Michael Joyce Afternoon A Story I try to recall winter. < As if it were yesterday? > she says, but I do not signify one way or another. By five the sun sets and the afternoon melt freezes again across the blacktop into crystal octopi and palms of ice-- rivers and continents beset by fear, and we walk out to the car, the snow moaning beneath our boots and the oaks exploding in series along the fenceline on the horizon, the shrapnel settling like relics, the echoing thundering off far ice. This was theessenceofwood, these fragments say. And this darkness is air. < Poetry > she says, without emotion, one way or another. Do you want to hear about it? I feel vaguely ill all day in this heat, my ankles burning, and the collar of my madras cotton shirt heavy as a yoke as I sit here, unable to dream. Four full days now it has crouched over us, the humidity like the exhalation of tigers, scratch of tough leather across the piss damp concrete. And yet everything is at a remove. Each morning I wake, my ears filled from the draining sinuses, all the world in rut and the pollen everywhere, so thick we sweep it up into shovels like useless grain. Wert says, as we sit detached by the restaurant airconditioning, thinking of what to say. I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning. : I try to recall winter. Once I saw a group of snowmobilers by the side of the road, off perhaps a hundred yards in what, in Spring, is often a dark jade lagoon, a meadow of oats. They stood, as if posed, all begoggled, all in helmets, nylon jumpsuits and foam injected boots, watching helplessly as a snowmobile burned in the snow before them. It looked like nothing other than a black chrysalis, or perhaps a milkweed husk, the emergent wings -- the seed spawn-- yellow fire flapping like a banner. < Shouldn't you be certain? > she asks, < More exact? > < How so? > < Pupa or seed pod... when you mix the images so, you dilute the vision. And the banner....? Too much, really.> < It was something very primitive, you see. Nothing less than a clan surrounding a ritual godhead. > she says with small smile. This would be too dramatic for me, although not for Werther. He enjoys deathintheabstract; for instance, how, when he drives this Japanese truck of his, sometimes his eyes will turn steely and he will grip the wheel in a definite line, resisting road and emotion both, hardly breathing, eyes to the vanishing point along the road crest, practicing -- he says-- unveering. < Lest sometime an animal cause an accident. I drive through imaginarybeasts: raccoons, muskrat, deer, snakesandcrows. < It is a sort of insurance. > He laughs. I had a friend once, he knocked against the steering wheel, while drinking coffee on the way to the station at Westport. Swerved into the oncoming lane and that was that. In a Bimmie. . . no less. Somebody said that at the wake: My wife said she thought I'd be willing to die for my coffee too. But that was in Connecticut. Inthosedays. Or Wert. < As in Vert-igo > he says. It is characteristic. I don't know anything about Germans, except my grandfather, but Wert seems like what one would mean by Prussian. A thin, cherubic face, apfel cheeks which make it appear as if he is always smiling, if diabolically. Monkish hair, a pattern-bald tonsure beyond a high polished brow. Teeth: one doesn't always notice teeth in others, but you notice that Wert has teeth, as if it explains why Wert is a rodentish name. He has heard there is a plastic surgeon in New Jersey who will fit one out with dueling scars. He shows interest, but for now satisfies himself with simpler mutilations, the pierced left ear most often holds the smallest of Mepps spinners, sans treble hooks. Have I mentioned that he is younger than I? It isn't something I think of, though I think it fair to say it's something never far from his mind. < Now why would he do something like that, do you think?> Mrs. Porter asks this in his presence. We are all there in the outer reception area, out from our walnut-panelled and leather tufted caves as on any of several afternoons talking dirty, evil, politics, sex, weather, actuarials, hysterectomies, Yankees; testing the puckish limits of Mrs. Porter, urging the willowy file clerks to file sexual harassment complaints against us, escaping the utterly lucrative boredom of what Wert calls the < Easy, I say, < he's bisexual. > Oh how Wert laughs, with what shocked delight, as if hoping I could think so. How he loves the diabolic. The other disfigurement he call Maori, but it's as germanic as the first: a single dot tattooed at the precise placement of each vertebra. < How... he asks slowly, savoring the question, dragging it out devilishly, meeting the eyes of the whole afternoon cluster in the reception area, It is foolish. He doesn't know her, has never met her. She detests young men. < As if I were your father > I say. He is delighted by the geometry, and Mrs. Porter smiles. He asks slowly, savoring the question, dragging it out devilishly, meeting my eyes. It is foolish. She detests young men. < We are like that.> she says, vaguely pointing toward the window. Everything condenses: the emanations from the wood burning stove and our bodies rise into a fog which drifts and then prints itself in frost on the window. I think I have never known a woman who so tightly bound me in her. She is all sinew, even to her sex, and the air in this room is humid with the warmth from our cooling flesh, and the fire, and the slightly cinnamon incense of the bedside candle. < Do you mean the light? > I ask. There is a moon without. It colors the snow silver. < No. > She laughs, she thinks I am quaint. She grasps my penis in her fingers with the same tightness. Everything rhymes. < You think of me as brown, not ice. > I said. She had been a client of Wert'swife for some time. Nothing serious, nothing awful, merely general unhappiness and the need of a woman so strong to have friends. It was all very messy, really. For they did become friends, Lolly and Nausicaa, a very earlyeighties kind of thing when you think of it, appropriately postfeminist and oddly ambiguous. Therapist and client-- Lolly's not so scrupulous professional bounds already stretched by herbal tea after each and every session, each and every client-- easily became friend and friend when someone, they are neither sure who, suggested they stretch a five p.m. post-session tea to supper. < Vegetables doubtlessly > Wert smirked, telling me, stressing each syllable in his approximation of the german. < Lolly's so fucking wholesome it makes me sick! > He poured on the accent now, turning the word fucking to a prelude to spit. < I'm sure it was all bean sprouts and fruit juice and cunt talk, don't you see? > He glares to see if I understand that he wishes to malign his wife. < It's good for Lolly, I must admit... > He admits nothing in this. < She needs to know real women. > The silver bauble sways in his earlobe with his fervor. < She should have been a beautician! > He rails. Lolly studied at the Jung Institute after med school. I know he hates how much money she makes. < Or a gynecologist? > I ask. He likes this and doesn't see any irony. He thinks instead I am getting into the spirit of it. < I'll admit-- he says-- she hasn't been the same since she had her wombreamed. > < It was worse when she first went into practice... then she used to take showers with all of them. It was some sort of malodorous and blasphemous baptism back then, hugging each other up tittotit. > I decide to provoke him. < And an occasional dick? > I ask. < Sounds like some jealousy here. > < Jealousy, jellopussy! > he says wonderfully. < And you? > I say. he says. ? Still it was messy. When Nausicaa left her husband, Wert hired her. And so, on the one hand, he felt some mystical and lofty attachment to her, as if she were linked to him through Lolly. It was a loyalty almost like incest, flesh of his wife's flesh. Although she was my age-- nearly old enough, she said, to have given birth to him-- I think sometimes he thought of her as their daughter. On the other hand, he wanted her for himself, as if in some dim way he and Lolly contended for her love. Thus when I began to see her, he was at the same time both jealous of us all and certain that we each knew secrets kept from him. I asked her how she got such a name. < My mother was a romantic-- she said -- she loved the classics and...> < And my father was a uranium miner. She spent her life cleaning borax from his coveralls. > I touch her nipple and it swells into a rilled fruit. < When I was a little girl, the kids called me Pukey, don't you see? Nausicaa nausea. > < What shall I call you? > I ask. < Nausicaa. > she says calmly. She sees I am amused. she says. I understand how you feel. Nothing is more empty than heat. Seen so starkly the world holds wonder only in the expanses of clover where the bees work. Elsewhere it is sheershimmer, like the skim of hallucination which holds above roads in summer. We have been spoiled by air conditioned automobiles to think we can transcend the blankness. It is as if paper were never invented. No wonder. Says it exactly. And I am taken by the medievalism of Hours, to think of the day so. In this season the day has only two long hours. Mornings, when I walk, I pass through zones of odors: chemical fertilizer, cigar smoke, lingering exhaust fumes, an occasional talcum scent when an infant has been ferried from the car to home or vice-versa. I rather enjoy the blankness, the succeeding fumes like glass slides in a lantern show. I walk briskly. Nothing touches me. I know why you would not want to know. The other Hour is the hour of cooling. The nightfall shifts senses from scent to hearing and everyone, here in the city, is out, either sitting on the small porches or drifting out through unscreened windows. The word, motherfucker, drifts in the night. Tires screech and someone shouts, < Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! > It was not much different when I lived in Manhattan. Dominoes clacked, there were more sirens. But it was different when we lived in our suburb. No one sat on the chemically treated decks outside their landlocked homes, no voices drifted from the double-paned windows. There was only the whirring of the central air units, as if the whole development were a stealth bomber laboring to rise up on a hundred engines. She never understood when I would want to shut the air down, open the windows, and make love. Still sometimes -- at least until the end-- she would humor me, knowing how I loved the feel of the sweat between us, the slap of belly to belly, the taste of salt on her thighs, cooling after in the still air. She would look sad when I said these things, but she made no protest. While I lay there, she would pad slowly to the bathroom, scrub her belly and then between her thighs, douse herself with floral powder, pull the cotton gown over her, shut the windows, and turn on the air again. The jelly-filled hard candies in the crystal bowl on the table are, curiously, the same wrapped Polish hard candies Wert keeps in his office. For a moment I wonder if he has requested that they serve these to him here, perhaps because we lunch here so often. Then, of course, I realize that the opposite is true. He has seen this here in summers and appropriated the ritual for himself. I have been employed here three years now, lunched with him over three summers, and never made this connection. I have an appalling inattention to such details. The pineapple candy is sickeningly sweet in this heat, and yet I need the energy after a lunch of salad. I felt certain it was them, I recognized her car from that distance, not more than a hundred yards off along the road to the left where she would turn if she were taking him to the Country Day School. Two men stood near the rear of the grey buick and a woman inawhitedresssprawled on the wide lawn before them, two other men crouching near her. Another, smaller body beyond. In the distance, coming toward them and the road along which I passed, there were the insistent blue lights of a sheriff's cruiser and a glimpse of what I thought to be the synchronized red lights of the emergency wagon. It was like something from a film: Blowup or the RedDesert. < What did you do there? > I ask her. It is only making talk. She says this so calmly that I think of cotton, her darkly tanned skin against cotton, the sound of strange birds, saffron. < It seemed a natural enough profession for an army brat, and I had a very expensive habit. A man in Hong Kong offered to manage me in such a venture. He said that Indian men were very repressed, but would pay a fortune for a club whore. He offered full benefits, so to speak, but I had to dye my hair blond, if you can imagine.... > Elsewhere it is sheer shimmer, like the skim of hallucination which holds above roads in summer. We have been spoiled by air conditioned automobiles to think we can transcend the blankness. It is as if paper were never invented. had a wife once used to love me in the heat called me lover as porpoises in the dog days belly slap and salt : = I try to recallwinter.Asifwere yesterday?shesays,butIdonotsignifyoneorfivesunsetstheafternoonmeltfreezesagainacrosstheblacktopintocrystaloctopiandpalmsofice riversandcontinentsbesetbyfear,andwewalkoutthe car,snowmoaning Yes. Yes. Yes.beneathourboots andtheoaksexploding inseriesalongthefenceline settlinghorizon,shrapnelsettlingrelics, the echoing thundering offfarice. the essencewood,thesesay.And this darkness is air. Anyone needs to ask for help sometime, as my grandmother used to say. and another /6 anotherbeneathbesetblacktopbootscar,continentscrystaldarknessdoechoingemotion,essenceexplodingfarfear,f e n c e l i n e five f r a g m e n t s freezes hear horizon, ice-- ice.inintois it? likemelt moaning < Yes > /notoaksoctopiofofoffononeoneor ouroutpalmsrecallrelics,riverssay.says,says,series setsshe she shrapnelsignify snowsunthethethe the the the thethe these thisthunderingtoto f r a g ments Who'smusic? :walk wantwas way * Away we were winter. without wood, yesterday? you < No. > < Seriously ... > he says. He should ask for help. I love you in me. I do. I do love & you in (me) moaning < Yes > / 14 first a set of places was generated each one word in order and then a copy of this set was alphabetized and randomly distributed (the music comes in the hearing, as sometimes the word the is truncated sometimes the crescendo of thundering the in their Cage's V. Hsu a whole hour's work lost the first time for this note ? P Q T ?UV?P?U?U ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?W( for directions click yes (y)-- to start press Return 1987,92 MichaelJoyce EastgatePress3rdEdition 1992 12345... PO Box 1307 Cambridge, MA 02238 This story is created with STORYSPACE, a hypertext program which is both an author's tool and a reader's medium. You move through the text by pressing the Return key to go from one section to another (i.e., "turn pages"); and you click the Back arrow (on the bar below) to go back ("page back"); or You double-click on certain words to follow other lines of the story. Window titles often confirm words which yield. The story exists at several levels and changes according to decisions you make. A text you have seen previously may be followed by something new, according to a choice you make or already have made during any given reading. Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends. Even so, there are likely to be more opportunities than you think there are at first. A word which doesn't yield the first time you read a section may take you elsewhere if you choose it when you encounter the section again; and sometimes what seems a loop, like memory, heads off again in another direction. There is no simple way to say this. 9 Michael Joyce lives and works in Michigan with his wife, Martha, and their sons, Eamon and Jeremiah. He is the author of The War Outside Ireland, a novel, and one of the co-developers of Storyspace. [Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and onthergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.} ... in der weg... (Charles) Tao #$& echo echoing ing echoing echoing echoing ecoing / 6 F M ` " < There was a businessman in Delhi (she says) a filthy man, really-- he smelled of stale cooking oil and rose pomander, and had greasy nails -- a regular client. He kept white tigers in a chrome steel cage surrounded by orchids. Afternoons his servants would walk them through the gardens on long leashes. < You can't believe the excess among these people! There was one man who had a gold-plated radio next to his bed. One of those old humpback Philco's with art deco dials, the whole thing plated over with gold. He used to listen to a program of show tunes on Armed Forces radio while I sucked him off. He would gouge my back for pleasure, dragging his nails through until I cried and bled. When I wept, he would ring a bell and call a servant to rub the wounds with ointment. The servant was always naked, a thin young man with a lavender penis and huge, swollen balls. > < He never came when I did him. He would lay there like a stinking carcass, swinging his fat toes to the rhythm of chorus boys, hurting me... < Only when the servant boy rubbed me with the ointment would he come. He got off on that. This naked boy's skinny, purple dick only half-hard because he was so afraid, my blood mixed with the thick cream of the ointment on his leathery fingers... > < I would dream of the white tigers all the while. I would dream of the white tigers in the cool garden, I would think of them stretching their flanks, their paws like velvet across the cool stones of the garden paths, their tongues slowly lapping the curved surface of the gold radio ...> I sit here, unable to dream. Four full days now everything is at a remove, all the world in rut and the pollen everywhere, so thick we sweep it up into shovels like useless grain. Wert says, as we sit detached by the restaurant airconditioning, thinking of what to say. I dream of white tigers and the hours of the day, the first hour when Vivaldi plays on the gold radio and the sun is a sheet of noiseless fire. < Are you sleeping with her? > he asks. There are candies in a crystal dish before me. I pick one and unwrap it carefully. < Would you like to make a bet on something? > I ask. < Mine's longer by a full inch! > he laughs preposterously. < No, seriously. > I say. He nods. I am boring him. He would rather consider the probabilities of one of us sleeping with the other's wife. < How likely is it that I might see her buick any given morning on my way to work? > < That depends on whether you've followed her, or stayed with her the previous night, or... > He wants me to ask what. < Who? > I say. Against a sterile horizon, sometimes broken by pastel-to-greybrown smokestacks, an occasional oblong of bright red. The pure ennui of the industrial landscape not unlike the absentedness of these characters' lives, also broken by occasional passion. Albers, say, or Werther. Our lives shot through with color, dazzling orange and electric blue veins, within which poison gases, and the incessant thumping, beating, chugging. Popart: Erro. I always confused them. Antoniani taught us boredom. Truffaut taught us love. Godard politics Bergman time Fellini dreams WoodyAllen prepared us for the eighties and Reagan. Deathvalleydays. < You're thinking of the deathvalley film, the one he made in America. You see, you've confused the name with the scene where things explode. < He picked a boy and a girl who had never acted before to play the lovers, and when they fucked in deathvalley, they rolled through a dust of borax and alkali, the whole landscape like ashes, but everything writhing with naked bodies. > < The Open Theatre ... > < JoeChaiken. > she thought he thought he said she said they both all three % < You could call me Giulia. > she says. Reagan. Death valley days. Twenty Mule Team. 5 I am boring him. He would rather consider the probabilities of one of us sleeping with theother'swife. She was named Lolita. < Like many women our age, our names actualize the repressed desires for accomplishment within a preceding generation of women. We were christened as ships are. Like Voyager, we travel outward beyond stars our mothers only dreamed of.> < Yeah, that and white trash mothers think it's classy to have a name that ends with ah. > Wert says. Nausicaa laughs. She shouldn't, one supposes, but in many ways she is wiser than them both. Although it is a mark of Lolly's wisdom that she halted the transference when she did, and they became friends. Lolly needs an older sister. < You notice-- he says-- in the South they immediately turn these repressed fantasies into something mindless... Lollypop, Lollypop, whole lotta lollypop.... > < Wouldn't you just love to lick that thing! > he says. As usual his demonic qualities have a certain accuracy. Lolly would have been named when both Nabokov's book -- or rather the movie-- and the lollypop song were popular. It is curious to think that in the movie the girl sucked lollies, and wore those heart-shaped glasses. < What was her name? The little girl in that movie? > < Zabriskie Point? > Lolly came by her profession naturally, born in the upward regions of the deep South Mississippi delta, the youngest daughter of very old parents, her father a graduate of Yale Law School and professor emeritus of history at Pearl River Junior College in Poplarville, Miss'ippi, her mother twice president of the Literary and Arts society, herself a publishedpoet and authoress. Lolly was born at Natchez by chance, her mother being indisposed and at her sister's. The professor attributed the name to this coincidence of sisters, although Lolly's mother swore to her death that the choice had been hers alone. She was fifty one years old. Her husband had once met Faulkner. By mixing farcical grotesques with the enormous suffering that the comic hypocrites inflict on less callous, more sincere beings, Germi achieves his particular seriocomic blend. The paths of neorealism took several other directions. A Short History of the Movies-- Gerald Mast . The jelly-filled hard candies in the crystal bowl on the table are, curiously, the same wrapped Polish hard candies Wert keeps in his office. For a moment I wonder if he has requested that they serve these to him here, perhaps because we lunch here so often. Then, of course, I realize that the opposite is true. He has seen this here in summers and appropriated the ritual for himself. I have been employed here three years now, lunched with him over three summers, and never made this connection. I have an appalling inattention to such details. The pineapple candy is sickeningly sweet in this heat, and yet I need the energy after a lunch of salad. F (iction) ragments r etro A apple groundless enthusiasm < Or Grimsci? > M my na m e elements of n e x u s T triste tropique s (sssh) ex 17 9 < Whom. > he says, < A writer should know that. Whom are you concerned about? Her or him? > Theladyorthetiger. < Why didn't you just turn your car around and see if it was them, instead of worrying yourself to death? > < You can never be afraid of that. Not in this business. > Insurance or poetry? < Love... > he says. < Fear is a suspect quality made manifest. When you tire of it, the experience ends. < There is no simple way to say this. > The waitress brings around a pot of water-processed decaffeinated coffee. She is very blond, very tan. < Yes please... > he says, and when she bends to pour, he says < Pardon me? > she says. Wert steals a glance to see if I have laughed. He has done this to delight me, I know. It is coltish and vulgar and he means in this fashion to cheer me. < The chit . .? Check, please? Thanks, love. > he says. I think she should slap him. Instead she meets his eyes, measures him with a gaze. When she moves away from the table, her walk seems to show more grace then she has before. < You're rude-- I say-- you're really rude... > but I say it the way men talk, young men, not the way someone of means would say so. It is very difficult to use the word, rude, seriously, don't you think? The same is true for clever. The notion of cleverness is a class distinction, much like draperies. < It's true-- I said-- I was so moved when you brought back lunch for me that time. It was enchanting really, very poetic. All a study in brown: the corned beef on rye and dark, grainy mustard; the square of spiced cake; a toffee bar. > < And orange juice. > She says, but she is blushing. < No matter, it's brown in its way. The little glass jar. It isn't often that you get to see how someone sees you. At first I thought you wanted to choose something to match my office. Then I noticed you were wearing a brown tweed skirt, and that you bought yourself yogurt in a yellow cylinder. > < Somehow I think of you that way, as if pith and carbon and water, resilient and yet hard (she laughs) No, not in that sense -- although that's true enough-- unyielding, I mean. I used to watch you. Does that flatter you? Men always think that don't they, that women watch them? < We do, I suppose, but more furtively than you watch us. You have chestnut hair, don't you see? I had heard so much about you, from Wert, and the girls-- they say you are brilliant. Is your head swelled yet? > (She laughs.) < I'm sorry -- I say -- I didn't hear you? > < It's Mt. St Helen's, I think. > she says. Quietly the pale moon cupped, the texture of a hidden thigh, the silken arrangement of limb, and the close cropped clover. Attitude de la djeuner sur l'herbes d'une accident, sprawled like the tongues of iris, orchis, hooded ladies'-tresses, ivory light, crimson line like silken thread, the men dreaming of moisture, heart throbbing like a hidden wren. It comes down to that, doesn't it? Despite what we think of our techno-philosophical advancement? Love or death. Risk with two faces. Go on, press the button, treat it all as if it were real. Thelady ? or thetiger ? In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in normal fashion and it ends with Chapter56... The second should be read beginning with Chapter73 and then following the sequence indicated... ...I leaned up against the wall of my room and was happy because the boy had just managed to escape, I saw him running off, in focus again, springing with his hair flying in the wind, learning finally to fly across the island... (BlowUp) In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. (Borges) The two elementary Forms, the four emblematic Symbols, and the eight Trigrams can all be exhibited with what may be deemed certainty. (Legge) There is a form of writing which is like the art of music. It can affect us through the senses directly without first appealing to the intellect... In this it acts more like our life experiences, which enter the body directly before we are able to dissect them. Anais Nin the novel of the future (2I CHAP. XIII. It is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him, merely to put him in the mind that there is such a body still in this world, and whom, upon the best judgement I can form upon my own plan at present, -- I am going to... But... which may require... -- 'twas right.... in the mean time;---- because.... Sterne % The riddle of, to put it less specifically, the set problem, is, apart from its magical effects, an important element in social intercourse. As a form of social recreation it adapts itself to all sorts of literary and rhythmical patterns, for instance the chain question, where one question leads on to another, or the game of superlatives, each exceeding the other, of the well-known type: < What is sweeter than honey? > etc. ( Huizinga ) DROIGHNEACH Irish. Syllabic. A loose stanza form. The single line may consist of from nine to thirteen syllables, and it always ends in a trisyllabic word. There is a rhyme between lines one and three, two and four, etc. There are at least two cross-rhymes in each couplet. There is alliteration in each line-- usually the final word of the line alliterates with the preceding stressed word, and it always does so in the last line of each stanza. Stanzas may consist of any number of quatrains. The poem (not the stanza) ends with the same first syllable, word, or line with which it begins. (The book (Turco) of forms) {The New Science So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia ), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia ); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. of Giambattista Vico} &()1o or happening is an event only for the observer? No one there. Everyone here. . Here is all there is but there seems so insistently across the way Robert Creeley/Pieces ,M \ 0 ?T c s < Really you don't. Except tosee. > There is no simple way to say this. < Why don't you study the Odes? The Odes will arouse you, give you food for thought, teach you how to make friends, show you the way of resentment, bring you near to being useful to your parents and sovereign, and help you to remember the names of many birds, animals, plants and trees. > He called it Shih-Ching, Possum did. SHOWY LADY'S-SLIPPER Cypripedium acaule Orchid Family (Orchidacaea) Our largest and most beautiful northern orchid. The white sepals and petals are in striking contrast to the rose-mouthed pouch. The stout, hairy flowering stem is leafy to the top. 1-3ft. Swamps, wet woods. Ontario, Newfoundland to n. U.S. and locally in mts. southward. June-July Peterson & McKenney (A Field Guide...) "4[h < Yes please... > he says, and when she bends to pour, he says < Pardon me? > she says. < The chit . .? Check, please? Thanks, love. > He says. < You can't know everything about anything. > I had said. I was having fun. The interview had come from nowhere, and this man was plainly mad, though undeniably interesting in an attractive sort of revolutionary entrepreneurial way. BrooksBrothers charcoal tweed and Reeboks, a silver bauble hanging from his ear. He passed a bowl of sweets across his desk. < You really don't give a shit about me, do you? > he asked. < Should I? > these people are too bright for their own good they have minds which ought to seek sparrows, what's happened to us, we ask, and await an answer at the bottom of a well only echoes of sunlight % +K Qw } < That's embarrassing -- I say-- If there were somewhere to buy poems back from the ages, I would do so with that one. > He looks hurt. < What's wrong with that. I'd make that poem the company motto if you worked here. Look, see, you can tell I've had this thing pasted to my mirror. > < Cleverness.> I say. < I came here because I have neither been to AnnArbor before, nor been head-hunted, and also because I could not for the world imagine why someone like you would want to hire someone like me. I mean what would I do? > < What do you do where you are now? > < You know that. > No... > he says. < Please, I want you to say. > < Marketing. I write copy so I can write poems. > I laugh. < And, as a poet, you know more about the world than anybody? > < Some poets like to think so. > < There! > he grins. The silver bauble swings from his earlobe. < What do I do? > he asks. < Does this amuse you? Twentyquestions? > < No... > he says. < Please, I want you to say. > I could not help grinning. I could not wait to call mywife. < Why would I?> I say. < Dataquest. > He says just this word. Dataquest. As if it were a spell. His eyes watch me for a reaction. He looks madder now than ever, a thin and defrocked monk from abadhistoricalnovel. < Do you know what an expertsystem is? > he had said. (SETQ MIDDLE ( APPLY 'APPEND ( MAPCAR ' (LAMBDA (STATE) (LIST (CAR STATE) (CONS 'COND (APPEND (MAPCAR ' (LAMBDA (TRUTH) (APPEND (LIST (CADR TRUTH)) (COND ((CDDDR TRUTH) (CDR (CDDDDR TRUTH)))) (LIST (LIST "GO (CADDDR TRUTH))))) ( CRD STATE)) '(( T (GO LOSE))))))) BODY))) And now, he said, what did we just now call that principle which repels the even? The odd. And that principle which repels the musical or the just? The unmusical, he said, and the unjust. And what do we call that principle which does not admit of death? The immortal, he said. And does the soul admit of death? No. Then the soul is immortal? Yes, he said. And may we say that this has been proven? Yes, abundantly proven, Socrates, he replied. What had made him wealthy were the costbenefits of certainty, as well as the natural longings of men with property to see its increase and conservation. WUNDERWRITE R was an expert system, a computer program which built upon his firm's knowledge as independent underwriters and consultants to the insurance companies. It allowed an insurer to enter situational variables and client information as well as a weighted set of additions to WUNDER's established rulebase. Then it told the client the worth of things, and what the risks were, and whether they should take them. WUNDER, however, operated solely within the domain of industrial facilities insurance with special attention to capital projects and robotization within a shifting technological marketplace. Dataquest would extend this ability extraordinarily. There is no simpleway to say this. < Do people really talk that way? > Wert says. % ( < It sounds like badsciencefiction, I know.> he said. < But consider the fact that once every few weeks thousands of computers take over Wall Street and race each other to buy or sell and optimize profits by hundredths of a point. And auto engineers cost out component failures against the likelihood of successful product liability suits. You can insure your dick at Lloyds of London... > He smiles. < Actually, you can do that right here at home. I know, I did thecalculations. > I could see that the android was approaching red imaging, but I didn't have a laser crystal and couldn't catch an ion stream. " Stop, farthing!" I shouted. I could see that the android hated my use of the Bossy Boys term for him. " Cease, banger!" he shouted in return, also using Bossy cockney. He was already at green image. Brother Transubstantiation leered. " All the saint's cannot save you unless you kiss my crucifix now!" Countess Ellyn's breasts heaved with fear. "Please, blessed one?" she begged. She could smell his scented breath even as she felt his perfumed fingers on her bodice. I haven't indicated what words yield, but they are usually ones which have texture, as well as character names and pronouns. There are more such words early on in the story, but there are almost always options in any sequence of texts. The lack of clear signals isn't an attempt to vex you, rather an invitation to read either inquisitively or playfully and also at depth. Click on words that interest or invite you. Respond to questions using the Yes/No buttons below or by typing. Note that you can also type some words and occasional one-word questions in the text entry box to the right of the buttons below. In subsequent readings, you may wish to browse links between screens by using the Browse icon below. You can also print the text of a screen by clicking the Print icon below. The icon bar may be dragged to relocate it. To stop reading, choose the Reader menu command. When I first met her, I thought I had discovered her, although not in any life-long sense, not the violet halfhid. Even then, at first, it was clear she had lived, did, and would engage herself with what interested her. She was clearly a passionate woman, and her quietness only emphasized that. She knew how to use herself, how to move in silence: slim-hipped, slender and long feet, isolated breasts, flaring eyes behind the red-framed eyeglasses, careful diction. She seemed convent trained, or reformed. Both were in some sense true. She, shyly, came to talk, in the late afternoon, early evening hours when I liked best to work since usually no one was there. < I'm sorry. > She said. I looked up from the screen, although my fingers kept typing. I thought, yes, if you would sit and drink it with me. I said. She disappeared from the doorway. < Shouldn't I know your name? > I called after her. After some time, she brought the coffee. I had been thinking of chasing after her, looking to see if she had gone without making the pot afterall. She sat with me, checking first with her eyes. I nodded. She sat on the sofa, folding her legs like a crane, toe tucked behind the opposite calf. she said, as I rummaged through my desk drawer. < Mrs. Porter wouldn't approve. She doesn't like her girls to look after men like that.> She laughed brightly. Really her laugh was a low chuckle, unusual for a woman, especially one so slim. she said. < I'm sorry... I'm... > I said. she said. She rose half-way from the sofa and extended her hand. I rolled my chair across the carpet toward her. It was a very formal thing, in the dark office late on a winter night, drinking coffee. I want to say there was a certain warmth in her grasp, but that would be inaccurate. Still, you know when a woman has some sense of the effect of hertouch. She had slender fingers, dark nails. I am trying to convey the ceremony of it. Everything begins there, don't you see? < It will be a huge project, and I need good people. Consider the possibilities: the value of all the world can be somehow quantified--Not in any spiritual sense, I mean, I'm not crazy, you see-- but in the kinds of terms which make sense to money. < Money understands money. There are venture guys ready to spend megabucks on something like this. Risk assessment, think of it like that. I wouldn't put my own money into this, if I didn't think it would work; and I'll tell you out-front there's been a lot of things I didn't think would work, but didn't mind spending other people's money on. < WUNDER, for one. It's really just a trick. You take all the information you have at hand and make rules. When it fucks up, you tell your client they didn't have enough information...> < Dataquest, though, will have enough information. All the information in the world, if you like... at least all that counts to money. We've already got access to a Cray and a new parallelprocessing machine a guy's building in Cambridge. We'll have our data bases, government material, insurance companies, military -- this thing can do targeting data, you see, very hush-hush, the actual value of things... I'm ready to buy the best minds in America... > He grins, a blond death's head, young Werther. < Of course not! It's sold itself already. The idea itself is worth all the millions it will cost, whether or not it works. Don't you see? > I did not. I raised the backs of my hands in a gesture of complacency and curiosity. < I want you to fight it. I mean, do you think Jesus would have been tempted by anything less than a shining city of sinners, the far fires there on the desert far below, the distant sounds of harlots and tambourines, the ascending scent of incense and desert flowers... ? > < Offering me money would be enough temptation. > < My wife drives a Bimmie. I drive a truck. If you like, I'll drive you downtown now and buy you a Maserati... > < Or a DeLorean... ? Distant tambourines?> I mean I didn't yet know her story. I knew that Wert met her through Lolly but I hadn't yet put the pieces together. And so, as we talked those nights, I thought I had discovered her. Maybe I had. She was the brightangel of reformation, and Wert might not have known that yet. It is hard to say. She knew what I ostensibly did there, but I didn't yet know her part. I assumed because she was a woman that she was with the Data Group or the Systems Team. There was no way I could have known that she too was with Validation. Wert kept our names from each other. He masked the names from all hard copy, and everything electronic was pseudonymous. he said. I felt certain it was them, I recognized her car from that distance, not more than a hundred yards off along the road to the left where she would turn if she were taking him to the Country Day School. Two men stood near the rear of the grey buick and a woman inawhitedresssprawled on the wide lawn before them, two other men crouching near her. Another, smaller body beyond. In the distance, coming toward them and the road along which I passed, there were the insistent blue lights of a sheriff's cruiser and a glimpse of what I thought to be the synchronized red lights of the emergency wagon. It was like something from a film: Blowup or the RedDesert. He has heard there is a plastic surgeon in New Jersey who will fit one out with dueling scars. He shows interest, but for now satisfies himself with simpler mutilations, the pierced left ear most often holds the smallest of Mepps spinners, sans treble hooks. Mr. Faulkner arrived as a guest of a colleague to address the Pearl River Junior College honors society, and, at lunch-- a stuffed tomato-- sipped whiskey from a teacup then smoked a cuban cigar. Everything bored him but a co-ed by the name of Louisa May Nunn who wore a picture hat with a pink bow over a large smile. < Imagine that...> Mr. Faulkner said. < Louisa May! Imagine that... > A therapist could have asked for little more by way of upbringing. Consider: Her two sisters were the age of others' mothers (thus Wert'scontention that she needs an older sister). Her mother wasn't utterly certain that she could recall any occasion which might have led to Lolly's conception, or-- for that matter-- the act itself (though she bowed to the wisdom of others, and her own sense of biology, as evidence of her legitimate maternity). She was born with a phantom (extra) nipple, what the colored folks called thedevil'stitty. Also: Her father doted on her from the first, insisting that they hire a wet nurse (black) and dress her in crinolines (pink) right from birth. When she grew old enough, he walked her on his arm. He called her "crevette," which she grew believing had to do with craving (as in the popular, household saying ), until, at age seven, she found the truth on a French Quarter restaurant menu (the black folks called her Stumpy; she called them Uncle and Nanny, and--later-- nigrahs). They lived, in Poplarville, in a house called TheOaks (chronicled in her mother's tome, HistoricHouses of PoplarvilleandVacinity ). Wert suggests. Nausicaa asks. < What? > Nausicaa says. Lolly and Wert answer in unison. she says. Lolly says ( for she always converts the expected "you all" to this more learned locution). If it can be admitted that the talking of children in their sleep belongs to the sphere of dreams, I can relate the following as one of the earliest dreams in my collection: My youngest daughter, at that time nineteen months old, vomited one morning, and was therefore kept without food all day. During the night she was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: "Ann F(r)eud, st'awbewy, wild st'awbewy, om'lette, pap!" She used her name in this way in order to express the act of appropriation; the menu presumably included everything that would seem to her a desirable meal; the fact that two varieties of strawberry appeared in it was a demonstration against the sanitary regulations of the household, and was based upon the circumstance, which she had by no means overlooked, that the nurse had ascribed her indisposition to an over-plentiful consumption of strawberries; so in her dream she avenged herself of this opinion which met with her disapproval. Me? Or Nausicaa. My first husband and I were children. He was seventeen and I was sixteen, which at that time was street legal in California. I wanted to study the classics, most likely on account of the name my mother gave me, but also because I liked the way those words sounded together. The classics. As if the smell of ocean salt and the severe light of a beach and the feeling after you wake up from a dream could all be bound in leather. We drank together and he built airplanes for too much money per hour for anyone ever to put in a young kid's pocket. I never did any shit then, although he picked up a heavy jones at the factory. Three bags a day and rising. He'd shoot up and I'd smoke weed, and then he'd touch me. For hours on end, all very junkie funky, very weird and very removed, like the way they can fuck in India for days without anybody coming. We listened to Jefferson Starship. Anyway it got so he couldn't make enough money building starships to support his thing. Life was fairly good then and it didn't seem any big deal to turn some tricks to help out with family expenses. Then I began to take things from other people. By the time I went away to Vaca, I had a ticket as long as my proverbial arm. Mostly soliciting, but a goodly number of petty t's, bargained down from Grand Larcenies. The last time they added battery, since when the trick woke and found me, he decided to remove my teeth. I hit him with a motel lamp. I never used shit until Vacaville, and then this girl who was my lover brought me a pop she hid in her pussy after a visitation from her pimp. Although they called it Airplane then. 8 God forgive me for it, but there is nothing on earth as directly good as your first time riding the crystal stallion. Nothing takes you as far, nothing keeps you so near, nothing makes you laugh or cry, like the first time shooting up. After that I dreamed of it day and night. I dream of it still, though I've been clean for ten years. (She cries. Silver tears.) Here they turned the mules loose from under the yoke and drove them along the eddying stream to graze on sweet grass. Then they lifted the clothes by armfuls from the cart, dropped them into the dark water, and trod them down briskly in the troughs, competing with each other in the work. When they had rinsed them, they spread them out in rows along the seashore, just where the waves washed the shingle clean when they came tumbling up the beach. Next, after bathing and rubbing themselves with olive oil, they took their meal. When mistress and maids had all enjoyed their food, they threw off their headgear and began playing with the ball, while Nausicaa of the white arms led them in song. But, when the Princess passed the ball to one of her maids, she missed her and dropped it instead into the deep and eddying current. At this they all gave a loud shriek. The good Odysseus awoke, and rising up took counsel with himself. One condition of my parole was that I leave the state of California within seven hours. Enough time they figured to drive, including a stop for lunch. My daddy drove me to Tucson, but he cried all the way. I spent a day in the desert and left for Asia on my mother's passport. We could have passed for twins in those days, though now she's younger than I will ever be. < I remember negroes. Perhaps it is wrong to say this in this fashion, but then I have dedicated my life to a certainty that recollection is somehow sacred, without sanction, blameless, and liberating... < I remember negroes, stiffly starched and tall, silent men in white coats and pants with dazzling satin ribbons down the sides of their legs, serving lemonade, moving through the shade, their temples greyed silver, their voices deep. < I'm sorry. Perhaps this is among the worst legacies of the South, this image, this memory, the creation of the idea of tall, silent negroes stationed across a colonnade, all dressed in white and patient. But you see, I've been there. I remember this.> He pauses. Perhaps it is wrong to say this in this fashion, but then I have dedicated my life to a certainty that recollection is somehow sacred, without sanction, blameless, and liberating... I had a wife and couldn't keep her. Which, of course, was the mistake in the first place. I mean, have you ever chased fireflies? I always did as a child. I remember the mayonnaise bottles, the instant coffee jars, the smells of egg or roasted beans which wouldn't scrub out, and their tops slit, punctured again and again with a bottle opener, and their plain grey bodies and the mysterious green glow, pulsing in a rhythm which even then you knew held the code to some deeper mysteries you couldn't quite decipher, rising up from the grass and meeting, loin to loin, in the darkness. I am a terrible romantic. I thought when we came here than Ann Arbor would keep her when I couldn't any longer. I am like Wert to this degree, I believed in lectures and small chamber orchestras. Have you been to Greenfield Village? Ford thought he could corral history. This is the great fact about Michigan. There are men here who believe in the power of things. Henry Ford had a plan to gather together the houses and labs of the Great Men-- his cronies like Edison and Bell-- who invented modern time. Greenfield Village is what resulted. It is not much worse than those historical villages elsewhere-- Sturbridge and Charleston and whatever-- and it is worlds better than Disney's three-quarters scale plastic. Yet there is an air of falsity, a certainty that these houses have not shared the same dust and sunlight over years. Ann Arbor is like this. It is as if they decided to put together a university town out of tested parts: here a carillon, here a college green, here a huge crater of a football stadium, filled with a hundred thousand weekly. A great mall sits on the outskirts; and beyond it we inhabit a socalled researchpark. Even now it continues. There is a man who loves Frank Lloyd Wright and who made his fortune on pizzas. He buys up Wright houses in pieces and reconstructs them right outside Ann Arbor. He is building his corporate headquarters using plans for a skyscraper Wright never built. He's an orphan. On the grounds of this place there is a petting farm for children. He calls this corporate development Domino Farms. Do you see how it is? This Village, that Farms, this Park-- in Connecticut they call corporate headquarters campuses. The man who loves Wright owns a professional baseball team. The tigers. She never understood when I would want to shut the air down, open the windows, and make love. Still sometimes -- at least until the end-- she would humor me, knowing how I loved the feel of the sweat between us, the slap of belly to belly, the taste of salt on her thighs, cooling after in the still air. It was my fault. I gave her nothing. I kept wanting to put her into some story of my own making. I kept wanting to change the facts, not just the way things happened, but in what order. I turned my son into a little man, a shadow of me. To a programmer seated at a terminal, it appears that the entire system ... exists solely for his use-- a vast electronic sheet of paper upon which he may write almost undisturbed. With the help of a remote terminal connected to the processor by telephone lines, the programmer may in fact be alone in an office or at home, miles from the machine. Anyone who has worked in this fashion, alone, late at night (the ideal time for programming because there is less demand for the facilities, which are therefore more responsive and reliable), knows the peculiar satisfaction of this hermetically sealed kind of creativity. The feeling is like that produced by lone work of any kind, which men have experienced since the beginning of civilization: plowing a field, puzzling out a theorem of geometry with straightedge and compass, constructing a watch. What especially characterizes a programmer is withdrawal from nature into the private intellectual world (Bolter) the riverrun Shem and Shaun 0 9 What is also dismaying and painful, however, is how vividly I can convince myself that I do not invent the occurrences of that night at all; how thoroughly I have reassembled what I can of its sequences and changes. So much so that I can readily lose track of the simple fact that I was not there. For my images I blame my own medieval ambiguities. (M Joyce) S T O R Y S P A C E Once, before time, Crow and Snake were very thirsty but the Great One had not yet made the waters. Snake lay gasping on the sand, too tired to go on, when suddenly Crow appeared. "Do you know, friend," said Crow, "above the sky there are great waters?" "How can I go there?" asked Snake, "My lot is to crawl the sand of this valley, tasting salt and awaiting night." "You will die before night," Crow said. Just then Crow had a plan, and he confided it in Snake. But, as he was whispering to Snake, suddenly Snake struck out and bit Crow, and blood flowed on the salt desert. "Father, father!" Crow shrieked, flying high above what was, his blood falling behind him like dark rain. "Father," he cried, "Snake has wounded me and the desert blooms with blood." The Great One was very angry that the desert bloomed before his planned time, and he sent a great flood to wash it. And so Crow and Snake enjoyed the waters according to Crow's plan. Since then the Great One has been angry. To these days, Snake still crawls the desert and tastes only salt until night. To these days, Crow screams "Father! father!" in the high air. To these days, the desert does not bloom. QR "Man... never perceives anything and only Jane Yellowlees Douglas has read this screen. That's not true. so have others. "To be born again, first you have to die." The Satanic Verses He was an advertising man's dream. He spoke such things without pretense or calculation, and in many ways was the true naif. From the first, she found value in it. she asked. I said. I studied her to see if she was suspicious of me. All of us in Validation had a "cover" on the organizational chart. Wert promised, and I believed him, that anyone found out would be fired. I said. she said. I asked. she said. I thought then that she was beautiful, slim-hipped, her long legs gracefully folded, long fingers curving around the stoneware coffee mug, sly smile and precisely painted lips. In the silence I could hear the humming of hard disks. Her face was a mirror. L We all had signed Nondisclosure Agreements, of course, but that was becoming routine in almost any business. We all also submitted to security clearance, a first for me, but something equally routine to nearly everyone else there. The UCSW was unique as far as I knew, and I only half believed Wert when he explained it to me. he said. I assumed from his smile that this was his notion of a joke, although I didn't ask him directly. 1) The four-fold way begins by living with what is beautiful. 2) Be lean, silent, gentle, and extravagant. Balance. 3) Serve the eternal Brahman with the blessings of the Sun, the cause of the Universe. Be absorbed, through samadhi, in the eternal Brahman. Thus your work will not bind you. 4) Don't look back, something may be gaining on you. 5) "No" is not necessarily "No," nor is "Yes" "Yes"; but when you miss even a tenth of an inch, the difference widens up to one thousand miles; When it is "Yes", a young Naga girl in an instant attains Buddhahood, When it is "No", the most learned Zensho while alive falls into Hell. (DE FIX-CONTRA (CONTRA) LET (ASSUMPTIONS (SUPPORTING ASSUMPTIONS CONTRA) CULPRIT NIL) (COND (NULL ASSUMPTIONS) (ERROR "Unfixable contradiction")) Romance has no part in it The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together. (The Ivy Crown, William Carlos Williams) # 4 K e s | (1) What is the answer to question number three? (2) Who is sleeping with whom, and why? (3) What is the answer to question number one? (4) Define interactivity. Did Alan Kay slay Is Vannevar Bush's the memex? favorite songstress Dinah Book? In Xanadu did Kubrick con a stately, plump Buck Mulligan? Will you? Marry me? Yes|No Y O Y O Y O did I ever Lief-- O hi!, Oh? >copy a:dir:: c 0 1; Ji o %7 I was about to tell her this was nonsense when she began to recite, speaking the lines with the calm and easy cadence of a young mother to a child. "Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce, And dost not know the garment from the Man, Every Harlot was a Virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan." I asked. she said. < Can I assume that I'll be able to validate the values your KE's put on the values I give them?> I say. he says. No, friend, I think, I don't see. Poor Peter, he believed in everything too much really to ever understand. It was as if he were always in someone else's story and yet so certain it was about him that he anguished for all the characters. Surely you know men like that. I remember when I told him Wert was Jewish. < He told me he was a Lutheran.> Peter said. I said. With men like that you need to begin by explaining mystery. Dataquest the secret of secrecy is secrecy + On the margins the lawn lapses into field, and the staghorn, the star thistle, the boletus rise and thrust in the far shadows, dark and singular things, stems veined and heads gilled, spiked, furled: most succulent in Spring or whatever season their youth is upon them, they grow hard and bitter and solitary with age; dry things, witnesses. But now in the ripe dampness, the awful, dusky smell of seed is all over them-- fungus, fern, and Caltrops; the insistence, variety, and solitary maleness. They watch birds die and thrive. They seek channels for air, spore, Sticktight, rhizome. What dies is distant. In my mind the story, as it has formed, takes on margins. Each margin will yield to the impatient, or wary, reader. You can answer yes at the beginning and page through on a wave of Returns, or page through directly-- again using Returns-- without that first interaction. These are not versions, but the story itself in long lines. Otherwise, however, the center is all-- Thoreau or Brer Rabbit, each preferred the bramble. I've discovered more there too, and the real interaction, if that is possible, is in pursuit of texture. There we match minds. Fuck bubble. Cunt wafer. Tower of Ivory. Star of Lamentation. Juno Pronuba. Juno Domiduca. Juno Nuxia. Juno Cinxia. !?Abd|~ Radius squared times 3.1416 times height divided by age times sperm motility divided by .0473 times IQ divided by per capita income times normed Kidder Attractiveness Scale score divided by FBI crime incidence rate for zipcode (figure) I try to recall yesterday. < As if it were winter? > I say, but she does not signify one way or another. By five the sun rises and the night freeze melts again across the blacktop into crystal rivers -- octopi beset by fear, and we walk out to the car, the snow exploding beneath our boots and the oaks moaning in series, echoing off far ice. This was poetry, she says, without emotion, one way or another. Do you hear it? Not Wert. His allure is that he sees what is so starkly that it is as if he lives in a dream world exactly like our own, down to the knickknacks and blades of grass, except that he's turned the soundtrack down, as if it were a movie with his voice over. < You probably should say a videotape.> I suppose. I grew up in the age of artfilms. What was the one where the woman leans against a white wall and suddenly it transforms to a lush pink because she is in love? I know it's Italian... No matter... The difference between them is this. WithPeter, if you talk about how beautiful it would be to slip away to the islands, he believes that it will somehow happen. Wert buys plane tickets to Spain. These differences make them attractive. Wert-- so self-centered, rash, raw-- is all energy and comes like a sinner, sometimes weeping for all the guilt her feels, sometimes laughing in the pure joy of what he imagines it must be to conquer. There is an undeniable benefit to his youth, and, if I had to choose, I would not give him up. It is always better to have a younger lover, for they can be tailored to fit dreams and can be slowed, when necessary, by a woman who knows herself. With Wert it is all school, wonderfully abstracted and frenetic; I would wear black stocking for him if he asked me to. Which doesn't make Peter second, not at all. He is more complicated, more like me in his rhythms and misgivings. I am apt to dream with him in me or upon me. Lolly says that in each of the last three centuries in the West, the dominant culture went in "cyclic dormancy," in preparation for the efflorescence which followed in the first decades of the new. the failure of a property that has been changed by an external agent to return to its original value when the cause of the change has been removed: i.e., hysteresis. the laws of physics assign proximity no more meaning than absence. yet one word follows another & 3 H U i v 9 F O \ k x And yet he has given me means, if no end. We live, or did live, comfortably and my child, our son, attends the Country Day School, and so when I call I am shunted-- as all divorced parents are-- to the Assistant Headmaster, a woman who insists on this cross-gendered title-- most likely, one suspects, because she thinks, "I am no one's mistress."-- and among whose tasks it is to handle the delicacies of parent-school interactions with the non-custodial parent. she says, when I have identified myself. She is a bit mad-- given to long, floral-print skirts, and these pseudo-Britishisms. Quite right. Bloody hot. Toodle-ooo. Abitofaboff. she says, when I ask if she's seen my son today. I am a dear and I wait and listen to piped Brahms on the Public Radio station to which holding lines are linked. I try to think what I will say when she locates him, as she doubtlessly will, playing with his Montr'ssori blocks and doing ciphers, or having a go at creative movement, or lolling at his own little computer. I imagine him frowning over the keyboard, dressed in flannels and a starched white shirt. It's absurd, of course. These kids wear jeans, or, in weather like this, confetti patterned "jams," brightly-colored California beachware for the mod'rin child, and tee-shirts with a Coca Cola logo. she says. I would raise a fuss but I haven't called my wife's office, which is quite against the rules for how this all is supposed to be done. Even so I want to know what no one's quite sure of. I lie and say Lisa was in a meeting. Miss Assistant Headmaster sighs as one imagines a relieved Dowager might. We used to call these field trips. she laughs a fa-la-la laugh which means to say that everything's fine. Lisa's secretary hates me, not with, but without passion. She merely hates me. I attribute it to the fact that we separated the weekend of her wedding. It was there Lisa met her Desmond, the half-blind musician who currently gropes her somewhat misshapen, yet endearingly globular breasts on those weekends when I have Andy. the secretary says. she says, sensibly enough. she says, and I tell her I do also. I would have asked her to transfer me to U hospital or Children's but part of me does not yet want to know, and now-- having talked to her-- another part wants to be the first to know, or rather-- to be accurate-- wants to know before I alarm her, lest I am wrong and Lisa forever ridicules me because I have been needlessly protective and condescending. Instead I ask her secretary to transfer me to Desmond's office in music, a little sad because I am too anxious now to enjoy the little jolt of satisfaction and liberality I usually feel each time I ask my wife's secretary to transfer me to my wife's lover's office as if their whole university were an obscene and inbred tribe of fools I ride above upon a crystal stallion. In place of the satisfaction there is the shocking sound of my own swift and shortened breaths and my pounding heart in my earphone as I wait first for the call to patch through and then for the muffled and civilized electronic "rings" of the university switchboard. He always answers the phone as if he were announcing an encore. < DesmondLeary. > he says. Nothing else. Most times when I hear him say this name I feel giddily fraternal. You poor bastard, I want to say, isn't she just a riot? using her favorite term for anything witty which she does not understand. I imagine him squinting as he tries to position the phone, squinting likewise trying to moor himself between her wonderfully muscular thighs while she sighs like water. A half-blind classical saxophonist and Professor of Theory, rebound lover of the world's most stubborn woman, he whom my son calls ThismanLarry. Fear makes me less fraternal. I say, without adding obviously. I ask. It is paranoid and I fluster him. he says. It doesn't make any sense, I know, but I do not want to explain that I want to know if she carried identification. Anyway, even as I ask it, I realize the question is mad, since they'd look up the registration on the car if she weren't able to respond to them. Then just as quickly I realize that they wouldn't necessarily call me, since the car is registered to her in the newly edited name which removes me from her utterly, except in the flesh of Andy. I say, my anxiety -- and the late conversation with Mr Headmistress-- turning me Brit. When I hang up, I wonder did I speak so to twit his Dublinissimus, Irisher than moi, the four-eyed bastard. I want to kill someone now I am so worried. So I call Datacom and leave autodial instructions and a voice segment to have them call U hospital and St. Joe's and ask whether she is admitted there under her newly edited name. I am still too afraid to have them check for Andy. And then I go out, without checking out with Datacom, so that Wert will not know I am frantic. A J-shaped skidmark extends perhaps fifty feet of the westbound, or-- from her perspective-- oncoming, lane, the curve of the J slanting across the single yellow line. Another shorter skidmark, something like a roostertail, stops short of the first. They seem to have taken care to sweep the street, and yet I am able to find a scattering of glass, here and there, glinting like raindrops in the late afternoon light in the space between the skidmarks. There is neither blood nor oil on the road. I have halfway expected to find the remnants of a chalk outline of a body, the kind of thing one sees on television. I do however find the place where the bodies have lain. It is relatively easy to locate them on this manicured grass. The wheelmarks of a gurney lead up to each of them. Cigarette butts and matted footprints mark the place where groups of on-lookers stood. There is a singlesequin in the grass near where I believe thewoman'sbody lay. The discarded wrapping from a cotton surgical swab lies near the sequin. The lawn is a wide expanse from the road back to where the faux manor stands, doubtlessly the home of a doctor or banker. Eastward the lawn gives way to something of a field before the slope down to the creek and the woods. Here there is a catch place, a low wire fence along a ditch which snatches what the wind wafts. Among candy wrappers, newspaper pages, and oak leaves, there are children's schoolpapers, evidently blown free from the knapsacks and backpacks of the children from the County Day School, some who walk along this road on their way home. Most of the papers are old and waterstained, dried by the sun into yellowing things. There is a fresh white paper with my son's name upon it, and red markings from a teacher. It is a report on Louis Quattorze, and his looping handwriting makes me weep. It begins: "I am the Sun King," said King Louis the Fourteenth of France. I remember seeing a film, one of those wondrous Bfilms which sometimes can surprise you on a cable movie channel, in which PeterO'Toole plays a delightfully mad scientist who devotes his life to attempting to clone his dead wife from the cells of her preserved brain. I think it not inconceivable that in some future time, when gene-splicing has played out its inevitable course, it should be possible to create, much in the way that one now videotapes a child's first steps or high school graduation, a semblance of what that child, or any being, was once in the past. I have in mind a non-sentient, transitory creature, nothing more than memory embodied, yet infinitely sadder than handwriting, photograph, or the preserved sound of another's voice. She startles me there at the fenceline, a woman wearing a silk dress and running shoes. she asks, and I want to embrace her. she asks. I say nothing. She knows she has nothing to fear from me because we are in our uniforms, she her Reeboks, me my J. Press khaki suit and tassel loafers. she asks. I nod, not lying. she says. Back at the office, there is no news from Datacom. The call transcript proceeds well enough (with the usual giggling from the operator: "Fran, you ought to hear this. There's a computer calling here for patient information. No... it's a taped voice..."; Datacom calmly repeating its request until she patches the call through), but goes afoul when, perversely Patient Information will not release any information without a confirmation that the caller is next of kin. "I'm sorry, we can only release status to relatives, you know husbands and wives, fathers and mothers," the operator says. "Caller is husband of Lisa," Datacom surprisingly, resourcefully says, the voice recognition chip managing to parse the operator's crisply articulated list of relationships. "Caller is father," Datacom adds, "of Andy." "You didn't ask about no Andy," the operator complains, "Listen," she says, "is there a human there?" Datacom isn't much on philosophical issues. It politely replays the sound segment requesting the information. The operator asks if I have been a patient there in the past. Datacom doesn't know. The operator asks for a social security number. Datacom gives one. The operator asks for mother's maiden name. Datacom says "Abort call," and politely hangs up. Nausicaa is not in her office. I call her apartment and her machine answers. This means she will be seeing Wert, but I am not sad as I sometimes am, for there is too much else to be sad about. I call Lisa's office and a machine answers. I call Lisa's home and a machine answers. I have Datacom leave my standard call back sound segment, afraid to leave my live voice on her machine. There are no humans after five o'clock, no women any longer without offices. I have an irrational desire to go back to talk with the woman with the silks and Reeboks, question her gently as if I were an investigator, ask her where the hours of the day have gone. I do not call the hospital. I take a pill and call Lolly. She has no machine. she says. Once, for instance, he was camping alone in the Upper Peninsula when a group of forestry students from Purdue came to the National Forest campsite for a party. He harangued them for the noise, but they were too polite to bait him, and he retreated to his campsite until the music started up again through the pines. Soon two of them set off to the outhouse along the path between their campsites, and he decided to stalk them. He carried his rifle with him, although he did not load it. (He is shocked that I tell you this. he says. ) I keep wanting it to be one of those stories in which one wakes up-- not as a cockroach, not from a trance of twenty years, but rather in the way you wake to your mother when you are a child, still hesitant about the propriety of having such a dream, yet vastly relieved that it is over. Louis XIV at the fenceline. Only machines speak. There is no mystery, really, about the truth. You merely need to backtrack, or take other paths. Usually the silent characters yield what the investigator needs to know. It isn't over yet, by any means, this story. No dream. Mother long gone. Welcome to Datcom. Login please. > Error: Does not Match password. This is a restricted node. No retries. Datcom abort. Nearly everything breaks the frame. This dialect, for instance, seems dramatically unlikely, an authorial intrusion, and yet I suppose he might-- under stress, somewhat angry and detached-- be more likely to attend to her accent manque. I am trying to tell you exactly that. I tell her I know that he isn't there. I tell her I need to see her. she asks, bemused. I lie. she says. I tell her I do not. I begin to weep. I think: walnut fudge. Crevette. I say. I have never been in this room before, since it is always locked when I come here. It would have been a family room, game room, teevee room-- whatever you call this sort of lower level enclosure. Their home is modern, a long brown-sided ranch with Bauhaus glass, set in evergreens. The office is to the rear and next to their garage. Her furniture, a sofa and two overstuffed armchairs, is covered in white duck or unbleached muslin, something beige and canvasy, unthreatening. There are two paintings, both nudes, both women. Her desk is a Japanese lacquer table, spare and unthreatening. There are fresh flowers, and she smells of lilac. She opens up the doors of a beige credenza and retrieves a lilac-colored legal pad. I say. I think she sees my lip quiver, I think she fears that I will start up again. She retreats from the admonishing tone. she says, stretching her arms out, She smiles, my lip still quivers. she asks. I say. She looks at me without speaking. < I am so afraid of what I will do, how I will feel, if it is true. And then I begin to feel guilty. I mean, I start to think that part of me doesn't really care, part of me would be relieved... in a way, that is, if they... > She does not speak. I have seated myself in one of the white chairs and she sits on the sofa. I wish now that I had sat there, on the sofa. I want to lie down. I am afraid that I will pass out. I consider asking her to move and let me sit there, consider sitting next to her and asking her to hold me. she asks me, I do not speak. She recites: "Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit..." I ask. she says, and laughs, She laughs with greater gusto, with delight. I stop this short. It is what she wishes me to do. She smiles. I am aware of the taste of my own tears, slowly streaming as we talk. she asks. I think she means my son. I ask. I ask. I say. I say and smile. She laughs wonderfully, womanly. She looks at me. There is silence. she asks. I think of a story Wert told me, about a man we both know at the office, one of the ones who runs every day at lunch time, a fifty-some year old man who has been with the company since the days it was truly an insurance business. After years of running, this man went up to Detroit for the marathon, his first one ever. He ran in the middle of the pack for most of the race, not that far off the pace of others in his age bracket. By the twentieth mile he was in awful pain, bone-jarring, delirious pain. The middle of the pack began to pass him. By the time he reached the twenty five mile mark he was among the stragglers. Even so people cheered him on, offering him fruit juice and encouragement, words of perseverance. He made it to twenty six miles, his chest searing with pain, his legs jarred like raw bone with each step. With one hundred yards to go, he knew he could not make it. He had slowed to something less than a walk. Around him people shouted for him to go on and finish, people applauded his pain and endurance. He could see their faces, one by one, as if in slow motion. They held out paper cones of water, they urged him onward, they wept with him, they cheered him. He stopped with maybe fifty yards to go. He knew he was unable to finish. The race official wrapped him in a silverspaceblanket. He told the story warily, Wert says, as if he did not know itsmeaning. There is an end to everything, to any mystery. It is good advice. Even so, I still wish I could lie back on the white sofa and think. I wish I were the Sun King. She'd prefer that little be said about her. Consider her name. When it was given to her, she was unique among the children born that year in their postwar suburb. her mother's friends would say. Then, without warning, it seemed everyone in the world was named Lisa for a time. There were three in her high school homeroom. During the seventies, she switched to calling herself Elise and wearing a headband as a sort of flower child option. That, however, sounded even more French. When they had a child she named him Andrew because it seemed timeless and unlikely to be popular. She does not care for avocados or bananas, or anything similar in texture. He insisted it was sexual, although for many years she loved sex even more than he did. When a couple divorces, sex becomes a convenient mnemonic for their failures. He predicted she would stay celibate for years, but, of course, she took up with Desmond within weeks. There isn't any story here. It's as Tolstoy said, the genuine drama occurs on the upward or downward slopes, never at the apex. The controlling myth of her marriage was Snow White. She wished for a Prince, ate the apple, spent years under glass. Even so, as manufactured myths go, this one is accurate. The Princess gets her Prince and a little death hardly seems an awful price to pay. Remember that, in the end, even the mute, Dopey, speaks. I agree with her that there is too much talk of it, but I want to argue that it is something of a new courtly love tradition. she says. I ask Nausicaa, but she laughs her wise, experienced laugh. She laughs again. We are drinking Stag's Leap Fume Blanc, a little too cold, yet still flinty, an echo of lilac and oak leaves, a following sweetness. Lolly's thighs are muscular and smooth but not enticing to me. Even so she has an animal quality, a fervid presence. It is more exciting to see her like this, paired with Nausicaa's spare calves, her searching eyes. I begin to feel a stirring in my center, and I think that Nausicaa's breasts will have a taste very much like this. They lie entwined, she, a fervid animal, with her head in the prim and ordered lap of the other, her fingers weaving through her friend's hair, her fingers gently reaching up and caressing, sculpting really, the older woman's features. Her fingers her thighs her breasts her breathing. I believe that none of this is true, that I have merely washed up upon this memory as if upon a wide and salty beach. To be alone with women at rest, and to speak of these things. They rub themselves with olive oil. I feed them strawberries. It's understandable, I suppose, to think of this all as some sort of techno-literary game, a cryptogram, or garden of the forking etc., the minotaur at its end. I, for instance, think of Djuna Barnes. For years I told a fraudulent anecdote about when I helped the executrix of the cummings estate clear out Estlin and Marian's Patchin Place house. There was a mysterious woman, dressed all in black, a veil over her face, a blackthorn walking stick. One afternoon, Gerry introduced me to her, saying "This is Michael Joyce, he is a writer." It was the first she ever said this. Usually she would introduce me to people saying, "He wants to be a writer." The woman in black said, "Joyce? I knew Jimmy in Paris, you know. He was a wonderful man." I forgot who she was but in later years told the story, claiming she was Djuna Barnes, who I knew also lived on Patchin Place. It made a good ending, a rite de passage. After a number of years, guilt and curiosity caught up with me and I wrote to Gerry to ask her who the woman really was. She wrote back and said Djuna Barnes. We kept talking about anchoring devices. It was a foundation-sponsored conference on interactivity, in this case video disk soap operas. It was my first such journey, the place where, probably, I got the notion of the crystal bowl of candies, for there was such a thing there. At any rate these film semioticians or structuralists or whatever kept talking about anchoring devices. It began to dawn on me that they meant things like the titles in silent films (or these screens). I came to know them, we became friends, me and these California film theoreticians. J. Press and Brooks Brothers function also. Reeboks are more transitory. See Barthes or, better still, Cheever. He is the master of anchoring devices. (He chased me through Iowa City one night to talk fiction, then confessed his nickname: Joey, as in clown. Cummings gave it to him.) The conference was in Santa Monica. Once a day we walked to view the dazzle of the ocean. There is a real difference, I think, between what constitutes the Avant Garde now and what did then. Bogosian, say, or Spalding Gray (sp?) versus Chaiken (sp?) or the Becks. These days we inevitably deny the possibility of community. The same was true of films. Even Godard is predicated upon the possibility of community. Truffaut certainly was. Implausibly an Icelandic Pop Artist now living in France, popular behind the Iron Curtain. His foodscapes and erotic monsters. This is truth. You want fiction. I ask. We are playing parlour games, I know, and know also that this sort of thing went out with-- Oh what was the name of that Albee play? You know, Richard Burton and Elizabeth terrorizing poor George Segal and Sandy Dennis...? Nausicaa furls her brow. She too cannot remember. Increasingly, there are so many of us who cannot remember. Perhaps, I think, this is why Ann Beattie was invented. Lolly doesn't let us let her off the hook. she says. Apt, even, to forget him in reverie. It is a great blessing to have not simply a lover your age, but one with a poet's sensitivity, trained by women. With Peter I am able to merge into something continuous. It is very nearly masturbatory, the sense of warm familiarity, the willingness to extend. I do not need to see him for weeks; while with Wert it is urgent and cyclical, like the need for cigarettes, for heroin, and just as transitory. That makes him fun. I am certain they both believe they have me. They share that man's sense of the cliche: wife and whore, and I am the woman without complications. Neither understands that I choose them. Peter knows better. Yet of the two, he is more likely confused. He is like a woman. He longs to believe, to join in something. In this way Dataquest has been good for him, for he is too easily frightened, too naive about what other men value: property, ownership, commerce, power. He fears this project, and fears Wert even more. He is incapable of understanding that these things often occur in the world. There is a great sea of money and power and it flows from place to place aimlessly and without purpose. These millions of dollars surely do, as Peter thinks, create monsters, but the monsters are Frankenstein-- the Frankenstein of the most wonderful of the films, The Daughter of Frankenstein-- do you know it? It is the most tender of these films. The monster happens upon an old blind man and his daughter, and he lives with them for a time in peace. He learns music, and how to smoke a pipe. "Smoke good!" he grunts. The daughter, who can see, does not see evil. She gives him flowers. Mary Shelley would have loved this extension. In time, of course, the villagers hunt him down. They chase him down with torches and murder him, to save him from the girl, you see. (She laughs.) Now that's an interesting inversion, isn't it? I suppose it's true in its way. Someone said all films affirm capitalism; thus they save him from her, no? It is like Star Wars, exactly. People say this or that about the waste, the risk, the impossibility of it all. I say, let them have at it, let them put themselves to conquering time with money. For that's what it is, isn't it? All this waste is merely a vain effort to somehow anticipate the future, to know now what men know will take them decades to begin to understand. Do you know what I think of when I think of Dataquest or Star Wars? Sometimes a trick wants to come on you, spread his semen across your breasts, or face, or ass, or have you collect it in your hand... I know that the standard interpretation is that these are gestures of conquest and humiliation, and that may be, but I can tell you from experience (she laughs) they are like boys afterward... I think they merely want to see it with their own eyes, the waste, the result of dollars spent and minutes gone. That's exactly it, in fact. The point is Peter needs to be saved from this sensitivity he has, for in sustaining it, he also sustains the value of what he fears most, do you see? Because he fears Dataquest, he gives it value. He should instead understand that it is merely what other men do, what money does. Money needs to build these complicated systems for itself: options, calls, margins, puts, expert systems... Sure, this thing, if it succeeds, will achieve great power, but it will only be power aimed at itself. An implosion. People will still walk along roadsides and search for baby's breath and loose strife. Perhaps, towards dusk, they may notice the flaring lights of exploding cities on the horizon, but life will not change. All that possibility reduced to a pool of silver grey. Sometimes I cup it in my hand like jelly, watch it slowly lapse into a thin, clear fluid... Sometimes a trick will want you to leave it there to dry into something like lace upon your tanned belly... It is both very sad, and somehow comic. If you are meant to be humiliated, this fungus-smelling water does not do that. If this is a gesture of conquering, you consume it, as surely as if it were in your womb or mouth. I think these lasers and starships and particle beams will be this way, a comet's spew of silvery water into mother's belly. Boys at play... Yet Peter can't learn to see this. Can't or won't? Nausicaa will not say. I have, like her, come to love Peter in my own way. Obviously, I came to love Werther long before that, and long before her also. Nausicaa tends to think the accident was caused by distraction, and she doesn't blame either of them. I am less sure. I do agree, however, with her sense of coincidence. She shows an uncommon, instinctive understanding of synchronicity, you see. An accident often occurs both spatially and temporally at the location where, for psychic reasons, it should. We can grant the truth as Peter conceives it. Let us agree, with him, that he was concerned about Andrew and distracted because the school said they could not locate Lisa. Let us stipulate that, in his anxiety, he might have lost concentration-- perhaps spilling something on himself-- at exactly the spot in the road where he sees Wert's truck and her in it. Let's agree that it is shocking, unexpected, to see this particular woman with him. Yes, I know that, for anyone else this should not be unexpected, that Peter should, at least, have suspected; but we nonetheless ought to grant him his truth. It is all he has, and so it is authentic. Let's agree he must feel abandoned-- even, literally, out of control. Granting all this, we are nonetheless left with history, which is nothing more or less than what synchronicity really is. Wert knows Peter takes this road. Peter knows we women are free. There are forces which we can call evil. There are powers which we can call good. The world is a world of properties and physical objects, of entropy. Even coincidence is a freewill decision. The investigator finds him to be at fault. He is shocked to see the body so beautifully there upon the wide green lawn. The boy is nearby. It is foolish. He doesn't know her, has never met her. She detests young men. < As if I were your father > I say. He is carefully tailored, you couldn't say he looks plain, and yet there is an attention to a spare style. He practices invisibility, his shoes -- either bench-made pumps or italian moccasins-- are seamless, his suits are mostly Brooks-cut although occasionally European. I mean you couldn't describe him in a police line-up and yet you always notice him. I believe he carries a revolver, but it may be only that he likes to affect dangerousness. Still, there is a smell of oil and metal about him. She says she has known wealthy men before, and he doesn't smell wealthy. He grins, he knows he's shocked us with this term. These are not versions, but thestoryitself in long lines. Otherwise, however, the center is all-- Thoreau or Brer Rabbit, each preferred the bramble. I've discovered more there too, and the real interaction, if that is possible, is in pursuit of texture. There we match minds. Yes, love. (What more do you want?) After the rain, for instance, certain tree branches, which I walk past every day, will suddenly block the passage of the sidewalk, they are so heavy with rain. And I often smell eucalyptus, though we are hundreds of miles from the sea, hundreds of miles from anywhere. There is one certain house, a white ranch without any evident architecture, where an old man in cloth slippers, grey Dickey's, and a baseball cap tends his lawn, day after day, chewing the cigar and bending over, digging at the occasional stray dandelion, clipping the margins. Sometimes his wife is outside trimming the arborvitae into cones and cubes; otherwise I do not see her. It is that kind of house. There is a single dwarfed tree, a dark leafed maple, red flowers (only red flowers) around the foundation. The house is always in sunlight, or-- when it rains-- in rain. There are never shadows, nor are there fences. A single lawn chair, one of those springy metal chairs with a tulip-shaped back, sits in the rear of the house, though no one sits there. The garage is sometimes open, and inside it is as neat as you would suspect, the tools arrayed in soldierly rows. Yet surprisingly a grey-hulled boat and trailer sits on one side, his plain white Mercury automobile on the other. We, of course, never speak, nor do I think he would acknowledge me if I didn't wear the Walkman earphones as I walk. His world is neatly outlined, you see, red geraniums around the foundation, endless blades of carefully tended grass. Once I saw him go into the house. He will eat a cheese sandwich, I thought. Even so, I wonder about the boat. Its hull is clean and waxed, the chrome is perfectly dazzling. Does he sail upon a wide sea here inMichigan? and does he dream of the fat and silversided KingSalmon? I imagine he loves the water. His baseball cap has the name of a company: Aeroquip, a manufacturer of parts for rocket engines. The odds are he retired never knowing why the occasional general was escorted around the shop floor to watch them make these precision valves. Do you remember that made-for-TV movie that was supposed to frighten us into good sense about atomic war? What was its name? In that film, missiles rose up from carefully trimmed silos and lifted over houses like these, neatly up and gone acrossthesea. It wasn't a limousine, it was a black Checker sedan which, for some unfathomable reason, Daddy bought in New Orleans. It had a wood veneer dashboard and three seats upholstered in wool tweed, and I used to sit way in the back, wearing frilly dresses and holding a stuffed, pink poodle. Sometimes, when she could stand neither the heat nor the constant rush of wind from Daddy's vent windows, mother would sit in the second seat on the passenger side. We must have been a sight, the professor, the poetess, and the Infanta, sitting in an irregular line within the black bubble of the Checker. Daddy always said that when he drove Mr. Faulkner back to the train station in the Checker, the latter was moved to comment that it was "a regular ocean liner." On some occasions the weather forces me to walk indoors, and in these times I head for the mall and join the crowd of stroke victims, recovering heart patients, and the emphysematous who walk there in all weather, breathing splendidly filtered air, wheeling their little carts of oxygen, wearing their pacemakers neatly stitched behind a flap of flesh, and, like me, wearing their foam earphones. We walk along the grand concourse, from HickoryFarms to The Gap and back again, swinging our arms before us in the early morning hours before the teenagers arrive with their spiked hair, plastic slippers, and ghetto blasters. As we walk, the fountain splashes above submerged colored lights, and falls into a pool full of pennies. There is a booth where you can have your blood pressure measured by a robot chair, your pulse taken from a strapped finger, your lungs checked by lifting ping-pong balls on a transparent column of air. As the morning progresses the air of Pine Sol is overtaken by the inviting, wafting odor of onions and peppers from the east wing food court, HomagetoNewYork. There, even at this mid-morning hour, already sausages are simmering, already macademia chip cookies are baking, already sweet & sour pork is frying for the lunchtime crowds. Sometimes the community college has a table where they register people "online." Once a lone young man, ahead of the spiked hair crowd, asked for information on machine shop classes. The pretty recruiter looked like the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, her full thighs, and a dark glimmer of the diamondcrotch of her pantyhose, carelessly disclosed beneath the folding table where she sat splaylegged at the terminal. Istoppedtowatchher. she said, smiling brightly, and clicking the words into the terminal. There was a blinking delay of the cursor and then the terminal blanked an instant and finally cascaded with light like the mall fountain as the information flowed from far away. She caught me watching her and primly closed her legs. A plastic tent sign noted that the college takes Mastercharge, Visa, and the Discovery card. It doesn't take Dataquest to tell you the outlook. she challenged me, and she and the boy stared until I said no and moved on. They do not allow handwriting analysis or the booths where a computer generates a teeshirt with your picture printed on it. The mall management attempts to maintain an "upscale, family image." Once a year there is an auto show and the walkers have to negotiate a slalom course between Firebirds and Bimmies, Sables and Jettas. In Fall there is a Consumer Electronics show. Guards in grey flannels and blue blazers with an embroidered security crest monitor the the teenagers' ghetto blasters and keep them from necking. Even so they do alright. The mall recently announced it will not renew the lease for the health booth. They would prefer that the elderly walk elsewhere, "for their own safety." Even so they do alright. All of this has been said before. What use is a stale recital? On Easter Sunday there is a sunrise service in the vast, west parking lot, outside JC Penney's. Wert snaps. (Fullbacks laugh, coeds crack gum.) (Desmond's a sad case, no gracehoper him, tho froshwimmen, weir tolled, luv im.) Dark as a dog's ass with a nose like a dick and a pimply neck. Comes from wearing those damn turle-nick sweaters these frigging moo-sicians affect. (She was always a sucker for a retracted foreskin.) Twice selected most popular lecturer by LSA tarts and assorted linemen, occasionally shows up at a pub named Mr Flood's Party, where he blows some jazz and drinks warm stout. A real regular guy, a riot when he lectures (she says) everyone loves him, Andrew also. Speaks like a hornpipeIrishman: have a listen: Thisman Larry, he's so funny, plays me songs on a stick with holes in it, and he calls it a tape recorder, isn't that weird? Mommy says she loves him but he isn't your Daddy. I told him he should know you and he said he'll take my word. She moored between her muscular thighs, he moaning sighs like water @ E now i dont know if thats history at pleasure or whether its somewhat more aristotelian that is when you think of aristotle's idea of poetry his idea was that poetry was essential history it was the kind of history that had to happen or the kind of history that might have happened or the kind of history that should have happened (david antin) 6 9 G O i l s x ^ e She would like to argue that I have no right to use such a term. But you see, I say, this is the dilemma you put me in. If feminism is to be taken seriously as a philosophy, then shouldn't anyone, woman or man, be able to scrutinize it, apply its principles, and use it as a dialectic? What use is a philosophy that belongs to only one sex? < "She'd prefer that little be said about her," indeed! It's utter nonsense! For all your supposed variations, you've written nothing but the same old patterns: the wooden wife, the receptive whore, the all-accepting female mind! < Even Wert's a strawman... no, worse! ... a ventriloquist's dummy for your ugliest misogynistic notions. L Perhaps, I say, this is truly the nature of interaction, it's a kind of fantasy machine. she says. All the women have offices and we all have machines. People seem less and less apt-- less able-- to remember. she says brightly. She leans against a white plaster wall; it turns slowly pink. Squares: the antithesis of this. "Intellectual order as well as intuitive or instinctive order":art. and yet the colors are not dissimilar to this technique, and, ironically, the whole thing is composed (invisibly) of squares Still, Anni would be more comfortable than he with this: weavings "no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at." she found the mountain traditions stifling; it is reported that, at first, he thought "pasture" had to be the opposite of "future" Correct in a way: squares. ' R G rs J We were never more in love than then. Sometimes I would come back from the station and find them down at the beach, surrounded by swans, or bundled against the cold walking among solitary terns, her hands full of grey stones. Once a great sailing sloop, a three master, cut into the cove and moored not more than three hundred yards out as Andy whooped. The light was brilliant and the sails crisp as starched shirts. After a time, it sailed off, as mysteriously as it had come, a man waving and waving to someone unseen. We would make love to the sound of the constant tide or of storms marching in off the Sound. Often you could hear fog horns moaning up and down the shore in their comradely rhythm. We took photographs of each other all the time in those days, and, almost always, there is the sea-- or what the Sound gives us of the sea-- in the distance. It took the place of perspective for us, benign and ever changing. No matter how I scrutinize these pictures now I cannot find the truth. I know our marriage had its place in some society, in some economy, in some idea of love; but always there is the sea behind us, sometimes brilliant, sometimes adipose. In the background of certain snapshots there is the featureless black factory boat, a chowder clammer, which sometimes worked our inlet for days without end, constantly dredging, slow, awkward, and without visible humanity. I am a terrible romantic. I thought that some idea of culture would keep her when I couldn't any longer. I believed in lectures and small chamber orchestras, as if they could replace talk. You see the flaw, of course: it was neither my task to keep her, nor to think she could grow by my wishing. I took the train into the city five mornings a week and sometimes six. Sometimes she joined me at City Center for the ballet; sometimes we took a room at the St. Regis and left Andrew with his sitter. I was just about to break into six figures, I knew the names of the principal dancers, and after she slept I stayed up and watched the lights of the city and yellow taxis on the avenue below. I should have known she was unhappy. MUS131 (Sibelius) 9 I have argued elsewhere that Japan is now everywhere. It is the long dream of a new culture. Consider the stones. We inquired afterwards about the Tama River in Noda and the Stone of Oki. At the famous Sue no Matsuyama, a temple has been built... graves dot the intervals between the pines. The most intimate promises of lovers, made never to change, have their outcome in these graves, and the thought made time seem crueler... ("The Narrow Road Through the Provinces"-- Basho ) < A truck like this is the noiseless sutra of the Machine Essence. That sucker can crawl up mountains, slide down streams, and walk in pines. Put a winch on the front and you can zip the horizon shut or drag stars back to camp. In the city it floats above sidewalks... America has forgotten the value of a good truck: it keeps the mind from wandering. > f grant that I stand as fittingly in his clogs crossing distant summer's hills $ 2h v Perhaps he is right, perhaps I would prefer silence about me. I am, afterall, the one plain one here. Wren, perhaps, is right. I enjoy my job. It is an opportunity to view art unvarnished. All these contracts and schedules, the complaints and the constant rescheduling, give you a different view than from the dress circle in the balcony. Conductors, choreographers, mimes, and string quartets translate themselves to doting, middle-aged goats with liver spots and hacking coughs, or self-centered matrons of any sex. Or cheese plates and unsweetened grapefruit juice (40 or less) after each performance, the cheese plate to include fontina, stilton, and aged New York Herkimer cheddar, among others. And gods, to be sure, goddesses... Katherine Battle, for one, and what's his name... Isaac Pearlman? FG I still enjoy seeing genius, once or twice a year. I think he was one when I married him. (It's a riot to think he'll catch hell for including this. They'll claim he's attributing it to me, that it's some power fantasy. Even so, I think he was.) And I fear that Desmond may be one also, which would, I fear, end it for me. You see, I am a refugee from culture. That's the irony of what I do and what he says about how he failed to keep me. Lectures and chamber concerts dulled me. For a time I believed in mystery and art-- believing in some awful way that did not include me. Then I had Andrew. (He'll catch hell for this too, even so it's true.) You see? I mean just look at them, the lovely strong ones: Lolly and Wert, Nausicaa and Peter. Theirs is the new aristocracy, the spawn of psychotherapy and technology. Even their anguish has glitter of a sort; even their confessions of emptiness sing. I would have believed it once, as if theatre, "When I first met her she was shy, shy as a fawn..." As I say, my job has been good for me, that and childbirth. I understand now that I have a genius for the ordinary. I can send out for bids on computerized tickets, can hire a Mercedes sedan as per a maestro's contract, I can argue with the Projectionists' Union about the size of a running crew, the duration of a load-in. I go home, I make supper, I read him books, and, sometimes, my lover arrives after a rehearsal. We discuss Milhaud and the saxophone, I take him inside me and moan. It is, honestly, very good. Yet you see how what I say becomes infused by irony. The general atmosphere is helium, every voice is somehow higher, clearer, oddly comic. I insist I am happy. We are not yet divorced and even so I have my own name again. My job does not define me, I love my secretary because she grew up on a sheep farm near Chelsea, I even like when Andrew's expression makes me see Peter in him. Why then do I have to define myself? Why then must I play some part in a half-tragic, half-comic mystery? Why should I portray myself as part of a culture which excludes me, whether the Joffrey Ballet or answering machines and bimmies? You know who my hero is? That girl with the orange hair and outrageous skirts who Andrew loved when he was a baby, what's her name...? (He's right about this, no one can remember anymore; although I think it's computers have done it.) Yes! That's it... Wendy Lauper, the sweetness of her. I know this will seem so desperately seeking-ish, but so what? The movie's a riot and true in its heart. Except everyone understood it upside down. It's not glamour and risk and sex she seeks, but getting away from the earnestness. Madonna's wrong for it though. She's a sort of caramel in the Sampler, you can see she's hard beneath. I like this Lauper person... (it's Cyndi, isn't it? I said Wendy), you can hear her sweetness, see it in her laughing eyes, she's orange creams. I'm sorry ( I shouldn't keep saying I'm sorry I know-- even Lolly told me that the one time I saw her-- and I shouldn't say that either, not "even Lolly," she's really quite good at what she does, you'll see, the others depend on her...), but I am sorry that I'll have to end this now. I do know what you feel. You make some choices, you begin to see a pattern emerging, you want to give yourself to believing despite the machine. You think you've found something. (It's a beautiful image, really, the hidden wren-- I told you I thought he was a genius... I think he means it to be the clitoris, all nervous and yet somehow self-contained-- a bird's perfect, really (although I'm being too literal I suppose, it's all images, isn't it?) That's why I'm sorry I have to end it for you so soon. one perfection within another one belies an other. perfection is one divided by one. - BY n (me) ! " $ "if this world makes you crazy and you've taken all you can bear you call me up because you know I'll be there" M [ who's she when he's at home? Halidon Hill, long-time home of the Cox's, surely epitomizes the Belle Epoque of these parts. Framed by towering blue pines, the long and quiet lane gives way to a vantage of the great lawn and geometric orchards, and, finally, this "lovely manor." Of a July day in these times, it is more than likely that "your hostess" will await you on the cool and fragrant North Veranda with a refreshing pitcher of her unusual and fabled Chinese plum lemonade. Yet it would be incautious to assume that this great lady, Mrs. Walter Cox, represents a throw-back to the "Old South" of myth. For she, like so many hereabout, shares the yearnings and ambitions of her more urban sisters everywhere. A watercolorist and social activist, her motto is "Service First!" "Though she be but a great anchor for this restless ship, Still she probes the depths and tethers it to the slip. Hers are the hands that grapple sand and mossy stones; When storms howl, the long night's vigil she stands alone." from Garlands (1972) by Adelaide Warner-Colombe published by Andy's Print Shop Poplarville, Mississippi ' , 4 ; X r If the reader will forgive a paraphrase of a master, it might be said that "All happy houses are happy in different ways." Surely, The Oaks does not belie this wisdom. Rebuilt on the foundation stones after a disasterous Nineteenth Century fire, this Gothic Revival home shares a hill with the giants who give it its name. Immodest though it may seem, it can be said that giants also have lived and moved within its walls. The home of Professor Betrand Colombe is, in many ways, also the home of learning itself in Polarville [sic]. Just as the house itself has been built upon the foundations of the past, so too this learning is built upon a foundation of "the good cheer and civilizing presence" of spirited women, including now three daughters and your humble "Beatrice". An everpresent stink of flowers, as if in a mortuary parlour, against a jungle wall of green-- dark shaded canyons so dense that the houses they surround rot and mildew: dampness everywhere, even the earth at night exhaling damp. Cotton underthings which stuck to the flesh of legs and buttock (oh once he froze them as if some gesture against what I had become), gnats and mites and fleas and hundred-legged things. But also the cathedral coolness of a canning cellar behind resurrection stones six feet thick, on high shelves the jars draped with cobwebs: mustard pickles, chow-chow, sweet okra pickles, pigs feet. Damson plum jam which outlived its maker, grandmother dead three years when we ate the last jar, and I recall thinking this is what Catholics are about... Meanness everywhere. Rifles and someone whom they say once shot a nigger ( seen at Montgomery Ward's, eating ice cream with fat wife and scrubbed red children; he caught me looking and grinned at me). Father's whiskey, a cut-glass decanter she called "your decadent past" and he threw the knobbed stopper halfway across the front room, where it shattered into crystal shrapnel, and she began to weep. (Later he replaced it with a plain cork.) "Your father is thinking at present," meant stay away. My sisters stuffed scented Kleenex in the cups of lacy brassiere's ( one must never say bra, it's vulgar). One summer night a boy named Billy McDaniels was humping my sister Bettina on the screen porch. Her wide skirt and crinoline seemed to swallow him, only his head and bare ass thrusting out of it. She saw me and winked over his shoulder, put a finger (shhh...) to her lip. Back in the parlour my father sat with a book drinking whiskey. He held me on his lap in the cool leather chair and I knew he too could hear Bettina and Billy groaning. I said. he said. He saw I was confused. Billy McDaniels owns his own gravel company now, proud green trucks with his name in golden script. Bettina married a doctor, divorced him, married another. I gave the crystal decanter to Wert for our wedding. I told him. I have another sister, but we don't speak. Li Po, they (my friend joel, for one, god rest his soul) say, drown one night on his way home from the wine shop when, after writing a poem to announce his intention, he made love to the moon, drowning himself in her reflection in the Yellow River. It was not his first infatuation with her. She seems saddened by this. We have had dinner before, you see, earlier this year. she said when I asked her, but before we left her apartment for the restaurant that night, she let me know the rules. I had commented on her dress, a swirly, peasant-cut thing, scooped low across what she might have called ample bosoms. I said, although perhaps I was. she said, and grabbed for my hand, giving it a more than fraternal squeeze. She released the hand just as quickly as she took it, then gave a little spin, modelling the skirt. she said, I held the door for her. I said. I said in the car. she said, and gave my arm a lingering pat. I chanced, calculating-- from the hand squeezing and arm patting-- that flirting with her socalled parents was not utterly proscribed. she smiled she said. she said. she said quietly. I say, laughing, and-- delightfully-- she laughs with me. I say, laughing, and-- delightfully-- she laughs with me. she says and touches my knee with a hand that she leaves there. I ask. she squeezes the knee. she says. she says. I begin to think we may break some rules. I said. she says. I say. I say, and cover the hand she keeps upon my knee. Before dinner she drinks Kir Royale, and then eats only salad, explaining that red meats foul the flesh and seafood, though it is passionate, makes one languid. I explain. she says, and, later, sets out to prove her own theory, while I loll in her ample bosoms, crossing against the light. She is the kind of woman who believes in flavored love oils-- Raspberry-- and yet, at the door afterwards, she reestablishes the rules. she says and makes a crooked smile. She lets me kiss her. she whispers. I say okay. she says and, as best as I can, I toodle-ooo. I hear my voice at the slightest delay through the earphone. It is all too frantic, even for me. I say, and the voice fails to convince me. It seems farther and farther away, like the sound of ships steaming away in submarine movies. Father and father away. < It was an awful dream. Awful!> I insist. 01101001001011000101011001001010100100100100100100100 0110001001 0love1 0000110010111100010100010001000100001 00101100010101100100101010010010010010010010001100010 01001001011000101011001001010100100100100100100100011 00010010010010110001010110010010101001001001001001001 00011000100100101000100001100101111000101000100010001 000010010110001010110010010101001001001001001for00011 00010010010010110001010111000100001100101111000101000 10001000100001001011000101011001001010100100100100100 1001 0one1 00010010010010110001010111000100001100101111 00010100010001000100001001011000101011001001010100100 1001001001001000110001001001001011thing10111000100001 10010111100010100010001000100001001011000101011001001 0101001001001001001001000110001001001001011000101011 10010111100010100010001000100001001011000101011001001 I say. I ask. She sighs.