea bag that sat in a tiny dish on the
sideboard. Typhoo Tea, a brand I hadn’t seen in years, didn’t know was
still sold anywhere. The rest of the kitchen, the counters, the stove,
on which there was a blue kettle, seemed almost untouched, *unbreathed*
on, empty canning jars and knives pushed back against the walls under
the cabinets. I had seen Jane’s house in Las Vegas, but I was so full of
finding her and being the messenger that I didn’t really notice
anything. But here the *order* of her life shocked me, the ghosdiness of
it, like the pearly water in that cereal bowl. I felt reduced, or
invisible, like a kind of ghost too, along with her. If I walked out
from under the shadow of her house and stood in the full beating sun,
all that daylight would pass right through me, I’d be nothing but a
veil. Still there was something blinding about all that empty white,
something I had to close my eyes against.

When I opened them again, I looked to the right and noticed for die
first time the side of the refrigerator. It was where my view of the
rest of the apartment ended, but there were pictures or newspaper
clippings stuck to the side. I crouched down to look in the next lower
set of windows where I could see more clearly. Next to a clipping I
couldn’t read was a Polaroid, black and white of a man and a litde girl
who was probably three years old. I got it, instantly but only in my
head, that this was Jane and her father, and then I set about trying to
recognize them, to see how they resembled their older selves. It was
really too far away and the light wasn’t quite direct enough. I wanted,
just for a second, to break into the apartment, just so I could hold the
pictures in my hands, up close to my face, close enough to breathe on.
Still, what I could see clearly was the angle of the Professor’s chin,
that deliberate, arrogant way he held his head, keeping it *above*,
clear of everyone else, out of the path of their messy, dispensable
lives. I hadn’t even known that I *could* recognize him that way, that I
would remember the gesture, the tip of his chin, the oh-
no-pardon-me-fuck-j/0// smile. And then I remembered how the woman in my
Physics for Poets class, the woman I’d loved for a little while, how she
had cried over him when he cracked up. I saw it all again, piercingly
clear, that classroom, the luminous exit sign over the door behind the
podium, the word EXIT burst from the Professor’s head like a thought. I
smelled the woman’s scent, the sweat of animal fear that everyone in
that room gave off, and I realized how much he had liked it, having us,
a bunch of bumbling, sleepy undergraduates, holding us in his power by
making us afraid of him.

In that moment the sensation of losing, losing Barbara and losing myself
at a steady clip, the pace of that loss increased like a voice can speed
up on a tape and become gibberish and then finally a high-pitched whine.
I took a completely involuntary step backward from the window and saw
myself in the glass: older and not wiser, the sun in my hair making it
look washed to gray, the lines beside my eyes, around my mouth cut
deeper, my eyes more shadowy and sleepless looking, grim meanness
playing everywhere, the look of someone who seemed to want nothing but
to be alone, no woman, no children, no pleasure in company, or voices or
laughter. And the view of it all, the final view, I thought, the sight
of my *corpse* this way knocked me forward, and I smacked my forehead on
the window and would have done it again until the glass broke and made
itself jagged enough to finish the job.

I would have except my eyes were still open and I saw the slightest
movement on the floor of Jane’s kitchen, a flash, a shape hunched low at
the baseboard beside the stove, the white gleam of an eye, an earring,
the round face of a watch on the wrist, the hand coming up quickly to
cover the human face. The sun canted in at waist height, so that there
was a skirt of darkness around the entire kitchen, but I could just
barely see Jane, sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up, as she’d been
the entire few minutes while I peered in and took stock. She’d been
holding herself perfectly still, a shadow among shadows, until it seemed
like I was going to drive my head through the glass, and then she
covered her eyes.

We watched each other for a second or two before she moved to get up.
And even when she did, I wasn’t sure if it would be to let me in or to
walk away into some unseeable, unreachable comer of the apartment, and
then just disappear, as she had from Las Vegas. Maybe she didn’t know
what she was going to do either, because she stood fully risen and still
before she raised her left arm, jerked her thumb toward the front door
and finally nodded her head. For those two seconds, though, her arms
hung by her sides, her body fully facing me, in a way that seemed
ancient, the weaker animal giving itself up to the stronger one,
exposing its soft belly, or the enemy showing empty hands, *look here*,
*no weapons.* She was wearing a dark colored tank top and shorts, and
she’d started to let her skin tan, which she either couldn’t or wouldn’t
do in Las Vegas. She seemed more muscular, more a force, less breakable,
less a pleasure to be had.

“Hello, Charlie,” she said at the door. I could see she’d been crying.
“You caught me, I guess.”

“Ditto.”

She smiled the old Bean girl-smile, and ducked her head.

“Have you been here all the time?”

“Pretty much. It’s easy just to stay in the back. I didn’t really want
to see anybody. And I might have been at work. I’ve been going to work.
I’m not flaking out again.”

“Good. That’s good, Bean.” I waited for her to invite me in, but
obviously she wasn’t going to on her own, so I asked.

“Um—no,” she said. “If you’re in my house, I won’t have anywhere to go.”

“Okay. Well. Can you come out and sit? That way, when you have enough of
me, you can go back inside and shut the door. Because you know what I
want to talk to you about.”

“I know.” She turned and grasped the door handle, shook it hard, to make
sure she could get back in, and then came outside to sit on the front
deck.

“Seems like a nice place. Are you okay here?”

“Great. Lots of good luck. I got a job teaching dance, and it’s fine. I
have this life. You know, it’s not embarrassing, or lived under the
cover of darkness or anything like that.”

“You’re taking care of yourself.”

“I always did that. But now I have this great view too.”

And she surely did. Every other structure in town seemed hunched low to
the cool ground, so up here on what was really the third floor, you
could see for miles to the south, almost, you could believe, to White
Sands and on to El Paso, scrubby desert, buttes that seem not to end the
horizon but to give it more presence, something to move beyond, the
constant specter of storms, dark clouds that build and threaten but
never really come any closer. Soft pink light, light that felt young,
new, flooding in from everywhere, as if north, south, east and west
existed in a constant, whirring dance, with Santa Fe and us in the
middle. And it didn’t really matter which was which.

“I have to tell you that I’ve been talking to a lawyer.” I said just
that much for effect, to ease her in. But Bean, the master of the body,
kept hers perfecdy still, her gaze fixed on the far south.

“And what did this lawyer have to say?”

“I don’t have much of a case.”

She waited, perfectly composed.

“I need something else. Letters. Something. Right now, I think he feels
sorry for me. He’s willing to go try to find your father, just a visit,
an accidental—”

“Please don’t do that, Charlie,” she interrupted. She placed her hands
flat on the deck beside her, as if to push herself up and go back
inside. “Please. Let me think for a minute.”

“All right.”

“What I don’t understand,” she said after a while, “is why you just
don’t go tell somebody. I don’t know. Cops. The authorities. Whoever
gets told about suspicions. You know pretty much where he is now.
There’s a tip line, Pm sure.” Then she spit out this last part: “1-800-The Bomb.”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself, you know. I weigh it all out every night before I fall asleep. If it’s not him, no big deal, right? If it is, then good. Great. And let me just say that I’m sure. More certain than of anything else in my fife. But it’s gray. I lie there at night, and all I see is gray. Lie’s your goddamned father, Jane.”

“You think he’s responsible for the death of your wife.”

“I want you to think it too.”

“You’re a coward, Charlie.”

“Maybe. But I want your permission.”

“And his letters.”

“Well. Yes.”

“Why do you want me to turn against him?”

“I don’t want that.”

She laughed at me then: “Of course you want that. You want me to believe
my father is that kind of lunatic. And believe it enough to help you
make other people believe it.”

“Is that turning against him?”

“Isn’t it? Come on, Charlie.”

“Is it?”

“Who should I be loyal to?” she said. “That’s what you’re asking me. You
or him? And you know what, Charlie? You’re so typical.” She was crying,
and for some reason, a deep something I don’t want to admit to, I felt
glad. “So fucking typical. All of you. Men. You can’t make a choice, so
you find one of us to do it for you. You find the exactly perfect one of
us, who’s just managing to hold it together, and you make her choose for
you.” She did get up then, put her hand on the doorknob, start to go in
the house. “Well, not me, babe. I’m not, not, not. You’re on your own.”
Then she turned around. “And I want you to go. I want to watch you

g°”

I tried to tell her I was sorry, explain, but she wouldn’t hear anymore.
She said the word *go,* not loud, she never raised her voice, I remember
that, she spoke evenly. But that was the word. The word *go.*

<strong><em>Nathan AND</em></strong> I **HIKED** into the woods west of Los Alamos on three
separate trips, and we found the Professor’s cabin, what I know now to
be the Professor’s cabin, right away. We couldn’t of course, be sure at
the time, but when I first laid eyes on the place, I was as sure about
who it belonged to as I was about every other part of this story. We
located a trailhead just off NM 4, half-hidden, it seemed to me, in the
lushness of aspen and Douglas fin When we got out of the car, Nathan had
a strange moment of déja vu, strange to watch: he blinked his eyes
rapidly and fell into the trance of a sleepwalker. I had a sense of what
was happening even before he told me, it was so clearly some kind of
brain jolt. And then he said, yes, this was the right place anyway, and
he remembered almost exacdy where the cabin was, the one he and Isabel
had seen all locked up tight. A tiny little singing spark of alarm ran
up my spine, and I wish I’d paid more attention to it, hauled us back in
the car and driven away, back to Santa Fe and dropped into a bar there,
one Nathan liked, called Mañana, taken the name as advice, stayed in
mañana and mañana and mañana until all this passed over us, the cup
passed from us, and it fell to someone else to bring the Professor in.

It was a tiny place, a shack really, maybe twelve feet wide and only
slightly longer. But it was beautiful in a way—it’s an unspeakable irony
how churchlike the place was, purpled cedar with a steep roof to keep
off the snow, in a clearing, pine and aspen trees all around. It faced
east so that the sun would come dappling in on a clear morning. A
smallish— comparatively anyway—fir tree grew right beside it to the
south, and it struck me at first glance like a faithful companion,
leaning slightly toward the structure, the *most* faithful companion,
more so than a dog or even a wife because it could never rise up and say
*I’ve had it with you. Yve had enough.* There were two work tables out
front, heavy plywood on saw horses, a smaller picnic table next to a
fire pit, which seemed to contain ash, and later, when we got up close,
I thought it felt slightly warm, though I could have been wrong, the
warmth might only have been the sun shining down pretty directly. It
doesn’t matter now, anyway. I wanted it to be so. I wanted there to have
been fire. I wanted the Professor to have been at home and come flying
out like some vision of crazy wrath and get us started on the end of
this story.

We stood thirty yards back and called out, *Hello, hello*, *we we hikers
fro?n Santa Fe, and we Ye lost. Anybody home? We don’t want to bother
you, but we need some directions. Anybody ho?ne?* I had this mortifying
sense suddenly that the Professor was peculiar enough to be able to
remember my voice, even all these years later. That would be one of his
strange talents, I believed. Then we waited and listened, for the creak
of a chair, of a body turning over on its mattress, the sound of a human
sigh or the strange and unmistakable vortex of held breath. Or maybe
worse: a door or a window yanked open, the *ka-ching* of a rifle being
pumped, a fuse fit and hissing toward us.

But nothing. Wind in the trees, birdsong, intermittent and not
portentous, not in the least. Water nearby, the sound of it, I thought,
though Nathan said he had not heard it. The smell of pine and dirt and
woods. We called again, the same words, and waited, then edged in
closer, to the tables, the fire pit, calling and talking ourselves
through it, explaining our movements aloud, as if to a blind person. We
knocked on the door and waited, even though there was a padlock. *Nope,*
we said to each other, almost a yell. *Will you look at this? Locked.
Nobody home. We better just, walk east. We better get a move on. We
don’t want to be stuck out here all night, do we?* All the while, taking
in details, saw and paint marks on the tables, warm air over the fire
pit, a bicycle tire, a wheel really, frame and rubber tube, hanging in a
tree. A sure sign, I thought. Rusted, Nathan pointed out later. A couple
of penny nails dropped around the work table, glinting in the sunlight
is how we noticed them.

And then I made what might have been the big mistake, the one that
changed everything, the course of this history. I looked at Nathan and
from nowhere Robert Frost bubbled forth, and I said: *Whose woods these
are I think I know*. Nathan looked at me and frowned. He suspected what
was probably true at that moment, that the Professor was inside, locked
in and silendy listening. Without much of a pause, Nathan finished the
couplet: *His house is in the village though.* It might have sounded
then like we were messing around, like we were city clowns who knew a
litde poetry. But I think now that the damage was done. I heard it
myself, the taunt in my voice, the challenge.

And so, the second time, the Professor came out when we called. We
couldn’t say we were lost, but we stood in the same spot and called
hello and almost immediately the door opened, and there he was, the
Professor, seventeen years older, but still every bit himself. Tall and
thin, bearded, his hair a litde wild, but not alarming. That lift of the
chin, though, unmistakable and enraging. And I went for it—saw Barbara’s
face, and the lack of it, then saw red, literally, her blood, what I
wasn’t allowed to have. I took a quick step forward and Nathan put his
hand on my arm, an innocent gesture, as if I had only lost my balance.
Steady, I told myself, hang on. We stayed where we were and he talked to
us.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he asked, and I tried to remember
the tone of voice, the accent, from college, but of course I couldn’t,
except that the word *gentlemen* rang with irony.

“Hiking through,” Nathan said. “Surprised to find you this far in.”

“You’re way off the trail,” the Professor said.

“Are you up here year round?” Nathan asked, carrying the conversation. I
still didn’t trust my voice.

“Pretty much. Occasionally, I winter in Monaco.” A beat and then Nathan
laughed. I tried to. The Professor’s mouth twitched up at the left
comer. It was like talking to air, I’ll always remember that, his way to
make you feel mocked by air. So what can you do, claw at air, spit at
air, talk back to air?

“Not much snow?”

“Not really. Good shovel. Strong back.”

“How long you been up here?”

“Twenty years, give or take.”

“Wow. Must be nice,” Nathan said. Then he looked at me. “We’re looking
to build. A big enough place for two families.” He cast his arm about in
a circle. “Do you own all this, or rent?”

“Whose woods these are,” the Professor said, and I tried not to jump out
of my skin, and race toward him, get it over with, all that polite
masquerade. When I recovered enough, I studied his face, but I couldn’t
read anything. Nothing. He waited then, surveying us calmly, taking a
silent accounting of our clothes, our gear, the state of our hiking
boots. “I rent,” he said finally.

“Is it anybody we could get a hold of? Is there more acreage, do you
think?” Nathan asked.

“Anybody you could get a hold of,” the Professor said, musing, a litde
puzzled, like a foreigner trying to get a fix on the local talk. “No,”
he said. “I was just thinking how we’re all renters in a sense. I own
it, actually. About three acres.”

“Mind if I ask what you paid?”

“I mind,” he said, with a litde rise in his voice, as if maybe he could
be won over. Then he smiled and shook his head, eyes closed. “I’m sorry.
I don’t see many people, so the niceties of conversation sometimes elude
me. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an attorney,” Nathan said, “and he’s a teacher.”

“Ah,” the Professor said, turning to me, “whereabouts?”

“Boston.”

“Yes,” he said, “I taught for a while. In California. Science. Until the
discoveries got ahead of me.”

“That can happen,” Nathan said.

“Where do you think it will end?” the Professor said. “With a whimper?”
He turned to me. “Do you know Eliot?”

“I do,” I said. “Though he’s out of favor these days.”

“Yes,” the Professor said. “Anti-Semitism. I read all about it in the
library. The *New York Times.* The best paper in the country.”

“The best,” I said. “The best there is.”

“Yes,” he said again, then put his hands in his pants pockets and rocked
back on his heels, that old gesture of<em>you’re standing on my
property.</em> It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen, this
man affecting that posture. It was worlds colliding. I thought, *This is
so American. I could just kill him now, here, cold-blooded. So
American.*

“Have a nice trip down the mountain,” he said, then turned, disappeared
inside his cabin and shut the door.

We talked about it, back and forth, all the way to Santa Fe, and then
over dinner too. Both of us. A recluse, a hermit, overeducated, out of
touch. Only the *Times* for a link to civilization. Maybe that was all
he was. Nathan believed it, then I did just for a second, then we both
doubted everything, doubted anyone so far from the world could make and
deliver bombs, I felt cleaned out, robbed, exhausted. I’d been expecting
so much more, that I’d be certain and Nathan would see it too, that he
would come to the door with his hands full of wires and nails and
gunpowder. That he’d reek of chemicals, ask us to mail an odd-shaped
package, that he’d have blood on his clothes, that he’d say, *Charlie
Parker, I did it.*

And then there’s this, which I’ve never admitted to anyone, this
disappointment, so ridiculous: he didn’t recognize me. I believed he
would, which might throw my entire story right here into doubt, only
doesn’t it make me completely believable, that I would confess to such a
hungry ego? It was all right that he didn’t know my voice. Voices
change, fill with smoke, deepen with disappointment. But I knew I didn’t
look all that different. Not so young, but still the remarkable product
of Mr. and the first Airs. Parker. The height, the ears. The scar below
my right eye, the way the shape of it tells the whole story: the knife
over my head like a slice of moon, the blood warm like tears. He’d
forgotten me, that’s all. Very simple, very common among teachers, who
see hundreds of students a year. And I wondered, in my unmade bed of
selfishness, if I could jog his memory. Nathan said we wouldn’t get much
from him, not much more, that what we needed were Jane’s letters. Fie
remained, when it was all said and done, unconvinced. So I was the one
who wanted to go back up again, just one more time. I said *it, just
once, Nathan, and then Fll go work on Bean some more.* I remember
Isabel’s face through the candlelight at dinner. They always ate by
candlelight. Keeps the romance going, she’d told me. Nathan had shrugged
and given me a kind of joyous, helpless look. But that night, the little
flames lit her face in odd ways, darkened the hollows of her eyes and
below her cheekbones, the valleys above her collarbones. She looked like
a death’s head, a skeleton sitting between us. I remember having to look
away.

<strong><em>The EXPLOSION knocked ¿me</em></strong> back into the trees, into the woods, and
while my head rang from the sound of it, I kept calling Nathan and
asking him to help me. Pieces of the car, a mirror, I remember, rained
down, but only as close as my feet. The fire, the flames shot up in the
triangular shape of a fir tree, a Christmas tree, and burned bright
orange. When the gas tank blew, the heat was more than I thought I could
stand. And then the woods were utterly silent, for what seemed like
hours afterward, a crackling from the burning car, but no other sound.
It took a long time, I thought, for anyone to find us. This was not true
of course, but as I lay with my head and neck jammed against a fir tree,
I thought a lot of time was passing. I thought I had grown old, maybe
had children, raised them, and watched them leave me, watched them from
just that peculiar and painful angle. I tried to remember who their
mother might be, hut couldn’t. Women, I thought, were always mysterious
that way, absent.

Isabel did not come to visit me while I was recovering. I didn’t go to
see Nathan remembered or buried. I believe I will never see her again,
and I understand. I don’t think I could bear it either.

The Professor had not been at home that day—or else he had not chosen to
come out and greet us. Of course he wasn’t there, Nathan’s voice still
says in my head, he was down at the trailhead where we left the car. No
one saw him, though Pm told he would have mosdy been under the chassis,
so that’s not surprising. All it takes is dynamite and then a detonating
device attached just about anywhere under the hood, around the engine,
motion-sensitive hardware set off by the vibrations of an engine roaring
to life. *Roaring to life* is the phrase. The metal in the car does the
rest, makes its own shrapnel. Nathan’s body would have been shredded and
burned right along with the car. I went back because I thought I’d heard
something, felt something fall out of my pack, keys, a jangling at the
edge of the consciousness, and Nathan said he’d get things going. We
were late because we’d waited for the Professor to show up. And he
didn’t. Or else he was watching us from somewhere inside the ocean of
trees that made up his three acres. Watching us, impassive, looking at
bodies that would soon be in shreds.

There wasn’t any blood, that seems to me the strangest part of Nathan’s
death. I can understand, I can intellectualize that there *was* blood,
*had been* blood, but it was burned up with everything else. Still, I
need to see it. My dreams are full of this need: a car door opens and
Nathan’s blood pours forth, running through the streets of Oakland,
Berkeley, Westwood, Santa Monica, Winchester Massachusetts, everywhere
I’ve lived. If there had been blood, a bloodied shirt, a seat cover, a
shard of glass, I would have taken it to Jane Gillooly and said, *Be
loyal to this.* I would have said, *You had it in your power.* Instead,
there was nothing left, nothing to take her. I didn’t think I could see
her at all. She had to come around by herself.

And her father. He must have known what would happen, that I would talk,
tell, name him loud and clear to all interested parties. And there were
plenty of them, crowded into my hospital room, lined up outside the
door. He must have understood that now his woods would fill up with
strangers, that he’d be found out, dragged out. He must have known.
Already it was happening. In two weeks, it would be July 16<sup>th</sup>, and the
fiftieth anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The
woods were already darkening with scientists and druids, equations and
spells, everybody looking to purify, simplify, sanctify. Exorcize the
demon.

** III

Once upon a time. The modern world began as a fairy tale.

In Germany, in 1923, a theater seat sold for an egg.

My daughter Jane said to me, Dad, you’re an extraordinary man, but what
I had to say back to her was, no, I used to be an extraordinary man.

Leo Szilard was taking a walk in London. As his thesis topic, he had
been given an obscure problem in relativity theory. For months, he made
no headway with it. He wasn’t even sure it was a problem that could be
solved. He read in the *Times* that an English scientist, Lord
Rutherford, said liberating atoms on a large scale could not be done.
Szilard hated to hear that something could not be done. He went for a
walk, and in the act of stepping off a curb saw how a nuclear chain
reaction could be sustained. He saw the future.

Sometimes from the top of the ridge outside Los Alamos, I believe that’s
what I’m seeing also. The future. I came here to be at intellectual
Ground Zero, the place where, fifty years ago, the snake began to eat
its tail. Some days I wake at dawn, or just moments before, and the land
spreads out in front of me, so lovely and new, gray fog pearling in the
trees, a dream of a world, and I feel sure it can be saved, this earth,
the gende spirits abiding here. I can see it beginning to happen, people
turning their backs on technology I walk my bicycle down the trail and
then ride it along the highway to a place where I can buy flour, sugar,
a newspaper. I want to take Mary Ellen Rappaport, the store clerk, by
the hand, tell her everything will be all right. I have a vision of my
old age, a woman in my house, children, the promise of their children.

But then, I don’t know. The smallest things. A car horn behind me, too
close, bloodied fur by the side of the road, a rabbit, maybe, a
surprised fox, crows picking it over. Sometimes even the smell of meat
cooking.

I am interested in what people build when they start to worry that time
might be short, there might be nothing left. I made a shack of scrap
wood and rock. An underground garden in Fresno, California, built
through hardpan. The tops of the citrus trees are at ground level. A
castle of bottles in Los Angeles. Empty bottles. Plenty of storage
space. For what?

The Birdman of Alcatraz too. Even when the modern world has imprisoned a
man, he could still fly away.

Why have I done what I’ve done? A few possibilities: it might be because
I never saw the ocean until I was nearly twenty. And then, even then, I
thought I was seeing the ocean when what it really was was a bay. Close,
but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

We used to say that to each other in school. I said it far longer than
anyone else. They all grew out of it long before I did. So perhaps I am
a case of arrested development.

It might be because I am an only child. Now, that is.

It might be because I had a brother who was killed in Vietnam. The
army’s official explanation was that he choked to death in the mess
hall. Two days before his official discharge. But I know better.

It’s hard to know what to think about that. Choked to death on *what*?
Government bile, government phlegm. Of course there was no such
explanation in the letter. The army lied to me as it did to all of
America. I know how Benjy died.

When I worked at the match factory in Chicago, there were always little
fires. Never more than one at a time, but easily one a day. Small
incendiary moments, a flash across the room and a woman’s voice, sounded
like the cooing of birds from where I was. The men who worked there
never got used to those fires, but if a woman stayed long enough, a few
months, say, she would. I often think of that. What is it about a woman
that enables her to live with the constant threat of fire?

It might be because I am a man and have no power over anything or
anyone. But this seems so easy an explanation. I should get a pet then.
A dog. I could say sit, and it would. But all the dogs in town snarl and
bark at me, chase me on my bicycle. A snake, then. A poison tree frog.

I worked in the match factory the summer I was sixteen, took the El in,
the El out. There was a woman who worked nearby, named Cleo. She was
eighteen. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Cleopatra, short for that,
she told everybody, but in a tone of voice that made you suspect she was
lying. Dark hair in a long braid. Something black around the rims of her
eyes. Liked to tease me. She had a scent about her too, I still get a
breath of it sometimes, from the piñón. At first, her attention was
flattering, sustaining. T hinking of her as a way of getting through the
day, the long rides back and forth, her face like an apparition in the
train’s darkened glass. And then one day, I just knew, suddenly, that
she didn’t mean it, would never mean it. I had the sensation of die
factory, the noise, the other people, the little fires, all rushing away
from me. I thought I could look down a long corridor and see my entire
life just that lonely, because nobody would ever mean it I walked away
from the conveyor belt, walked outside into the bilious soup of Chicago
summer, stood there, with my fists clenched, waiting to be put out of my
misery, hoping for an explosion to wipe me off the planet. The air
seemed to gather itself up for that, grow hotter and hotter, and then
nothing, city noise, a church bell somewhere far off. Noon. I went back
inside, to work.

My brother’s name is Benjamin, and of course, he was a wonder: smart,
tall, handsome. He seemed many years older. He is still many years
older. I think of him, having birthdays somewhere, that the dead occupy
a fold in the universe where time passes in a sidelong way, glancing off
the bodies of the dead, as if they were encased in armor, leaving no
marks on the dead but moving them along with the world, too. I believe
the bodies of the dead are perfect, and it’s true that the living miss
them far more than they miss us.

Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for the living, as if I were not
one of them.

Just crossing the street, Leo Szilard could see the future of the world.

I know what I am doing is wrong, according to law. But what if the law
is erroneous, incomplete, a relic? The right to rebellion, the right to
bear arms. On the Fourth of July, all the commentators on National
Public Radio read a section of the Declaration of Independence. They
always give Nina T)tenberg the parts about justice, judges. There’s no
funny parts for that ridiculous cowboy person, nothing for the
ricketyvoiced southern woman who writes far too sentimentally about her
*Momma.* This year, when I was listening to it, I wept. The right to
rebellion. It’s a beautiful document, clear-headed and graceful.
Children should be made to learn it, in every school grade, until they
can say it like a prayer, all together, their sweet voices, like a flock
of angels.

Ernest Rutherford grew up in the New Zealand bush. He shot wild pigeon
in the miro trees, worked his father’s flax mill. The language for
making flax is beautiful and strange: the plants are cut wild from
aboriginal swamps, and then retted, scutched and hackled to make linen
thread. Rutherford lost two younger brothers to drowning. He helped his
father search the Pacific shores for months.

His ultimate distinction in school was his ability to be astonished.

Ret is to soak, scutch is to separate by beating, hackle is to comb out
with a toothed instrument. I liked these words better before their
definitions made them so mortal.

Dying is the smallest, most insignificant thing that can happen to us.
It’s a wonder so many people are afraid of it.

The sound of bombs dropping. Not long ago, there was a hiker killed and
another injured in my vicinity. Since then, there has been the constant
whir and chop of helicopters overhead. A few months before that, there
was a child lost, I heard, found after three days, unhurt, just tired,
very hungry. The same noise then too, the drone of machinery, the buzz
that grows louder and louder until you think something will flash and
explode in your head. I had the smallest inkling of what it must be like
in a city under siege. Imagine: the silence at night which means only
that the enemy is coming for you by some different route. The terror of
birds’ wings beating around the face. Something divine about it too.
Beating, wings, the lost child hauled up out of the forest on the third
day, his first gulp of water, one piece of bread and then another. His
mother waiting for him on the ground, her arms raised. Years later,
grown up, he would try to find ways to be that alone again. He would get
into his car, drive down roads he did not know, take wrong turns on
purpose, spend whole afternoons this way. Always the disappointment of
recognition.

The land around me is filling up with men. When Birnam Wood comes to
Dunsinane.

I have circled somehow back to the beginning.

My memory is more acute than most people’s. When I was six months old,
no one held me anymore. For a long time. I swear I can remember.

I have circled somehow back to the beginning.

And dren I did not want to be held.

In a novel, I came upon the word *overloved.* Looked at it on the page
for a long time. What can it mean? There are those questions people ask
themselves forever. Loved too much?

Men and their inventions are destroying the earth. I would never harm a
woman. I understand they are what we have made them.

The Luddites smash their power looms.

What we have made them. Soft. Some days I wish for a wife and children.
I would not wonder so often, then, if I were really here.

Immanuel Kant never married. Reason must, he believed, determine the
will. Is it not of the utmost necessity to construct a pure moral
philosophy which is completely freed of everything which may be only
empirical and thus belong to anthropology? It is not sufficient to that
which should be morally good that it conform to the law; it must be done
for the sake of the law. An action is moral if its motive is presented
completely *a priori* by reason alone. Anything else is just psychology.
An action performed out of duty does not have moral worth according to
its purpose, but in the method by which it is determined. Suppose a man
is fall of sorrow, which makes him unresponsive to other people. He is
kind enough, but others’ needs leave him unmoved, because he is so
preoccupied with his own. If he can wrench himself out of his own
insensibility and perform some kindness because he feels it is his duty,
then his actions have real moral worth.

Kant, the old Puritan. Self-examination without blinking. Pure
abstraction. No bodies.

I took by the throat the uncircumcised dog and smote him thus: copper,
plastic, and galvanized metal pipes, with plates on one end. Aluminum,
zinc, lead, and potassium chlorate. Solid cast ingots. Batteries and
electrical wire for detonation.

One night not long ago, I dreamed I was buried under four thousand
pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

Nature is the opposite of history. Nature is the corrective to history.

There are tasks yet to do. Visit Alcatraz, find out the true story of
the Birdman, his wings. Learn to sail. On a lake, which is the earth’s
eye. Thoreau wrote that. Poor man’s Emerson. But still, in the summer,
more than two thousand people a day visit Walden Pond.

White pine, oak, and birch. More trees today than there were 150 years
ago. A good sign. I would like to visit again some day, but I won’t be
able to. Some things you just know. Saved by Don Henley, an Eagle,
raised a Catholic or a Baptist, I am almost certain. So acute the
presence of evil in the songs he writes for himself. In my father’s copy
of *Walden*, *or Life in the Woods*, at the very end, he had written,
*Thank God.* Meaning thank God the book had finally ended. All his life
he spoke of how he hated it, that book, called it, spitting, *The Pond.*
I often wonder why he read the whole thing, why he didn’t just quit when
it began to irritate him. Duty.

Civil disobedience. The bull by the horns, that’s what I’m doing.

“People at Walden are always asking, ‘What would Henry think of these
crowds?’ ” said a park service supervisor. “But then we tell them they
can’t get in, and they say, ‘Henry would have said *Practice civil
disobedience*.’ We try not to guess what Thoreau would have thought. I’m
not sure he would have stuck around.” A woman tourist said she was
amazed by the young women with tattoos, butterflies and roses. Ankles
and shoulders.

My daughter said, “But Dad, it’s a tasteful tattoo.”

Did I ever imagine I would be the father of so beautiful a daughter?
Even her mother’s beauty cannot account for it.

Then the terrible drinking. I don’t know, really, how terrible. In those
years, in all those years, I never saw her. She said, Dad, it used to
help me see where the road went through the forest. The first drink did,
but then she’d get fooled. Wouldn’t two drinks make the road clearer,
wider, straighter? After that, it would take two, then three drinks to
make anything much happen at all. If two was clarity, three was truth.
Fooled by numbers.

I have a sense sometimes of numbers as the purest, truest thing in the
world. I can hardly explain it. The feeling comes at me the way I have
heard other people describe the onset of a migraine. There’s a rush of
sensation from the back of my head forward, a glimpse of something, a
lifting of the veil, just for an instant. I see all experience
quantified. Sometimes, on educational children’s television, numbers
will be endowed with life, will be animated, move around on the screen,
acquire a kind of narrative in order for children to learn to count.
What I feel is something like that. But not exactly. And very brief. A
shadow. If I could see more I might be transformed. Perfected.

Coolness and slow fluttering, that would be a human perfected. A quality
and not a thing, not a being. Coolness, slow fluttering and light like
this, early evening in northern New Mexico. Coolness, slow fluttering,
light the color of flush disappearing along a woman’s neck.

Even though her mother was very beautiful. Is still very beautiful,
probably.

Buckminster Fuller said, when he is working on a structure, or a
problem, he never thinks about beauty. He thinks only how to solve the
problems. But when he has finished working, if the solutions are not
beautiful, then he knows he is wrong.

July 16, 1945. This is so well-known, it has become a parody of itself:
As Oppenheimer watched the first atomic bomb explode in a test near
Alamogordo, a passage from the Bhagavad Gita came into his mind: *If the
radiance of a thousand suns were <verbatim><sic></verbatim> to hurst
into the sky*, *that would he like the splendor of the Mighty One.* Then
as the mushroom cloud darkened the horizon, another sentence from the
same source came to him: *I am become death*, *the Vh afterer of
worlds.*

It really isn’t very difficult for one of us to play God. July 16, 1945.
After that date, mortals could play God, the thousand suns, the
shatterer of worlds. July 16, 1945. In two weeks it will be fifty years
since men could first be little gods. So a man could also choose to save
the world, even if the cost would be death. Not sacrifice. Sacrifice is
war, old as the hills.

It’s not war that I want. I want someone to pay attention, the way most
people do the weather. I understand there is now an entire television
channel devoted to the weather, twenty-four hours a day. I may have seen
it, once, in an airport, though I am not sure.

I want to believe that I am working for the common good. Albert Einstein
and Leo Szilard applied for several patents that dealt with home
refrigeration. They read in the newspaper that an entire family,
including many young children, were asphyxiated in an apartment as a
result of their inhalation of the fumes of their refrigerant, which had
escaped through a leaky pump valve. Einstein and Szilard devised a way
to pump metallicized refrigerant by electromagnetism, a method that
required no moving parts, no valve seals that could leak. I am of two
minds about this. The world ought to be moved by compassion, but not so
quickly or so far.

Entropy: energy dissipates as heat wherever work is done. Heat cannot be
collected back, and so the universe must slowly run down to randomness.
Disorder will increase. The universe is one-way and not reversible.

I have all this knowledge, and it doesn’t help me.

What perhaps disturbs me most, *most*, is that my daughter has someone
else’s name. Gillooly. It’s absurd. Jane Gillooly.

When I met her mother, I was very young and she was younger still. This
was in Berkeley, California. I could not believe someone so lovely would
give me the time of day, notice me so acutely. Perhaps all I am doing
now is an attempt to be so utterly noticed as that. I had only just seen
an ocean for the first time. Except that it was a bay. I took her to the
inside of the Bay, and we sat on the rocks at the water’s edge. The
darkness was terrifying to me, the shapes the land made unfamiliar and
impossible to decipher after the unbroken geometry of the Midwest.
Vectors, Pythagorean perspective, your vision ending in a single point,
as it ought to. We sat on the rocks and it was July 5<sup>th</sup>, and a hundred
yards away someone was setting off fireworks that illuminated the hills
and the water and the curve of shore. With her there, I didn’t feel so
afraid, so irrevocably lost. Cars’ headlights probed the beach,
something hopeless about them, some futile search. I began to realize
there was no one I could ever love more or want to love me.

Even when she was a baby, I took Jane everywhere. She adored my office
at the university. She was very good in the library. Once I brought her
with me to a class when her mother had to be somewhere else and we
couldn’t find anyone to stay with her. We rented a house on a quiet
street, within walking distance from the campus. The landlady lived in
the guest house out hack, and between the two residences she grew an
intricate garden of herbs: lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano, four
kinds of green basil and the opal basil that looks like an undersea
creature, cilantro, lemon balm, mint. She had them all labeled, and
those were some of the first words Jane learned, words for flavoring,
words for exotic tastes. I would bring her in at night to give her a
bath, and all those scents would be clinging to her hair and hands, even
her feet. It almost seemed a shame to clean her up, this litde perfumed
creature. She was a kind of talisman, a little puckish figure of good
luck in the household, more so than children normally are. I could
imagine in ancient cultures the little anointed child hallowed in the
house.

So then what happened? What happened? She was the apple of my eye.

My work is theoretical. You can’t talk to anyone about this sort of work
over a cup of coffee—maybe another mathematician, but it wouldn’t be a
conversation. Mathematicians, in advanced calculus anyway, are like old
lovers. When two of them meet, that’s how it is. Not much of a need for
words, for explanation, shorthand even. At a conference, I might say,
*Ym in boundary functions,* and the other mathematician would smile,
nod, maybe say, *Keep the faith.* For a while, Jane’s mother was
interested. I believe she thought at some point she’d get it, she’d
understand, and then we could have intelligent discussions. But the
truth is, she doesn’t have that kind of mind. Her mind is rooted in the
real, the tangible, the world, the body. Despite all her Christian
Science. She was a lover of trinkets and decoration. In the end, she
wanted more things and fewer ideas. And I wanted the opposite.

Of course I still love her. Even now. I am steady that way. Abstraction
brings on a kind of steadiness, imagine space. Steady, isn’t it? Black,
empty, vast. But what woman would want to be loved that way? Imagine:
*My love for you is empty and vast.* Arid. Like the desert. But even the
desert has its little tendernesses. Think how gendy grains of sand must
fie next to one another in order to avoid being completely worn away.

One day she just took Jane and left. I suppose I saw it coming.
Obscurely. Like a great wave on the ocean at night. Through a glass
darkly. I remember the sound of the door closing, the front door, after
we’d loaded her things. Or the quiet after. Could be that’s really what
I recall. The quiet after, which was utter. I have never known such
silence in life, in the world. But the curious thing was that it matched
the silence inside, the quiet that had been in my head for years. It was
a peculiar equilibrium. I felt as if I would just disappear. For a
couple of days, I didn’t look in the mirror, afraid there’d be nothing
to see. This was during the summer, so I wasn’t teaching. I’d drive up
to the hills, over to Mount Tamalpais, up the coast, farther and farther
each day, stay gone longer and longer. No one cared when I came back, or
*if.* I’d park somewhere and then hike up into the hills, on the marked
paths for a while, then off them, making my way through rhododendron and
maidenhair fern, thorny undergrowth, with no particular destination.
Just up. And over. Butmosdy up. Some solace in that, some consolation,
being that alone on purpose. Choosing it myself. Denying that someone
had let me go.

In the world now, there’s a lot of amusing language for being let go.
Release of resources, involuntary separation from payroll, career change
opportunity, right-sizing. Jane’s mother said, I don’t need you as much
as you need me. Focused reduction, repositioning. Strengthening of
global effectiveness, reduction in force.

For as long as I can remember, I liked to blow things up. That first
science experiment everyone performs: shooting an object into the air,
the propulsion powered by a mixture of vinegar and baking soda, later a
volcano with real fire, the smell of a girl’s hair singed when she
leaned in too close. It’s real power for a child, high drama, a way to
be one of the boys, for a while. There’s a road that diverges in the
middle of high school. Half the boys quit exploding their litde sisters’
toys and discover physical force, their bodies. They push other boys, or
run away from them, or wallop a ball. The other half, my half, keeps
blowing up the world.

A bomb is elegandy self contained. It requires only what is required of
a good athlete: will and timing.

Think of a bomb as down-sizing, a release of resources, as focused
reduction. Exchange of energy. Heat. Light. Fire.

I hardly ever saw Jane after she was six or seven. Her mother moved to
Santa Monica and after a couple of visits made it clear that Í should
stay north, stay away I could have done something, hired someone of the
legal persuasion. I was about to, actually, before my next to last trip
down. But something had changed: when I walked into the kitchen, Jane
looked up from her cereal, and there was nothing in her eyes. No
affection. She seemed barely to recognize me. I don’t think she even
said hello. She was forgetting me, and I didn’t think I had the strength
to stop it from happening.

Her mother became a Christian Scientist. Mumbo jumbo. Impossible to
understand. I tried to read *Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures* so I could have some idea of what was going into Jane’s head
at home. The sense one gets is light and vapor. Eternal gaseous morning.
Complete wakefulness and the accompanying flatulence. Going off to work
in just a minute. It is the most bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed religion
I’ve ever encountered. A religion for certain kinds of salespeople,
those who chatter on to cover up the stains on the ceiling, the
termites, the radon problem, the crack in the muffler, the rolled-back
odometer. Every so often, though, Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy falls off the
wagon and gets sloppy Romantic. With a capital R. In the moment of
death, she says, the living can hear the dead calling them over, feel
the breath of the dead rowing them home.

If poison is swallowed by mistake, and the person dies, has human belief
caused this death? Yes, as clearly as if the poison had been taken
intentionally. In these cases, some people believe the poison to be
harmless, but the vast majority believe the arsenic, the strychnine, et
cetera, to be poisonous, for it is perceived as poison by the human
mind. Thus, the result is controlled by the majority opinion.

Jane’s mother introduced me to this notion. My very last visit to her
house in Santa Monica. She and her second husband, Gillooly, had a son,
who, when I arrived, had just swallowed a cocktail of household cleaning
solutions. He was almost two. Named Adam. WEen I walked in, Jane was
sitting by herself in the kitchen. Face streaked with dirt and tears. It
was seven in the evening, bat no one had thought to give her dinner. Her
mother and Gillooly were in Adam’s bedroom, praying. The house smelled
like death. He’s going to be fine, Jane said to no one, her gaze lost
somewhere in the air. Then her mother came out of the back of the house,
told me what had happened, and pointed to that passage in Mrs. Eddy’s
book, tier hand shook. There was a terrible struggle going on in her
face. In that moment, I could have won her back, but instead I told her
she was a fool. I remember so clearly how it was transformed, how her
face shut just like a door, went dark. She turned and went back down the
hall to Adam’s room. Jane sat exacdy as she was when I came in. She took
up her chant, *he’s going to be fine.* Her eyes were closed.

So began my very first act of violence. In the same moment that I knew
I’d lost my wife again and forever, I saw a cast iron frying pan on the
stove, drew it into my right hand and walked down the hall, following
Jane’s mother. She didn’t seem to hear me behind her as I entered Adam’s
room, saw the back of Gillooly’s big, stupid head and let fly with the
pan. He fell forward and was still, so I dropped the pan, stepped around
him and gathered Adam into my arms. Jane’s mother told me to stop, but
she stayed back, crouching by the other side of the bed. I loved her
even then, and pitied her, caught there on the floor, afraid of every
single thing she knew in the world: me, her husband, herself, her baby,
God, death, life as it would have to be from that moment on.

In the kitchen, I caught Jane’s hand and told her we had to take Adam to
the hospital. She started to say no, but then took one look down the
hall towards—well, I don’t know what she thought at the time, but she
came away quiedy, and she held Adam in her lap in the back seat, and she
was still holding him when he convulsed a litde and died two red lights
later. She said, Daddy, I think Adam’s in trouble, and then she let out
a litde cry herself, the exact twin of Adam’s silent capitulation.

Of course, I was arrested and charged with all manner of ridiculous
offenses, and then let go. Jane went back to live with her mother, who
soon left Gillooly.

I hear that cry of hers all the time in the woods around my house. In
owls, in rain, in the snapping of twigs when someone strays off the
path. Sometimes even in thunder. The voice of my daughter crying against
death. In thunder when it is far off, in the middle of the night. When I
have been awake for hours wondering whether the world will end in fire
or in ice. I think I must be hearing Jane’s cry, giving me the answer.

Or else I am Lot’s wife, turned to look at the burning world, cities on
fire, turned to look while the others flee. How long before they notice
I am missing? How long before they stop themselves? Before they come
after me? How long?

And more on explosives. This just in, as the culture says. An airliner.
I did not do that. I will not be calling the radio stations, claiming
responsibility, *claiming,* like it was my wife’s fur coat on a
revolving rack and I have the ticket right here, sir, in my pocket,
please it was right here. I saw it just a moment ago when I reached into
my pocket for some change. T) make a phone call. To the radio station.

In all the excitement, my thinking becomes circular.

In Germany in 1923, a theater ticket sold for an egg. An egg. Fry it.
That is about all you can do with an egg. Put it in a pan and turn the
fire high. Leave the shell on. Light the fire. Watch the explosion.

<strong><em>“Hello, Professor,” the barber</em></strong> said. His name was Joe. Joseph
McCullough. Occasionally, I needed a haircut. He took a look at my hair
and said, “Whoa! How long’s it been?”

“To my shoulders. Once,” I said. “In college.” He laughed, but I could
tell he’d rather not. We talked local politics.

“They’re all full of shit,” Joe said. “All on the take. And what for?
Bigger, bigger. More, more, more. And you know what? I hate to say this,
but I don’t care so much when it’s way over in Washington, when it’s all
theoretical and most likely undone four years later. What I get riled
about is my own backyard and stuff that can’t be replaced, or changed
back, like trees and roads.”

“You can replace roads,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

“Like ‘no blood for oil’?”

“Yeah. And look how that went.”

“A bit wild, isn’t it?” I said.

Joe smiled, I might describe it as tenderly. He could have been my
father, about my father’s age. I thought he had a son somewhere in the
East, recalled our speaking of it, the incurable heartache of missing a
child—that may even have been Joe’s line, *incurable heartache.*

“Just a trim, then?” he said, and I told him all right.

I watched it all in the mirror, that careful man with such dangerous
tools, the razor, the scissors that appeared to be flashing light in his
hands. How had he learned to do this? How do you discover it is your
God-given talent to cut another person’s hair?

I wanted to know this about people. At my Ph.D. orals, the chairman of
the committee asked, how did you come to this topic, and I told them
all, like a blind man to the edge of a cliff, is what I said. The
scissors nipped all around my face, like birds, the snip like a kind of
chirping, hysterical. Strange to see that glint of metal at the throat
and not feel fear, which of course I did feel anyway. I do feel fear.
All the time now. You can’t imagine how a man would allow himself to be
shaved by another man. Or by one of his servants, maybe two, one to do
the deed, and the other to hold the jar of creamy lather, looking like a
mortar and pestle.

Mortar and pestle. Very few people know which is which, I have found.

Or to be shaved by a woman. Consider the terror of that. A woman one has
loved for a long time. So long, in fact, that one nearly doesn’t notice
when the tide turns, when the kiss turns to air, when her eyes move
slowly over someone else’s face. Imagine her taking up a razor, turning
your face away from the mirror, saying so sweetly, here darling, lean
your head back. Yes. Like that. That’s right. Like that.

Joe didn’t do this of course. It was only a trim.

“You need to come down more often,” he said. “Come down from the
mountain and get cleaned up.”

“I know,” I said. “But I get busy.”

He looked away. He knew better than to ask, doing what? Busy doing what,
Professor? He asked once and I didn’t say, and after that, he was a
litde nervous. In exchange for the haircut, I mended his fence, fooled
with the engine in his truck, painted the outside of the shop. Never
right away, though. Always later.

Then I was off for groceries. Not much. Flour, yeast in bright yellow
packages, sugar, coffee. Jam in the wintertime after mine ran out.
Potatoes, which I never could manage to grow, rice, chocolate bars. Once
in a while I bought soy sauce, used it sparingly as a woman uses
expensive perfume. Chanel No. 5.

Chanel No. 5. Does that date me?

I got my hair cut and beard trimmed to talk to Mary Ellen at the general
store. About work. Real work. My funds were running low. Even on a
dollar a day, the money went.

“I don’t know the first tiling about it,” I told her. “It’s been a long
time. What do you do? Where do you start?”

“Do you have a résumé?”

“Not anything current.”

“You should probably start there. What kind of work do you want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s out there.”

“I guess you ought to get a newspaper.”

I knew she meant from Los Alamos or Santa h e. I reminded her that all I
had for transportation was a bicycle, and she said that might be a
problem. There was a sensation of fluttering high up in my chest, which
is what always happened when I came down to civilization. Circumstances
beyond my control. When I was alone, this never bothered me. And yet,
there I was, standing in front of Mary Ellen, who was lovely, by the
way, who was giving me her undivided attention. She was blonde and
somewhat nervous. She was too thin and getting divorced and the mother
of two boys. Her husband left her for a girl in Santa Fe. I knew them
for years and never believed such a thing would happen. She had bruises
sometimes, though none lately, none since her husband had left.

You can know someone for years and never suspect.

She was giving me her undivided attention. Which is what I truly crave.
Truly. All the casebooks will tell you this. All the newspaper articles.
All the armchair psychologists. All the Monday morning quarterbacks at
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“Do you think I can get work that I want?”

Mary Ellen laughed at that and shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said.
“Almost nobody can get that.”

“Do you have work that you want?”

She looked at me quickly, furtively like an animal, fearful that it will
be beaten. It made me hate her husband. I wanted to find him and kill
him, and I knew I could do it without much trouble.

“My boys,” Mary Ellen said. “I have my boys.”

“I don’t think I have the right résumé for that kind of work.”

Her eyes opened wide and her hand flew up to her mouth.

“What?” I asked her. “What did I say?”

“You made a joke,” she said. “I didn’t really think—I never heard you do
that before.”

I wanted to tell her I used to be a real funny guy. I wanted to tell her
I used to be a cutup, a laugh a minute, the life of the party. B ut it
wouldn’t have been true.

T thought it was probably a good time to leave.

“I’ll keep my eyes and ears open,” she said. “Odd jobs turn up
sometimes. Often when you least expect it.”

I reached into my pocket for my wallet.

“Free groceries today, Professor,” she said. “Always free on”—there was
a slight pause here—“Thursdays.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Sometimes Wednesdays too.”

I forget from time to time what it feels like to be close to tears. I
forget how it feels to feel and how much I dislike it. A good time to
leave. Before anything happens.

Mary Ellen’s older boy, who was sixteen, rushed into the store as if
he’d been cued. He slid to a stop and looked at us, from his mother’s
eyes to mine, and back again. Whatever it was he saw, he didn’t like it.
He made a terrible face,

“Mom,” he said, his voice like a slap. “Cut it out.”

“What?” she said.

“You *know”* Suddenly he was in a rage, lashing at the magazine rack
with his arm. I told Mary Ellen thanks, that I’d see her later.

Usually it’s two weeks between trips, but I would come back sooner, see
if she had any leads for me. Two weeks had been a rule, but I had been
breaking it, more and more. For seventeen years, I came down only every
two weeks. But then I got out of step, lost my footing, the first wisps
of dust off the mountain before the rock slide. I can feel it, the suck
of bedrock into the pale, waiting arms of gravity, the gasp before the
plunge.

And so I headed back. I had this idea that she might get in her pickup
truck and follow, Mary Ellen might, and so I pedaled more slowly and
planned to take the clear path to the ridge, not the more obscure route,
the one I thought only I knew. I wondered what it would be like to have
a woman watching your back as you moved away from her. If it would be
pleasurable, or if it would cause you to feel like a target, like you
might get a bullet between the shoulder blades. Then, miraculously, I
heard something, the crunch of gravel, a car on the shoulder of the road
behind me, my name being called.

“Hey,” Mary Ellen said, and then when she got out of her truck, “Jesus!
How can you move so fast?”

I turned around, resisting the impulse, which came upon me like a sly
litde joke, to raise my hands over my head. She had my groceries in her
arms.

“You forgot your stuff.”

I knew I was staring at her like the village idiot, but I couldn’t help
it. Benjy once told me he prayed to run into a certain girl, prayed
every day for months, and then suddenly, there she was, at a baseball
game. From then on, he said, he considered God with a kind of respectful
amazement. I was thinking about Benjy and God and looking at Mary
Ellen’s hair, the sun on it. Suddenly, I wanted to be somebody’s father,
wanted it with a kind of fall-to-your-knees longing. I thought of Jane,
how I’d last seen her, how everyone was seeing her. I opened my mouth to
speak to Mary Ellen, but all I could manage was thank you.

“I apologize for Jack,” she said.

“Jack?” I didn’t have any idea what she meant.

“He misses his father.”

“He must,” I said, knowing all the while that what she just told me was
shorthand for something else, the idea coming at me dimly then, like an
animal out of the woods, in the morning, in fog. I couldn’t think of
anything else to say, and I didn’t know whether she wanted me to speak
at all. Dumb as a post, I was, in all possible senses.

So I just stood there.

Farther back in the trees, deeper in than we could see, an animal moved,
crouched, took aim. An animal or a man.

“You forgot these,” she said, and I took the bag from her.

The world seemed to split open, just for an instant. There was fire and
light, and the peculiar music of birds, peculiar in its discord that is
universally agreed to be harmonious. But it isn’t at all, not in our
half-deaf Western sense. I believed I was hearing it, the crack and
flutter of the earth being rent.

What a word, *rent*, meaning both to tear apart and to pay to live in a
place that doesn’t belong to you.

That is what happened in the last moment of contact I had with a being
who might have cared for me. The earth split open, and I had to step to
one side or the other, to the piece of rock where Mary Ellen stood, or
else stay in the place I already was. And I stayed where I had always
been.

I thanked her and turned to my bicycle, swiped at the kick stand with
the side of my boot, all the time, thinking, no, no, and faced away from
her. The sun would have been in both our eyes then. It was later in the
afternoon, and the sun was in my eyes. I wonder if I could say that in
my own defense: the sun was in my eyes, and so I had to continue uphill
and leave Mary Ellen Rappaport, a kind, pretty woman. Leave her standing
behind me. I believe I will always wonder what she looked like right
then, the cool shadows of late afternoon across her face, waving over
her brow, which may have been wrinkled, furrowed in perplexity. Was she
sad? Did she think, there goes another one, walking away, headed out
toward something he wants more than a few words with me. Did she say my
name in her head, call me back in a whisper? I could have known the
answers to all these questions. It was so completely possible.

Then the distance grew between us, the air thinned, it seemed, my breath
whined in my lungs.

I heard her truck, turning, going the other way, back to the store. For
a while I listened to her go, as I was going.

.And then only my breath, the old wheeze, like a dying thing in the
deadfall.

<strong><em>The TRUTH IS, BENJY</em></strong> and I were twins, but we lied about it all the
time. We looked alike as children, but then life set out to separate us,
and so we let it. He was gregarious and I wasn’t. He played sports in
school, and I didn’t. We were identical, scientifically, but you never
would have known it.

In twelfth grade, Benjy was the Snow King, the wintertime counterpart to
Homecoming Queen, the most beautiful boy in school. I was the Snow
King’s twin, sitting up high in the bleachers, waiting. It was quiet
there, so high up.

Perhaps that was all I really ever wanted, quiet. And a moral universe.

I tried to write all this down in my journal. Morality does not fie in
what one writes, but in the writer’s behavior toward the language.

A moral universe. Is that too much to ask?

Sometimes Benjy would snub me in public, pretend not to see me in the
hall at school, make fun of whatever I did, the chess club, the physics
club, loudly, where I could hear. I tried not to go to our mother,
complain, rat on him.

I became her favorite anyway. I was there more often, it was that
simple. Adore often than my father. And Benjy was at practice, football,
basketball, baseball.

Slowly, the story of the day would come out. “And, Benjy, where was he
when all this was going on?” my mother asked.

Even back then, I was telling the story of my life without him in it. As
if I already knew what would happen.

“He was around somewhere,” I said.

“Do you see him during the day? Talk to him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Not every day?”

I shrugged my shoulders

“Here. Do these,” my mother said, pushing a colander of green beans
across the sideboard. Instead of cutting the ends, I bit them oft. She
watched me without turning her head, sidelong. “Well, they’re going to
be boiled anyway,’ she said. “They’ll be sterilized. Play with them all
you want.”

“He bothers me sometimes,” I said then. “Benjy.”

“Bothers you?” She still didn’t turn her head.

“He says things. In front of his friends.”

She let out a long sigh. “You’re different,” she said.

“I’m different? Or Benjy and I are different from each other?”

“Both,” she said. “Both.”

<br>That spring, in our last year of high school, things turned around,
equaled out. It seems to me now, looking back, that all of high school,
perhaps even all of school, every single moment, rewards beauty and
poise and congeniality, popularity. Except on one occasion, except
graduation, and maybe the few days leading up to it. Then all the
shadowy, slow-footed, pale-skinned cave-dwelling creatures like me have
their day in the sun. And we love it so much. We’ve waited for it so
long, we can’t bear it to end. Like everyone else, finally, we’re just
like everyone else, we bask in it and drink too much and wish we could
remember more about it the next morning.

On the day before graduation, honors day, I walked off with all the
prizes, in physics, in math, in English, drama, music, all of them, even
a newly invented prize for people the school didn’t know what to do
with. I wondered later if that two hours in the gymnasium was the high
point of my life, the sustained moment in which I was finally what I
was, and everyone could see it. From the stage, on the back row of the
risers where I stood with the chorus—I think we sang “We’ve Only Just

Begun” but it would have been years before that song was recorded—I
watched Benjy, sitting between our parents, and I beheld something,
beheld is the word, a change of heart, happening right there. Every time
my name was called, each of the nine times, I looked hard, and saw him,
at about award number four, give in. I thought I could see his eyes
focus and his shoulders rise and fall once, almost like a shudder. For
just an instant, he looked scared, and he turned his head slighdy to
find his girlfriend among the sopranos. Another wave came across his
face then and he looked back at me. And then he started to whistle,
through his thumb and forefinger, so that it rose like a squeal above
all the other noise. My parents jumped and tried to quiet him, but he
wouldn’t stop. The applause, which had been careful, polite, reserved,
picked up, as if somebody else, Benjy himself, had joined me at the
front of the stage, was shaking the principal’s hand too.

I could feel his breath on my neck as sometimes I can feel it now.

After that, Benjy whipped the place into a frenzy. Every time my name
was called, five more prizes, he whisded and stomped his feet, whooped
and cheered. The crowd, the students mosdy, followed his lead, and when
the principal said my name for the ninth time, he jumped to his feet,
and the entire gymnasium rose with him. The place seemed delirious, the
teachers looked at each other and stood up too. I remember the noise and
also how I was deaf to it, how I thought my chest was going to fly open,
that it could not contain so much feeling, so much that I did not then
have words for.

How easily people can be led, into crowds, into riots, how fickle, how
malleable, how stupid. But I didn’t care about any of that then.

There was a party that night, which began at someone’s house, I
remember, but not whose—just an outside patio, which was lit and
besieged by bugs, moths and mosquitoes. But then outside that light was
utter darkness, and a lot of it. There were some teachers there, other
adults, but we were drinking, beer mostly, while bottles of hard liquor
circulated quietly. People who had never spoken to me before shook my
hand. One of Benjy’s friends said it was great how the school united
behind something that actually mattered. He said this quietly,
privately, and then I don’t think I ever saw him again. I wondered if
the rest of the football team took him out and shot him. Much later I
heard he died in combat, a few months before Benjy did.

Hours later, I seemed to wake up into myself at Lake Michigan, sitting
beside Benjy. Someone had built a bonfire and we’d humped up the sand
behind us like the backs of chairs. We were talking, the two of us. I
remember there were other people nearby but nobody disturbed our
conversation. Once, Benjy’s girlfriend seemed to drift in right out of
the fire, her dress and hair blown in fire-wind. That vision of her,
Louise, Louise, no other name for her, that vision though has always
stayed with me, her stepping toward us out of the shimmery heat, dust
and ash blowing behind her so that it seemed she was losing bits and
pieces of herself as she came nearer. She touched Benjy on the arm with
one bare foot, and then she walked off behind us.

I don’t believe I ever saw her again either. She really had caught fire
and she burned up behind us somewhere. That is what I have come to
believe about most women.

It seems to me now that we talked a great deal and not at all. It seems
to me that Benjy was trying to tell me what had happened that afternoon
in the gym, when his face wrestled with itself, right before he began to
whistle and cheer. And I think he told me how we were going to die, both
of us, I remember him saying he saw our deaths, they ran in his head
like a movie, and his would be futile, his would have no meaning because
all he’d done in his life was strut around in various uniforms.

“I always wanted people to be happy,” he said. I think he said this.
“You know what I mean?”

I said yes I did know what he meant.

“No you don’t,” he said, not unkindly though, but as if it were a fact.

“Because I don’t understand it. So how could you? I just did what other
people wanted me to do. Even times I made fun of you. People wanted me
to do that. Expected me to.”

I believe this is what he said, although it may be what I want him to
have said. There were millions of stars over us, and waves in the big
lake hushing into the shore, wood splitting and cracking in the fire,
conversations near us, cries from out of the greater dark when someone
splashed into the cold water. It was only May. The world waiting to take
us, but we were going to hold it at bay for a few more hours.

We went in swimming and I don’t remember feeling cold at all, only the
sensation of keeping Benjy’s body near. I think his talk of death scared
me. I was worried that he was prescient, that he would be drowned then
and there. He was the older of us by nine minutes, and I had always
deferred to him, but there in the cold, close darkness of Lake Michigan,
I kept watch over him, told him when we shouldn’t swim out any farther,
when we should head back in toward shore.

At dawn, after we’d had more to drink, I came into consciousness again,
and Benjy was holding my head over a trash can at the edge of the beach.
Louise had her arms around my waist, her feet braced against the metal
can. It seemed a strange arrangement, she taking all my weight, Benjy
doing the more delicate job. She drove us home, and I rode with my
brother in the back seat, my head resting on his shoulder.

Whenever I talked about the past, the whole world seemed clear to me,
sweet in its appalling unconsciousness, its terrible possibility. I used
to tell it, the past, to myself to make sense, the same stories, talk,
talk, talk. After a while, I decided narrative might not be the best
way. That false order, the fie of memory. The arrow-straight plumb line
always taking me to where I couldn’t bear to go.

My father, for, instance. A certain baseball player was back on the
field recently. *He looked caneer in the eye and cancer blinked*, I
heard someone say that on the radio. Jack Kevorkian in a motel in
Michigan, conferring with a dying woman. Law enforcement from the town
burst in on them. Jack Kevorkian wants to be God. My father set his
affairs in order, then he blew his head off in the garage. Sometimes I
can’t stop thinking about it for days. The moments before. The last
second in which he might have changed his mind. The explosion, the smoke
and dust.

Function: the symbol of the West is an idea of which no other culture
even gives a hint, the idea of function. The function is complete
emancipation from any preexistent idea of number. With the function,
Euclidean geometry and Archimedean arithmetic ceased to have value for
the really significant mathematics of western Europe, which henceforward
consisted solely in abstract analysis. Also gone: the common human
geometry of children and laymen, which was based on everyday experience.
Geometry and arithmetic were demoted to practical auxiliaries of daily
life. Cooking. Building a house.

The history of Western knowledge is the progressive emancipation from
classical thought. There is a long, secret battle against *magnitude*,
which means greatness, importance, comparison in terms of size. Think of
that, and the consequences for civilization. Nothing bigger than
anything else. It leads to the end of standards. We are in the midst of
a long, secret battle against standards.

Not so secret.

A boundary: the point at which the transcendent extension came into
conflict with the limitation of immediate perception. Descartes
introduced that language, conflict, numbers as something to be
conquered, to be wrung out.

Apollonian, classical mind: intellect is the servant of the eye.
Faustian mind: intellect is the master of the eye.

A soul, which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of
expression and in the end passionately brushes them aside. The inner eye
Iras awakened.

Euclidean geometry is a hypothesis: *a* to the third power becomes *a*
to the *?ixh* power.

The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, it can be
answered.

Function: correspondence or relationship between two sets. For example,
let A be the set of all males in the United States, and B the set of
females. Then a function from A to B is specified by the rule that each
member x or A is to be associated with the wife of x in B. If x has a
wife, f (A) <verbatim>=</verbatim> y <verbatim>=</verbatim> f (x).

If x has a wife.

I am obsessed with obituaries. Just listen: Helen K. Neary left New York
City to five off the land. Wrote *Living the Good Life*, the idea behind
it being that one can learn to use what is at hand simply because it is
at hand. The archetypal knowledge of building a stone wall because there
are stones underfoot, of making maple syrup because there are sugar
maples all around. And what irony, also Martin Bucksbaum, the inventor
of the shopping mall, dying in the same year. Imagine their shared
ascension, Helen and Martin, the kisses, so tenderly exchanged: I needed
you to run away from, Martin, Helen whispered. And what would he tell
her in return? He would say: the West is one great big last chance, and
so to move East is to see all your chances blossoming backwards. What
happens to a last chance once it’s been sworn off and not looked back at
is it becomes a shopping mall.

Harvey Pennick, too: golf is character, and the quality of your shot
depends on the quality of your soul. My father was an excellent golfer.
He would play all day, if he could. He once told me golf was a
perversion of hunting, gentrified and made modern for pleasure. Always
chasing the prey, always catching the prey, both at the same time. What
about a hole in one? Benjy asked him. On the very next hole, our father
said, everyone plays the worst golf of the day. To make up for it.

John Finley, my master at Eliot House, who died, of course, not
remembering me, except as one of the thousand boys who spilled sherry on
his carpet. First there was sherry and then dinner at the high table
with Master Finley and his wife. Then walking back to my room, or along
the river. How best to throw myself in, where, from which bridge.
Whether to leave a note. At the end of my third year, Master Finley
asked to see me, and I thought, now I’ll tell him everything, maybe he
can help. When I got to his office, I was told he was ill, and the
appointment was never rescheduled. I wonder what might have happened.

All these moments that add up to the emptiness of now.

Sometimes the words come into my head: *I could have been a great
mathematician.* The words come from nowhere. I never could have been
anything of the sort, not ever. I’m very, very intelligent, but I have
never had an original idea.

How many of you can say *that* ?

<em>In <strong>COLLEGE, my FIRST </strong></em>year, I lived in Harvard
Yard, in a dormitory called Wigglesworth, which I was told was named for
the great Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth—and of course his whole
family—whose most famous work is called *The Day of Doom.* It was a
best-seller. Its object was to delight and instruct and terrify. That
seemed to me also the three-part purpose of college.

The strangeness of living in community with strangers. Sometimes it
seemed that all that truly belonged to me were my bodily functions. Up
at Radcliffe, the women all menstruated at the same time, or so we
heard, and the men roamed the Yard in hungry, aimless packs. At
midnight, when there was a hill moon, the whole freshman class stood
between Matthews and Weld, turned their faces to the sky, and howled.
Everyone else seemed to know to do this. I was asleep in my bed the
first time it happened, dead asleep and then called suddenly awake by
the voices of a thousand wolves. My roommates were gone. I thought, for
days, I might not recover—not from the shock of that waking, but from
the sense of being shut out forever from the human pack.

Benjy was already flunking out of Champaign-Urbana. *Champagne*, he
would spell it in his letters to me, *Fm drowning in it.* He quoted the
famous phrase of the French monk Dom Perignon, *Co?ne brothers*, *I am
drinking stars.* His letters were fascinating, witty, tortured. I still
have them all. I am coming unglued, he wrote in one of the last ones,
and in the envelope was a hank of hair, tom right out of his head,
bloody piece of scalp still attached. I told him to come to Cambridge,
and he wrote back that he was too stupid, they’d sniff out his ignorance
at the first gate and send him away from Harvard Yard, *to Braintree*,
*maybe*, he wrote, *but even the plant life there woidd look down on me.
Pardon me,* flora.

There was no moment when I was sure of what I was doing. Or maybe one:
in the winter, after the first snowfall, when the people from Georgia,
from southern California slipped down the icy stairs, or suffered in
their thin cloth coats. I knew winter, the cold, the wind that will flay
you alive. I knew what I was doing then when it was time for solitary
lurching through snow.

A year-long course in English literature. Lectures and section meetings,
hundreds of students. My section leader, a graduate student, was dying
of brain cancer. His dissertation was on Edmund Spenser. He was dying
and writing, dying and writing. Just like all of you, he said to us one
day, only faster.

There’s nothing I don’t know about Spenser, he said. Five years ago, he
said, in my first year of graduate school, I gave a paper at the Spenser
society meeting in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They are quite the party crowd,
those lovers of Spenser. One of them was a Greek Orthodox priest. On the
last night, I wandered away from the farewell dinner and into a bar and
then around some part of the town of Kalamazoo. I knew there was water
nearby, but I couldn’t find it. I was very drunk in Kalamazoo, and the
only people I knew there were passionately devoted to Edmund Spenser.
For that reason, I felt a peculiar freedom and contentment. I felt as if
a small part of my brain, small but exquisitely valuable, had broken
away from the rest and was floating happily. Two years later, all that
turned out to be true. The worm of cancer had chewed off a morsel of my
cerebral cortex and inched its way inside.

When I write this, I don’t know who I am. Someone I barely knew in
college, or myself.

All that painful shyness. This sentence, again and again, running
through my mind day after day: If I can just walk into the room and sit
down next to someone, it won’t be so bad. But it was always bad. It was
always worse.

The way the river ran next to our fives there. Just to know there’s
water nearby. Bridges to get over it. The lull and suck of water under a
bridge, sometimes very close. The chance to be borne away, to cross
over.

Girls you would never be able to touch, not in a million years. The
blondes from western Massachusetts or Maine, the ones who were born
knowing how to sail. The senators’ daughters, the writers’ daughters,
the daughters of foreign correspondents and consuls and attachés.

’Ihe shock of so much history and so little time.

Benjy came to visit in the spring, the weekend of April Fool’s Day. He
intended to stay just that long, the weekend, but it turned into nearly
two weeks. He slept on the floor in my room, and sometimes on the couch
in the common room, and I hustled him quietly into meals or brought food
back for him. He charmed everyone, right from the start.

The day he arrived, I walked in from class and found him chatting with
my roommates, two other boys—we seemed like boys then—and two women—not
girls—I’d never seen before. One of the women he’d met on the train. She
was coming from Chicago to visit her sister at Radcliffe—and the other
woman was the sister. I stood still and watched them for a moment before
they saw me, and my heart sank. I saw before me the stupidity of all my
aspirations to become a Harvard version of my brother, embraced by a
circle of friends and by a woman. I saw the lie of it all. I don’t think
I felt a thing, just the clear truth, the way Benjy said he saw our
deaths. I walked into the room.

Instantly, he was on his feet, and I thought I saw pure joy in his face,
and relief, which seemed unbelievable. One of us had to cross the room
to get to where the other was—there were couches, chairs, bodies in
between. In that space of time, really just a few seconds, Benjy’s eyes
filled with tears. He embraced me, in front of all those people, and
then hung on. He’d done this at Christmas too, but it was outside our
parents’ house, in the evening, in the snow, which must have protected
him somehow.

“My brother keeps his fight under a bushel” were the first words he
said.

“He sure does,” one of my roommates replied, warmly. “But it makes him
great to five with.” And then I was introduced to the two women.

My memory is that we spent the next week walking, walking, walking,
often with the two sisters from Chicago, whose names were Nadine and
Paula, walking until Nadine left to go back to Chicago. She was older
than we were, and had a job in a bank, she never would say exactly what,
so that “bank” became for the four of us a euphemism for all manner of
illicit occupations. She was, like all the women my brother associated
with, very beautiful. She had long straight hair, which seemed uncommon,
though it wasn’t really, dark hair, and blue eyes. There was a kind of
distance about her, endearing a little because she seemed aware of it
too, tried to erase it, but couldn’t and so she’d fall back into a kind
of musing that we’d all work to draw her out of again a little later.
She and Benjy saw each other for three years after that, and they were
terrible for one another.

Paula was less pretty but more in the world. She lived at Radcliffe of
course and seemed to share my surprise and horror at the daily presence
of so many other people. She played lacrosse, was team captain her
senior year. I thought we might be friends, but after Benjy left town, I
only saw her once or twice, in passing.

But that weekend.

But that weekend, the four of us went everywhere together, really myself
and the Maybeck sisters in Benjy’s thrall. At eighteen, I didn’t know
the word *manic*, but I do now, and I see that’s what he was then,
magnanimous and clever, so charming particularly to Nadine Maybeck. I
thought he was still interested in Louise, his high school sweetheart,
but she never entered his mind. At any rate, he didn’t talk about her.
We went everywhere in Boston—Benjy had been reading guidebooks for
weeks—the State House, Beacon Hill, Fenway Park, the public library, the
harbor, where he lay hill length on a dock and sipped at the water and
told us that it still tasted like tea. I don’t remember any of it now,
not clearly.

I think if I could, I might be saved.

Somebody owes somebody an explanation.

When Nadine left, Benjy was miserable, and I had to go back to class.
When I asked what he did all day, he told me he read and took walks, but
there never seemed to be any books in the room, and when I came in, I
would find him in exacdy the same position on the couch as when I left.

“Go with her,” I said. “Nadine. Go follow her.”

“Flow would I explain to Mother and Dad?”

“You don’t have to explain to them.”

“I do. You know I do.”

“What do you think of our parents, Benjy?” I said to him one day.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean *them*, their lives, what kind of job they did raising us.”

“I miss them sometimes,” he said.

“They don’t miss you.”

I wish I had never said it. I wish I could take it back.

“They don’t miss you,” I said.

“Yes, they do. They say they do.”

“They don’t mean it. They don’t miss me either. They don’t think about
us at all.”

He must have been staring at me, blankly because I felt the need to go
over it again:

“They don’t think about us at all.” I watched him for a moment, then
went on, “It’s just the way they are. I try not to mind it, but I worry
that you do. Out of sight, out of mind, that’s them. I think I would be
different with my children, but you can’t let it bother you.”

“It doesn’t.” He paused. “It didn’t until now.”

“You’re probably like them. I’m the one who’s different, I guess. I miss
everybody.”

I was standing outside myself, listening to my voice say these words.
Benjy looked stricken.

“We’re all we have,” I said. I remember I looked at my watch. “It’s time
for dinner.”

I **HAD STARTED DOWN** some strange path then, and couldn’t turn back. I
decided Benjy needed to know the truth about our parents, that they were
weak and silly, too much taken with appearances and social status. They
were harmless, really, but we had to be careful not to become like them.
Sometimes, I said, I heard the ghost of our mother in Benjy’s voice, saw
her in his mannerisms. He needed to watch himself, he needed to put them
at a distance. I worked on my brother all that week.

It pains me to write this now, somewhat pains me. Mosdy because I cannot
see my motives clearly enough. I cannot really remember my parents. I
don’t want to.

We drank late into the night at bars in Somerville and over in Central
Square. I was developing some horror of Cambridge. I was growing tired
of my brother in Cambridge, striking up conversations with other
students, always the charming one. I was tired of that look on people’s
faces when they discovered Benjy was the one returning to Illinois, and
I was staying. But he drooped and faded in those farther bars, where no
one wanted to talk, where there was only work, exhaustion, and sex for
hire, no such thing as a young man drunk on promise, on the beginning of
his life. I watched Benjy, made sure he was less than his happiest self,
much less in fact. I watched us both in the mirrors behind the barkeeps’
heads, the mirrors in the mens’ rooms, in the liquid mirror of whatever
we were drinking. And I believe I saw my own face altering, becoming
less like Benjy’s. Truthfully, this had been happening all our lives,
and after the age of ten, it happened at a perplexing, irregular rate. I
could see it in our parents’ expressions. One or the other of them would
look at us, eating a meal, listening to the radio in the car, and the
smile would drift into puzzlement, into—I sometimes thought—horror. At
first I believed it was that they had confused us: suddenly our mother
or our father didn’t know which one of us was which. But later, I came
to understand it was that they could see us change, maybe even see our
futures, as Benjy had been able to. Our perversely twinned, destructive
futures, that we would spend our adult lives, Benjy’s short, mine much
too long, tunneling toward each other in the dark.

The night before my brother was to leave to go back to Illinois, we were
sitting in the bar that was to become the Plough and Stars, out toward
Central Square. It was a very warm night, freakish for April, and the
bar was hot. We said to each other how good a swim would feel, and we
thought of Walden Pond, which neither of us had ever seen. So we drove
out in Paula Maybeck’s car, which I had more or less appropriated using
Benjy’s charm. I don’t believe Walden was very far from Cambridge, I
don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me that we got in the car, drove
a block, and then we were there. I don’t know that I had ever been in
such darkness before, such velvety, seductive *absence.*

Now, I live in it all the time: on moonless nights, up on my mountain,
that same sense of being stricken, sudden blindness, astonished. An
archaic definition of astonished is to be bereft of all one’s senses.

So with Benjy that night was the first loss of all my senses.

When we got out of the car and shut the door, we were lost. We knew what
direction to move toward the pond, but not what lay in our path. Benjy
reached out for my hand as I came around the front of the car, I felt
his hand moving in the air before I grasped the flesh of it. It was a
ghost hand, out of nowhere. It was more like a hand moving away than
moving toward.

I remember a short walk through underbrush, past pines and sycamores, to
a steep bank and then to the shore of the pond. Still holding hands, we
seemed to step into air, and then fall into sand. Little waves lapped at
our feet.

“Shoes and socks,” Benjy said, as if the darkness had caused us to
forget what to do first.

“Right,” I said, then, “everything else?”

“Everything else,” Benjy said. He had assumed, in that spectacular dark,
his old role as leader, his ancient part, the one he’d been given in the
nine minutes at the very beginning of our lives in the world.

We stripped off our clothes and stood up, no longer holding hands, both
aware, I think, that this kind of nakedness changed everything, even
between brothers, or might, or could. The darkness was overwhelming,
like a weight pushing us back from the water. The night, though, was
deliciously mild. There was some kind of leafy whisper high above us,
but around our bodies, only the sense of space. Air so still you could
lose track, momentarily, of where the air stopped and you began.

I have felt this once or twice since, but not recently because I have
given up my body.

The chill of the water, though, brought our skin back to us. I suppose
Walden Pond never really warms up very much. I remember Thoreau wrote
about the ice breaking up in March, and I know that he took and recorded
the water temperature all the time he lived there. It could not have
been more than fifty degrees, probably less, I don’t have much sense for
what’s what in the world of the thermometer. It was certainly water cold
enough to make a person scream or curse, but Benjy didn’t make a sound,
and so I, following him, didn’t either. When we were knee-deep, I
thought to stop, but I could hear Benjy wading on ahead. I believed
suddenly that if I got lost from him there, we would both drown, and a
second later, I wondered if that was what he wanted. I called out his
name, and he stopped and waited for me, grasped at the surface of the
water and found my hand again. We walked until the water was to our
shoulders and then above.

“Benjy,” I said, “shouldn’t we stop?”

All right,” he said, “then swim.”

He let my hand go and dove. I felt on my face the little splash his feet
made as they slipped under the water, and for a long time, the night was
perfectly silent.

As it is now, right now. Benjy has just now disappeared beneath the
surface of the air, under the softening crust of the earth, and soon he
will come back up, materialize right next to me, and shake off whatever
element it is he’s been swimming in.

The past and the present move closer to a single point, and the point
moves forward.

There is no such thing as was.

It seemed he was under a long time.

And in the Los Alamos hills, I am yelling for him and stretching my arms
out, sweeping them through the air to find his body, the body that no
one will ever be able to find because it was blown into liquid and ash
by the United States Government and its folly, its clownish whim in
Southeast Asia. If it could be that night again, he would finally
surface, and our bodies would move into each other as they did then, his
whole body, legs and arms, chest and hips, his hands that were high up
on my back, his legs around mine. I have never held another person, man
or woman, as I held my brother that night. I have never been held as he
held me. There in the dark, I was his twin again, balancing together in
the same element as when we first held each other, clutched and then
were borne away into fight. If we had been able to see, the resemblance
would have been striking. Stricken, that’s what we would have been.
Because my face was exacdy his face, the precise mirror of it, my mouth
was his mouth. The fines of our bodies fit together the way lover’s
bodies do, we were that *same* that lovers crave.

I said to Jane’s mother once, desperate, *I want to be like yon, tell me
how to be you.* A wish to have Benjy back, my old same flesh. In any
mirror, that moment stares back at me, impossible.

Calling over the hills of Los Alamos to him, my booming voice, and then
the pulse of no answer. The air beating full of silence.

I don’t know how long we stood there—isn’t that the phrase lovers use?—I
gradually became aware of our twoness, pond water dripping off the end
of Benjy’s hair onto my shoulder, my left shoulder, the side farthest
from shore. His right cheek pressed next to my left. He was saying
something, and I was listening, and trying to talk too, say the same
words just as he said them. But what he was telling me was that he
didn’t want to go back. He was a miserable failure at school, he
detested it, he missed me, he hadn’t realized it before, but our parents
were pushing him too hard. He said *breathing down my neck*, and I could
feel my own breath breathed back off the side of his face. Don’t make me
go, he was saying, over and over, and I tried to think how that could
be: school would be over in a few weeks, my roommates wouldn’t mind.
Then it would be summer. We could get jobs in Chicago or Boston, an
apartment, talk about what to do the following year. I said all this to
Benjy, and he stood wavering in my arms like a water reed, listening,
drooping a litde onto my

shoulder, which I believed then meant he was giving in to the Ufe I
described.

Now I think he may have been falling asleep.

I could see the tops of trees outlined against the sky, and nearer, a
dull gleam that gradually became the oudine of Benjy’s shoulder. By the
time we waded back in to shore, we could see our clothes, see the path
back to the car. There was something, a force, in the air, all around
us, imminent explosion. Benjy tried to speak, but all that came out was
a cry. Then he said, I can’t get in there, meaning Paula Maybeck’s car,
I can’t get in there, he said again, if I do, I’ll blow up. I’ll go to
goddamn pieces, was what he said. It was not quite five o’clock and I
had a class at ten. I told Benjy he could sleep as late as he wanted. In
the dorm, I gave him my bed. He seemed frail then, worn to the brink of
mortal sickness. He needed me to care for him. I fell asleep on the
floor by the bed, Blinking of summer jobs in Cambridge, apartments, that
it was cheaper to live in Somerville. I was imagining how we could live
on a dollar a day.

I’m awake now, living in New Mexico on a dollar a day.

This is how the United States Government helps the next-of-kin mourn:
after the official visit, there’s a letter and a padded envelope of
personal effects. It is with deep regret, the letter may begin. There
are other phrases too. Why, you ask? Why not one standard government
phrase to tell you your child or husband or wife has been killed? In the
case of a brother or sister, I believe, there’s particular phraseology.
Parents want a different language. Spouses too, a phrase for them.
Siblings. Even twins. Twins, I’m told, are especially hard cases.

Elvis Presley had a twin, Jesse, who died at birth. The story is, Elvis
missed Jesse all his life. Ridiculous. How could a person miss what he
never had? I am sick to death of the Freudians, the feminists, and all
their pathography.

I am a dangerous man. I am a dangerous man. I am a dangerous man. I sent
the bomb. It’s there in my own handwriting.

In the end the water was too cold for us.

There was something between us that love could never be. I wanted to
love women, be in love with women, the bodies of women. I have a child
with a woman. But my brother and my brother’s body, which was my body
too—I am essentially dreoretical: being closer to him, I could begin to
understand myself. There is a kind of need which is pure orb, like
light, physical, but an abstraction too. It was that. Not my need. Not
Benjy’s need. But need which pollutes the atmosphere. Doing one’s part
to reduce the pall of need which hangs over the earth.

Because it has nothing and everything to do with our bodies.

Be patient. I am trying to explain. Please be patient. You can do me no
greater courtesy. Let me tell my side of the story.

Not the electric pleasures of the body, but the body at rest. Having
Benjy near was the body at rest, the body that has all of itself, can
see all of itself. I think sometimes malaise has to do with not being
able to see all parts of one’s own body.

This is difficult.

I see from the photograph that the poet and the President are exacdy the
same height. They are shaking hands. I wonder if each thinks: he is the
same exact height as I am. After that they have a wonderful evening.
They dance with each other’s wives. Later that night, at the Hilton
Hotel, the poet’s wife says, dancing with the President was like dancing
with you. And in the Lincoln bedroom, where they sometimes sleep because
the mattress is better, the President’s wife says, dancing with the poet
was like dancing with you.

For a moment, two men in the District of Columbia are happy.

Sometimes in my journal, I wrote, *I mailed the homh.* Careless,
perhaps, but I want there to be a record. I want to be able to look
back. So often people cannot look back. They do not remember. This leads
to loneliness. They cannot see all the parts of themselves.

I imagine in his last moments Benjy felt this: he could see all the
parts of himself. Because he stepped on a mine, the lower half of his
body would have been decimated and propelled upward through the air,
through his field of vision. He could see all parts of himself. This is
me, he must have said as he fell, and this and this. This is what I am.
Shreds and hunks, gobbets and skeins of flesh. This is a man unraveled,
a man thoroughly gotten to the bottom of.

He said, at Walden, I can’t get in there. I can’t get in there. If I do,
I’ll blow up. I’ll go to goddamn pieces is what he said.

It could happen. Years later, two men in my woods, coming back to their
car from a hike. I’ve seen them before. They are familiar, the exact
twin of Benjy and me coming up from Walden Pond. Something in the air,
the sense of imminent explosion, that their car will burst into flame.
One of them senses this, turns, opens his mouth to cry out, a second too
late. He is blown backward, off his feet, by the sheer force of
everything coming apart. Everything. The fire makes his face ghastly,
shadowed, the features twist inhumanly with grief and pain. I am quite
sure his friend can see all of himself now. Because he was sitting in
the car, the lower half of his body would have been decimated and
propelled upward through the air, through his field of vision. He could
see all parts of himself. This is me, he must have said as he fell, and
this and this. This is what I am. Shreds and hunks, gobbets and skeins
of flesh. This is a man unraveled, a man thoroughly gotten to the bottom
of.

Thus, having been asked what is a man, I answer.

** IV

Jane came to believe all her life had been preparation for this.

She went to see Charlie at the hospital, did see him, but he was
sleeping, and so she watched while he slept. Plenty of other watchers
too. Police, FBI, ATF, Sheriff’s Department, eyeballing her. She might
have been a child again, her fugitive self, always returned to the scene
of the crime in the arms of a cop.

Like a stripper’s work, this story can’t seem to be told all the way.
And even when it is, there are parts the audience still wants to know,
would give anything to see.

She left when Charlie started to look like he was waking up, and the
next time she saw him was at his house. He’d left the door open, or
unlocked, the front door to his apartment, because, he said, he didn’t
figure any more harm could possibly come to him. If it did he was ready
to look it in the eye and say come on trouble, do your worst. And laugh
and hold out his arms like the picture of the crucified body.

All this he said to Jane, opening his arms to illustrate, and she took a
breath and thought a minute and then crawled into bed beside him. He
called her Old Bean, and they went to sleep. She didn’t know how many
hours passed, or if it was days. When they woke up, there was a little
light in the room, in the comers, just along the baseboard and the
molding, greenish, sickly before-storm light. Not enough for her to be
able to tell whether Charlie’s eyes were open.

“Now do you see, Bean?” he said. He cocked his head toward the window,
and Jane saw a man pass by. “From the State Police,” Charlie said. “They
think they see. Do you?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I see what you think. I see why you think
it’s him.”

She did see though. Maybe even saw everything, the past and the future,
lying there, perfecdy still, on into the evening.

“I have a few letters,” she said.

It was dark enough then, in Charlie’s bedroom, so that she would not
have to look Charlie Parker in the eye, would not be able to for another
seven or eight hours. She believed Charlie was as grateful as she was
for that onslaught of night, that little bit of good timing. He waited a
long time before speaking again, she thought he was waiting to see if
she’d take it back or jump up and run away.

“Do you know where they are? The letters.”

“I think so. I haven’t looked at them for a long time.”

“Would you let me see them?”

Jane said it again: “I haven’t looked at them for a long time.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, and turned on his side to face her. He groaned and
she turned too.

“What hurts, Charlie?”

“Everything, Jane. Everything hurts. Every blessed piece of me.” Then he
made a kind of half laugh. “Blessed,” he said. “The inside hurts. The
outside. My bones ache. And all that stuff that’s invisible. That stuff
is fucking killing me.”

He turned away from her and they stared into their separate darknesses.

When Jane thinks about that night now, what she remembers is the old
line about your lile flashing before you: she spent that entire night—
she thinks she did—reviewing her life with her father. Life With Father,
which didn’t amount to much or much to think about. It was so brief. It
seemed, in memory, to have more to do with pain than with anything else.
Janes father closed her hand in a car door when she was four. That was
the first moment she remembered, not for how much it hurt her, but for
how he would shudder, close his eyes, shake his head years later if she
brought it up. And she always did, as a kind of test, a checkup. It
pained him so to have hurt her, to have caused her to lose an eighth of
an inch off the tops of the fingers on her right hand. Pained him nearly
to tears, the same man who caused whole bodies to be ripped apart.

After her mother married Charlie Parker’s father, there wasn’t anything
Jane could remember. She went up to see him a couple of times, but
couldn’t recall the actual meetings. She is lying to herself, of course,
but it’s all right; it’s a small sin. And after that, there were other
kinds of trouble, the least of which was her father.

She got out of bed at three in the morning—she had been watching the
time pass on the clock—and went into the kitchen to make herself
something to drink, something warm. She looked in all Charlie’s
cabinets, his refrigerator. She found that Charlie’s kitchen was
pitiful. He had tea bags and cans of soup, a one-pound bag of white
flour, a box of sugar, a jar of peanut butter. It struck Jane that this
was probably all her father had in his larder. The refrigerator was
worse: a loaf of bread, two cans of beer, a jar of mayonnaise. The
freezer was empty. Not even ice.

She shook her head. Refrigerators ought to be full; hers had always
been, even in the bad old days. Sometimes there was so much food, it
would rot. She needed it though, that illusion of plenty.

Jane stood in front of the open door, chill rushing out at her, and
considered. Her boss from the gym would be wondering where she was. He
would say, why do you do that Jane? Disappear that way? She would say,
who knows? Are you going to keep disappearing, Jane? he said the day
before, or maybe the day before that. She thought she should give him an
answer; she owed him that much: Yes I am. Right up to the bitter end.
I’m going to keep disappearing because it’s the only thing I know how to
do. Use elaborate gestures to make less of myself and finally
just—evanesce.

Charlie had peach tea. What a funny thing, to open a small box and smell
summer and heat, humidity and shade in a part of the country she’d never
been to. She thought of the whole eastern part of Charlie’s life and
Barbara and their maybe baby.

The water boiled, she made the tea and sat down on the floor in
Charlie’s tiny, neat kitchen. *And then her whole life flashed before
her*, that was the phrase people used, but how long could that go on
happening, flashing and flashing, the past steadily becoming more real
dian the present? The tea water was a clear, faint pink, like tinted
glass. She thought if she looked hard enough she could see the trudi in
the past, see if it could be true, her father, those explosions, all of
them, all that destruction. It seemed beyond thinking about, but she
stared into the cup until her vision went foggy in the steam and the
thick scent of peaches.

And it seemed so possible that she could know her father not at all drat
way, that she could never know him. For a long time she thought her
father could do anything. He was strong and stern and in possession of a
man’s world Jane believed she would always find impossible to enter.
Always. But he was the closest fink, the first way in, if there was ever
going to be one. By the time there were boyfriends, the man’s world was
closed off, it was the puzzle, the tricky balance, the enemy. This was
how Jane felt about her father when she was a litde girl: that he might
let her into his world, where there was deep, potent thinking, where
there was history and mathematics and God. Her mother’s world seemed
immediately knowable, not because it was simple or shallow, but because
it was the same as hers. Her father’s world had always been a threat and
a challenge, like school.

She heard that he’d cracked up at Berkeley when Charlie was in college
there, and that was when he’d become at odds with most of the civilized
world. Become at odds with. Somebody had used those words about him. Her
mother? Jane felt her mind was getting distracted by language, refusing
to go to the heart of the matter. This used to happen when she tried to
pray. She’d say a few words, *intercessions*, and try to listen, but
then her thoughts would go wandering off. She sensed she was like her
father in that way.

“You do this,” Jane’s mother said to her father once, “so that you can
feel sorry afterward.” Jane couldn’t remember what her mother was
talking about, but the words carried over all the years between like a
strong scent on the wind. “You need a steady diet of contrition,” her
mother had continued. Her father just smiled. Her mother made a face,
like she’d tasted something bitter, and said, “How can you stand it? How
can you live like that?” He shrugged, but he didn’t walk out of the
room. He waited for more. He loved it, Jane realized, the attention. She
wondered if she might be just like him.

She thought about heaven, about her father in heaven, surrounded by the
ruins he’d created, men, all of them, holding their heads in their
hands, their severed fingers or whole arms, clutching their guts to
their bellies where it was all leaking out, an alarming ooze. He’s diere
because he’s exacdy the kind of guy God is, might be, could be by that
late hour, because heaven is the act of contrition, *Oh*, *my God*, *I
am heartily sorry*, and that is right where her father wants to be. Jane
pictured her father and all those men trying to get a grip on
themselves, a handle, that look of infinite surprise on their faces. Men
getting a grip on themselves, which reminds her of her old fife in
Vegas, where she looked out into the darkness of Maison Des Girls and
that’s what she saw.

And as if knocked over by the wave which is time, suddenly she was there
again, and so was her father, watching her. But still it was heaven and
there were all those men asking for something back, something the world
had tom away from them, stripped away like clothes or skin in one long
aching heave.

Heaven is *heave* plus 77, Jane’s father would say, where *n* equals the
end of the road.

She was aware then that she was dreaming, nodding over the cup of peach
tea, sitting on the floor in Charlie’s kitchen propped against the
refrigerator. But then she was back in it, and her father was calling
from the dark recesses of Maison Des Girls, *Jane, you’re a little
pearl*, *you’re a shijiy shard of junk.* And of course, she recognized
the voice, but she was trying to pretend it wasn’t him and to keep on
dancing. He was walking toward her into the light, and then she thought
someone in the audience must have thrown a drink at her, because she
felt the wet falling down the front of her body.

But what happened was Charlie hobbled into the kitchen and Jane spilled
peach tea on her shirt. He took the cup and set it on the counter, then
tore off a wad of paper towel and sat down beside her on the floor. He
leaned over to mop up the tea, then stopped.

“Here,” he said, handing her the towels, and they both laughed a little.

“Thanks,” Jane said. “I was just having a strange dream.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I was. And I was thinking it’s time I did something.”

“Like what do you think you might do?”

“Get out the letters for one thing. Read them again. Go see him maybe.
If he’ll agree.”

“I’m afraid for you to do that,” Charlie said. Jane saw that his hands,
which had been lying quietly in his lap, began to shake. He wrung them
in what she knew was a perfectly conscious gesture.

“I know,” she said, “but I don’t think”—for a moment she couldn’t finish
the thought— “he’d do anything to me.”

“I couldn’t live through it twice.”

“Charlie. You have lived through it twice.”

He started to nod his head dien, and kept nodding, Jane thought, like an
autistic or palsied child. She thought he might start crying and she
wouldn’t know what to do.

“You know that feeling of holding your own hand?” he said, and she did
it so she could get the feeling, held up her finked hands to show him.
“Isn’t it strange how that feels?” he said. “How it feels so good. So
perfect. Like that’s the one single hand you were bom to hold? Sometimes
I think that’s the only hand I’m ever going to hold again.”

Saying this seemed to calm him. He stopped nodding. Jane told him she
had the letters and would look at them the next day, that day, it was by
then. He nodded again, the assenting nod of someone who may be too tired
to speak. It was getting to be morning, a faint blue glow in the kitchen
window, and Jane sat with Charlie and watched it for a while. She felt
there were certain people you could keep your body next to in this way,
flush against them, and hardly notice they’re with you. She didn’t know
whether that was good or bad.

<strong><em>For years, Jane had</em></strong> been keeping her father’s letters in a blue
velvet box that a friend’s mother threw away The friend’s name was Lucy,
and they were eleven, and the box looked to Jane like such an elegant
place to keep her secrets, the blue sort of queenly and sad, a little
faded. For a while, five or six years, she kept all her letters in
there, but gradually, she stopped doing that—she didn’t get many letters
anyway, and the only ones she kept were from her father. They went back
fifteen years, and there were gaps of two, three, five years. They all
begin Dearest Janie.

She sat on her bed and read them the next morning and on into the
afternoon. There were thirty-seven letters in all, written from
Berkeley, from his various travels after that, and then from New Mexico.
Jane tried not to cry the whole time she read, but often she couldn’t
help herself. She thought her father sounded both lonely and crazy as a
loon. She didn’t know why she had not remembered this from before,
though she thought maybe she hadn’t noticed. He seemed to have a bone to
pick with everyone. He called his colleagues at Berkeley *bean
counters*, a term she hadn’t known the meaning of, wondered at the time
if it had something to do with Bean, the nickname Charlie and his father
had given her. She had wanted to ask Charlie then, but was afraid to. He
father wrote that his colleagues set unimaginable store by their own
cleverness and raided on all the time, or else they didn’t speak at all.
Jane didn’t know why he was writing these things to a young girl, a
fourteen-year-old. He wrote five months later that he’d met a woman in
the art department. He wrote, *I think she must import her clothes*, *or
else she designs them herself because they are some of the most
beautifiil garments I have ever seen.* Jane had imagined an
exotic-looking person in flowing priest’s robes who would soon become
her stepmother, and that she would love and encourage Jane’s dancing as
her own mother never had. She would live half the year in Berkeley, and
her new mother’s house would be filled with light and the walls hung
with huge, bright paintings.

Her father’s favorite word seemed to be *despair.* Jane noticed it in
this later reading, though mosdy he talked about everybody else’s
despair or the despair of civilization. He wrote that he believed that
the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation,
how the modem world is a place in which something is obviously lacking,
where there is the general mystery of incompleteness, everywhere he saw
the drama of the salvation or loss of the soul. He went back to the
Catholic Church and wrote to her about catechism and the holy
sacraments. Some of these letters she didn’t remember having ever read.
She believed she must have looked at them, glanced down the page and
seen her father on one of his usual tears and put the letter away in the
blue box. She never threw them away, she remembered wanting to keep them
for some glory he might achieve, some fame. Not one letter ever went
into the trash.

After leaving Berkeley, he wrote about living *autonomously*, and how
such a life might save mankind from despair, from an overwhelming sense
of powerlessness. When Jane read this again, sitting on her bed in Santa
Fe, so close to his cabin, so much closer than she’d ever been, she had
the sensation of wreckage: she said over and over, whispering, *Dad,
just come home, just come see us or let us come to you.* Even if all of
what Charlie said was true, she thought she could talk sense to him.
Hadn’t he written all these letters to her, hadn’t he wanted to tell
her, have a conversation? Of course he would listen when she asked him
what he was doing, when she told him he had to stop.

*Or,* she thought, *he might shoot me. Blow me up.* There was a breath
of fear, more like smoke, at the base of her skull.

For a while then, in the letters, he seemed to be on the road. He had a
habit of visiting strange shrines, places dedicated to the memories of a
jilted lover—she wouldn’t have thought there were so many. He was in
Florida, somewhere just south of Miami. It was hard to imagine her
father in that climate, wearing sunglasses and a short-sleeved shirt,
being a tourist. He wrote to her about a kind of fortress built by a
Latvian immigrant named Leedskalnin, whose sixteen-year-old bride
disappeared the night before their wedding. Jane’s father wrote about
the place, called Coral Casde: *There is a table in the shape of
Florida*, *and there are heartshaped tables and two kinds of love
seats*, *side-by-side for good days and back-to-back for not so good.
There’s a throne room*, *with seats for the bride who never came and
children that never were. There are beds with stone pillows.*

Her father seemed thrilled by how practical the place was, how
Leedskalnin dug a well, built a barbecue, and made a pressure-cooker
from the rear axle housing of an old Ford. He carved an outdoor bathtub
which he’d fill with water so it could heat all day to reach bathing
temperature by evening. He grew all his own fruits and vegetables, and
trapped rabbits for meat. In town, he purchased only milk, eggs, and
sardines.

The longing in her father’s letters about Coral Castle was clear. He
knew he couldn’t live exactly as Leedskalnin did, and he was envious.
Hie difference, he wrote, between the Latvian and himself was *that I am
furious*, *and he was a pleasant old coot.* And in the end, Jane’s
father was angry at Leedskalnin for taking the easy way out by living in
a mild climate. *Try this in Montana*, he wrote, *in the mountains*, *in
snow half the year. I have to get out of here,* he wrote at the end of
this letter, *this weather makes me lazy and muddled in my thinking.* He
wrote about all those people living on the beaches with fancy drinks in
their hands, with their minds completely empty.

And after Florida came the five years that she didn’t hear a word from
him, before he turned up in New Mexico. He had given no sense in the
last Florida letter of where he might be off to, and Jane thought of him
in those years as occupying space above the earth, floating around,
because her mother put it that way. She said, your father’s out there,
floating around. Jane was twenty, drinking too much in Santa Monica. It
was exactly five years before she left for Las Vegas and began to hear
from him again.

She had the strangest flash of understanding, right then, in her small
bedroom in Santa Fe, the blanket strewn with her father’s letters. She
believed he had been nearby, in those years, that he’d watched her, that
he’d been poised to step in if there was ever real trouble. It would
explain how she got from the street to the dance studio that last night,
why she sometimes found money in her car, it would account for her sense
of being followed. Her father had managed to find her again in Las Vegas
because he had never let her out of his sight. She envisioned him as a
guardian angel, cruising over the beaches of Los Angeles searching for
her, whispering through her open window at night, sitting in the darkest
comers of the bars she drank in. Charlie had said to her once that she
had a charmed life, and she thought he meant that she was lucky, but he
was really telling her that somebody was looking out for her.

Most of the rest of the letters bristled full of the rhetoric the public
gradually came to know, that technology was mining the country and soon
there would be nothing left, no unspoiled, uncompromised nature, only a
mass of powerless, despairing individuals. He worried about the ozone
layer, about logging companies, about the stunted human spirit. Most of
these letters sounded to Jane like somebody talking in a trance, but
every once in a while, her father seemed to remember that she was out
there, somewhere, listening. He would seem to snap to attention and
write, *Jane, how are you doing, making your way alone in this kind of
America? Aren’t you lonely?* He wrote this in a postscript to a letter
she had not bothered to read all the way to the end. *Don ‘t you see
it’s not your own lovely spirit*, *but the technology-crazed world that
has made you feel this way?* And yet, he couldn’t invite her to come see
him, or ask to visit. Sometimes the letter would seem circular to her in
that way; he went around and around, chewing over the same problem, an
animal in a maze, in a cage. Jane wondered if he’d been hungry, the
words seemed to come out of the kind of haze one might get into without
nourishment. She used to see it all the time in dancers trying to lose
weight, when they needed more speed or diet pills or whatever they used.
They talked as if they were sleeping, speaking out of the middle of a
dream.

In his last letter, which was short, he gave Jane first two definitions,
one for beauty and one for faith. *Beauty*, he wrote, *is described as
the sense of relief experienced by living tissue when it is able to
adjust present experience and remembered attitudes. In other words, when
it can stop worrying. Faith, he continued, is the outreaching of the
mind beyond what it immediately possesses. Then he wrote this: Someday,
you will want to get out of this story.*

It was more than true. He had foreseen that, and Jane wondered if he had
also known how impossible it would be for any of them to get out of the
story. For the rest of that afternoon, she went over all the old
half-shadowed terrain of her daughterhood. She would take Charlie the
letters, then she wouldn’t. She would take Charlie the letters but warn
her father. But he might get away, disappear again, more bombs might be
sent, more people maimed, killed. How had it come to be that all the
unexplained violence in the entire country was being heaped upon his
head? Why did she believe Charlie? What kind of daughter are you anyway?
her father seemed to be whispering, his voice rising up from the street
and through her open window, into her bedroom in Santa Fe.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, Jane made herself get up from the bed,
get dressed in her dance clothes. She walked over to the studio to teach
her classes, two of them, an intermediate ballet and an advanced in
dance-making. She had no training in this area, but the studio wanted
her to teach it because it was offered by other studios.

She was teaching the intermediates *The Rite of Spring,* half in secret
because it was really too complicated for them, almost dangerous, the
story, the music, and some of the dance. The urge to study that ballet
had come from some deep, dark place inside her—she didn’t want to think
very much about it, why she had suddenly remembered it. She had been
dreaming about it for days, waking up with the sense that she had spent
the whole night in a kind of fearful spinning like the young girl
dancing herself to death. One of her oldest books was a volume called
*Stories from the Ballet,* and Jane remembered *The Rite of Spring* was
told in that book. She had been fascinated by it years ago, as a young
girl. It had seemed strangely sexual to her, the fury of the dance
building to a point of explosion. She hadn’t understood it, but she felt
it. She remembered listening to the music, the way it begins slowly but
picks up speed until it’s nearly racing to finish itself, and the dancer
does spin, and that was the trick, said everyone who had ever written
about it. It was the opposite of *Swan Lake*. You had to the loud.

She was thinking of this when she arrived at the studio and heard the
news she’d missed all day, the story of the seven-year-old girl who
intended to fly a Cessna cross-country but had crashed early in the
flight and was killed, along with her father and the flight instructor.
Students and their mothers were talking about it in the hallway.

Horrible, they said, holding their daughters, criminal.

That father, just for publicity, just for the money.

The girls, Jane’s students and the younger ones, stood silent,
stalklike. They looked pale to Jane, frightened. They listened to their
mothers talk, their heads turning sharply to follow the conversation,
each new outcry against the father, the mother, the news media that
encouraged this kind of instant celebrity. They were all good daughters,
it seemed to Jane. They would do what the adults told them to do. But
they knew something about the story that the adults didn’t know, some
truth the mothers and grown-up women had known once but forgotten. Jane
could tell from their behavior in class, how they stayed away from her,
in a kind of pack, closer to the back wall. She saw that they watched
themselves more intently during the warm-up exercises, and they watched
Jane. They didn’t whisper or laugh. They seemed not to want to do
anything that would call attention to themselves. Jane believed they
were afraid of her.

She started to talk to them about *The Rite of Spring,* told them the
story of it.

“Why isn’t it somebody old?” one of the students asked her. “An old
person who was going to the anyway?”

“Because then it wouldn’t be a sacrifice,” another student replied, a
girl called Phoebe, whose unusual name had always given her some
authority. Her tone suggested there shouldn’t be any more questions.
“You have to give up something that you want.”

Out of the mouths of babes, Jane thought. She felt exhausted all of a
sudden.

The story, she said, is one of the simplest in all of ballet. It is set
in primitive pagan Russia, where there is a spring festival of athletic
games and a sacrifice to make the gods happy, so that the crops would
grow and there would be enough to eat and happiness throughout the
coming year.

“Like Easter,” Phoebe said, and the other girls nodded.

“The ballet is performed in two parts,” Jane said and glanced down at
her old copy of *Stories from the Ballet.* She had read the story so
many times she knew it by heart. “The Adoration of the Earth and The
Sacrifice. The people assemble, the music sounds mysterious, a kind of
far-off chant, or something you’d remember from a dream. When the
curtain goes up, the audience sees a kind of wasteland, huge pieces of
stone, and young boys and girls sitting in separate groups, waiting, as
if for a sign from the rocks. Suddenly, a wise man, a prophet, stands
among them, and the girls get up and gather around him. Then the boys
stand and start to dance to different music, which is from the strings,
but has a drumming quality. The boys stamp their feet on the ground, and
the girls join Aim. The music sounds happy, and both the boys and the
girls seem to fall under its spell. Then there are three ritual dances.
The first is a mock war between the boys and the girls, in which the
boys start to attack, but at the last minute, they stop and don’t seem
to know how to fight. Then there is a mock kidnapping, of girls by boys,
which ends in a sort of love call. And last, there are contests between
tribes, in which the dancing is at its most demanding.

“Right at this moment, the wise man appears again and tries to
interrupt. At first, everyone ignores him, the music drowns out his
theme, but then the boys begin to pay attention to him. They fall to the
ground, then rise to dance in a frenzy as the curtain falls.” Jane
stopped and looked around the room. The girls’ faces were as closed as
before. “WTiew,” she said. I’m out of breath. Who wants to read the
rest?”

Phoebe raised her hand, and Jane passed her the book.

“ ‘The second part of the ballet occurs in evening,’ ” Phoebe began, “
‘and the sky is deep red. The girls sit near the wise man at the fire.
One of these girls must be chosen by the others to make the sacrifice to
the earth. She will have to dance herself to death. The music is calm,
the figures on the stage are quiet. No one is afraid. The girls are
resigned. They know they must obey nature’s rules. The girls then begin
to move in circles. They dance as if they are in a trance—as if the
decision is not theirs. But then they are *inspired*, that’s the only
word for it, and they rush to the edges of the scene, leaving the Chosen
One alone in the middle of the stage.

“ ‘Then there is a dance to glorify the Chosen One, who does not move,
as the other members of the tribe whirl around her. They’re spellbound
by her new power, which is also nature’s power. Their movements are both
glorious and uncontrolled. After a while, they step back to watch the
Chosen One. The music sounds brutal and savage, and her steps seem to
imitate it. There are also brief moments of quiet, periods of rest and
release, but after each of these, the dance is even more thrashing and
deadly. The tribe begins to join in. The Chosen One seems to have
finally exhausted her strength, but then there is one more fatal push
before she falls and dies.

“ ‘The men of the tribe catch the Chosen One up in their arms and hold
her high over their heads. The others rush around her, holding up their
arms, as if to the gods. Then in one last crescendo, they all fall to
the earth.’ ”

Phoebe made a face then, of distaste, and gave a litde shudder.

The rest of Jane’s girls were obviously horrified by the story. She
wasn’t sure, halfway through, if it was even a good idea to tell it to
them, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was something they had to
understand, at least what would happen to them, if not why it would
happen.

“The Chosen One has the longest, most complicated solo in all of
ballet,” Jane said. “But all of the dancing is complicated. You would
have to rehearse almost every day for four months to get it right.”

Still, the girls kept their own counsel. It was unnerving to Jane, that
distance between them, the silence.

“But it’s hardly danced much anymore. At the opening performance in
Paris, the crowd got angry. Because both the music and the dancing were
so violent.” Jane wanted to make up to them, offer something to redeem
the story, the class. “The orchestra couldn’t be heard over the
audience. The choreographer had to beat time for the dancers with his
fists. Like this.”

She pounded her fists on the floor. Several of the girls jumped. One of
them, in the back, began to open and close her eyes very fast. Jane
could see she was trying not to cry.

“We’re all a little raw today, aren t we?” she said, and for the first
time, a few of the girls looked up, into her face. “Me, too. I’m feeling
the same way.” She wanted to say that sometimes life was hard to
understand, but the words seemed inane. Speaking at all suddenly struck
her as ridiculous.

So Jane played Stravinsky’s music and she and the class began to
improvise, first the Adoration of the Earth. She showed them some of the
steps, and after a while, she saw a kind of calm come over their faces.
The more completely improvised their movements, the more relaxed their
expressions became. At times, though, they looked wild, and Jane thought
of her father’s talk about wild nature and the road to human happiness.
She thought of the way he spoke to her when she was much younger, about
the life and death of stars. It is one of her earliest memories, the
story of how rotating clouds of hydrogen gas could contract, heat up
until they become burning fires in the sky. After millions of years,
after an entire solar system is bom, when most of its hydrogen is used
up, the star expands and then contracts again, in a final gravitational
collapse. There are massive explosions and the star becomes a black
hole. It has danced itself to death.

Jane wondered if that was what she should have told her girls. She
didn’t know if that story would have been less frightening or more.

Then she stood and watched them, all of her lessons being performed
variously all over the room, facing the mirror and away. *Cabriole* to
*battement*, *developpé*, *échappé, entrechat*, *jeté, grand jeté.*
Litde pantomimes of blessing and friendship, anger, sadness, begging for
mercy, even a pantomime of dancing. Some of them were already very good
dancers, even at this age when that mysterious conjunction of body and
desire was just beginning: all these girls, Jane knew, wanted to be
dancers, or most of them did, but in the next few months, their bodies
would begin to develop breasts, or not, long, sinewy muscles, or not,
stamina, or not, drive to succeed, or not. And they watched Jane back,
secretly, in the mirror. She felt rather than heard her father’s words
about people being oversocialized; that the attempt to think, feel and
act morally imposes a severe burden on them. These girls trying to
please Jane. What was he talking about, she wondered, ranting about in
those letters? What part of being in the world doesn’t impose a burden?

She stopped the girls, let them rest, then cued up the tape to the solo
of the Chosen One. The music has a terrible blare to it, trumpets and
the whole stabbing wind section. It seems circular and flat at the same
time, like watching a whirlpool in water where the only view of it is
two-dimensional. It sounded to Jane as if the whole earth might crack
open, and the studio’s walls fall outward to reveal the diminished world
her father kept writing about. The words Jane knew to describe this
music were *dissonant* and *percussive.* It spins like a top on its axis
in 2/8 time to 3/8 time, full of high sharps. *Guisto*, the tempo
notation reads on the score.

She wondered if what she saw was true, that many of her girls looked
around the room, to see if any doors or windows were open, to find some
way to escape the music’s insistence. Even if they had not known the
story, they would have realized something was being demanded of them
here, an impossible sacrifice. It was the exact music humming behind all
her father’s ideas, the singing engine that drove him to say what he
said, live where he lived, do what he did. She must have believed
Charlie’s story finally, because that’s just how she said the words to
herself: *do what he did.*

Jane raised her arms to bring the girls to their feet, and began a dance
of running, searching, a circular path, but smaller and tighter with
each pass around the room. She moved to keep them in the middle of the
floor, herded together, and then broke open the circle and came in among
them. She set each one spinning like a planet, like a top, a clock. Her
teacher in Santa Monica used to do this, give the dancers her energy,
she said. It was like a laying on of hands, and Jane always loved that
touch, found it blissfully calming to be sent off that way, with a
blessing. She wanted to do this for her girls right then, bless them and
send them into the world.

When she’d moved through the little pink knot of their bodies and turned
to look back, the music was at the height of spin and blare. The girls
had stopped running, at a loss to keep up, to pretend to perform this
part of the story. She came to her senses a little then and started
toward the tape player to turn it off. And then she saw Phoebe stretch
out her arms and begin to run in a circle, the full circumference of the
room. She was making a low noise in her throat, and only when the other
girls began to follow her movements and make the sound too, did Jane
realize it was meant to be the buzz of a small plane, a Cessna, spinning
out of control. They all understood the rhythm, the buckle and sputter
every ten beats or steps. Soon they were a perfect air show, a squadron
of litde girls being driven toward death by their greedy, fearful
elders.

They moved their circle as tighdy around Jane as they could, flying and
stalling by turns, and so when the crash came, it happened at her feet.
Jane heard Phoebe turn her buzz into a hiss, and the others heard it
too, followed, and then Phoebe fell, all the girls fell, knocking into
Jane, knocking her down among them. They lay twisted like wreckage and
still kept up the hissing noise, to imitate fire and melting. There was
another eighty seconds of music left and still they would not come back
to themselves. It occurred to Jane that they might be there for a long
time, the way she lay drunk in the studio in Santa Monica, until the
next morning, spinning quietly. The girls all had their eyes closed,
clenched shut, and Jane thought, soon this will be over, there will be
quiet, and we will wake up and none of this will have happened. None of
it.

The music did stop, the tape player clicked off, and the girls began to
open their eyes.

“Do you feel better?” Jane said. It was all she could think to ask. Most
of them were nodding in a distracted way. Phoebe, on the bottom of the
pile of girls, lay still, tears slowly leaking out of her eyes.

“My arm,” she said. “It hurts.”

“Sit for a minute, girls,” Jane said and then she asked one of them to
go for help.

It turned out that she had broken the arm, an uncomplicated hairline
fracture. Phoebe told everyone very quickly that what happened was an
accident, her own fault. She had been goofing off, she said. Jane was
telling them the story of a ballet. Phoebe didn’t know what had come
over her, but all of a sudden she was running around like a maniac. Her
words, Jane recalled: *goofing ojf like a maniac.* And all the other
girls had followed her, she knew they would, she was the oldest and the
tallest and they always followed her. And then she just tripped and
girls fell on top of her, and that was what happened.

All the time she spoke, Phoebe looked direcdy at Jane. Even though the
sun was in her eyes, she did not put up her hand against it or move her
chair. Her broken arm was in a sling and she cradled it with her good
arm as though it were a nursing child. She seemed to have aged far
beyond her eleven years, aged to motherhood, aged beyond Jane. Phoebe
knew she and Jane had a secret to keep, that Jane had incited a riot of
hysteria in her class that day, she had worked the girls into a frenzy.

“I was thinking of *The Red Shoes”* Phoebe said, and she gave a little
shrug of her bony shoulders. She might turn out to be a wonderful
dancer, Jane thought, she had the right physique. Phoebe’s mother looked
at Jane, hard.

“No, Mom, not the part about the dance teacher,” Phoebe said. “Nobody’s
pushing me.” She glanced at Jane again, Phoebe did. She shaded her eyes,
finally, but not with her good arm, with the broken one, sling and all.
No one in the room could see her face when she said, “It was the music.”

The primitive stab of it, that music, how it made us do what we didn’t
have the heart or intelligence or courage to do, to break parts of our
own body. How the primitive could rise up in us and make us hate what we
had become, make us want to wreck the achievement of ourselves, Phoebe
meant all this. How Jane’s father was hearing that same music in his
head, how it played low inside him at night while he measured chemicals
and counted out penny nails, set the timers and carefully copied out
addresses.

So <strong><em>JANE GAVE the</em></strong> letters to Charlie Parker, handed them over,
surrendered them into his custody, there must be a correct term for what
she did, like people drive to a crossroads and give up their children to
the custodial parent or the noncustodial parent, whichever one they
aren’t. He took them, and then for a while, nothing happened. She
expected more, expected the world to split open, her house to be swarmed
by men in suits and flak jackets. That might have been familiar to her,
a house swarmed over by men. In the dark.

One afternoon, Jane called her mother, intending to tell her what she
thought and what she’d done, but then she just couldn’t. It was a hard
subject to introduce. At the end of the phone call, she began to tell
her mother and Sam Parker, who was listening on the extension, about
work, about her students, the ballet classes, but they seemed to want to
hang up. “Are they really learning anything?” her mother
said, and jane didn’t know what she meant. It occurred to Jane that her
mother never thought about her father. When she talked to Jane, the
question of where Jane came from never crossed her mother’s mind. And
after they finally said goodbye, Jane sat for a moment, grateful that
she was so far away.

And then suddenly sad, a little orphaned. *At least my father loves me*,
she thought, hearing the words in a tiny voice, a child’s voice. *I want
my Daddy.* And so she would go see him, a surprise. She did not think
the phrase “catch him in the act,” not really, not completely. This is
what she will tell herself later.

*But my Daddy doesn’t want me.* It struck Jane like that, after she’d
packed a few things, shouldered the duffel bag and closed the door
behind her. The sun beat down on her head and arras, and she saw how the
town spread out below her seemed crouched and injured by the same hot
weight. She felt dizzy, weightless, as if she had no body, and the word
that came to her was *eviscerated.* She wondered if this was what it was
like to be blown apart, suddenly, if it was like a realization, a kind
of awakening to fact, to speechlessness. She pictured it—she could see
things in her head, see action, it came from all those years of making
dances—as the branches of the lungs like a tree struck by lightning,
small shards of flesh glistening like stars, *oh heavenly body*, and
then silence.

So what would she say to him anyway? Jane wondered this, as she made her
way down to her car. And then it came over her, the old enemy, a thirst
like fire.

In the liquor store, there was beer, there was wine, there was hard
liquor. The man behind the counter, his long black hair
shining, more beautiful than any woman’s, Jane thought, this man asked
if she needed help, but she couldn’t speak. She thought the sentence, *I
want it all*, and shook her head. The bottles were gorgeous, some
appeared to be filled with light or jewels. She wondered how she had
lived so long in Santa Fe without them, all along the counter in her
kitchen, to catch the sun as it poured through the window. She saw it
again, the vision of Charlie’s face on the other side of that window the
day he came to find her, and she’d tried to hide from him, huddled on
the floor. How it was just like the way they’d been as children, Charlie
always looking after her, looking out for her, trying to keep her safe,
and Jane lying in a heap somewhere. Charlie had loved a woman, and then
she’d been taken from him in the worst possible way. All around her,
people taken from each other in the worst possible way.

She bought them all: cointreau, which was clear, curayao, which was
blue, créme de menthe, which was green, midori, which was a different
green, and a funny thing to contemplate, liquor from a melon. Framboise,
which was colored like garnet, her birth stone. Poire William, die
essence of pears and a cloudy pale color, translucent, like women’s
stockings. Galliano, which was yellow and tasted like medicine. She
remembered this from Santa Monica, from drinking it next to a man in a
bar, because the bottle was so strange, that was what she told him, its
long neck looking like a tortured swan, glass-blower’s mistake, made
again and again.

“Some party,” the man at the counter said, and then his voice took on a
different tone, lower, with a kind of song in it. “Am I invited?” he
said.

Jane tried to look at him, tell him something about what kind of party
it was going to be, about invitations, but she realized she wasn’t
really seeing him, couldn’t get him into her sights. Her brain felt
splintered, she pictured it again, evisceration, Charlie’s wife’s body
flying apart, Nathan Pierce’s body, blood everywhere. She had no botde
that color. She scanned the shelves above the man’s head. Nothing
blood-colored. His face swam into view then, a sweet face, the dark
complexion of a native, hair like spun tar. He’d asked if he was
invited. Jane shook her head no.

He handed her the credit card receipt, and she signed her name, then
while he was reaching under the counter for a cardboard box, turned it
over and wrote on the back, *You have beautiful hair.* He loaded the
botdes, pushed the box across the counter. Jane put on her sunglasses,
lifted the box in both arms and walked carefully to the car. When she
was almost there, the man rushed out of the store, calling her name.

“Wy,” he said, “Jane Gillooly. Let me help you with those.”

“I’m all right,” she said. She unlocked the car door, set the box on the
passenger seat.

“That was a nice thing you wrote,” he said.

She shrugged, walked past him to the driver’s door, unlocked it, and
bent to get in.

“You’re just going to do that? ” he said. “You’re just going to say I
have beautiful hair and walk away?”

*“Drive* away,” she said.

“What if somebody did that to you?” he said. “Told you you were
beautiful, and then walked away?”

She shrugged, closed the car door. He didn’t move or say anything else.
She started the car, backed away, drove out of the parking lot. She
wondered where she was going, and then she knew. Home. Home to drink. It
seemed the car was taking her there. The car was a willful machine, and
like all machines, her father would say, it has overstepped its bounds.
It has become too forward, it has taken prisoners. *The Luddites smash
their power looms.* She heard this in her father’s voice.

“Something is wrong with me,” she said out loud, and her own voice
ringing inside the car sounded good, strong, cleared away some of the
fog in her head. “I have to go home.”

The flight of stairs, the heavy box, the sun and its mirages. *What if
somebody did that to you? Told you you were beautiful*., *and then
walked away?* In her kitchen, Jane arranged the bottles against the
window. The effect was stunning, like church, she thought, like Notre
Dame. The pictures she’d seen. A good place to worship. She reached for
the framboise, garnet, *let’s stan with January,* its bottle like a
globe, like a crown, another tiny crown for a stopper. She opened a
cupboard and took out a glass, remembering the small footed glasses her
father had. So he knew beauty when he saw it. Sometimes he needed to be
in possession of beauty.

Barbara Eberle was a beautiful girl. Jane remembered her face from high
school, recalled that their lockers were not very far apart. That she
was shy. And the one small kindness: fresh from some defeat, a test, a
boy, a teacher, it was hard to remember them all, Jane left the
classroom building to be alone, to have her tears in peace. But there on
the stairs leading down to the parking lot, on the bottom step, where
she knew she couldn’t be seen, just as Jane knew it, was Barbara Eberle,
having her own tears. They sat side by side, without a word, these girls
who had never spoken to each other in four years, never really crossed
paths. Barbara turned and put both her arms around Jane, patted her
back. For maybe a minute. “I know your brother,” she said. “Take care.”
Then she got up and walked back into the school building. That was all.

And suddenly, it was Barbara’s pretty face at the window, and Charlie’s,
and the face of the baby they should have made together, jewel-colored
lights in their eyes, in their hair. It was too much, too real, and Jane
flung herself out of the kitchen and through the front door, the empty
glass still clutched in her hand. She stood for a moment on the deck,
looking north and west toward Los Alamos. *That’s why I liked this
place*, she thought, *I can make believe I’m watching him.* She looked
at the glass, thought how near she had come to taking a drink that would
have become three drinks, ten drinks, more, until the bottles were
empty. She felt cold, frozen, and she began to shake uncontrollably. She
made her way back inside the apartment, picked up her keys, and hurried
out again, locking the door behind her. As she was just starting down
the stairs, the telephone rang inside her apartment, and it startled
her, the shrill, metallic cry of someone wanting something from her, and
Jane lost her balance and fell, crashing off each riser, to the street
below.

She heard a car stop immediately, someone running towards her.

“Oh my God!” It was a girl, a teenager, kneeling down by Jane’s head.
“That looked awful. Are you okay? We saw you from down the street.”

“I think—" Jane said, and then she stopped.

“Your head’s really bleeding,” the girl said. Another teenager, a boy,
was standing over them.

“That’s bad,” he said. “You might have a concussion. Can you see?” he
said, bending over to look into Jane’s face. “Can you remember your
name?”

“Jane Gillooly,” Jane said.

The girl smiled. She seemed so sweet, so young. “Of course, we don’t
know that’s her name.”

“You can look at my license,” Jane said, sitting up slowly. “I think I’m
okay.”

“Are you sure?” the boy said. “Do you want us to call somebody for you?”
‘

“You should go to the hospital, though.” While the girl said this, she
patted Jane’s back, the softest touch. “Even if you feel fine.”

“I was just going to see my dad.” Jane heard that she was whispering,
but she felt far away from her own voice. *You may have heard of him.*

“Is it far?” the girl said.

“Not really,” Jane told her, the words rasping in her throat. “He'll make
sure I’m OK.”

“Can you talk?” the boy asked. “You sound like— Can you breathe?”

Jane swallowed. She breathed in and out carefully, pressed gently on her
rib cage. “It’s just my head,” she said.

The boy and the girl waited. A car drove by, slowing down, and then
another. A third car stopped and the driver called across the front
seat. “Everybody’s okay,” he said, like a statement, like a wish for
them. The boy said they were, and thanked the man.

“We can take you home,” the girl said, pointing up towards Jane’s
apartment. “Billy can carry you. He’s pretty strong. He carries me all
the time.”

Jane saw them smile at each other. She stood up then, and brushed off
her knees and elbows. “I’m really all right,” she said. “Thanks for
stopping.” She wanted to say more, but she couldn’t think of anything.
“Thanks.”

“It was a hell of a fall,” the boy said. “Acrobatic.”

““lake care,” the girl said. They got back in their car and pulled away,
moved slowly up the street. The boy watched Jane in the rearview
mirror—from where she stood, she could see the angle of his head. The
girl turned around in the front seat and waved.

*Take care, take care, take care.*

<strong><em>JANE DROVE IN a DIZZY</em></strong> haze, a white froth at the edges of her
vision. Twice she stopped to rest, to lean her head back and close her
eyes, but then Barbara Eberle’s face appeared out of that darkness, and
she forced herself to go on. About five o’clock, she passed the
trailhead leading up to her father’s cabin, and then stopped at the
general store a litde ways down the highway. She parked beside the
building, under a tree big enough to cast a shadow. It was almost chilly
in the shade. She leaned over and pressed the side of her head against
the car window. It felt cool but very far off, as if that side of her
face was miles away. *I shouldn’t have driven*, she thought. Then, *How
did I make it here? I must be nuts. Crazy. It’s this place.* Then she
thought of herself in Las Vegas and smiled. She wanted to fall asleep,
but thought she shouldn’t, so she got out of the car and went inside the
store. *I didn’t even have a drink*, her own voice said, echoing inside
her head, *and here I have this hangover.*

There was a bench there by the door, and Jane sat down. A woman clerk
stood behind a cash register. Jane listened to a sound like pinball
machines, or an array of alarm docks, a tree full of strange birds. The
only customers were an older couple; the woman held a few items in her
hands and talked softly to a man who looked much older and more frail
and seemed distracted or lost. Jane remembered her mother telling a
story, long ago, about her father, Jane’s father in a grocery story—she
didn’t know where the memory came from—maybe her fall had knocked it
forward through the gleam of pain and snowy numbness, Jane’s mother
saying to her father, don’t call me “Mother” in the grocery store. Her
father had used that name after Jane’s birth, probably to get used to
hearing it himself. And it occurred to Jane there in Los Vamos that this
old man was calling his wife Mother, and it sounded strange and sweet at
the same time. How long they must have been riding around in the world
together.

It made Jane think of her last desperate drive, years ago, and ending up
in St. Helena and listening to the sad night clerk diere. Adam, like her
other brother, the one killed by Christian Science. Her father had
wanted to save him, she remembered, but Adam died in the car. Still, her
father had tried.

Then the woman closed her cash register and walked over to stand in
front of Jane. She stared and then bent down to pull at Jane’s shoulder
and insist that she wake up. She asked if Jane needed anything, and Jane
looked away from her, out the window, saw a car that said taxi, and said
that, a taxi to the bus station, a ticket back to Santa Fe and a call to
Charlie.

“Well, the bus stops here,” the clerk said. When Jane opened her eyes
wide and looked around, she smiled and added, “To pickup backpackers.”
She paused. “But you don’t have a pack.” She reached out to touch Jane’s
face, then stopped herself. “Are you all right?”

“Do you have a phone I could use?” The woman pointed to the comer of the
store.

That old call to Charlie: *Come get me—I tried to work something out*,
*but no go—I got into a little trouble.* Pathetic, Jane thought, that
phrase people used: get a life. But where? You had to know where to go
get something as big as a life, where such a thing was being exchanged
for goods or services. She could feel her mouth filling up with bile
until she had to step outside and spit into the dirt. Blood, there was
something bleeding in her mouth, the inside of her cheek. Maybe she
would go hack to Santa Fe and throw herself at Charlie’s feet and say
let’s get married. We’re perfect for each other. How has it become so
easy to get hurt in our world? This kind of hurt was happening to
everyone: a fist out of nowhere, a bomb in your mail, another one under
your car. In the act of picking up the receiver, she remembered she had
never, not once, had to call him from Las Vegas. She’d been so protected
there, by the ring of mountains, the desert, the presence of tourists
who would consume and depart, consume and depart. Something about being
so high up, out of her element, made her need Charlie. She turned away
from the telephone and went back to find the clerk and asked her about
buses to Vegas, back to the old life. The woman looked at her strangely,
at her swollen face.

“I used to live there,” Jane said. She felt like she needed to explain.
“I liked it. The seclusion, like a convent.” She thought for a moment.

“Unworlding,” she said. That’s what it was. The clerk was silent. Her
name tag said Mary Ellen.

Then Jane shook her head as if to clear it and walked back to the pay
telephone. Charlie answered, and Jane began to cry. Like all those calls
from Berkeley, from San Luis Obispo when she was a teenager.

“Jane?” he said, recognizing the caught breaths, cracking voice.

“Can you come and get me, Charlie?”

“Of course,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Los Alamos.”

“Did you see your father?”

“No. I’m at the general store. Down the road from where you and your
friend—where you got hurt.” She said goodbye and then she said “hurry.”

“I’m on my way,” Charlie said. “Fast as I can.”

Jane thought the word *rocket.*

Back in Santa Fe, she was trying to plant a litde garden in pots, out on
the back balcony. It was too late in the growing season for most things,
but she was trying lettuces, salad greens, arugula, the common name for
which is rocket. She had been trying to remember its name for days. She
said the word again, out loud, and then looked surprised, as if the
sound had come from somewhere outside of her, from space, as if it had
been shot into the air, propelled, rained down on her gendy, on her head
and shoulders.

She found the ladies’ restroom and went in to wash her face. In the
mirror above the sink, Jane could see a gash at her hairline, a dark
reddish blossoming on her right cheekbone, as if she’d slept on her face
there, slept hard, grinding into the pillow. Some swelling too, already,
so that she looked off balance, or else this was a funhouse mirror, one
of hundreds and this was the distort-your-face mirror. Jane stood
looking at herself, with a kind of wonder, as if she hadn’t seen her own
face for a long time, hadn’t thought about what she looked like or whom.
It was a pretty face, triangular, wide at the cheekbones, even unhurt,
unbruised. Large dark eyes and such light hair. It was a pretty face,
she thought again. It was. Like Barbara’s was. Sometimes out in the
world, you see two girls

*together and one of them is pretty and one isn’t, not ugly, just not as
pretty as the other. What makes pretty? she wondered. Proportion?
Balance? Everyone always said Jane looked like her mother, but her smile
was entirely her father’s smile. She smiled into the mirror and there he
was, a little off balance, smaller. I have been thinking a great deal\
Jane, and writing a great deal, but no one wants to see my works, or
publish them. It would take some huge catastrophic act. And even if it
happened, they probably wouldn’t be read because it’s more fun to watch
TV. And readers forget because the inedia make them numb. In order to
get any message to the public and make some impression, I’d have to do
something outrageous, kill somebody.*

From looking at her own face, Jane knew it was true, finally and totally
true. From staring at the way genetics worked. Something small that had
been living in her heart for a long time, sleeping out the winter, woke,
stretched, and made itself very large. “Pretty girl,” she whispered to
herself for comfort, then “pretty, stupid girl.” The clerk named Mary
Ellen came into the restroom just as Jane was saying these words. She
paused and looked at her own face. She and Jane exchanged a glance and
then a smile, women caught not quite alone with their reflections. Then
the clerk looked more closely at Jane’s right cheek, and said, not are
you all right, or what happened, but “Pm a nurse.”

“It’s not too bad,” Jane told her. “Just a silly accident.” She checked
her watch. “Someone’s coming to get me.”

“That’s right. That’s good. Pardon me for saying this. I mean, I don’t
really know your story. But I just remember—Just get away from him,
whoever he is. Get away and stay away.”

“It’s not like that.”

“All right,” Mary Ellen said. “I believe you. I’ve got to get back out
there now.”

“Thanks,” Jan! said, and without raising her head, Mary Ellen told her
not to mention it. People misunderstand each other, Jane thought, but
even when they do, they’re right.

When she came out of the restroom, she saw, almost as if she’d been
expecting him, her father, looking at her. He seemed unfazed, as if he’d
known for some time that she was in the store, waiting for someone to
come get her. She smiled, a thoughdess, happy, kid grin, her mouth open
to call to him, the sounds for Dad already rising in her throat.

Then she thought to look at his hands, which were holding nothing, no
package, no letter. He had a small satchel, black, slung over his
shoulder, an overnight bag, bulging, it seemed, with rolled-up clothes.
Something soft in there. She glanced again at his hands, and in that
second, in the downward flail of her eyes, he must have known that she
knew. He knew. Jane saw her father’s eyes unfocus while he prepared his
story. And then he saw the red welt on her cheek, the cut on her head,
and was glad. Jane could see him try not to look glad, but he was, glad
for the hurt and the story of it that would fill up the space between
them.

“Jane,” he said. “Janie. What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” she said.

She saw he was wearing clean clothes. He looked just like anybody else.
His hair was combed. The clerk named Mary Ellen turned around. Jane was
noticing details this way, all out of order. The woman smiled, crazily,
and shook her head in wonder at the father and daughter, reunited. Then
she seemed to realize she was staring, and went back to the cash
register.

“But your face. It looks like—” But then they were moving towards the
door, he was leading her out, into the air, a breeze, towards the
highway.

“I fell.”

They were trying to get through the door side by side, and that small
space had to be navigated. It felt like a visceral passage, a windpipe,
about to become sealed. Jane’s father moved ahead of her, behind the
store, up a little rise, to where there were pine trees, a hump of
ground to sit on.

“Not too far, Dad. I need to see the road.”

He stopped and turned, and his face went through a curious range of
irritation and then computation, as if he were standing in the open air
working out a math problem.

“I feel sort of faint anyway,” Jane said. She stretched herself out in
the shade, and her father set his bag down and then sat next to her.
Jane looked up at the sky, waiting for time to speed up and the clouds
to start streaming by.

“Now tell me what happened,” her father said.

“I’m falling asleep,” Jane said. “I probably shouldn’t do that. I think
if you have any kind of head injury, you shouldn’t fall asleep.”

“Concussion. That’s if you have a concussion. Which I don’t think you
do. Let’s see though.” He turned her face towards him and touched her
cheek gently with the tips of his fingers. She tried to get the scent of
them—what did explosives smell like? The thought she’d had when she
first saw him drifted in at her again: he was going somewhere to put
something in the mail.

“Where are you going, Dad?” Jane said then. She wanted to watch his face
but her eyes were closing.

“I come down sometimes. For a change. Use the library at the
university.”

“Pickup coeds,” Jane said, and even though her eyes were closed she
thought he must have smiled at that. A litde of the tension seemed to go
out of his body.

“Sure,” he said. “Jane, you’re falling asleep.”

“I am,” she said. “So talk to me, Dad. Just talk.” And then she couldn’t
help herself. “Pretend you’re writing me a letter.”

“Dear Jane,” he said, after a slight pause. “Dearest Janie. Once upon a
time, there was a litde girl named Jane. And she lived in the big bad
world.” Then he talked. Rambled. Some of it Jane heard, much of it she
slept through. She thought he must have been planning how and where he
would get away from her. He talked about getting ready for winter, all
the wood he still had to chop to last through March or April, sometimes
to May. Jane slept and listened and dreamed and after a while it all
became the same thing. Later she had a strange feeling he was talking to
her about death—a kind of blackness and impending doom colors her memory
of that afternoon. She imagines it must have been raining, even though
she knows it can’t be true, stormy, fierce black clouds scuttling along
overhead and gathering in the north. There was a picnic going on nearby.
The smell of tortillas, too, and some kind of spiced meat, the crinkling
sounds of unfolded foil and waxed paper, the smack, smack, smack of
eating, chewing and swallowing. And no talk, except the voice of her
father. The occasional slosh and clink of a bottle being tipped back,
dropped into a paper sack, and the sweet whispering scent of dope from
somewhere in the trees.

Jane heard the grind and hiss of a bus, then believed for a while that
she was on it, and that she woke up at every stop; she woke to see a
body coming or going up the aisle, and to check for the body of her
father, which was always there. As she imagined the bus hauling them
closer to Santa Fe, she was sure her father would get up and go, without
warning, talking and moving in one swift gesture. *Well, this is me*,
*Jane*, he would say, like a kind of introduction, and he’d get up,
collect his gear and step out into the wind and dust. But he never
moved. Once or twice when Jane opened her eyes, she saw he was staring
at her, and she thought he looked worried, or moved even. Tears stood in
his eyes. But then the old mask seemed to slip on again, the Professor,
doing his impossible calculations, worrying the numbers back and forth
to find the mistake, the lapse into illogic, the inelegant operation.

“I’d like to come down from the mountain one day,” he said.

“So why don’t you?”

“But I don’t really want to live in the world,” he went on, as if Jane’s
question hadn’t interrupted his thinking. “Technology. Technology would
make me its slave. Look at what it’s done to you.” He raised his hand
and pointed to her cheek.

Jane put her own hand up. Her face felt hugely swollen and hot. “No,
Dad,” she said. “I did this to myself.”

“I’ll bet you, Jane.” He paused there, as if to let the instructive tone
take hold. His voice rose a little, as if he were addressing a class.
“I’ll bet if you trace that action back, you find technology at the root
of it.”

“What are you talking about, Dad?”

“Technology gives us too much leisure time. We think this means we’re
free, but it’s really taking our freedom away from us.”

“So everybody should live like you do?”

“Yes,” he said. “They should.”

And have families? Children? Jane wanted to ask him, but instead the
words melted into a dream, a vision of her mother and her father and
herself living in his cabin, the three of them moving around as if their
lives were one long camping trip. Building fires, cooking some stringy
meat, sleeping in the winter while the snow piled up outside the door
and locked them all into one another’s deep embrace. *Safe from animal
magnetism,* the phrase drifted through Jane’s dream like skywriting,
though animals themselves would be prowling everywhere. Mary Baker
Eddy’s name for the illusion of sin, but it sounded like, in Jane’s fa
ther’s dream of life, what they would need to keep them warm.

“Still the teacher, Dad,” Jane said and opened her eyes again. She saw
her father smile in a hesitant, tender way.

“You too, eh?” he said. “It must be in the blood.”

“How so?”

“You know. My mother.”

Yes, Jane remembered. His mother had been a schoolteacher, later a
grammar school principal.

“So why did you quit? I never did know,” Jane said. She tried to sit up.
The fog behind her eyes had lifted a little, was lifting. She felt
better. She seemed to see the words, *Vm talking to my crazy father* and
*He doesn’t seem so crazy,* again like skywriting.

“Everyone was always so unhappy,” he said, sounding years younger, a
twenty-year-old suddenly come up against the truths about his own
aspirations, “Either the students weren’t working hard enough, or some
trustee had an agenda, or the president did. My colleagues were either
distant or ridiculous. Knee-jerk liberals who talked a blue streak about
equality and community but they loved to set up situations in which they
would rank each other’s ideas or work or proposed work.”

Paranoid, Jane thought, and as if he’d read her mind, her father fell
dead silent. He turned his head away from her to gaze away through the
trees as if they were a window.

“But enough about that,” Jane said, and her father looked back at her,
startled, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “I know what you mean. I
wanted to teach flamenco dancing,” she continued, “and everybody about
had a shit fit. Somebody, my boss, the director, so I guess not just
somebody, said, Jane, you don’t know anything about flamenco. I told her
I could learn, take some classes myself. Read. I told her a good teacher
can teach anything. Big mistake. But that’s true, isn’t it? That a good
teacher can teach anything?”

She could feel her father drawing away from her. The left side of her
body seemed to grow colder.

“Flamenco?” he said.

“I saw it on television, and it seemed so—I don’t know. Tense. Full of
meaning. The smaller the rectangle the dancer can move in, the better
she is. The head is held perfecdy still.” Jane wanted to get her
father’s attention again. “Men dance themselves away from death and from
the waist down. Women dance toward love, and from the waist up.”

“I have to be going,” he said.

“Me too.”

“*Bailaora*,” he said. “Spanish for female dancer.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “I know.”

“What you’d be if we were in South America right now. I wish we were in
South America right now.”

Jane asked why, but her father didn’t answer, only leaned further away
from her, so he could look out to the street, leaned and craned and
gawked like a child. Jane could see that the storm had passed over them,
or maybe to the west, and there was a lightening northward, a kind of
bubble or halo of light over the city. There was something about the
dark sky behind, a quality she has never forgotten, and maybe only
lately has found words for. It was a dark smoky gray clear to the
horizon, endless and empty-seeming, the way the sky can look even when
it’s the usual blue. This darkness appeared to be *the usual,* that’s
what was so frightening about it, and for a moment, the pearly sunlight
that had broken through seemed like the oddity, the change in the
weather, the force that would cast a shadow.

Jane wondered about it, that light could have seemed so foreign to her,
that she feared its drawing nearer, that back in Santa Fe she had wanted
to block it out with bottles of jewel-colored liquid, and then keep that
light out by drinking the contents of those bottles. She reached for her
father’s hand and held it, half expecting his bones to turn to w^ater
and dust right then. They didn’t, of course, but there was still
*juerga,* nothingness, a Spanish word for the soul of the flamenco
dance, a word that means absence and explosion both.

<strong><em>All THAT happened next</em></strong> <em>is a blur.</em> Jane has said that sentence
over so many times, to so many different people, that she’s not sure she
believes it aminore. Now she is lying next to her sleeping husband, who
is not Charlie Parker, and their baby daughter is breathing quietly in
her crib down the hall. Jane thinks if she listens carefully she can
hear her, though she knows this is probably impossible; there is too
much night noise and house noise, inanimate creaking for her to be able
to decipher the little sighs and murmurs. But Jane has to keep up the
fiction of her daughter’s even breathing or she’ll go crazy with fear.
She taught herself to do this in the two and a half years since the
baby’s bi rth. In the beginning, Jane insisted on keeping watch,
standing by her bed all night long. She drank coffee or took pills to
stay awake, sometimes she pinched herself. For months there were
horrible, fresh-daily bruises on her arms. She insisted on standing—she
knew if she sat down she’d surely fall asleep. Her husband tried
everything he knew to get her to stop, but as she became more exhausted,
Jane grew less and less able to see any kind of reason. In the end, it
was her mother and stepfather, Charlie’s father, who got her to sleep,
who taught Jane the trick of imagining Helen’s breathing, counting the
little breaths like sheep.

She, Helen, has just started to take ballet classes, in the smallest
pink leotard and tights on earth. Jane is one of the mothers now, not
the teacher, she comes into the studio carrying a camera instead of
music or plans for a lesson, and she sits with the other mothers in one
corner of the big studio that she believes gets humid with mothers’ love
and pride and swallowed-back tears. The teacher is something of a
magician, a saint. She keeps fifteen two-year-olds interested,
concentrating on their feet and their bodies. Most of what she does is
playacting—pumpkins in a pumpkin patch because it’s Halloween, angels at
Christmastime. But Helen has also learned <strong><em>passé, plié,</em></strong> and how to
take a graceful bow, <strong><em>cwTsey.</em></strong>

Her teacher gets the little girls into first position by saying *open
the window*, and they keep their heels together and move their toes
apart until their feet form a right angle, like a window swinging out
into the air. Helen loves to say this all the time, even in her crib
before she falls asleep. She likes tire sounds of the words, the
singsong intonation her teacher uses. Jane wonders if she likes the
strangeness of it, the way the movement of her feet and the opening of a
window really have nothing to do with each other. Every window Helen has
seen in the house goes up and down.

But she says it at night, *open the window*, even now when it’s much too
cold for her to sleep that way. It seems to be a kind of prayer, though
she says the words only once. But they’re always very nearly her last
words, as if in order to fall asleep, she has to let something in or let
it out, through this window she’s commanded to be opened. Jane could
ask, but it seems like Helen’s first litde privacy, so she doesn’t. And
Jane worries Helen could tell her—she’s afraid it might have something
to do with her father, Jane’s father, whose last words to her were
nearly exacdy those three. Open the window, Jane, he said, and then he
was gone. In the world of flesh and blood, of surfaces, of daylight and
human beings walking around upright, there could be no connection
because Helen never knew Jane’s father, never even laid eyes on him. But
he’s a glimmer in the air somewhere around Helen’s head, a nimbus, a
word you can find only in church, and then you have to steal it away
guiltily. He’s there at night. He appears sometimes as a flash in
Helen’s face. He thinks Helen is the only one who might still love him,
so he hangs around. Sometimes, Helen will sweat a litde at night, or
early in the morning when Jane goes in to check on her, her litde
forehead will be wet, and Jane thinks that’s her father’s litde baptism
of Helen, for Helen. He is trying to woo her so secredy and Jane wishes
she could tell him, that’s all right, you should have another litde girl
to love you, the way litde girls do, the way little girls can. Is it
*can?* she asks herself. She thinks it is. To a litde girl, a
grandfather can say, here is your world, now what will you do with it?
And that’s why, when Helen says open the window at night, Jane thinks
it’s her father Helen wants to let in, her imaginary friend, whom she
loves without any understanding. He deserves to be loved like that, Jane
can say so, and mean it. Loved without understanding for as long as
possible. Someday Helen will find out who her grandfather was and what
he did. She may still try to love him, but it will be difficult. She may
ask Jane how to do it, and by then Jane will have an answer.

In a strange way, Jane was already imagining Helen when she and her
father got up and walked back to the entrance of the store. There, an
old man was being helped by his granddaughter<em>—There you go,
Grandpa</em>, she said as she guided him to her car—and Jane was holding
her father’s arm because he seemed suddenly frail, and she thought of
her own child at such a moment. And so when she saw who was actually
there waiting for them, she felt confused. For a split second, she
thought, *Charlie is here to take us home,* and it seemed perfecdy
natural that they should all three be living together, and Jane’s mother
would be there too of course. For the smallest fraction of a second, she
felt filled with warm light, or with helium—it seemed that she might be
able to float. Now, she keeps taking that moment apart, trying to decide
what she could have done. Her husband says nothing, that there was
nothing she could have done to alter the course of events. Actually the
first part of that is true too: he is saying nothing; he is utterly
silent on the subject of Jane’s father. He knows she’s still looking for
the words and when she finds them, his place will be to listen. ,

Charlie was waiting to take Jane home, arrived to do his old duty. At
the moment they recognized each other, Charlie and Jane’s father, she
saw something shimmering and visceral between them, a knife, fire, a
flash, the history of her father’s cold, broken heart, and Charlie’s
heart too. And she saw those two histories repeating themselves, which
was their doom. It seemed as though Jane had, for the first time, the
leisure to look at them, at her father and Charlie, really stare at the
facts of their existence. The store was silent—though she knew it
couldn’t have been, Jane does remember things that way. This was her
vision of the end, flash and fire and conflagration between her father
and Charlie Parker, with her bombshell body at the heart of it, and then
silence. The silence of winter and long sleep and a child’s breathing.

“Nice to see you, Professor,” Charlie said, and he stuck out his hand
toward Jane’s father. She saw it was a fist, aimed too high to shake,
and she reached for it, caught the hand and held it in both of hers.

“Thanks for coming,” she said to Charlie, and tried to hold his gaze,
tried to give him a sign with her eyes. He would not look at her,
though, only at the side of her face. It was the gaze of a blind man,
someone who might be able to hear your voice but not locate it or its
source. Charlie could hear Jane, but he could not see where she had come
from. That had been the trouble all along.

“What happened to you, Jane?” he said.

“I fell,” she said. “It’s a long story.”

“You’re bleeding,” Charlie said. His face was gray. “You need stitches.”

It seemed to be more than Jane’s father could take—at least this is what
Jane thinks—to see Charlie, who he knew was still alive. He started to
laugh then, to smile first and then to laugh, a deep bellowing sound
that modulated into a high *who who who*, like an owl. At first, two
women nearby turned toward them and smiled, the old man enjoying a joke,
the sweet couple, the decent-looking young man and the beautiful young
woman. And Jane could see it, the way these same people noticed the
beauty of her face and the relentlessness of her father’s laughter, saw
the sideshow they made, the bad theater, the ridiculous exaggeration
that is very like a woman taking off her clothes, the poor timing, the
cheap music.

The older woman shook her head in disgust. “Someone should slug *him,”*
she said, raising her voice. She was standing with her grown daughter,
who repeated, “Yeah, someone should slug him.” They looked exactly
alike, sinewy and sunbaked, dressed in tight jeans and tank tops, and
when they spoke, Charlie turned toward them, paused to take it in, the
uncanny doubling, a chorus of hags. In that instant, Jane’s father woke
from some spell and bolted. They watched him go, watched the Professor’s
amazing speed and grace. Without a word to Jane, Charlie took off after
him, hobbling on his cane, caught him by the sleeve outside the door at
the front of the general store. Jane could see all this. She couldn’t
hear what Charlie said then, his head thrust forward toward her father’s
face. She didn’t want to hear. Whatever they were, though, the words
seemed to make her father cordial. He shifted his shoulder bag and held
out his hand, offered his hand to Charlie, who did not take it. Then
with a kind of theatrical gesture, he kicked Charlie’s cane out from his
hand. Charlie swayed for a moment, and then fell against the low metal
pillar of a trash can. It broke his fall in a lucky way, so that he did
not hit the ground but managed to catch himself. Jane picked up the
cane, which had skittered toward her, and carried it to Charlie and
together they followed her father’s path around the building. He was
gone.

“It won’t work, though.” Charlie’s voice cracked. “He’s a dead man.”
Then Charlie seemed to realize who he was talking to. He looked at Jane
and his gaze steadied again on the injured side of her face. Still, some
stubbornness kept inside him, Jane knew, the wounds of Barbara and
Nathan that were never going to heal, that would fester and stink
because Charlie could never answer all the questions they asked. “Let me
look at you,” he said and drew Jane’s face close to his, brushed her
cheek. “Does that hurt?”

She toid him no, that all she wanted was to go home and go to sleep.

“What was he doing, Jane? What did you tell him?”

“He was going somewhere. I don’t know. He didn’t say anything.”

The general store had returned to stillness, after this brief circus of
escape and goodbye and desperate vagrancy. They got into Charlie’s car.

“What did you do with his letters?” Jane said.

“Do you want them back?” He was looking at her with an ironic smile. He
was still forgetting who he was talking to.

“No,” she said. “I guess I just want to know what direction everything
will be coming from. And when.”

“From above,” Charlie said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m trying to keep your name out of it.”

Jane nodded, and that was all they said until Charlie stopped the car
outside her apartment. She started to get out, and Charlie put his hand
on her arm. So gently, she thought, how could you be so gentle to me
now? *He’s a dead man.* She couldn’t stop hearing it.

“All that time, Jane. Did he say anything? I mean, to change your mind?
You had all that time.”

“Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t say anything.”

She said it over and over, getting out of Charlie’s car, even turning
around to slam the door shut. She didn’t know what he could possibly
mean, change her mind. Wasn’t it too late? Hadn’t it always been,
really?

And that’s all Jane knows. She can’t tell the story of the last
explosion, though she was there. She thinks someone with more of a taste
for it should do the honors. With a flourish. Charlie. Jane went into
her apartment that night, and all she could hear was *he’s a dead man*,,
and she lay on her bed in the dark, listening to a voice whisper those
words. The window was open and a breeze drifted hotly over her skin,
and she thought, he was a dead man for years, why should she care? Then
she reminded herself it wasn’t true. She always knew where he was,
always had at least some inkling, some sixth sense told her he was out
there, in the dark, just beyond the last row of people, men mostly but
sometimes women too, that she could actually see at Maison Des Girls.
His was the face screened back, on the fringe of light, the one whose
expression she could imagine wasn’t slack or gone in pleasure like the
laughing death’s head. He was the one watching carefully, the one who
knew why Jane did what she did, that it wasn’t about pleasure or money,
but drat it was the place the world had given her. And when he said *go
baby*, if he ever did, it meant, walk down from that stage and out the
front door, it meant go away from here. Run fast, my baby, my litde
girl, who I used to cradle in my arms, carry on my back. Go away from
here.

Jane met her husband for the second time in a bar in Santa Fe. He was a
fi refighter, mosdy working for the park service. Half of his body was
badly burned in a fire the year before. He tries to keep that half
turned away when he speaks to someone, though usually this is
impossible. He told Jane that being scarred like that makes him feel
naked, the way people stare. The first words he ever said to Jane were
“I’ve seen you somewhere before.” And then they both smiled. She tried
to think of a clever reply, but all she could manage was what she wanted
to say: “That’s nice. That’s really nice to hear.” They knew exactly
where they had seen each other—you don’t forget a face like that, like
hers, the misery of it, the *mystery,* the last person to see her father
alive. And his, thickened and red, the burnt eyes always weeping, always
seeing the world through a veil of tears.

** V

What I said to him was what I’d been itching to say: you’ll never get
away with it, and he said *Bet*, and stuck out his hand so we could
shake on it. When I started to reach for him, I saw the litde shift of
his hip, knew he would kick either me or the cane, thought I had time.
He’s an old guy, I thought, forgetting how fear and meanness make people
quick, but still I knew what was going down, so I didn’t fall hard. But
awkwardly, that’s what made me say what I said to Jane, the flail and
then the hard stab of a trash can, the ungainliness in front of her, of
all people. It was the first purely personal rage I’d felt in years.
Years? Jesus. No. *Months.* Only months since Barbara’s death. Like I’d
stepped back into my skin. It made me a stranger to myself, and so I
said to Jane, *He’s a dead man.* It was high school rage, the fury of
the home team behind by infinity, the defense, on Friday nights in the
autumn when the girl you want to impress is sitting high up in the
stands. I am way too old to have said such a thing, and I saw, finally,
what I’d been asking of Jane all that time. I’d been asking her to say
those very words: my father is a dead man. I got it, *capeesh,* but it
was too late.

After I took Jane home, I drove down the street, a half block, and then
waited and drove back, parked across from her building. Jane would have
seen me if she’d looked outside, and I guess I half wanted her to— see
how I could be faithful, a good protector. Vigilant. The night was cool,
pleasant to sleep in the car. I mostly stayed awake, though, watching
and glad to be out of my apartment. I believe, too, I was waiting for a
sign from Jane, a light put out and relit, dot-dash, some Morse code,
wdiich we’d learned together when we were children. The lights for
forgiveness, for Come In Charlie. T)wards dawn, I fell asleep and
dreamed, the old dreams about Barbara, a baby crying somewhere in the
background. I can’t find the baby. I search all the rooms of a house,
which is sometimes burning, sometimes not. In this dream, the dream I
had that night outside her apartment, Jane was walking toward me, with
the crying baby in her arms, and just as we were about to meet, she and
the baby seemed to be blown sideways, out of view, by a terrific wand.
Then I woke up. And the world seemed so strange. The light in the sky
was reddish, but tinged with brown, smoke somewhere, another fire in the
hills maybe. My car was the only one on the street, and no others passed
even within my hearing for a long time. The false gleam of that dawn and
the stillness made me think of the way Barbara once described a sunset:
*That looks postnuclear,* she said. It turned out she was actually
talking about a bumt-out but perfecdy landscaped quality of someone’s
front yard—we were taking a walk in our neighborhood. But what I saw was
the horizon and the rangy tops of four well-spaced fir trees poking
through, and the false pink of the sky. We used to call colors like that
*cubic zirconia*, that man-made diamond. Mere mortals aren’t supposed to
be able to tell the difference between CZ, as they call it, and the real
thing. And that morning in front of Jane’s apartment, I never felt more
mere.

**I HAVE NOTICED THAT in both law enforcement and journalism, there is a
kind of striptease, a show going on, but bulimic, all binge and purge. I
use the word, bulimic, because I know many of my girl students are lost
to it, to that non-sense of self. In the next weeks, all the people I
met with and talked to had this ricochet between overindulgence, this
disgusting oh-yeah-give-it-to-me-baby for my story on the one hand, and
thin, yawning bored indifference on the other. Sometimes a guy would be
hot for my tale and then next thing, he’d go on vacation. As more of my
clothes came off, I became less interesting. And I’d known my little
handful of facts for so long that it had become truth. Like Jane knows
her own body. I couldn’t see why anyone needed to see so much. What I
knew had all become part of the Professor’s personality. I wondered if
that’s how it looked from the outside, that I was offering a character,
out of a story. Then I began to see that if the authorities didn’t
discover information for themselves, through their own doors and windows
and listening through the walls, then that information didn’t exist.**

Near the beginning, one of them said to me over the telephone, *If
you’ve really got letters*, *this is going to be a slam dunk*, and there
was such heat and hunger in his voice that I said goodbye, I’d call him
later. I never told Jane this, and probably she wouldn’t believe it of
me anyway, that I had this litde change of heart. But I sat still for
twenty-four hours in Santa Fe, thinking of people scared and killed,
orphaned, widowed, and went back to begin my slowdance with the Feds. It
was a kind of crazy move—I could have stayed put, stayed close to the
Professor, led them in myself like Custer or Beauregard. But I wanted to
see if I could outrun it all, leave it behind by going home. And if it
found me in the East, then I’d act, I’d name him. Call me a coward, go
ahead. But someday I’ll tell the real story of it and expose them all
and make a million bucks. I say such things and realize how much I must
sound like the Professor himself.

I flew back to Boston and went to see Barbara’s sister Lorraine and her
kid Frieda, called them from the airport, and then took a taxi straight
there. They live in Cambridge, in two stories of an apartment building
on Ellery Street. Lorraine rented the top floor one summer, years ago,
when she was in college, and she never forgot the place. So when she
could, she bought the whole building. She rents the bottom floor to law
school students.

“Uncle Charlie!” Frieda said when she answered the door. “Wow.

Your leg. You really hurt yourself.” She paused there, so I knew she’d
heard some of the story. “You look tired. Mom’s in Africa. You go on
up.” *Africa* is a name from all those years ago—what Lorraine and
Barbara called the third-floor screened porch because it was high up in
the trees, and lush and cool. I didn’t get it for a while—Africa to me
was desert or savannah—then Barbara told me there’s rain forest in west
central Africa. It was the kind of thing she knew, the kind of way she
always helped me out. By the time I arrived on the scene, Frieda was
already saying it too, Africa, in her baby lisp, Mom’s in Africa, she’d
tell the door-to-door salesmen and *IVatchtower* peddlers, all of whom
would depart quietly, peacefully.

It was a kind of sacred place, that porch, completely engulfed in green,
hard to tell where the rest of the world was, what it was, who was
really in it. Hard to care, in a way.

Lorraine was reading the Sunday paper. It was Sunday—I thought this with
kind of a jolt. She was drinking something clear with a lime wedge in
it, and the color of that lime was the same green as the rest of Africa.
She held up the glass and smiled.

“Welcome back, Charlie. Let me look at you.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to look if I were you.”

She stood up from the sofa, held me at arm’s length for a second, as if
to get a better view, then we held each other. She asked if I wanted a
drink.

The thing about Lorraine is, she sounds just like Barbara. They have the
same voice, high and a litde choked-sounding, like there was too much
air in their mouths whenever they’d begin a sentence. It was hard for me
to talk to Lorraine after Barbara died—I hadn’t really missed her voice
in the weeks I’d been out West.

“Seltzer,” I told her. “Is there any more lime?”

“Sure. Limes like crazy in Boston. Have a seat, and Frieda will serve
you. She’s into waitressing these days.”

Frieda, like all good waitresses, had appeared out of nowhere exactly at
the moment she was needed. “I have an apron,” she said, “and a little
round tray, like in the bars at the airport.”

“The only bars she’s been in,” Lorraine said to me.

So Frieda served me, with grace and also a kind of yeah-but-I’m-
really-a-philosophy-major-at-Radcliffe disdain. “That’ll be nine-ninety-
five, sir,” she said.

“For water?”

“Seltzer. And limes don’t grow on trees, you know.”

She was a crack-up, and knew it.

“I left my wallet at home, honey.”

“You think I’ll fall for that one?” Then she straightened up a little,
snapped out of character. “Is this what Aunt Jane does?”

That had been the story, that Aunt Jane was a waitress in Las Vegas, and
that someday she would come to Boston to visit.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Aunt Jane teaches dance classes.”

“Oh.” Frieda took this in. A kind of stillness swept through her
whenever the subject of Aunt Jane came up. She knew, I’m sure, she
seemed to guess, there was a wrinkle in the story, a missing piece. She
turned and drifted inside, toward the kitchen.

“So,” Lorraine said. “Rough times, Charlie. How’s your leg? You look
like you’re doing pretty well on that cane.”

“I guess so.”

We sat facing each other, and I tried not to close my eyes or look away.
Lorraine looks like Barbara too, in a kind of off-kilter, cubist way.
Their features are the same, but Lorraine is rounder, her cheekbones
less carved out, her nose wider, her lips less thin. From having a baby,
Barbara always said. Before Frieda came along, they looked almost
exactly alike. And Frieda’s appearance was utterly different. Her
father—who was long gone to nobody knew where—had been half Japanese,
and so his daughter looked exotic and wise, sleepy-eyed. Her liveliness
always came as a surprise.

Frieda came back with the glass of seltzer, on a litde round tray, with
a blue bowl of lime wedges, a napkin.

“Here you are, sir,” she said.

I asked if I could run a tab.

“I’ll have to ask the management. Mom? Do we know this guy?”

“We think we do, honey,” Lorraine said. “We’re pretty sure.”

“Okay, then.” She looked at her mother, and a glance passed between
them, locked for a second, the look of married people when a touchy
subject comes up, a thorny issue.

“I’ll be gone, now,” Frieda said. “I’ll be in my room if anybody needs
me.”

“She’s great,” I told Lorraine while I was sure Frieda was still in
earshot. “Seems like a lot’s happened to her in the last few months.”

“She’s a gift,” Lorraine said. “The other day she got ail her dolls
together and they did the story of Cupid and Psyche. She’s in this sort
of cultural summer camp at Harvard, and she loves all that mythology.”

“And she’s beautiful.”

“And she’s crazy about you. Come see us more next year, Charlie. I know
it’s been hard.”

I told her I would, and I meant it at the time.

“We’ve got to get that guy put away.”

“I know.” It was going to meet me in the East. “So what do I do now?”

“I can get things set up. There’s a woman I went to school with. She
knows who to talk to. She’s got them all lined up. One-two-three. Two
days. In two days, it’s all over.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to whoever you think I should talk to.”

“There’s a case I’m working on right now,” Lorraine said, and she used
the words to let out breath it seemed she’d been holding in for a while.
“It’s like yours. Impossible, in a way, but the path is pretty clear. A
mother, a son and a daughter. Heroin. The mother sells and uses. The
son’s known about it for a couple of years, but you know, it’s his
*?nother.* But then she starts supplying her fourteen-year-old daughter,
his sister. He turned her in. He’s got that to live with now. We kept
telling him, it’s the right thing to do, it’s the right thing.”

“It isn’t about right or wrong.”

“That’s what the son said. He said it was a matter of gravity. Gravity.
Not like grave, but like Newton and the apple gravity. That’s how he put
it. A smart kid. He said it was a matter of what was heaviest, what fell
fastest to the ground.”

“Strange way to talk about it.”

“Yeah. So strange you can hardly imagine it. But absolutely right.”
There we were, high in the trees, so high it seemed gravity could never
get at us. My leg ached. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to walk on it,
not like I used to. If I got up, *I* would fall fastest to the ground.

“We can talk about her, you know, Charlie,” Lorraine said. “We can say
her name. Barbara. We probably should.”

“I know.”

“You’ll feel better when this is all over.”

“I will? How do you know? Will you feel better?”

Lorraine went quiet.

“Africa,” she said finally. “Barbara made that up. I think sometimes
about all the cleverness that’s gone out of the world now. Not
cleverness. Wit. Fun. Joy. Something like that.”

“I don’t think I’m going to feel better for a long time.”

“Me neither, Charlie.”

The fight dimmed, from yellow patterns on the wall behind us, to deep
blue, to black, and when we could no longer see each other, Lorraine and
I, we stood up and went downstairs to collect Frieda. Then the three of
us walked out into Cambridge in search of dinner, up Ellery Street to
Mass. Ave. And west into Harvard Square. Which was teeming with exotic
summer fife: unshackled students and professors, hundreds, it seemed
like, of babies, all about the same age, as if they’d been born on the
same day in late April, their mothers tired but pleased, their surprised
fathers just coming home from work in the city. Street musicians too,
and the summer homeless, who seemed younger, like graduate students in a
way. We ate in a little place, Lorraine said *Bistro Something.* It had
opened after I left for the West, and I must have ordered food, chewed
and swallowed, but I don’t remember. I watched Frieda and listened to
Lorraine’s voice and tried to imagine the impossible: Barbara. Our
daughter. And then they took me home.

Lorraine’s friend was named Katherine Shale, and she asked the same
question, why did you come back here?

“I was scared,” I said. “I’m scared now. I’m not in the habit of calling

on the legal eagles. Some people are, and get a kind of rush from it,
but to me it all seems like television.”

I wanted to give Ms. Shale the letters and be done with it, disappear
back to the Southwest and never be touched by any of this again. And
make sure the same held for Jane. But I realized you can’t do that after
I’d walked into her office in Cambridge and didn’t leave for four hours.
She promised full confidentiality but she was disturbed by what I’d
brought her, she said. She would call in another friend who was doing
consulting. His specialty, she told me, was criminal behavior. I
shouldn’t leave the Boston area. Sure, I said. I live here, I told her,
thinking all the time what a lie that was. But I did live there, I had a
house. You get so paranoid about the truth. You see how there really
isn’t any, objectively speaking.

In the next two weeks, everybody had more questions. Were there more
letters? Where had they been mailed from? And to whom? Who’s this
*Janie*? When I copied the letters, I left off the greeting at the top
when there was one, forgetting that her father called her Janie all the
way through. I sat in Katherine Shale’s office while she said into the
telephone, we have made a promise of confidentiality. She was breezy,
she smiled into the receiver, she kept her promise. She told me her
consultant had called in a psychiatrist, a linguistics expert. Both
agreed that the author of the letters might be responsible for the
bombings.

Then she started to talk about responsibility. She had it, she said, she
had responsibility and so did her consultant. Someone had to be
identified.

“This is what will happen, Charlie,” she told me. “My friend in New
Jersey will call the behavioral science people in Virginia. He’ll tell
them to let him know if there’s any news on these cases. Or rather, if
there isn’t any. He’s giving us time that way.”

“Did he say he was going to do that?”

“He didn’t need to.”

“Why do there have to be names?”

“Because God gave them to us,” she said. I understood what she meant,
though I’m not sure I can put it into words now. She meant that actions
are meaningless without some sense of where they come from. They’re just
hurtful. Like the Professor’s actions. She was telling me that all my
hemming and hawing was a little like what he’d done.

Our house, Barbara’s and mine, is on the eastern edge of W mchester,
*we’re on the way into Cambridge*, Barbara used to say, *near the Mystic
Lakes.* I loved the way she said it, sounded like we were always
traveling, or else waiting to be admitted to Harvard. She liked to walk
around the campus, Harvard Yard, and say *here’s where I* and *there’s
where we.* She wasn’t in love with Harvard, the way some of its
graduates are, she didn’t try to get the name into every conversation,
but the place moved her deeply, probably more than I knew. She seemed to
feel about Harvard the way you do about someone who’s done you a great,
maybe life-saving favor, that tenderness, almost trancelike, a kind of
crush. It was never explained to me, though, she never said why—we never
had time enough, and so I have that same reverence too.

So when I needed to think about naming the Professor and Jane, that’s
where I went—I was going to meet Lorraine and Frieda tor lunch— and
walked for hours, from the river houses, to the law school, the music
building, the Science Center, where Barbara said she watched E. O.
Wilson calmly respond to the demonstrators who filled the back rows of
his class on the last day of every semester to call him a Nazi and a
racist. He seemed tired, she said, patient with them though, but still
you could tell that all he wanted to do was get back to his ant
colonies. A half hour into the heckling, she said, you could see him
drift off, see the slow flicker in his eyes as he watched the tireless
work of his specimens, the simple unquestioning achievement of it. I
thought of stopping in to see him, asking E. O. Wilson what to do. I’d
heard of that book of his, *On Human Nature*, Barbara had it, and I did
see what all the fuss was about, but still it was so measured, so
scientific. He collected his data in that sort of world-proof room that
good scientists work in. Maybe he didn’t have popular ideas, but he
didn’t kill anyone over them. He started conversations, arguments. I
thought he might understand the Professor in a way. There would be a
place, years and years ago, w’here they had been on the same path.

I looked him up on the directory in the Science Center and then stood
outside his office for a long time. Finally, though, I decided I’d scare
him, so I walked back downstairs and found one of the large lecture
halls, Science Center C, unlocked, went in and sat down in the last row.
The room was totally dark except for the exit signs and a strange
moonish glow from the stage below me. I had the feeling that someone was
going to appear from the wings and start speaking to me, and nt would be
how I’d decide what to do. I waited. The room stayed inky black and
cool. I imagined Barbara in this room, years ago, sweating over the math
placement test. Or listening to Oscar Handlin talking about twentieth
century cultural history. The class was reading *The Joke* and all the
while Barbara was developing that tenderness I so loved in her. Or E. O.
Wilson was just saying *drosophila*, and Barbara was nodding, writing
quiedy in her notebook, writing as she told me she so often did, *Ask
about this. Look this up. Find out about this later.*

It occurred to me suddenly that the Professor had been here too, had
preceded Barbara into knowledge along these very paths, in these same
buildings. They had put their fingers on the same door handles, along
the same stair railings, maybe on the same books. Barbara told me about
the carrel she sat at in Widener Library, weeping over her philosophy
notes because she didn’t understand a single thing she had written down.
It was the night before the exam, *Spinoza*, she told me, *modes.* I
wondered if the Professor had wept there too, or at least nearby. Jane
said her father had done well at Harvard, but he was lonely, friendless
after his first year. I tried to imagine their tears falling on the same
scarred desk, and the thought of it, the trouble I had to go to see it
happening, put me in a deeper darkness than the simple absence of light
in Science Center C could ever be. Nobody ever has any idea what they’re
going to become, nobody. I thought this then, and it seemed profound.
Sadness surrounded me like air and it seemed like that was all I was
ever going to have to breathe.

But I think what I felt that afternoon was nothing. Nothing as a real
force, a presence. The emptiness I felt there in the dark had much more
to do with the Professor than it did with Barbara. The fight of her went
everywhere with me. Even out in Santa Fe, she had become that gorgeous
canted light, that silver-toned effusion. I had just begun to understand
her presence that way right before Nathan was killed, and then suddenly
I was indoors, flat on my back and drugged asleep so much that I lost
it, the way you lose ground in your playing if you don’t practice. The
music starts to disappear because you forget how to hear it. Absence is
a kind of skill— you can learn it, which is maybe why I felt so much
absence around Harvard. But it seemed like absence could also be evil,
the way evil sucked life out of the world. The Professor lived at the
edge of the world because that was where evil was, that’s what evil is:
nothingness imposing itself on substance. He wanted to live as close as
he could to the vacuum of the sky, to empty space, but still be able to
ride his bicycle into town.

And so it became clearer and clearer to me that what the world does to
counterbalance evil is to bring it into existence, yell out its name,
show it forth. Barbara wasn’t in that empty lecture hall, but the
Professor was, and when I realized this, I almost threw myself out of my
seat, out of the room, and into the Science Center’s main hall, where
there are tall glass entryways at each end. Green and yellow summer
light flooded in. Human voices pealed and fell. I was shaking, my heart
thumped crazily from getting up so fast. I thought, *Charlie Parker, you
are an old man.* I walked a few steps, nearly to the angle of the wall
where it receded into the entry for Science Center B, and suddenly there
was a child flying at me, Frieda, who at the last possible moment looked
up, took stock of my face, and then kept coming, right into my legs.
Even then, she held on, and laughed, that wonderful abandoned chortling,
hiccuppy child laugh. Her father, that one quarter of Japanese, is what
makes her look sometimes like the laughing Buddha.

“Hello Miss Frieda,” I said, as she ran her arms around my waist.

“We knew you’d be around here someplace,” Lorraine said.

“This is my Mom’s school,” Frieda said to me and glanced back at her
mother. “Right, Mom? And Aunt Barbara’s. Mom says Aunt Barbara ran the
place.”

“Right,” I said. “She did.”

“We were just over in computer science,” Lorraine said. “We hadn’t been
in a while. Everybody there was crazy for you-know-who.” She stuck out
her thumb like a hitchhiker and jabbed it in Frieda’s direction, but I
didn’t get it for a minute. I thought she meant Barbara. Lorraine must
have seen how blank I looked, how sad maybe, because she went on: “For
Frieda, I mean, Charlie. A woman there told me Barbara used to cut their
hair. Did you know that? She said she was the best.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s strange to find out stuff like that after.”

The truth of it made us both quiet. We began to walk back toward the
front entrance to the Science Center, talking carefully, watching Frieda
run in great circles, climb onto and fly off benches, make a plaything
out of every nook and cranny. Lorraine said again how strange it was,
and I felt like I was going to have to escape. Then she sniffed the air
and laughed a little. She looked at me closely, testing my grief, trying
to decide whether it was ingrown like hers, whether this trip to
Barbara’s life had made it raw again.

“She said Barbara used to ask them if they ever smelled roses when they
walked near the Science Center. Not roses exacdy, she said, but a
certain kind of rose-scented hand lotion. She couldn’t remember the name
of it. She was always saying things like that. Somebody asked her if she
had migraines. Her boss. He said people who had migraines were seized by
a particular acute smell right before the onset of a headache.”

“She never told me that,” I said.

I thought I would weep then, tear apart with weeping, but I didn’t.
Something about Frieda running around was holding me together: she was
growing bored with the possibilities for play in the Science Center and
had started to orbit around the two of us, in huge, swooping ellipses. I
could imagine a white banner in Frieda’s hands, a bandage, and she was
binding Lorraine and me up in it.

And the fight of Barbara was everywhere, the fight of Barbara telling me
what to do. I thought: she has learned to be nowhere. I thought of it
all of a sudden, out of the summer air, and it gave me such peace. In
the middle of what had to be the most *somewhere* place in America, I
felt the presence of Barbara invading nothingness, pushing it back. She
would want me to do what I was about to do. She knows the future, I
thought, because her body exploded into all time, and she was telling me
that I should go ahead.

I kissed Lorraine dien. “We’ll be all right,” I said. She held on to me
a moment, became small and warm in my arms. Remember this, Charlie
Parker, I instructed myself. Remember what this feels like.

So **BEGINS MY MOST** unsentimental journey with the law and the press,
which is now well known and began with a phone call to Jane. When I told
her what I was about to do, she was silent for a litde while, then
huffed out her breath.

“I thought that’s what we already agreed,” she said. “Why do we have to
go over it again?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Jane. I just wanted you to know. I
guess so you could feel like you had some control.”

“I don’t, Charlie,” she said. “I don’t feel like it, and I don’t have
any.”

And, of course, she was right.

That was the last time I spoke to Jane until her wedding, though I saw
her one more time. God only knows why she invited me, but I went and
watched her walk down the aisle of the church by herself and give
herself away. Then I danced one dance with her at the party afterward, a
dance more honored by silence and watching than the one she had with the
man she’d just married. I had the sense then that if the music went on
much longer we would crumble to dust in each other’s arms. I never saw
her after that. I have not heard from Old Bean in years.

Then I called Katherine and told her yes, I would fly with her down to
Washington. Lorraine would go too, and we would meet with the necessary
authorities and name the Professor. I never called him that anywhere
except in my own head, though I thought I’d slipped up on the phone that
day. I worried about it on and off during the train ride to Logan,
through check-in and security, ironic I thought, I’m carrying my own
private bombshell. Out at the gate, Katherine didn’t smile, only shook
my hand and we boarded the plane. She never struck me as a very warm
woman, which I think is why I trusted her. I was late, and I imagine she
thought I’d changed my mind.

The plane was crowded, and I was grateful for that. It meant we wouldn’t
be able to talk much. If we had I would have felt even more horror at
being thirty thousand feet in the air, the inescapability of it. Once we
were setded, Katherine finally said my name, to get my attention, then
without turning her head to look at me:

“You called him Trofessor.’ ”

I laughed, I remember, and then she did turn her head. I told her I’d
been worrying about it. “You’re wondering,” I said, “if I’m angry over a
bad grade in college.”

“No,” she said. “I was trying to remember where you said you’d gone to
school.”

“Cal,” I said.

“You’re a smart guy.”

“Was. I was smarter then than I am now.”

“Ain’t we all,” she said and laughed and shook her head. “You’re so
quick. I mean we. We were all so quick. Quick at math. Quick readers.
Quick to take offense.”

A little while later, the plane took off, hurtled itself into space in
that miraculous way. We reached cruising altitude as they say, always
sounding to me like the perfect dope-smoking buzz. The flight attendant
wheeled past us her cart full of little bottles of booze, and I wanted
them all. Katherine had coffee, the worst in or above the world, she
said, but she needed to stay alert. There was a kind of nip in her
voice, a tremor. I asked if she felt nervous, and she told me it was a
big deal. She said, *We want a lotfiwn them.* I started to ask what she
thought was going to cause the most trouble, but she put her finger to
her lips and we passed the rest of the flight in silence.

Katherine went right to sleep, and I watched her on and off, glanced at
the ring finger on her left hand, which was bare. She didn’t wear much
jewelry, just a wristwatch that I could see, and small gold hoops in her
ears. She was about my age, I guess, maybe a year or two older. She
never mentioned a husband or children and had given nothing away when I
told her about Barbara. She took notes, didn’t look up from the pad of
paper. I wondered what she thought about having children in order not to
disappear completely from the face of the earth. Probably she would tell
me I was a fool. No way to prevent the body from failing and then
turning to dust. The Professor for instance. He had a child, and what
good had it done him;

She opened her eyes as the plane landed.

“Have a good sleep?” I asked her.

“I was awake the whole time. When I looked every once in a while, you
were still on the same page in the magazine.”

“True. But I know that page real well.”

“Forget it, then. There’s only one thing you should be thinking about
now.”

Suits is what I remember, suitcoats on in July. In a conference room,
with windows facing the Mall. I could see a slice of the Washington
Monument, like a white needle. Blue suits mostly, though I know one was
khaki, and the man inside it had on a pink shirt and a bright, striped
tie, gleaming the way raw silk does. I concentrated on that tie, after
introductions were made, hands shaken, coffee passed around. Three men
from the Bureau. Katherine had always called them agents, but that
wasn’t what they called themselves. They had first names and last names,
which, because I never saw any of these men again, I can’t remember. The
lawyer in whose office we met was named Pellegrino. It was etched on the
front door, cut into the glass with something like a dentist’s drill, I
imagine. I thought about that process too, the sound it would make, the
little motes of glass spit away into the air. The office manager’s name
was Megan, or maybe she was called assistant, executive assistant I
think they say now. David Pellegrino was his whole name. It comes back
to me now that way, in bits and pieces, sharp and insubstantial at the
same time, motes of glass. Someone, Pellegrino, turned on a tape
recorder, which sat in the middle of the long table. Katherine started
to speak, as if to a blind person who would receive the tape later,
identifying everyone in the room, stating their business with various
government numbers and titles. I was asked to state my name and address.
She asked for her terms: a low-key nonintrusive investigation, no
publicity.

“We ask, too,” she said, “that the government not seek the death penalty
in this case.”

I had not expected that, had not thought beyond a team of uniforms
milling outside the Professor’s cabin. Katherine and I never talked
about anything beyond this meeting. Because I have since heard the tape,
I know that someone responded very quickly that the matter of the trial
could not be discussed at this time. But there in the conference room, I
didn’t hear much of what was said. I was thinking of Bean and her father
and now having put into motion something that might end in a way I
didn’t believe was right. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before—wasn’t
I thinking exactly an eye for an eye, a tooth for a goddamn tooth? I’d
worked it out over so many long nights, in so much darkness, what he’s
taken from Barbara, and so what I might take from him. His freedom, that
was it. The freedom to get on a bicycle and go to town, the freedom to
touch another human being. I’d thought my mind was made up, though
Katherine had told me that at the last minute, this would happen, my
brain would go foggy with indecision, but that I had to swim through.
Concentrate on something, she said, a picture on a wall, somebody’s tie.

I was looking at that beautiful tie.

“Mti Parker?” someone prompted, and then looked embarrassed. “Why did
you come back East?”

“I live here. It’s my home.”

“We’d like to hear what you have to say.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”

I told them tire Professor’s name then, and though it comes out very
clearly on tire tape, I remember having to struggle with my voice for a
few seconds. Pellegrino turned off the machine.

“Well,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen. Either it’s history or a wild
goose chase.” He didn’t look at me as he said thank you, and then all
the others did, without sympathy or any show of emotion. Pellegrino said
they would be in touch, and suddenly and feverishly, I hated him. It
came over me in a kind of fireball, a storm, and I stood up. There was a
kind of

catch in the room then, an intake of breath, the silent electricity of
seven people thinking about the nearness of their weapons. What’s he
standing up for? Why so suddenly? It seemed like I could see all their
thoughts. They were completely transparent, people made visible by their
work and their natures. Why did anyone do this kind of work in the first
place? Did it attract you? Was it a calling, a talent, like to the
priesthood? I don’t know if I really thought all this at the time. I
know I have thought it since. What I thought at the time was that I had
made a huge mistake—the emptiness in the eyes of everyone in that room
was astonishing. As empty as the Professor’s eyes had ever been. Two
minutes before I had known something no one else in that room knew, and
then I was nothing to them. I rose so quickly from the table because I
weighed nothing, I was nothing. They shouldn’t have been surprised at
all.

Katherine and I left the room escorted by Megan. At the last possible
second, she caught me by the arm.

“You’re going back to Boston tonight?”

I told her yes, the flight got in at seven. She said that was fine.

“I want to be kept up to date,” I said to her. “I want to know what’s
going to happen to him, and when. His daughter—”

“Of course,” she said, “within reason, Mr, Parker. We’ll keep you
apprised.

“Nonintrusive.” I said it, Katherine’s phrasing.

“Of course.” Megan smiled and looked at Katherine and maybe I’m
imagining it, but it seemed like some truth about womanhood ran between
them right then. Like they knew something about how ridiculous it was
for me to have asked anything of her before she went walking back into a
room full of men. It made me think of Bean, her life in Las Vegas. What
I thought I knew about it. And then I was really scared.

“You were great,” Katherine said when we were outside. “That went well.”

I stopped walking and so she had to.

“You did the right thing,” she said. “I know you must feel a little
dazed. Do you want a drink? We have a couple of hours now. Thai went
faster than I thought.” She seemed to think of something that bothered
her.

“I think I want to walk,” I said. “Lorraine’s going to meet us.”

We walked two blocks to a sandwich shop and I got my bearings. Four
blocks west. I used to know Washington, from trips with the kids when I
taught seventh grade, but four-square as it was, I’d forgotten. I wanted
to go to the National Gallery, move quiedy through all those rooms full
of— what? I had this weird sense that in a museum I would feel less
alone, that paintings were full of betrayals like the one I’d just
performed. That betrayal drove all those artists, not light, or fear, or
mystery, or even their patrons. Seeing this betrayal at work would be
comforting, like being with family was supposed to be. And when we got
inside, the wrong way, at the end of the nineteenth century, I knew I
was right. In the American wing, they were all there, those portraits,
George Washington, and huge western landscapes, where you can see how
shocked the painter felt, betrayed by his subject, how unimportant and
speechless. I wanted to sit down and rest, He down really. The museum
didn’t seem very crowded. I wondered if anyone would mind if I stretched
out on one of the benches, those cool slabs of marbleized granite. Or
would a guard with a hissing walkie-talkie ghde over and say, sir, I
have to ask you to sit up. No rest for the wicked, he’d say in a knowing
voice, and shake his head.

Lorraine arrived, and for a while I sat next to those two women,
goddesses of the law, looking like a man who might never get up again,
until the agonies of this world blew him out of the room, the building,
the city, off the planet. They talked quiedy about what had happened in
Pellegrino’s office. I remember myself very near paintings by Thomas
Eakins and Mary Cassatt, though I don’t know how that could really be
possible. Still, when I close my eyes now, that’s how I see it, feel it:
the cool slab of rock under the backs of my thighs, and my elbows on my
knees, both hands open to support the weight of my head, which seemed
then very heavy. The Hght from above, creamy and almost transparent
through a skylight I never actually glanced up to see, pearly like the
skin of the man in the Eakins painting, a single sculler, though I’m
thinking now that I must have seen that one in Philadelphia. Still, it’s
the memory of how I sat for those two hours and what I saw that makes
the rest of this story fit together, become real to me. The figure in
the painting became the Professor, his narrow, naked back turned to me,
his whole body straining to drag the oar toward himself, to move a piece
of wood dirough water. That was the Professor’s loneliness—I was really
seeing it for the first time—that was the way he faced the world, by not
facing it, by heaving his gaunt, resdess body away In the beginning, he
probably only wanted to get away, which of course nobody can, not
scot-free, not without leaving a little wake. But then there’s that
fight. In the painting it seems to be something the man is rowing
toward. Stripes of it already fie along the hollow parts of his body,
melting into the pain of his straining back and arms. If he can only
come completely into that light. He’s learned to have such contempt for
water, even while it’s his element. How did he learn it, where did he
learn it, to hate the thing he has to communicate with, the place he can
never seem to leave?

Katherine and Lorraine wanted to see all the Mary Cassatts, all the
mothers and children. In the one I remember, they are arranged in an
armchair, the soft blue of the mother’s dress or the child’s or both,
che peach-colored skin, just washed, it seems, always so clean. I
watched a man looking at this painting, a man with a baby slung over his
shoulder, and the painting was completed for me. I thought of Barbara,
standing just this distance from me now, with child—I’ve made it
so—waiting for me to join them. There is so much fight in the world, I
thought suddenly, so much that everyone should be able to have some. The
Professor should have his fierce fight, and Barbara should have her
gentle fight. A woman and her tour group were approaching the painting—I
had heard their voices in other rooms for the last few minutes, coming
closer, the woman spieling out her tour of the American wing with more
and more irritation at the silly questions of her audience. She stopped
in front of this painting.

“It is rumored,” she said, “that Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas were
romantically involved. They were certainly very good friends. Cassatt
burned all Degas’s letters before her death in 1926, which certainly
caused a great deal of speculation.”

“What do you think?” one of her tour asked.

“I think not,” the woman said.

“I think she probably died a virgin,” Katherine said to Lorraine, her
voice trailing off. I looked up to see her turn, as if to present her
entire body to the painting. “No one could paint mothers and children
like this except a virgin.”

I felt like I had stumbled into some privacy some secret. I thought of
Jane, her unbumed letters. I wished Barbara, and Jane too, were there
with me—l thought they would love seeing these paintings. I imagined how
we would talk about them quiedy between ourselves, how Barbara and Jane
would come to know each other through all this delicacy, light and brush
strokes and all the possibility in a single gesture. l got up then and
went to find Degas, circling back through rooms I’d ignored earlier,
leaving no trail. I wondered how anyone watching me could have kept up,
or if Katherine had invented this surveillance to keep me in town. There
was that phrase: *risk of flight.* It knocked around inside my head as I
lost myself again and again in the cool maze of the National Gallery,
*risk of flight*, until the words lost all meaning, and then finally
came back to me, English teacher that I am, Icarus, the original risk of
flight, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” My shoulders felt hot already. Soon I
would be getting on another airplane. The sun would be setting, so I
could meet it halfway.

Degas and his dancers, he must have loved them madly, dancers and
horses, the hard training toward a single moment of pure grace or speed.
The years I lost touch with Bean, that’s what she was doing, trying to
make herself flawless, trying to be nothing, an idea, a leap into light.
Wasn’t she trying to get off the ground, blow herself into space? How
her father lived in her. I wanted her to be sitting with me in front of
Degas’s dancers, and I would say, *Bean don’t you see how you’ve finally
cast him out*, *like a demon? Haven’t you finally said no to him*,
*locked him out of your house*, *your room*, *your sleep? Isn’t this the
end*, *the bitter end?*

And then I thought I might never see her again. I had no reason to go
back to Santa Fe. School would start in a few weeks. I would be caught
up in my kids, the blessed relief of busyness. Fall would come, and then
winter, to bury me.

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<verbatim>*</verbatim>
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<strong><em>We FLEW BACK UP</em></strong> to Boston, Katherine and Lorraine and I, again
mostly in silence, each waiting for the other to say something momentous
and final. We all shook hands at the taxi stand outside Logan, and
Katherine said we would be in touch, but I knew everyone had got what
they wanted from me. I went home, and stayed in and played my sax, which
I hadn’t done much of since Nathan and Isabel’s solstice party. I played
for all the death I’d brought about and all the lives that might have
been saved. I played for Nathan and for Bean. I tried to call her, too,
but she never answered or returned my calls. I didn’t think she would.

I don’t know if I had ever been so lonely as I was the hours before the
storm broke. Surely when Barbara died, I thought at first, but then it
seemed that back in those days I wasn’t alone because grief is such a
fine companion, *boon companion.* But now, then, I stood by the window
or sat on a hard chair in the middle of the living room and heard
myself. It was a strange sensation, surprising almost, as if I hadn’t
intended to make any noise at all, but stumbled upon sound, upon music.
My energy for playing was endless because I imagined playing for Bean
and Barbara together, drawing one in, raising one up, all that zeal,
desire, rage, and love we had for each other. I was amazed at my own
stamina, terrified by it. I played parts of songs, mosaics bursting into
bits, the beginning of “Night in Tunisia" and “Now’s the Time,” over
and over, a jokey sentimental version of “April in Paris.” Every once in
a while, I got up to drink a glass of milk or eat a piece of salami
rolled up like a cigarette. Lorraine called and Frieda did too. I slept
holding onto my sax, holding it in my arms, that cold body. I waited for
the world to invite me back in, though sometimes I thought this might
not ever happen.

But it began with one voice on the phone, then two, then before I
realized, it seemed like a hundred.

“Is this Charles Parker?” The voice was a man’s, a fast talker who was
just polite enough, trying to pace himself, making an effort. I told him
yes, and he went on, “I’m calling for your help.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m a writer. I understand you know something about the bombing in
which your wife was killed?”

“Fuck! you,” I said and hung up.

This was at seven in the morning, not quite two days after I’d been to
Washington. *Barbara*, *Fm not ready*, I thought, *Pm still not ready
not to have you.* I walked back to the bedroom and pulled my sax out
from the tangle of sheets. It occurred to me that sleeping with a
saxophone was a strange thing to do. I vowed not to do it any more, like
a bad kid. So far I wasn’t thinking about what that telephone call
meant. I was keeping it at bay. I thought I could play so loud and so
long that I could drown out the telephone for the next few days. But
instead of sitting down in my chair in the middle of the room, I went to
the front windows and pushed the curtains apart. I’m not sure, even now,
that I can explain the surprise I felt when I saw I was in Winchester
and not in Santa Fe. Trapped, too. Like a dog. Run up against the edge
of the world, unknown monsters nipping at my heels, chasing me to the
ocean.

I called Lorraine, or started to, still looking out the window. Then
twitching the curtains a little farther back, I saw who was really out
there: two men, leaning on the hood of a white Ford Taurus, holding
styrofoam cups from McDonald’s, and surveying the house, a third man at
the back bumper, his foot up, tying his shoe. Resting in front of him on
the trunk of the car was a video camera, the black nubby eye of the
microphone visible over his head. A blue Taurus was parked in front of
the white one. The two men standing together saw me in the same instant
that I saw them. They each put a hand up, waved jauntily, like we were
old friends. One of them, taller but younger, put his index finger to
his own chest and then pointed it at me, like a gun, I thought, but what
he meant was, could he come in and talk. I shook my head no and dialed
the rest of Lorraine’s number, while the shorter man crooked his right
finger inviting me to come out.

“No, no. Hello Charlie. I’m awake,” Lorraine’s voice said a few seconds
after I’d started talking to her answering machine.

“There’s two guys waiting outside. And a camera. Somebody else just
called. Said what did I know about the bombing that killed my wife—”

She swore under her breath. “It was a possibility, Charlie. You know it
was.”

“But what do I do?”

“Listen. Don’t answer the phone unless it’s me. Or Katherine, I guess.
Don’t go out for a while. Do you need food? Anything like that?” I told
her no. “Good. That’s good. Just stay put until I get there. Don’t
answer the door. It’ll be about an hour. I have to get Frieda off to
camp. Maybe an hour and a half. More people might show up. The phone
might ring itself silly, but let the machine get it. Most of these guys
won’t leave a message. Okay. Damn those assholes. We’re on a tight
schedule now.”

She was talking more to herself than to me by that time. We said
goodbye. I went into the den and looked for the loudest piece of music I
could find, but it seemed like I couldn’t remember what any of the
titles stood for. My eyes fell on Gustave Holst’s “The Planets.” I
remembered asking Barbara to turn it off once because it was so noisy
and alarming, all crashing tin and dissonance.

The telephone did ring itself silly over the next two hours. Lorraine
didn’t come, and I waited and waited, a murderous rage growing inside
me, while outside my house, the street filled up with men and women and
their cups of coffee, their idle chatter that I thought I could hear
like static, and their goddamn *ease.* As if they were waiting for the
amusement park to open. Every twenty minutes or so, someone rang die
doorbell, and I felt like I was made of glass. After a while, the
shouting started, right through the front door, just one question,
please. It began to seem like I might live the rest of my life this way,
under siege. Outside the news people looked bored and stupid, cows
absently chewing, sipping, puffing on cigarettes. I saw one of them drop
a butt to the sidewalk, grind it out under his shoe and gently kick it
sideways onto my lawn.

It broke me, or damn near, that gesture and my puniness in the face of
it. I wished the Professor had a telephone, so I could call him on it,
tell him who and what was making its way up his mountain. I was standing
at the front door with the knob in my hand, ready to shoot the dead bolt
back, rush outside and curse them all. I wanted to blow everyone in that
yard to kingdom come, that’s the thought that was in my head, I wanted
to fucking incinerate them.

I yelled something then, I know I did because the sound of my own voice
in that house was a surprise, and a relief and also a frightening
presence. All the physical strength had run out of my body and it took
huge effort to turn away from the door, turn from it completely. What I
came face to face with then was a mirror—in that tiny front hall,
Barbara had hung an old pressed tin mirror and a candle holder on each
side. We had bought all of them together on a trip south, we passed
through Winston-Salem and the reconstructed village of the Moravians,
their primitive, delicate world. I saw the mirror as if I’d never seen
it before, saw us hanging it, and then it seemed like Barbara and I had
just then put down the hammer and nails and stepped back, and she had
gone into the kitchen to get the champagne, because she’d told me the
day before, in the midst of the shaking Moravian universe, that she was
pretty sure she was pregnant, and she’d just have a sip out of my glass
to celebrate, and that would be all.

But what I saw for a second was the Professor’s face, saw it staring
back at me, leering, and from somewhere, the words came into my head,
*?iow you know*, *now you see me.* I saw them, I thought, hovering on
the Professor’s lips. It seemed like there would never be escape from
any of it, him, Barbara, the world outside that hacked away at you every
day, took a little piece until you were just nothing. The doorbell rang
then, pressed long and hard by, I imagined, the ugly fat tobacco-stained
finger of the man who’d kicked the filthy remains of his cigarette into
my grass. An insistent knocking began and the singsong parodie, *Charlie
Parke?; oh Charlie Parker.* There was a hammer lying on the front hall
table where I’d left it, and I took it into both hands and smashed the
mirror, smashed out my reflection, the Professor’s, whoever it was, into
a frantic web of shards, and then bashed at the frame, the candle
sconces too. I wanted it gone, all of it, every last gleam, the fight,
the mirror, the voices behind the door, the voice of Barbara I thought I
could still hear, out in the kitchen, calling even then, whispering from
behind the shattering and the blown fights, *Charlie*, *Pll be right
there.*

The knocking on the door stopped, the voices outside fell to hushed
questions I couldn’t hear. Footsteps shuffled off the porch and back
down the path. In that retreat, it seemed like the universe pushed back
from my body, and there was a clear space in which I saw I never should
have come back to the house, that if I didn’t want to go crazy, I would
have to leave and never come back. This strange absence, the sense that
there was only empty space around my body, lasted a litde while, half an
hour, and when I finally came out of it, I was upstairs in the bedroom,
packing my suitcase. I called the airlines and got on a flight to
Albuquerque. United, the friendly skies, I got fixated on their old
slogan, made a mantra out of it, though I had to fly another airline. I
called Lorraine, left her a message. I have to get out. You’ve got my
number.

I have to admit there was a moment when I almost could not do it, leave
our house. I walked through the rooms once again, saw our lives so oddly
welded together, two people who had spent so much time alone and then
found each other, the way it felt for so long like a dream I would
surely, horribly wake up from, so that each new piece of furniture, each
painting or book Barbara brought inside the house was insubstantial as
most things are in dreams, edged with light, haloed in silver. I walked
through the rooms, unplugging lamps, television, clocks, toaster oven,
coffee maker, anything that might short out and start a fire. Then I
plugged them all back in. I locked the doors, the windows.

There was a door from the kitchen to the garage which I passed through
and locked behind me. I stood for a minute in that dark heat, the dark
shape of the car between myself and the metal garage door. I could hear
the buzz of voices outside, some of them standing close by. I would have
to do it all very quickly, I thought, start the car, open the garage
door and begin to back up very fast. Everyone would get out of the way,
save their own lousy skins. Turn the radio on loud to drown out their
voices. Air conditioning. Dark glasses.

Which is what I did, all of it. No one wanted to the for my story, the
Professor’s story, Jane’s story, so they moved, jumped, dove back. For a
while, there was a car or two behind me, but then I didn’t pay
attention. I would be easy to lose in the usual crowd and honk on 1–95,
which is what they would all tell their bosses at the paper, the
station, the studio, except for the government man, who wouldn’t say
anything to anybody. I parked in long-term parking, said goodbye to my
car. It had a nice radio. I hoped somebody worthy got it before the
towing company did.

I picked up the ticket and no one stopped me. I walked to the gate— only
ticketed passengers beyond this point, I read and thought, like a fool, that I was free. A drink in the bar directly across from the gate, the
first I’d had since Isabel and Nathan’s party Could that have been just
three weeks before? How was it possible? A woman took the stool next to
me at the bar, then moved. In my head, I congratulated her, complimented
her woman’s intuition. I hadn’t showered in a couple of days, or shaved.
I couldn’t remember when I’d last changed my clothes. I drank another
bourbon and then my flight was called.

Another wait in line, extremely heavy security, tickets checked again,
drivers’ licenses. Someone had threatened to blowup a plane out of L.A.,
so everybody was being careful. A man and a woman behind me in line said
this, *that bomber,* they said, *or someone*. The line moved slowly,
passengers sighed, tapped their feet, I counted the thousand old
gestures of impatience. The Professor would be happy, I thought. He’s
impeded progress. Once again, he’s slowed the world down to walking
speed.

I had no idea what I was flying back into. It seemed right that there
was cloud cover all across America. Every time I looked down, it was
into that empty, perfectly white pillow of cloud, blue sky above and
beside, that cottony landscape that seemed like it must be heaven. I
wondered that no one had taken up residence. When I flew as a child, I
would look down and expect to see angels or the transfigured dead
sitting there, smiling up at all of us who were still so busy, so intent
on going somewhere, anywhere, when really there was nowhere else to go.

My block, the street outside my apartment, was quiet, empty. It seemed
impossible that I’d outrun the news. I let myself in and, without
turning on any lights, felt my way to the bedroom and lay down.
Immediately my body began to shake, great wracking shivers. The room was
very dark, but I could make out shapes, dresser, table, clothes tree,
night-stand, the ticking clock. I reached for the telephone and called
Jane, but there was no answer, and I didn’t leave a message. I tried to
think what she and I were to each other: stepbrother, stepsister. I
wondered what we were waiting for, why we weren’t already halfway up to
Los Alamos. Everyone else was already there, I felt sure, camped where
fifty years before, men and women had fashioned the atomic bomb. Jane
was there too, I knew it then, sure as I knew my own name. It was
comforting to know where Jane was, I thought that because I was
exhausted and already dreaming. She would go up the mountain and stay a
while. She would still be there when I arrived.

*It* **COULD TAKE TWO** hours to get to Los Alamos, but I was going to
make it a lot faster, I could tell. For most of the drive, west on Route
502, the sun was coming up behind me, casting shadows forward. I thought
about it, the strange rightness of that: my shadow would get to Jane and
her father before I did, and it would add to the shadow that was already
there, the cold breath shadow the Professor had been blowing over the
world for eighteen years. Dawn came on and on, and I did what I do in
moments of direst need: I imagined riffs and the words that ought to go
with them. I remembered that a teacher of mine once said I’d never be a
great musician because there were more words in my head than notes. On
my way up the mountain to meet the Professor’s doom, I wondered about
that, whether too much of the wrong thing in your head could make you a
failure, or make you crazy, like the Professor was. And if there was
anything anybody could say to bring him back. I drove on, melting into
the trees, notes jumping into my head from out of nowhere, shadowy. I
was climbing, altitude-wise, but it felt more like going under, diving
deep into some melody, and then I’d come up for air, that much closer to
the cabin, and I’d feel sick, and let myself sink again. “Round
Midnight,” “Sid’s Retreat,” “Green Dolphin Street.” I’d hear horns, one
horn. I thought of what somebody said to me one time about horns: how
all jazz trumpet players are trying to recover from having to learn
“Reveille.” Not sure I get it, even now.

The thing is, I was absolutely certain I was going to die, certain I was
speeding toward it along with a bunch of jackbooted government angels. I
hadn’t run into them yet, hut I knew I would. I imagined them as
beautiful guys, big American specimens, hiding in the trees, still as
the beyond, their bodies held in suspension like an angel in a painting,
the promise of flight, but really so much stillness. At the Professor’s
cabin, they were going to push me out of my car, squeeze me out like
birth, trade me for Jane and save me if they had a chance at a clear
shot. I had already made up the whole story, finished it. I was trying
to empty out my head to prepare, but the music kept flooding in.

And then I tried to calm it all out, put parts of myself to sleep, tuck
it in, smooth it all out like a sheet, the way Barbara used to run her
hands over the sheets in the morning when she made the bed, run the palm
of her hand from the foot of the bed up to where our heads nested and
then shake her hand over the other side. It was a habit she had, she
said, a woman habit, getting the bad dreams out. It was something she’d
seen a masseuse do, and she thought it would work as well for places
where bodies lay as it did for bodies themselves. So I tried to do this
to my heart, my lungs, guts, and on down, smooth them out, get them
ready for the next long sleep. Make my body blank, empty, flat, ready. I
read somewhere that when Charlie Parker died he looked just like the
Buddha, round and pleased, a slighdy Oriental sharpness at the edges of
his eyes. Like Frieda’s face. The face said All Is Well. I remembered
this from a poem by Jack Kerouac. It’s strange what comes back to you,
and when, how Charlie Parker’s expression said, All Is Well, and
everyone who heard him play had a feeling like hermit’s joy. That’s
Kerouac’s line. I was trying to make my expression say all is well. I
was thinking, *Pm coming to you*, *Barbara. Yll be there in two shakes.
Like hermit’s joy.*

When I got to the parking area where Nathan and his car had been blown
to bits, I woke up a little, felt the breakfast I didn’t have rise in my
throat, and choked it back down. There were twenty-five or thirty
vehicles already there, big SUVs, fire and rescue, overflowing the small
parking area and lining the road. It was what I expected, and then I
remembered: July 16, 1945. So what else would they find on this
anniversary? Pieces of metal, a dip in the earth, the detonation crater
worn to the size of a golf course divot? But it didn’t happen here, I
thought, the big bang was miles away to the south, along the Jornada del
Muerto, the Journey of Death, Dead Man’s Trail. I thought of the
scientists and druids Nathan and Isabel saw at Stonehenge, hanging out
together on the day of the solstice. Jane’s mother, I thought of her
too, for no good reason.

Her devotion to Christian Science, a religion that sprang up when a
woman took a hard fall on a frozen pond in Lynn, Massachusetts, and then
cured herself. *ÍPhose woods these are I think I know.* The scientists
and the druids went to the same place because a long time ago, people
who saw something there thought the world was going to end. And they
wanted to make sure it wouldn’t, cure themselves by seeing it again and
again, every year.

A woman was just getting out of a pickup truck. She was blonde, pretty
in a weather-worn way, not a tourist. We headed for the trail at the
same time, though she was slightly ahead.

“Nice day,” I said, and dropped back a few paces. I didn’t know how I
was going to stop her. “Excuse me,” I said.

She pressed herself back against the undergrowth as if to let me pass.
“So what’s going on up there?’ she said.

“Up where?”

She pointed to my body, a little over my right shoulder. “You’re not
hiking,” she said. “You don’t have any stuff. All these people have been
milling around. It’s weird. There’s a man who lives up there. A quiet
guy. I wondered if something might have happened to him.”

“I think something did.”

“He’s kind of a loner. I thought maybe somebody who knows him should—”

“You should go back to town,” I told her. "There isn’t anything to do.”

“Are you going up that way?”

“Yes. But I think it’s too dangerous.”

“So why are you going?”

I didn’t answer, and she walked on beside me.

After about a hundred yards, the trail closes down, so that we had to
walk single file. I could hear her little breaths behind me, strong,
keeping up. My heart was hammering savagely, more inside my head, in my
ears, than lower down where it should have been. Like a heart in a
dream, surreal glub, glub, and I felt the woods full of whispering men
we couldn’t see. There was so much to listen to. Men where there should
have been trees—I think that phrase now because it’s exactly how the
Professor talked about the end of the world—where there should have been
trees, there would be men, standing still, listening for something
mysterious, divine, sounds they couldn’t recognize or understand
anymore, the beating of their own hearts.

I knew Jane was already up there. Her father would see her but nobody
else, so she was leading the horses to water, as the saying goes. They
wanted to send her in so they could get him with his tools and
instructions, his artist’s renderings of pipes and boxes and containers,
his field data, his cold-weather calculations, his journal full of
ranting and impossible solutions. They wanted to catch him with his
supplies: pipes of galvanized metal and copper and plastic, zinc and
lead, silver oxide, batteries, drills and drill bits, hacksaw blades and
vare cutters, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, penny nails. Or circling
names in a phone book, in a left- or right-wing journal, in a newspaper.
They wanted most of all to see him with a smile on his dirty face.

We heard their voices only seconds before I saw them, men in dark
windbreakers spilling out of the trees toward us, rushing, with their
hands up, telling us to stop. It took me a second to understand that
they were real men, not ghosts or druids, not even scientists.

And into this scene, suddenly, she appeared, Jane, in the arms of a man,
a dark blue uniform, fireman or paramedic, fireman, I know now, the man
she would later marry, on purpose because he was the last person to see
her father alive. They flew down the mountain past us, her eyes staring
open, so that at first I thought she was dead. He’d killed her, her
father had, and sent her body out to us, to me, as a warning. I
registered a kind of intellectual relief, but not enough to unclench my
body. I thought, a woman should not be seeing this, and moved to put my
body in the path. When they passed, my eyes met Jane’s and what I saw
was snakelike and burnt out from sorrow. I think she hated me, and I
think, though she has never said so, to me or anyone else I know of, in
those last moments her father had told her everything, tried to explain,
and then he did what everyone now believes he did, he poured gasoline
around the inside of his cabin and onto himself. He told her he would
wait until she was gone. *Go on,* he’d said, and laughed. Fie licked at
the gasoline that dripped onto his face from his hair. *Now Til bum on
the inside too,* he said. Then he said, *Just open the window before you
go. To let in some oxygen. Open the window.* And for a minute, she
didn’t move. Maybe longer than a minute. I saw all this in her face,
even before I heard the story of it. She didn’t move because she thought
she might save him. And then she did move, though she Mil never be able
to explain to herself why.

All of this in her eyes, in that one glance. All of our shared history,
our litde dances together and apart, our minute capitulations. All those
trips to see her father when he didn’t recognize her, or wouldn’t show
up. So she had seen him, finally made him speak to her, witnessed his
baptism into the brotherhood of protester, Buddhist monks, the holy
damned. She saw him on fire, and so she would marry a fireman. She would
have to. *That* fireman, the one who carried her out of the burning
cabin, down the mountain, over the threshold. I remember him too, tide
sear across his face. I remember he was whispering into her ear,
quieting her. He was mapping out their long, happy fife together,
riffing on it. Fantastic. Steel feathers blew out of his mouth, he was
singing to her, *Fly down this mountain, fly away from here.*

I caught all that on the inside of a nanosecond because suddenly, they
were running, the fireman was running with Jane in his arms. He said to
us, almost in a whisper, almost so Jane couldn’t hear, get back. It’s
gonna blow up there, and farther behind him, I could see other dark
figures in the woods fall down and roll. My left hand was still holding
the arm of the woman, keeping her behind me, but then something dropped
us to our knees, a tremor through the ground followed by a terrific
explosion and popping sounds, a quick little whine like cartoon
characters make when they scram, when they leave behind a puff of smoke.
Pings and zips of sound continued, and there was the odor of burning,
and the roar of it, coming down the mountain, the wind a fire makes blew
at us into my mouth so I couldn’t cry out to anyone. All that time, I
didn’t know exacdy where the Professor was, but I smelled something
foul, and believed it was his flesh, his own excremental burning. I had
never hated him more than I did then, lying on my belly, angled uphill
and half on top of a woman I didn’t know, in the woods outside Los
Alamos, New Mexico. I hated him because he was getting away, because he
would never face his accusers, the bereft husbands and wives, all the
litde children. And now I think I ought to have charged up that hill and
dragged his burning body out, fallen on top of it, rolled him over and
over in the dirt outside the cabin, stamped out the flames. So that he
could stand before us, his charred body, the weepy melted flesh of him,
and feel mortal. The woods got hotter. Someone yelled, then everyone was
yelling. We can’t get near it, a voice called through all the others, we
can only contain it.

*Words to live by: We can’t get near it; we can only contain it. Words
to live with.*

So that’s more or less the end of my story. The Professor doused himself
with gasoline and burnt to a hard black crisp. I wanted to see the body,
to satisfy myself that he was really gone, but I never could. When
there’s no perp to walk the walk and talk the talk, everybody pretty
much packs up and heads home. They tried to get to me for a while, and
to Mary Ellen Rappaport, the woman under me, men and women with
microphones and a hunger for statements. All those whores asking *how
did you feel?* No one cares how I feel. And anyway, I don’t know.

<strong><em>In THE ABSENCE OF</em></strong> the Professor, it is possible to become more
like him. That’s the statement I’d like to make, if anyone’s still
interested. I have come to see this in the hours and days and months
that have passed. I have come to see the moral of this story. Which is:

I play a litde these days, in bars all over the West. I’m on the move.
There’s a kind of circuit for guys like me, Albuquerque, Gallup,
Durango, Cortez, Flagstaff, Cedar City, Kingman, Barstow, Bakersfield,
Fresno, and then back the same way. There’s a bar near Bayfield,
Colorado, called the Broken Butt Saloon, as in gun butt, but I did kick
a guy’s butt in there one afternoon for tearing open the back of a
woman’s T-shirt as she was trying to make a clean exit. I had never
fought anybody before that, but it felt good. I’m afraid that’s the kind
of man I’m becoming. A place like the Broken Butt Saloon doesn’t want
anything to do with the likes of me, a saxophone, a white guy named
Charlie Parker. But I love the look of the land there, the unforgiving
cant of the mountains, the fir trees, the way it all says *we ain’t
taking any shit from you, buster.* The way you can drive for hours and
not run across a living soul. Sometimes I stop the car and get out and
play a litde by the side of the road. You can’t imagine it, that wail in
the southern Rockies. Nobody ever thought to do it before, I feel sure.
If a sax blows in the Rockies, and nobody’s there to hear it, does it
make a sound?

You bet your ass it does.

Except that what it makes isn’t sound, exactly, but angels. There aren’t
any angels until Charlie Parker blows them into being. Somebody else
said that. Jack Spicer? This high up in late September, there’s already
snow on the peaks. Far in the distance, sure, but there it is, snowy
mirage. It’s a gray day, no rain yet, just a solid, back-lit gray that
brings out the green of the firs. Nothing’s begun to turn. It’s like the
apogee of green up here, zenith of green. But that white in the distance
is made stark by some light I can’t see. Far from where I’m standing,
the sun has broken through this army blanket of a sky and illuminated
the tops of the mountains with the kind of brilliance I can never get
to.

And I’m thinking how making music up here is like making angels in the
snow. Angels in the air, in the snow, what’s the blessed difference? You
move your mortal self a litde, move your arms, your hands, and a shape
appears out of nowhere, the shape of consolation.

So I play a little here and there. I never went back to Boston. Resigned
from teaching. The principal said, the kids need you, Charlie, and you
need them. But I don’t know about that. Children are so delicate. I have
a feeling I shouldn’t be around them. I smoke a little dope sometimes,
before I play. I get loose then. I don’t think about anything.

Some nights I think I see Bean in the back of the club, the bar, the VFW
hall, wherever I’ve landed on Planet Boogie. I can see her face half in
shadow, I see her watch me, her thoughts drifting forward into the stage
light with all the cigarette smoke. She says, here’s looking at you,
Charlie. She says, how does it feel, people coming to watch you? How
does it feel to know it’s not you they want, but a sensation, a slow
burn? They get it from something your body does, something you can make
your body do.

Which do you prefer, she’s always asking me, the slow burn, or the quick
hot flash, the way my father went? The slow bum in hell or the quick hot
flash into angelic orbit. She’s in the last row, asking me with her
eyes. Barbara stands behind her, ready to answer the question, if I
can’t.

Somewhere far off, the gentle rise and circle of cinders, fire into
music. Jane’s father slowly waves one blazing arm out of the darkness,
the smoking ivory of his teeth gleams.

** VI

Because I could not still be talking.

Because I could not be still.

So that:

<br>I thought of my brother first. Benjy: a terrific change in pressure and
temperature. Dislocation. Skin reft from bone. Melting like wax. A
sizzle. I thought of hell. The picture Father Mick uses to scare the
litde boys. In hell I am a racist. In hell I am worse than what I was on
earth. I will eat flesh and drink blood. I’ll out-Satan Satan. Blood. My
own swims up into my eyes, my head is awash in my own gore so that I
can’t see, can’t tell if Jane got out.

<br>I’m melting.

The day after people escaped Hiroshima and came to Hijiyama Bridge,
there were hundreds of men, women and children who were so badly burned
that the skin of their whole body was hanging from them like melted
rags.

I’m melting.

Dorothy gets the hat and the broom to take back to Kansas. Or just the
broom. That was a story about populism. Agrarianism. People duped by their government.

Once upon a time.

Can’t any of you fucking *see?*

Where’s Jane? I think I can make out her shadow under the trees. The
blackness of her shadow amazes me. So dark and so transparent. That was
always Jane. No one knew her and everyone could see right through her
too.

Is it possible I will go on talking even though I am no longer here?
Isn’t that what the dead always do? There is no such thing as was.

But say I got out alive? Say I timed things just right and slipped out
through the smoke and the din and the implosion of my house. Say I
looked back just once and did not turn to salt, and saw all of you grim
and satisfied, saw the fireglow in your faces, and I ran out into the
night, into the cool arms of the trees. Those dark welcoming womanly
arms and pressed my burning body against the cool womanly bark and took
my ease.

Say it happened that way. Say it.

l knew it was all coming apart when I saw him at the store. I remembered
where I’d seen him before, that he had survived the bomb under the car,
and the lawyer didn’t. And then when I saw him on the ground, sprawled
out, half in a trash can, really, because he didn’t hit the ground, I
remembered all the way back to my last class at Berkeley. I remembered
because he was sitting down in a chair attached to another chair in a
line of chairs, and I was standing over him in that professorial
attitude of aggression. So he was there for the original Gehenna, the
primal scene, the onset of the so-called madness that became my life. He
would go to the authorities. He was young enough to believe *going to
the authorities* might accomplish something.

So I knew.

I smote him thus.

I hailed a cab and took myself to the airport, bought a ticket to San
Francisco, the next flight, just wait twenty-five minutes and you can go
almost anywhere you want. Pay cash. I took it all with me, nearly seven
hundred dollars. This was the end. I knew by the way I spent the money.
How American of me, to know a truth of such magnitude by the way it
makes one behave fiscally. I disgust myself.

And then I was standing on Fisherman’s Wharf with a crowd of tourists.
We were waiting for the Bay Flyer, the ferry to Alcatraz, me and my
brother Benjamin, who was of course not really there, having been
himself dead for these last thirty years. But there in spirit, with all
the schoolchildren, honevmooners, *turistas.* We listened to them wonder
about Alcatraz in their several mysterious languages:

*Chirp, chirp, chirp, Birdman?*

*Ha, yuk, yuk Birdman ?*

Sounding like the laughing gull, guarding its hilarious secret. Benjy
flicked his cigarette into the Bay and then he said, you know it wasn’t
all ashes, the day I bought the farm, gave up the ghost. He said no way,
José, he remembered everything about that day. As I stood there in San
Francisco, I knew what he meant, it was surrounding us both, the
distracted, syrupy cloud, the ashes rising up. But there was bone. I saw
it. Pieces of bones. And they float, stay with you, all the hard parts.
That was how I saw it happen, Benjy said, my own incineration, a kind of
flutter and plonk way off into the China Sea. There were maybe five
other guys around, all of us surprised to find ourselves shivering in
July, in thin jackets on the shores of that strange land. It was like a
fairy tale. VVe wanted to say, once upon a time.

Because he was so young, Benjy made a promise to take care of me, a
quiet pledge to our parents. Our parents seemed young too. They seemed
not to know each other very well, they needed us to help them know each
other better, and they would need us to remember them, need the force of
our combined remembering. And then our father put his affairs in order.
He remembered to put his affairs in order.

Wait, I said. It wasn’t all what?

Ashes. There was bone or something.

It was probably still down there at the bottom of the China Sea, that’s
how he was in life, Benjy, weighed down with other people’s burdens.

The wind over the San Francisco Bay was suddenly fierce and cold,
currents of air and water crossing each other in a merciless patchwork.
Other people seemed to be losing things into the Bay: a brochure, a
ferry ticket, a coffee cup.

What was his name? Benjy said. The Birdman of Alcatraz? His real name?

Larry, Moe, Curly. I don’t know.

Me neither. I haven’t the foggiest. Except that he got away. Made this
wild escape. He dug a tunnel with a spoon and broke out and it had
something to do with flying.

With a spoon?

It was nice out there on the landing, warm even, when the wind settled
down. I closed my eyes and tilted my face up to the sun. The noise of
the city, even the voices of people waiting for the ferry, dropped away
behind me and all I heard was the slap of water against the docks, the
funny questioning voices of sea gulls, the sky full of their nervous
hovering. But a few minutes later, I glanced back over my shoulder,
watching Benjy walk out of the snack bar carrying two styrofoam cups,
and it was alarming, the bad look of him, the thorough darkness of it,
the dark hair, the leather jacket and black jeans. A walking shadow. On
that particular day at Fisherman’s Wharf, everyone else seemed to have
decided to wear white, or some creamy color. Benjy looked like a blank
in the landscape, a hole the morning light had fallen into. He looked
dangerous. A woman ran out after him, shouting, Hey mister! she was
saying, Hey you with the two coffees tight, no sugar! And I could only
think, What? What did he do? Benjy stopped and turned around, listening,
then he held out his hand, and the woman raised her fist above his open
palm, and the silver, his forgotten change, dropped into it. I could see
it, catching the tight. He thanked her and smiled and looked up, over
the heads of hundreds of tourists, looking for me, checking to see if I
was still waiting in the place he’d left me that time.

But he’d been dead for thirty years. None of this was happening.

Pieces of silver poured into his hands. Like Judas, tike this Charlie
Parker.

We stood outside on the high aft deck of the Bay Flyer and watched San
Francisco recede, the edge of the Bay, the wharf seeming to draw into
itself.

So what are you going to do? Benjy said. Are you going to go back? Meet
your maker? You can’t stay here. You can’t run away forever, you know.

I know.

You know

It’s pretty here, near water. I tike water. Being near water.

What have you done with your life?

What a question.

Well?

I didn’t know the answer. You’d think if you lived alone long enough,
you’d know the answer to such a question.

Did you take good care of her?

Who?

Jane.

Of course I took good care of her. Doesn’t she look like it?

I guess I would have done it differendy.

He would have. Benjy would have started doing things differendy years
ago. I had a child, a daughter. Benjy always whispered that into my ear,
to remind me. He thought I needed reminding. Even if I were separated
from her, I still had a daughter somewhere in the world. He thought I
could have done a better job of hanging onto her. And maybe it was true.
If Benjy had been Jane’s father, the whole world might be different now.

And he would not have come to these two conclusions: that everybody in
America is capable of killing, even all those leftist pacifist types who
claim they couldn’t pull the trigger, sink the knife. And second,
fathers would kill for their daughters all the time, every single day of
their lives if they could. If they had to.

So this was all for Jane.

That’s right. Jane and her future.

And so we turned and faced south toward the island, “The Rock,”
prisoners called it, making the place sound like salvation, something to
cling to in a storm. We had to shout over the wind, everybody did, and
so you could hear bits and pieces of conversations going on nearby:

A young man tells his wife about the only time he was ever in jail. It
was after his senior prom and somebody threw a beer can out of the car
window right in front of a cop. The kicker was, he said, there were four
couples in the car, and the boys had on the girls’ prom dresses, and the
girls were wearing the boys’ tuxedos.

In Searcy, Arkansas? the wife said.

Dresses are kind of nice, the husband said, his voice softening. You
know. They’re easy.

The next day they got tattoos, Benjy whispered.

Then the guys all got those tattoos, the husband said.

Boy are so *interesting*, the wife said.

The inside of Alcatraz felt like a submarine or the belly of a boat,
like the hull of the ferry we were just on, all that open space for
people who can’t go anywhere. Secure and dangerous at the same time: a
hospital that most of the walls have been blown out of. We wanted to
keep making these metaphors, Benjy and I—

Though Benjy was a metaphor himself, dead these thirty years.

—all the tourists trying to pretend Alcatraz was anything but a prison.
We rented the taped tour, everybody did, everybody wanted to be caught
in their own secret fascination with punishment. The first voice on the
tape was a surviving prisoner who says he committed crimes because he
was dead in his heart.

So that’s what this is, dead in my heart. Is that it?

The cell blocks were full of echoing—voices were amplified and then
thrown around over your head and under your feet. There could be no
secrets, and that would be the one thing you’d be dying to have: a
secret, some small piece of information kept safe and apart from all
these people who were just like you. You never knew there were so many.
All these years, all your life, you’d felt so alone in the world and
hated it, and now, suddenly, it was all you wanted, to be that lonely
again.

Who are you talking to? Benjy said.

You. You. Always it was you.

You could never touch anybody here. I reached into the air for Benjy’s
hand. Not even by accident. Nobody would like it, or else they’d like it
too much.

This was not hard for me to imagine. You might forget what skin feels
like. And after months in solitary, if you did bump up against
somebody’s skin, accidentally touch hands in the chow line, you’d die
from the shock. The electricity of it would buzz straight into your
heart, and you’d hit the cement floor like a stone.

We went back to the gift shop, Benjy—

who is long dead

—and I, and bought a book about Robert Stroud, that was his real name,
the Birdman of Alcatraz. We read how he was put into solitary
confinement in Leavenworth for killing a guard, and how a bird fell into
his exercise yard. He put the bird in a sock to keep it warm, set it
beside him when he ate, caught beedes for it, tried to teach it to fly,
but it wouldn’t. What the bird would do, the book said, was learn how to
pull a cart, and how to open a cage and let itself in. But we stopped
reading after the part where Robert Stroud takes seven years to build a
bird cage without using any glue.

I think this story is going to be too much for me, Benjy said.

Someday, Jane, you will want to get out of this story.

But I kept turning over the pages, searching for Robert Stroud’s great
escape, his return to Mrs. Stella Johnson, his true love, in
Leavenworth, Kansas. Pages and pages, but still, I couldn’t find that
part.

You could open the cells, let yourself in, sit down on the narrow hunks,
maybe right where Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly once sat or lay
stretched out, plotting his next job, his great escape. Behind the
speaking voices on the tape was a constant din of echoing footsteps, or
crashing waves, the cries of sea gulls, shouts and bursts of gunfire,
all made up in a recording studio in Oakland. There was something
terrible about all this prerecorded, voiced-over suffering, worse than
gawking at a car wreck. It was like driving to a place where you heard
there was a car wreck once upon a time, an incendiary horror in which
everyone was killed and no one learned any lesson at all. I walked
outside to stand at the top of the inmates’ exercise yard, where there’s
a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the entire burnt red span of it, more
perfect than any postcard I’d ever seen.

It could be so beautiful here. Why do they want to hang onto the ugliest
part?

I don’t know, Benjy said. Maybe it’s a cautionary tale. Anyway, I’ve had
enough. Let’s go.

On the ferry ride back, I was still thinking of Robert Stroud’s litde
bird learning the lesson of Alcatraz, learning to open a cage and let
himself in.

His bird was called Runty, Benjy said. Imagine that.

Sometimes I feel Benjy in the water at Walden Pond. He is reaching one
arm around me, pulling me back from something in the dark water, out
there, deeper, something neither of us can see. With the other hand, he
uses the air to steady himself.

Here’s the story, I said. It used to be that I couldn’t stay in one
place for very long. Or with anybody. Any woman. I couldn’t stand to. So
much of the time they’d be asking you for something. Whenever they were
nice to you, it was greedy, it was a lie. They wanted to take part of
you and never give it back.

Why are you telling me this? Benjy said.

Because it’s no longer true. No longer the case.

I tried to hold myself perfecdy still. I thought: a single misstep, and
I might keel overboard into the San Francisco Bay. But then I felt
Benjy’s body next to mine. Benjy always seemed to be in love with his
body without realizing it. He seemed to know a truth that most people
forget or deny: of everything you own, only your body can’t be lost or
taken away, though I lost my body so long ago, I don’t remember what it
should feel like. I look down sometimes at my chest, belly, privates,
legs, and think what is all this and what is it good for? Benjy was
always content in his body, hut far off, far away from everybody else,
like a loose star at the edge of the solar system. He was out there,
shining, but I’d splintered apart years ago.

Remember, Benjy said, when we found that black widow in the garage?
Remember how huge? Big as your thumb. We captured her in a pillbox and
put the pillbox in the freezer. Later when we shook her out onto the
counter, she shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. We should have
brought her out slowly, let her warm up.

A woman built that for a man, I said, pointing to Coit Tower.

I thought she built it for a firefighter. It has a kind of lonely feel
though, doesn’t it?

In the shops along the Wharf, we looked at souvenirs, T-shirts,
paperweights, postcards, coffee mugs and shot glasses, jewelry. I
thought I should bring a present back for Jane, and I stopped in front
of a glass case of necklaces with tiny cable car charms attached to
them. The chains were so thin they seemed to wink once and then
disappear under the lights. I stood at the counter for a long time,
Benjy ghosting there next to me, drifting in and out of the push of
tourists. My hand played over a gray felt pad of necklaces. I wanted one
for Jane.

Go on, Benjy said.

But I don’t have enough money.

Go on, he said again.

So I slipped a necklace into my pocket and turned away, expecting to
hear my name called. But no one there knew my name, so it would have
been, Hey you, or, Stop that guy. And I waited, and still there was
nothing except tourists’ voices, the claw and scratch of their talk.

We left and walked south to Union Square and took the train back to
Emeryville, and all the while, I kept my hand on that necklace for Jane,
my fingers working over the delicate links, the cable car charm.

Nobody will notice. Its just gone, and for a while, nobody will notice.
Until somebody says, it was just here and now it’s gone. She will not
believe that I bought it for her. She will know I didn’t have the money.
She knows all about money and not having enough. She will be suspicious.

The result is a disruption of the society. So it is very probable that
in their attempts to end poverty and disease, engineer docile, happy
personalities and so forth, the lovers of technology will create social
systems that are terribly troubled, even more so than the present one.
For example, the scientists boast that they will end famine by creating
new, genetically engineered food plants. But this will allow the human
population to expand indefinitely, and it is well known that crowding
leads to increased stress and aggression.

So I wanted her to know I’d stolen it. A common thief. A kind of pledge.

My room at the Holiday Inn had a Bay view, and I stood for a long time
and watched the lights of the city coming on through the mist of late
afternoon, seeming to gather strength. There were all the islands:
Treasure Island, Angel Island, and Alcatraz, stretched out between me
and the city, like part of a constellation, so small and far away and
unreadable. I lay down on the bed and held the necklace up to the foggy
light. It was made of tiny gold finks, a tiny chain that would fie along
Jane’s throat, more like an idea than a real piece of jewelry. The cable
car charm hung on a stretch of slighdy heavier chain, and I saw for the
first time there was a diamond inside, maybe a quarter carat, moving
loose inside its cage.

When I woke up, the hotel room was dark, except for the fights of San
Francisco wavering in through the window. Benjy was breathing, deep and
even. Or it was a woman beside me, my wife, her arm around my waist. I
turned toward her, shuddered, turned back. I could never be with any
woman. Vampires, all of them. When they touched you, they wanted to take
something, draw the fife out little by little. I once learned this: a
true vampire prefers to get blood by gently sucking on the pores of the
skin. Not by biting but by a kind of kissing, something like a touch of
the lips and a gentle pressure. I thought about it there and then, in
Emeryville, California, an hour after midnight, people crowded into that
hotel room, Jane, her mother, Benjy, all their breathing hot and quiet.

Benjy said: Do you ever try to read your own face in the mirror? My
brother, my likeness.

Jane’s mother turned her head away, and then it was Benjy, the pale
column of his throat lying close to my mouth. I put my Ups to his skin,
closed my eyes and breathed in. Salt. The marine smells of the China Sea
and the musky bilge of Walden Pond. Sweat. Soap. A kind of boy-smell he
always carried. I kissed him sofdy on the side of his neck while he
slept the sleep of the dead. I thought about drawing his blood out that
way, a litde at a time, small mouthfuls of flesh, and how long it could
take, the thirty years he’d been gone, thirty years, the length of a
good marriage, through new jobs and children and houses, a future we
couldn’t possibly have seen into. Blind about it, like a vampire in
front of a mirror.

Vampire technocrats. We can imagine a future society in which there is
endless competition for positions of prestige and power. But no more
than a very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real
power is. Vampires, little draculas. Transylvania is in the Carpathian
Mountains, the first source of uranium, radioactivity.

See. It all fits.

The night was absolutely quiet, empty, no sounds from the hallway or the
bank of elevators, or the rooms on either side. I untangled myself from
the sheets and went to the window, looking for the fight from Alcatraz,
but there were hundreds of fights in the Bay, and I couldn’t remember
exacdy where that particular one should be. The tour of the prison
seemed like something I did a long time before. Already I was having a
little trouble picturing the inside of Alcatraz. I remembered Robert
Stroud and Runty and the possibility of his escape. And so I decided.

He got away. He studied birds, and then made wings for himself and

floated up out of the yard to Angel Island and was finally reunited with
his true love in Leavenworth, Kansas. He didn’t mind the facts of
prison: the cell, the food, the windy exercise yard, the Golden Gate
Bridge stretched out like a blood-red taunt. What he hated was the
silence in solitary. He missed talking to his birds. In the end, he
couldn’t live without them, even if they didn’t understand a word he
said. I patted the bedside table, trying to find the necklace, the cable
car, the diamond. I couldn’t make the light catch on it, couldn’t see it
sparkle, but when I shook the necklace, I could hear a tiny sound, high
and hard and wanting, like a voice just entering the world. He got away.

My father gave Benjy a pocket dictionary, English-French, that belonged
to his aunt. Benjy gave it to me before he left for Vietnam, and I kept
track of it all those years. It’s tiny, leather-bound, real leather,
with a snap that looks like a brown M&M. A piece of sweetness where
you’d never think to look for one. My father’s aunt spoke perfect
French. When he was a kid, Benjy used to write her letters in French,
back and forth, even when she was visiting, when she was living in the
same house. He told me later he couldn’t imagine what they said, but the
letters were pages and pages long, his bad translations, her beautiful
hand that looked just like my father’s. She always knew what he meant,
Benjy said. Even in another language. He told me what a huge relief it
was to have somebody understand what you were talking about. So I kept
the little dictionary. It had idiomatic phrases tucked away in the back,
like a sly joke at the last possible moment. “I take the rug and the
hatbox with me.” That one must be for travelers. “It has stopped.” “I
forgot to wind it up.” “The lightning has struck a house.” “I want to
see some kid gloves.” “I have some dirty linen for the laundress.” “You
don’t look well at all.” “I hope I do not intrude.” “I am sorry I cannot
tell you. I am a stranger here myself.”

I am a stranger here myself.

Driving, Benjy and I coukl have made it back out to New Mexico in less
than a day. I plotted the trip mathematically to see how fast it could
be done, the Cartesian wringing out of numbers. One of us would sleep in
the back and the other would go like hell. We made this same arrangement
as young men, hut Renjy was always the sleeper. As he would be now. But
that’s what we would have decided. We would give the world this last
view of us: two people heading out together across dangerous open
ground, territory barely known, where anything might happen. Two people
traveling back to the place they started from, which was a country
plagued by storms, unreliable allies, and sheer drops into cold, murky
water.

The positive idea that I would propose is Nature. Simple Nature: those
aspects of the spinning Earth and its creatures that are independent of
human laws and free of human muddling. And with this I also include
human nature, by which I mean the part of a person that is the result of
chance, or free will, or God.

Everyone—except the willfully perverse—will agree that nature is
beautiful. Certainly, it has tremendous popular appeal.

*How did you come to this topic? my thesis director asked me during the
defense, and I said, Like a blind man to the edge of a cliff.*

I decided: I would go back to Los Alamos and learn to be still. Develop
an accent, though I might be too old to learn that kind of new trick.

You could develop inflections, Benjy said.

What?

Oh come on, he said. I made a joke.

Inflections only. The act or result of curving or bending. I would drive
first, and Benjy would just be still.

When you get as old as we are, Benjy said, you need somebody else around
telling you what to do. Otherwise you start to forget who you are. Young
people could do with a dose of amnesia now and then, forget themselves a
little. But you. You’re already turning to air at the edges.

I should have come here to the coast to live. Benjy and I should have
come here together to college, to Berkeley or Stanford and then we might
have got caught in a movement and he would have run to Canada and then
later we could have returned and been old together.

We might go to Mass together. In Berkeley, once a year, at the Newman
Center, there is a funky sacrament of reconciliation. Everybody in the
church writes their sins on slips of paper, and brings them to the front
of the church, where the priest collects and then burns them all.

He doesn’t even read them first? Benjy said.

Nope.

Well I guess what does he care, right?

What I remembered about it, though, was the silence, how loud the
silence was. Confession was all that whispering, Abu might say the point
of confession was that serpent presence, the *hiss*, *hiss*, *hiss* from
the back of the church. But this confession was so quiet, quiet in an
imminent way.

Like numbers.

I **GOT ON THE** plane and flew back to Albuquerque, took a bus to the
store, where I’d left my bicycle. The store was dark but even so, I
imagined stopping in for groceries, a late night talk with Mary Ellen,
tell her— what? Explain about my mysterious daughter. Explain Jane. But
I didn ’t know the first words for it. I was afraid I would go too fast.
I would ask Mary Ellen to marry me before I’d even said hello, before
she had a chance to ask if I wanted coffee, a slice of the pie she’d
just baked, strawberry, it was the height of the season.

Say this, Benjy prompted from somewhere behind me: Mary Ellen, it’s
ridiculous that two people who live so near each other should be so
alone. Do you want to go for a walk? And after a while you’d just take
hold of her hand.

It’s that easy?

It’s that easy. And then when you’re saying goodbye, you just lean in
and kiss her. That’s all. Just a sweet soft kiss. Tike the chance. Risk
it.

She might not want me to.

How will you ever know? She might not know herself.

You’re right.

Of course I am. One of the things death makes you is always right. Of
course, by then nobody gives a shit.

It was nearly midnight when I got to the trailhead, left up to my cabin,
or down the highway to Mary Ellen’s house. I could find her address in
the telephone book. It seemed possible. A full moon hung in the sky like
a lightbulb, a lover’s moon—I thought the words to a song I didn’t even
know I knew. Where had I heard such a song? Who had I ever sung it to?
I’d been alone more than twenty years. Above me was the pure happiness
of clear starlight, I could find Orion’s Belt and Cassiopeia’s Chair.
What was the name of the dog? The trees looked like their own shadows,
just dark outlines against the deeper, star-pocked darkness. Some
mysterious animal lumbered in near me, then back.

“I can’t.”

I said it out loud to no one, to all of nature.

“I can’t do it.”

Her sons would be sleeping. She would be sleeping. I knew I looked wild
from traveling. I smelled like an airplane: formaldehyde and had coffee.
Human waste. I turned left, got off my bike and began to push it up the
hill. I was aware, even then, of a kind of doom, how the air grew cool
and still as I moved up the mountain. I could do this trek in my
sleep—some nights I wondered if I did—but that night after hesitating, I
couldn’t find my way, kept running up against parts of the path that
seemed strange, uncertain, huge fir trees growing where I would swear
they hadn’t been two days before. I could see the track perfectly well
in the dead-eye moon, but it was unrecognizable, obscured by moonshadow.
My head was filled with the odor of burning, but sweet: a hearth, bread
baking, cloves and pine, a richly scented human smell.

It filled me with fear. I knew I wasn’t in the woods alone, would never
be again.

**ONCE UPON A TEME, there was an old man who had a very beautiful
daughter.**

Don’t all the stories in the world begin this way?

Once upon a time, there was an old man. He was the lather of the most
beautiful woman in the land. At the end of her long childhood, she came
and stood before him. It was evening in her father’s country, summer.
The windows stood open and together father and daughter listened to the
world setding itself into sleep. Finally, the daughter spoke. Father,
she began, it is time for me to go into the world to seek my fortune.

Yes, the father sighed, I have known this hour would come.

What, the daughter asked, is my inheritance?

When I reached the cabin, Jane was waiting for me. As soon as I saw her,
sitting in a pool of moonlight so bright it seemed artificial, I knew I
had expected her. She was very beautiful sitting there, and I wanted to
weep at that vision of her, but there was no time. I knew this: no time.

She said, “Dad, I wanted to talk to you.”

You’re in a kind of spotlight, Jane. All lit up like that. Like a woman
on a stage, a baited trap, a blonde bombshell. Ecdysiast, the formal
term for *stripper,* coined by H. L. Mencken in 1940. From the Greek,
*ekdysis*, a getting out.

*Whose woods these are.*

“When I got up here,” she said, “and you weren’t back yet, I looked
around. And I realized there are things I’ll never know about you.” She
glanced toward the locked door of the cabin, or maybe just tilted her
head in that direction. “I’ll never get inside,” she said.

All daughters feel that way. And so they choose husbands.

“Are you listening to me, Dad?”

“Yes.”

“I want to hear your side of the story. I want you to have the last
word.”

And to his beautiful daughter, the old man said one of these things:

He said, I have no inheritance for you. Despite what you have come to
believe, I do not own this land, this house, all these rich trappings. I
am only the caretaker. So I can give you nothing.

Or else he said, this land and everything in it is your inheritance, but
of course you must stay in order to take possession of it.

Or else he said, your brother has already taken everything, stolen your
inheritance. Go claim it from *him.*

Or else he said, tomorrow I am going to die. Let’s talk about something
else. I will tell you a story, and that will be your inheritance.

Or else he said nothing.

I gave her a necklace, a cable car with a tiny diamond drifting inside.
I gave her a pocket dictionary, French-English. What a huge relief to
have somebody understand what you are talking about. There are idiomatic
phrases in the back. “It has stopped.” “I forgot to wind it up.” “I am
sorry I cannot tell you. I am a stranger here myself.”

‘Then I said nothing. Jane shifted half out of the moonlight, and I
realized I didn’t want her to leave. “I’m thinking of what to say last,”
I told her.

Do you know that the place we are right now is visible from the moon?

*Whose woods?*

Fifty years ago today, the first atomic bomb was detonated near
Alamogordo. But it was invented here, in my woods, my desert. I have
come to the desert to atone. And today I am joined by a thousand madcap
tourists, scientists, druids, all come to atone for the sins of the
fathers.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

Their RVs are in the village, though.

Jane laughed at that. It was good to hear her laugh—like the breaking of
a spell in a fairy tale. And then she said it again, tell me your side,
Dad. The laughter of the beautiful woman, the courteous question, the
one that heals the Fisher King, when the knight says, sir, what is your
wound?

There was a rustling in the trees, voices, the crackling of radios.
“Let’s go inside, Jane,” I said, and we did. I locked the door and lit
the lantern.

“It’s up to God now, Jane.” But whoever loves God truly should not
expect to be loved by God in return.

She looked frightened, I remember that and how sorry I was for it. How
she appeared to me as her girlhood self, her face open and
uncomprehending as it was when she held the dead child, Adam, killed by
a cocktail of household cleaning solutions and Christian Science.

“It’s not up to God,” she said. She began to look around her, for a way
out I suppose. And so she saw it all: the notebooks, arranged on a shelf
with the sketches above them, the map of electrical circuitry stretched
over the bed like a time-line, the pipes stacked like firewood, for
that, in effect is what they were to me, the chemicals, the aluminum
ingots, batteries and wire, that package that was already addressed. She
saw it and reached out, fearlessly. Her index finger grazed the name.

“Jane!” My voice rang and broke in that small space.

“He’d never open it,” she said. “He knows. The woman who died at Harvard
was his wife.”

I won’t say I was unmoved. I felt lonely. I am the loneliest man in the
universe. Sometimes there is this numbness at the base of my spine that
radiates upward. There is this truth I need to tell about the world:

The lovers of technology are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride
into the unknown.

Meanwhile, the sun rose, and thin light began to seep into the cabin,
under the door, through chinks around the windows. But the silence of
it! No birds. Postnuclear silence on July 16, 1995. Just heat and light.
A thousand suns. I could smell the burning. Sometimes humans give off a
scent like that, like grass fire, sand fire. Their acrid breath. Their
spew of talk.

“Tell me, Dad,” Jane said again. “Tell me your side of it.”

Once upon a time. She was looking around for a window, a way to get out.
Still the ecdysiast.

“You’re so beautiful, Jane,” I said. “Every time I see you, I’m shocked
by it. Stunned.”

Blown away. I leave the world a litde farther behind. I understand it,
that she took off her clothes again and again in order to find out what
was underneath. Not for them, not for the men, but for herself.

“Listen,” I said. “No birds. Somebody’s out there.”

“I know, Dad,” she said. She was so calm, ice water in her veins. “We
need to unlock the door and go outside.”

As if she were speaking to a small child. A troubled child. As if she
were already a mother speaking to her child.

“No,” I said. I reached under the bed for the gas can. I took die
matches out of my pocket. “I won’t hurt you,” I told her. “I would never
hurt you.”

“I know that,” she said. “Please don’t, Dad.”

The girl with dead Adam in her arms, she looked back at me like that. I
poured gas over my head, licked what dripped down my face like tears.

“Now I’ll bum on the inside too.”

She said no again, over and over, and began to weep. I won’t say I was
unmoved. She held out her arms and her body lurched toward me, a spasm,
but she stayed where she was, three feet away. Her will to live was
stronger than her desire to save me. That was all I needed to know.

“Open the window, Jane. It’s not locked. Open the window.”

She did. There were voices outside, fists knocking on the door. A man
called my name. She walked past me and opened the door, stepped through.
When I could not see her anymore, I lit the match.

What the world sees is the shock front and it cools into visibility, the
first flash, milliseconds long, of a nuclear weapon’s double flash of
fight, the flashes too closely spaced to distinguish with the eye.
Further cooling renders the front transparent; the world if it still has
eyes to see looks through the shock waves into the hotter interior of
the fireball.

Jane once said, Dad, you’re an extraordinary man.

There is no way to get out of this story.

I am the story.

Once upon a time, a man lived alone in the mountains. Now there is music
there, high in the Rockies. Inside the clouds, a saxophone. Bird.

Benjy. Wait for me.

A beautiful woman, her naked back to the audience.

In a moment, she will turn.

She will put on her clothes. She will begin to speak.

** VII

Reader, I married him. The fireman. That one, the last to see my father
alive. And mostly blinded in one eye. He said, someday, Jane we’ll talk
about it, and I said yes. I said, today.

I said, turn your face toward the window, so that I can see you clearly,
see the skin so burned, it seems new and shiny, as if you were just bom.
He said, now I can see you too, the beautiful glittering light of your
face. He said, go on, Jane, tell me. In your own words, with your own
voice. Tell me everything.

He lived in the mountains, on a dollar a day.

He was a physicist, a mathematician. He was an extraordinary man.
Extraordinary. As in *extra* + *ordinem*, out of order.

He gave me this necklace, a diamond inside a tiny silver cage. That’s
the light you see, my love, my husband, that is the beautiful
glittering.

And hanging beside it, sharing the silver chain, is the charm, the
*milagro*, that Charlie picked out for me at Chimayo. It’s a woman, a
dancer, arms out in a gesture that has always seemed to me like
crucifixion, one leg kicked high in the air. She’s leaping over
something, leaping beyond it. Though that’s not what Charlie said. What
he said was, here Jane, it’s you. What he said was, I don’t know what
part is the injured part of you, except maybe your father. So here it
is, he said, you, the big picture.

He only wanted his solitude, time to think, time to work on a project of
great importance, a treatise.

I was the apple of his eye. What can that mean? He was probably one of
the few people who knows.

*Deuteronomy, Psalms, Proverbs, Zechariah. The pupil in the center of
the eye, protected by the automatic closing of the eyelids when anything
comes too 7i ear; thus, precious and pivtected. Keep me as the apple of
your eye. Write my name on the tablet of your heart.*

I miss my father. This is his side of the story:

** [Back Matter]

*** Acknowledgments

Once again, I am deeply and happily indebted to Kathryn Lang, who is
truly the best editor and friend any writer could hope for.

Thanks also to Freddie Jane Goff for skillful and patient copyediting.

I am also grateful to friends who read this book along the way: David
Borofka, Kathy Fagan, Connie Hales, John Hales, Alexis Khoury, Dympna
Ugwu-oju, and Steve Yarbrough.

Finally, deepest thanks to the ones who were always interested in the
story: Barbara and Lee Wieland, Lee and Linnea Wieland, Paul Wieland,
Anita and Tom Loftis, Carol and Marcus Simmons.

*** [About the Author]

[[l-w-liza-wieland-bombshell-2.jpg]]

**LIZA WIELAND** grew up in Atlanta, the setting for her awardwinning
first novel, *The Names of the Lost*, which is also a story based on
newspaper headlines—about an unexplained string of child murders (SMU,
1992). The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a 1999 NEA Fellowship,
Wieland has also published two story collections, *Discovering America*
(Random House, 1994) and *You Can Sleep While I Drive* (SMU, 1999). She
lives in Fresno where she teaches creative writing and American
literature at California State University.

Jacket photograph courtesy of The Archives of Milton H. Greene, LLC 278 Maple Street. Florence Oregon 97439. t# 541-997-4970 f# 541-997-5795 wmv.archiv»smhg.(|srn ©2000 Archives of Milton H. Greene, LLC All Rights Reserved

*** [Back Cover]

“One might have expected that the story of the Unabomber would inspire
the horror and the tragedy of *Bombshell*, but the lyricism and the poignance of Liza Wieland s novel add up to a large and welcome surprise.”—Madison Smartt Bell

“in *Bombshell* Wieland takes a shocking story from our national news
and casts her speculative fictional eye on it. Like a master
ventriloquist, she throws her voice into three disparate characters—a
beautiful blonde dancer in Las degas; her father, a mad professor whose obsessions have
terrorized America; and her stepbrother, who has a personal stake in
revealing the truth. *Bombshell* is one of the most vividly and
intelligently crafted novels IVe had the pleasure of reading.”—ALLEN WIER

Liza Wieland understands down to the bone how loneliness and love compel
her characters to make their impossible choices. Not only does she have
a searing intelligence and wisdom, her prose is by turns graceful and
astonishing.”—JANE HAMILTON

From the first page this novel grabbed me and there was no relenting.
*Bombshell* rings with an unnerving understanding of people who are
unsure of their grip—at the end of their rope.”—RON CARLSON

Liza Wieland s brilliant work commingles death, sexuality, and the desperate
search of children for ways of assuring themselves of love. These are
some of the best pages of prose fiction I have read in a very long
time.”—FRED ERICK BUSCH


SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS