Sea Chanties

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         SEA CHANTIES

 

     Lou was dying and he was holding a salon in his hospital room.  The medicines he had taken for his heart and circulation since his coronary had poisoned his kidneys and liver. 

     He did not sound sick over the phone; he sounded more vigorous than Manny remembered him.  Drop on by.  He didn't need any more practice for sleeping.  He wouldn't be an insomniac corpse.  Visiting hours were extended until eleven.  The fix was in. 

     He sounded a touch brassy.  Manny could hear voices in the background.  They were loud and there was braying laughter, and Manny thought they were all blowing the trumpet of bravado.

     Manny did not want to join this group.  He argued to Florence that he did not belong in that tight circle of family and close friends.  She should remember how consistently they had dodged invitations to Block Island because too muchness of all things together would strain their relationship with Pearl and Lou which was, after all, based on manageable doses, the yearly dinner, the bi-annual movie, and these hardly seemed to warrant their participation in this prenuptial wake.     

     Florence was determined to go and Manny knew he would have to as well, but they decided they would go separately, which Florence thought was unnatural since they had always seen Lou and Pearl as a couple. Manny suggested it was less forced and ritualistic.  He meant to postpone the visit as long as he could.  And then, the means to do it. Manny was chosen to give the plenary at the Association's annual convention.  He had two months to prepare but it was not as if his other duties would slack and so he now had an excuse to fill the evening hours when he might have visited Lou. 

     Along with the honor came obsessing over why he was chosen.  All members of his Association were masters of symbolic and double meanings.  Manny had been circumspect in discussing his medical condition, but still the information had certainly leaked out.  If he put his mind to it, he could remember several times when he had fished for sympathy among his colleagues, lapses certainly and ill-advised considering their skill at heartlessly dissecting need, and there had been other times when he had needed confirmation of his good soldiering, which also required a confession.  The plenary could be interpreted as a disguised retirement speech, the laurels bestowed on him out of the complicated balancing and checking of power within the Association as a way of putting it out of play for a year, bestowed posthumously as it were. 

     This consideration decided Manny on his title, "The Termination of Therapy", ostensibly concerning how to decide when, and then to accomplish, the severing of the therapeutic relationship, but which he jumped into under the working title "The Termination of a Therapist", donning his headset with its floating mike wand and recording hours of talk which he erased at the end of each evening without transcribing. Meanwhile, Florence reported on the death of Socrates, Manny's description, being staged at the hospital.

     Maury Potkin had rewarded Manny with the plenary, and it was Maury Potkin seated in the audience who Manny pictured as he spouted his phantom speeches.  Maury Potkin had the head of a Roman Emperor.  His gleaming white hair was cropped close and combed forward on his high forehead.  He had a Riviera tan.  It persisted into winter, and for years Manny had hoped its olive hue was the result of a liver ailment. He would be seated next to his wife, a tall woman who had become brittle during the last decade or so, but who Manny remembered from his first acquaintance when she was gracefully gangly in that coltish way reserved for WASPS, heedless and high spirited while somehow wistful at the same time.  Maury's career had shadowed Manny's, and then he had sprinted around Manny, though never appearing to have to breathe hard, grabbing the golden apple or plum of publisher of the Association's journal, from where he dispensed draughts of immortality and was more feverishly courted than Manny as president. Over the years Manny had watched the unbridled spirit of his wife, that sheets to the wind luffing and flap, furled in, and for years her evolution into softly glowing vacuity gave him satisfaction, until he finally recognized it for what it was, saw the lantern glowing steadily beneath, the look of lazy, sure patience, and knew she was a woman in the nimbus of sexual bliss, and his satisfaction turned to anxiety.    

      He thought that this year the plenary would make him a spectacle, the audience of his peers studying him for deterioration: the sentence left dangling, rambles, breathing wheezing in the speakers.  He came out swinging.  The next night he would have had to position himself in the words of the night before so he erased them, letting himself fly headlong, leaving a jet stream of words behind that traced lovely patterns and then disappeared. 

     The recorder and headset helped him break the bonds of discretion.  The windy reaches bristling in the earphones suggested clairvoyance, pocketing the ether as a shell did the briny.  They also stoppered his ears so he could only hear his own voice through his skull.  The words acquired an autonomous compulsion, or he was not fully responsible for them.  It was as if he had put on a stethoscope and could hear the corporal interior of each word, the working of its separate lungs on their common breath.  And the recorder, the foot treadle pressed, seemed either to suspend or reel in time, tailoring it; it injected itself as metaphor, splicing out rectangles from the ether or quadrants of restive, loamy silence, and whatever he said was stitched onto these pleats of shaped and thickened material:   

     "Patient C. had been institutionalized three years by the time I began my rotations in July, nineteen fifty-four.  Caucasian male, age twenty-four.  Diagnosis: Satyriasis.  He did not agree.  It was the least he could do.  Masturbating to orgasm fifteen times a day.  He did not ask me to imagine his world.  He never did.  Mildly retarded.  In retrospect I would diagnose autism, Ausperger's, though these would be approximations.  He had no fantasy life.  His masturbations were not accompanied by fantasies, he had the autistic's ability and liability of remembering the literal.  He had no dementia with which to decorate the institution where he was.  Most of you are too young to remember these places.  Some of them were surrounded by pastoral grounds, and there might be echoes of manor houses when you approached them or of a university, but in this they shared an architectural ethos of the era with factories and penitentiaries. The hallways could remind you of the high-mindedness of the original intent.  Long, long, lit by pale light at the ends where doors with glass windows led to fire stairs: The light there was the same skim found floating in cathedrals. 

     I asked him what he fantasized when he masturbated.  It was the consensus of the doctors that only adverse conditioning stood any chance with him.  He was subjected to various forms of blood cooling.  Talk therapy had proven useless, and instead a regimen of nineteenth century optimistic cures were applied, balancing of spiritual humors with physical functions that might have been found in a tuberculosis conservatory, the poetic reasoning anyway, with the caveat that we were not dealing with a condition of melancholy and over refinement, but a conflagration of the libido.  He was put on fasts and diets without red meat, eventually reduced to a monk's barley gruel and water.  He was denied fruit, on the idea that all fruits are too sensually suggestive, and was saved from scurvy as impressed British sailors were a century before, by bitter, green limes.  The flames were doused in cold tubs with wooden lids with a hole cut to accommodate his neck and head.  He would be removed when his lips were a livery lilac hue and his teeth chattered like castanets, but an oyster of semen would be found floating in the water or dripping from the wooden cover, and his dousing lengthened until his core body temperature had to be braced up afterwards with warm teas and forced marches spurred on by two orderlies who supported him by the shoulders, his body resurrecting by spastic jerking and twitching.  Lobotomies were in abeyance then, electro-shock had been tried with little hope and abandoned: He was not depressed in any cooperative or collaborative sense.  He was not pointedly rebellious, but had neither the imagination nor complex self-consciousness to throw himself onto the mercy of a diagnosis.  The disorienting effects of electro shock were self-medicated by masturbation.  I don't believe he suffered the alarm of the blasted, exhausted self which emerges from these treatments, and at that time the charge was applied without sedation and the patient was strapped down.  We had yet to be sure that its therapeutic effects were not the result of dread and mortification, which is to say, we worked with more assurance back then and with less skepticism coming from a public unused to prosperity and happiness.  But, even the physical trauma, the black and blue welts and sprains he would wake to, because the voltage was increased while the tautness of the leather straps was decreased to effect some result-our scientific curiosity and humanitarian helplessness have subsequently been refined to a nearly non-metaphoric use of erosive drugs, but back then we were not entrepreneurs, we were philosophers and scholars with an intellectual's imperative to interrogate this mud wad that has been thrown at us.  The physical trauma did not seem to result in self- pity. From self-pity perhaps he could be led to self-awareness, but he recovered without recognizing his unconsciousness. He was innocent of a connecting story in memories whose lost pages might be missed, and awoke with some of the amnesiac freshness and immediacy we think of as the gift of animals.

     To imagine his world I try to forget a locus for the self.  When he again found his penis he had rediscovered himself, who was a source of pleasure and a point of intense focus, a unitary apperception in a world, which I believe, had to have fairly glowed with re-creation.

     The electro-shock was counter prescriptive it was decided. The libido was discussed as having an electrical bias that the voltage might actually be augmenting. Lacing his hands into huge mittens was discussed, but the same problems of sanitation as for a chastity belt dissuaded the plenary sessions of the staff.  Some kind of hood or muzzle was also suggested, but without his cooperation we would have needed to enlist a blacksmith to secure it.  These discussions often took a turn to the comic, some of the devices recommended had the expanding hygiene of Victorian syntax. They engaged our ingenuity too and a cooperative glee. A game of trump and counter trump ensued, and the basic point of sequestering that organ with a machinery of levers and pulleys diverted us into Rube Goldberg blueprints that included beasts cued to dropping food stuffs all hooked to that endless energy source of his hydraulic erection.  For a while he was straight jacketed and isolated, and daily hosed clean, but the required spoon feeding gave him a chance to rub himself against his keeper, defeating our plans, breaking his fast, and sending us back to the old drawing board to devise Inquisitional machines that would keep his pelvis from wall or floor or an unsuspected limberness that would allow him to employ his knees against medical advice.   

     Possessed by the idealism and confidence of a newly minted psychiatrist in his first residency, I began sorties into psychiatry with him.  He had no urge to confess, but I thought he could be induced to talk if we began with his chief interest in life.  I asked him if he fantasized when he masturbated.  He did not understand the question.  I rephrased it.  Do you see anyone when you masturbate.  It took us a bit to arrive at a common understanding of masturbation.  It was a transparent act for him.  It is not just that the term is loaded, the act is for most.  Even using other phrases all more or less derogatory he had trouble understanding this separation of the act out of his life.  I would say masturbation was his genius, that is to say he was its instrument, and if he was at those times most in possession of himself, he was also completely absent.  The self he had was emptied of anything but what was given at the time and left when he was done.  Finally, we reached a place of obfuscation where we could talk.  His idiocy was his purity and we blemished that sufficiently through suggestion until he was able to answer that he did not imagine anyone.  He was not being evasive, he did not understand the question.  He did not understand the interrogative. He was not capable of positing an alternative to what was, and so the concept of choosing alternative explanations was beyond him.

     It turned out he saw, we will call her Betty, and felt her, and heard her and smelled her, but he had no concept of pronouns.  "Anyone" made no sense to him, only a proper noun.  Betty, one supposes, beginning with dazed relish, finishes a tattered rag.  One need not suppose.  She had blue bags beneath her eyes and bleeding lesions in every orifice.  He had archived her wounds; he could summon her without the distance of imagination and read them off, the blood a curious presence, a morbid vitality, like mold, or rust, effervescing through the rouge, raw membranes in small beads that then coalesced into smears and oozes.  Betty had plucked eyebrows, she had freckles on the backs of her hands and in the cavity of her throat that spilled down her sternum and nutmegged the tops of her breasts.  She sat forward on the toilet when she peed, she probably had cystitis because she complained that peeing hurt, and kicked and scratched when he loved her up in the bathroom, on the loo, on the sink, which ripped out of the wall shedding tile and plaster, and in the tub, where she clawed the walls and cursed him.  The little muscles in her back stand out while she pushes off against the wall, and there are glades of chaste flesh from the nape of her neck along the back of her shoulders, where the scapula slide beneath, and there is another one at the base of the spine just above the buttocks.

     C. lived in a world of immanent beauty and realized truth.  Therapy could not touch him.  When I left he was no closer to being released than he had been two years before.  Truth and beauty so co-extensively joined are a psychosis impenetrable to psychoanalysis.  C. had organic damage, some structural flaw, an absence of architectural complication, an amputation of an intervening distance that in the rest of us is the area from where we live.  The damage had fused truth and beauty into one for him, and because of that accident which is a philosophical achievement and a moral one, he did not dream.  Not as we do.  He was cut off from the common lies.  There was nothing to be fulfilled in dreams, it had already happened.  His life had a surplus of actuality.  It was a defect.  He could not imagine things otherwise and did not feel cheated.  The world was true to its farthest margins which were filled entirely.  Nothing was left over for dreams, no interior unlived, no bitterness, no time used up.  And his dreams, no less or more inhibited by actuality than his waking could not be distinguished from being awake and had no wish in them, no serenade of slumber. Nothing was coated in symbol or burdened by it. 

     Let me tell the strangest symptom of all.  Yes, it was strange to hear him relate his past.  He simply pointed to it, nothing was embedded in a fable.  He had no feel for it being in the past, he had no affection for it, he did not intrude specifically on his memory; he did not see himself as the point of it or the origin of it.  It passed out of him without his intervention and was not bathed in the humors of the self which in us ripen to nostalgia and mourning.  They were fresh and sterile and arid. Looking at him one could see time refracting as if he were submerged.

     He was deaf to music. This deafness the difference that coalesced all the others.  When I played a radio for him he could do an imitation of static and interference, he had not heard the music.  The plangency of each individual note, its clothing in longing or tuning, in organization towards perfection or actualization of the impossible,  or the embodying of a frustrated self or the materialization of a wish, made them inaudible to him.  They were in a sense bodies conjured by a median, they did not exist and he heard through them to static.  When I sang he could hear me as long as I did not sing a song.  Rhyme, made the words disappear for him, of course symbolism had no meaning to him, but the binding of the words into a separate body with its own sense and mortality made it fade out of hearing.  Words as directions, as names, yes, but words arranged to find their own heaven of sense, words made into existences that can live in the ether, these he could not hear. 

     These institutions.  Some of the acts we did that we should in conscience most regret, were done to pinch ourselves.  They were the only way to refute the sirens of nightmare.  A miasma of dementia and delusions filled the buildings.  What might have been taken as the consensus of sanity among the doctors grew small as a wafer in those halls.  It tossed and tipped, and the recovery of normalcy, a world of solid geometry, the return, often it hovered above one, a glimmer of light, flickering, vanishing, small, a tiny, tiny opening, far away, whose direction was uncertain and shifting, and getting there, meant moving through turgid fathoms. You were trying to move through the stuff of dreams. 

     Supervision.  Discipline.  The imposition of rules.  You must take into account the medium through which each of us was moving.  All my training, my life outside, compare it to a flashlight.  Firm in your hand, a little cold, promising to throw light, to beat back shadows.  Simple to understand with batteries and the pert bulb in its skirt of reflecting plastic. I am talking now of logic.  The easily understood mechanics of a canon of thought.  The security, the means for survival.  The inkiest of shadows seem to press in on the beam, the batteries fade, the bulb dims and a weak dribble of light dries in the dark, and one is left clutching a small baton which has become inert and comforting only as a sentiment.        

     Doors are left unlocked.  Slippers scrape along the hallways.  C. was in constant demand.  Insanity is always accompanied by sexual mutation.  Monstrosities were housed there. The nymphomaniacs found him.  Perhaps they were encouraged.  There were matchmakers.  There were the curious, the withered, the vulgar, the shy.  A mob to watch the gladiators.  To watch combat among chimeras and enormities.

     Not difficult to imagine an orderly releasing the nymphomaniac from the woman's dorm and leading her to an assignation with C.  The taunts of those women. The impossible invitations. The hostile, brutal nakedness.  Their witchery. They mutated through the forms women take in the male gaze. Unbearable coincidences, accusations, mimetic intuitions, a tarot reading of the arcana of your lust.  How many times could the orderly stand seeing his spindly daughter appear in innocently demure, bold flirtation, beckoning him to show her more affection, before he might lead her to the Minotaur stabled in the dining hall, bellowing already, erect and pawing.  And there the relentless pinning to the ground or wall or table.  Would she return there on her own another night?  Limp, stark and extinguished, all veils ripped from the primal act of her creation, the ruthless use again, the offhand use again, her helpless impalement.  Some, I know, did return on their own. For the stab of reality, I believe.  The tangible pain rupturing drift and fog.  It might have seemed, in the focus of his peeled attention that they had been held fast, rammed back into their flesh, to suffer it again, yes, but to live it again, and that may have been worth it.

     They brought others.  The catatonic.  Wheeled to him.  To test him.  He could masturbate in ice water.  Did he have a limit?  The ancient ruins were led in.  No limits.  Snickers turned to blank awe.  Disgust capitulated to wonder.  They were seized, wrenched through their repulsion to a seed of mystery that had been its origin. They brought the self-mutilating, the starving, the grotesque, the retarded.  They watched salvation.  A divine principle that dumbfounded them.  They were witness to judgement day when the corpses are unearthed and returned to their creator.  Moving through the bottom of nightmare was a male principle which in its absolute ignorance of soul and in its undying hunger embraced all flesh and filth. It was some shard or remnant of divinity, a part at least of the impulse to place a spark in mud. 

     The nurses came, too, and some of the orderlies.  I found out and did not intervene.  I was to be there only two years. Sometimes I forgot that, but for the others who would remain here as long as the patients, the institution was continuous with their lives outside.  Or completely separate.  The nurse had never married, or maybe she had. Faith must work in both institution and home. If one could see it here for absurd, mindless brutality, sawing of flesh against flesh, here where redemption was most needed, how would she ever believe in it outside?  Outside it need only persist, but here it needed strength infernal as forges for gold. 

     She was Irish.  She wore her hair in a braided bun with an origami nurses cap pined on.  He was kept in a separate room.  She opened the door and he lifted her against the wall and her braids fell and unwound and the cap fell to the floor. The door only opens from the outside. She would be locked in if it should close.  See them then bound in all the banal cloddishness of the act, the magic-lantern rubbing when seen from the hall is lugubrious, turgid, and blind. And yet: A violent act has been delivered to her and in that expression of commanded need and forced obedience, though the act is absurd and ungainly, the violence is undiluted necessity, a command of nature and being. Confusing echoes are silenced.

     What did the poet write: `A sudden blow: The great wings beating still above the staggering girl.'  Not perhaps in the glance caught through the half opened doorway, the centaur wobbling against the wall, her white shoes locked across his spine, her head thrown back, her hair fallen, his rounded back tracing a devolution of the species into some trough of burden, into a herd of swine jamming their porky bodies together around the slop, a clutch of buttock in their frenzied press, a keen self-interest in those taut hamstrings and the steep-angled ankles with their pointed hooves, and then those rounded spines diving away from heaven, powerful and rude, and the tuneless snorts and grunts. But, who can see in this carnage her innocent ignorance? In the tottering pile, the staggering heap, the fermenting refuse held by the same solid literalness, dull weight of death, the same soured light, see with her the savage force that discards her, and loosening its grip, drops her into light?

     His knees buckling, they slide down the wall. He coughs into the hollow of her throat, the shallow chugs of a man kneed in the groin, and he is at it again as she worms her way along the floor, and catches her finally like an arrow or bolt in the pitch of her motion, in the ordained bathos of thighs parting to purchase a step, and pulls her back into a dull iron-mongering, a sledge on anvil where she lies on her side, her leg in mid-stride, knee held fast against her bosom in a slandered prance.  Locks her in the repetitious idiocy, the getting knocked up, the screw, the getting his rocks off, the compulsion, the excretory bloating and release.  All the echoes of the tireless banalities of making love hover about her, the relentless presence of herself in compromise, accommodation and dialogue, and then she is spared.  The fine ambiguity is swallowed in alluvial mud.

     She premeditated her steps to the abyss, jaded and calculating and left with a place for innocence only by her sadness and horror, these were hopes of a continued freshness in her that she saw imperiled. Her capacity for renewal is overwhelmed, he is at her, banging away, and it is then, or is it the next time, or the next, that he stamps her with the death all the mad suffer that witnessing had given her the necessary terror to know exile from God. She had kept back a residue of love, which by withholding was not love. And now, this tender gaze snuffed out and left with nothing, she has given all.

     Maury, she goes home after seven in the morning, and let us imagine house and husband and the disgruntled meeting at eight a.m. when she walks in the door of the clap board row house in Queens with its peaked, tar papered roof jammed in line, its five step stoop, postage stamp backyard with a clutter of wading pool with its bilge of yellow water and autumn leaves, rusty swing set and tricycle, and husband bleary and rheumy over his first cup of coffee.  Imagine a pile of dishes in the sink, an air of entropy depression, fatigue, the lumpy couch facing the TV, the narrow staircase to the upstairs bedrooms, stuffiness and the smell of grease and mildew.  And imagine a desultory collapse into bed during an overlap in schedules, staleness of breath in each. Imagine all this against her holocaust last night, and consider that she will make no use of it to slog on one more day, which she deserves, but that it is only the horror and splendor that can transfix the thickening days and dull weather in their orbit. Only by this can she feel a soul impaled by the celestial.

       

     Florence reported on her visit with Lou:

     "I'm so glad I went.  I was dreading it.  I shouldn't say it, but it was fun."

     "They've had to give him his own room.  Pearl knows how to agitate for things.  They weren't about to shut up, and the establishment gave in.  Hurray.  I just hate hospitals.  And they squeezed something out of them.  I got lost. He's in a wing.  I went around in a circle looking for his number until I asked someone because he wasn't there.  I thought I'd written it wrong or they'd misfiled him.  I thought I'd gotten there too late."

     "I'd just talked to someone there, and I thought, that's just how it is. I was a victim of death's mordant wit.  Actually, I didn't think that very long, but it crossed my mind. I was too upset.  And I thought I might have the wrong hospital.  Maybe I'd just assumed Sloan Kettering because he worked there and I hadn't listened. But, it was just the wrong wing.  I had to go down another hallway.  And they were all there.  It was easy to tell his room.  There was a crowd outside the door.  Manny, they looked like people at an intermission.  They buzzed.  I expected them to be smoking.  I really did.  In a hospital for cancer.  But, that's just the way it was.  Not like a hospital at all.  I had to push my way in and it was roaring inside.  A nurse tried to get in once.  They need to change his fluid bags; they treated her like a policeman or the meter reader.  It was just in fun, but they hissed her.  It felt historical.  I thought I was part of the gay nineties or roaring twenties.  I think a lot of them were tipsy and they shone at their best.  That generation, they're delightful drunk, so light-hearted.  It felt that way.  It was the atmosphere.  Maybe it's not true, but it felt that way, and there was an old man there, he was a colleague of Lou's, somebody said, he'd been the one playing squash with Lou when he had his heart-attack.  I'd have guessed that, he had ropey forearms; he looked like a jockey.  He had a bottle with him and drank right from it.  I think this could have been an excuse.  He was delightful, a regular imp.  He said Lou should hang on until he busted the bank.  But, he was really very gentle.  He was no taller than me.  He asked me to marry him.  What a party pooper I am.  I told him I was already married.  I didn't need to do that, he's married, too.  His wife was there.  She wished me Godspeed.  He said Lou could do the rites.  Dying men have strange power.  I had to promise Lou, and that would be a death bed promise and we'd have to do it, even if it meant eloping.  That's when his wife said Godspeed, and he introduced her.  My ball and chain, he said.  He should have been a truck driver.  It was so quaint.  He said death vigils are always rife with affairs.  It was our size.  We are both little people.  He thought we should conspire.  That's the way it was.  And Pearl.  She looked so strong."

     "She has rather stony features.  Recently.  She used to be quite a tomato."

     "Manny, she looked regal."

     "By the by, how did old Lou look?  Was he there?"

     "He's thin."

     "Well, you can't be too thin or too rich."

     "He doesn't look terrible."

     "Why not?  He's got the perfect excuse."

     "He doesn't."

     "That's considerate."

     "I was going to say, it's obvious he's dying."

      "And that's a virtue? The air of serenity that envelopes those who have left the struggle."

     "There is that, Manny.  But, it's Lou."

     "Who you never much liked.  He was an enigma but you didn't think that interesting a one.  Maybe, you were protecting me.  An enigma, inside a riddle, inside a platitude.  You enjoyed that, the iron curtain reference."

     "He's withered, I'd forgotten about the spidery wrinkles the very old have.  His skin's like a crumpled up paper bag, and he's always been dark but his color now is ashen or like lead, and he's laughing and talking and that should be grotesque.  And it's not.  He's got such spirit. I don't feel fooled by anything. He's very thin and his eyes are huge."

     "He can't metabolize his food.  His organs are failing."

     "It looks as if the bones of his eye sockets would cut the skin drawn over them.  When he smiles his skin sets in wrinkles, like whipped egg whites. That's dehydration, isn't it?  Isn't that dehydration?"

     "Well, of course it could be.  But it might be transubstantiation."

     "Manny, I see."

     "In details.  Where god is.  I would imagine it's not that painful for Lou.  There's a general morbidity which should take the edge off."      

     "That's not all that's there."

     "We've laughed at the faces we get stuck with."

     "And this is different."

     "Once upon at a time when he weighed down one end of the table with his silence, you remember, when his hair was black and he had biceps like a laborer, for years, when he was sullen, just vain you said.  He's vain.  All that sullen vitality, when he looked Italian.  Recharging his sexuality, that was the joke.  Some said it to his face.  Within earshot, anyway.  Not really flirtatious: sportively.  Taking up the gauntlet.  I can't remember if you were one of them.  Probably not.  He changed, a magpie recently, compared, but when he had his druthers, before the heart attack and the risk of being ignored.  Silence becomes him, anew, with this martyr's visage of his."

     "He doesn't look bewildered.  Why do so many old men look bewildered, I wonder?   But, he doesn't."

     "There's nothing out there, Florence. He said that.  Remember?  He had a preview."

     "He is clear-headed."

     "There is nothing to alchemize him.  Did you check his wrists and ankles?  For edema?  His body is not able to flush out the toxins anymore."

     "Good for it.  You exaggerate its poisons.  He is talking and he doesn't seem eager to flush out any of what he remembers.  If anything, I think he's reluctant to speak about them.  They must be sweet to savor, but at the same time, I get the feeling he is willing to because often they are owed to whoever he's talking to."

     "Florence, I think you're accusing me."

     "I'm not."

     "But you are telling me exactly what you will find acceptable.  I'll try not to disappoint you or our friends."

     "I'm not.  I'm saying I can see.  You think I'm not allowed to take anything from that last look, that it wouldn't be fair. Even if you believe he's earned the mask of age, that's OK because it's comical.  At the end it's only the disease and I can't see the loving look in his eyes, it is liver failure, and I'm telling you I can see."     

     "I'm just hoping, if I don't cooperate as well. If my disposition doesn't improve.  I'm hoping you won't, justifiably, because of my apostasy, if I sour and who knows, babble, rave, I don't know.  You won't, having every right, abandon…find better things to do, or, because it’s obviously not working the way it should when it means so much…I may crab. It happens Florence, people want the water to be colder or their pillow puffed up or the radio off, while they're dying.  It may turn out to be their last word if they're not careful.  Please take it seriously.  Not that it won't be a chore, but hear timbre even if I do it poorly."

     "I never suggested you go there as a lesson. I'm not being negligent.  I'm not considering it; I can't, so I forget.  I wish you could, because it’s so unfair and I don't believe it could happen. It won't and you shouldn't have to worry about it. Why should YOU?  It's so obviously a mistake. It's such a dirty trick.  It just doesn't fit.  It doesn't deserve our attention."

    

     "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death."  So the poet finished.  A somber verdict.  Maybe a better epitaph than a motto.  Where would we finish?  Our patients would probably agree with a cold eye towards death, but I think they all wish a warmer one for life.  Even if the objective eye of the marksman would serve them well, they would want us to promise a cozier reviewing and happier result.  After all, they aren't through with it yet.  At least, that's not what they're expecting.  And I think we have to keep that distinction.  Hopefully, they will finish therapy before they finish life, and with re-viewing might come some revival.  When their eyes are scaled, which we have promised them, do they have reason to hope they might regain first sight?  They wish it.  If they were to confirm it, wouldn't our work be done?  Or, are we all too suspicious of it, of any of the language of faith?  I think we are, but then where would we leave them, and where are we as a profession?  What do we have?  What are we left with?  We know what our patients wish.  The story is always the same.  They want to regain the lost object of love.  So wrote Freud, and maybe that is why they choose us over the alternatives that are offered, because we admit the primacy of love to the psyche.  We admit poem and epic and myth, and though Freud can only promise them frustration at recapturing that first past, it is likely that they come to us in hopes of having the in-sight of lovers, thinking of us as blacksmiths of Eros, with the charisma of smiths who work in fire, they hope for that in themselves, a core of glowing, even blazing life.  I think.  And that they will finish with the first sight of lovers which are all harmonies on soul, which they have witnessed, a love at first sight, and believe has been buried in them.

     Medical doctors have had to beat a retreat.  They have been forced into collaboration with their patients.  They have had to accept the fuzzier title of the healing "arts".  They thought they had left all that hocus pocus behind.  Bad as it’s gotten for them, it is either not so bad that they will stop ridiculing us for our lack of hard proof and statistics, or it is so bad they need a whipping boy more than ever. 

     Having defeated pathogens but not death, they are left with mystery.  The tangles become deeper and deeper and for the time being, they are reading glyphs and runes and reporting remissions that have as little explanation as magic.  Like us, what is the matter has become entwined with the heart of the matter.  They have been forced into dialogue and interpretation.  The deeper they get, the more psychosomatic this stuff of life reveals itself.  They find in gland and organ, old insults, family curses.  They deny literature but have been forced to use its vocabulary or be left stuttering.  The deeper they go, though they won't admit it, the more the body seems the stuff of dreams, and stuffed with them, the dreams of generations back to the bog, and again, though they won't admit it or see it as a temporary condition, they find Freud's flags of discovery already posted on this dark geography.

     I think we will show our maturity if we don't gloat when we meet them at the nexus of the roads leading towards death when they ask us for a match.  They're planning to side step us by perfecting the machine, and will have the last laugh.  If still capable or possible or necessary. 

     Meanwhile, as before, we work the graveyard shift, digging in the hours of nightmare. 

     We are rarely consulted by Visigoths.  Our practice is limited to those who rue.  Blessed are those upon whom the shadow of hesitation has never fallen.  To them has gone the race for the swift and the battle for the strong.  Our patients are not among them, and their dreams are populated with aborted acts and longings.  What attics and rumpus rooms and warrens they find themselves in, and how rarely and with what innocent fervor they relate their adventurers in lost paradises:  Golden cities, glinting mountain peaks, valleys watered by cascades.

     I am reminded of certain mornings.  A fog lifting.  Colors and shapes emerge new and dewy as fruit rubbed free of its glaucous shawl. 

     Freud writes of the birth dream.  Those of us who have experienced this dream find ourselves less bashful in the face of our ridiculers than we might be otherwise because Freud so perfectly described and predicts this shore on the Terra Incognito of dreams. 

     The dreamer, bodiless, without the ordure of a body but becalmed in a somatic weariness or serenity, finds himself on a stony beach.  The sea is calm, a ripple or two paws the pebbly shore.  A hush on the waters, pressing down, flattening them.  And an enormous sun setting on the nearby horizon, a globe dim enough to look at, all its fires banked, a rust red, already half immersed in the flat sheet of the sea.  No vegetation.  The rocks are like molars or knucklebones.  The feeling is unmistakable.  The last day of a world already dead, the dreamer left on this empty shore. 

     Why should Freud have concluded this was a birth dream when the stage seems set for death?  Because, this is not a dream like other dreams, this is the memory of being born from a consciousness which was still innocent of words.  Look at it to know the substance dreams are made of, the original matter.  Freud writes of the birth trauma.  Birth sets the stage for the drama of life that will, through metamorphosis, unfold from it, mutating in variation and fugue from this theme, the expulsion from the womb, that sea of unstinting gratification.  Embryology continues into metaphor, the mind does not break from the expanding metamorphosis that created the body.  Expulsion, rejection, the core. 

     All the players in the exile are present.  Light, water, a darkening landscape which in its narrowing horizons measures the birth canal, and death.  Because at this entrance by light into light, Thanatos dies, the immeasurable peace, the oceanic oneness.  Freud did not believe one could find in this dream, consciousness' awareness of its own mortality.  All it could know then, was pain, cold, and rupture. 

     When do we terminate therapy?  We have an answer.  We have an example.  We have a moonstone.  A relic.  A fossil.  We have the birth dream in which the elements have already condensed to the verge of becoming reality, heavy as the real, they have already dropped out of dreams into memory.  We encounter this dream in the terrain of memory, it is the substrata to our memories, the foundation for the house of awakening.  We do not find nostalgia there, no sentiment at all.  Other dreams steep in a rhetoric of wish fulfillment, mirrors and velvets and a fecundity of becoming and atonements.  Here, this labor appears over, there is no strength left to move this bedrock, and the dreamer, who feels awakened, who feels the residue of the sleep he has just come out of, accepts.  Able to look directly at the setting sun, arid of tears, he watches it leave the world.

     When dreams precipitate from the fog and land solid around us.  When it is the world we dream without surcease or need for it and the constellations pass un-refracted across the vault of our closed eyes.  They will resolve themselves and dreams will no longer speak in parables.  Artists!  Meaning to abuse us.  When we enter the dawn completely transparent, without hope for another separating us from it, the promise is fulfilled. As it has always been:  Hope itself, left as an organic element and compounded in the ground. 

     When beauty is joined to truth and to the damned.  We lived through death once.  We have been tempered.  Ready.  Cast a cold eye, on life, on death.    

     It was typical Manny.  It would take reworking.  He would have to insulate it with drier material, dole it out in separated paragraphs, trim the repetitions, but it had the flattering cultural allusions they expected of him.  He was still the best spokesman for psychiatry as a vocation.  No one had yet appeared in the new generations who was comfortable with the plush canon of the field.  There was a tendency to back away from Freud, as if he had been the wooly patriarch of a cult which could only be fully respectable if it ignored his fevered visions.  He was from an era when science was still the province of dilettantes and philosophers.  Statistics with its debunking of free will and the individual in favor of populations and hydrodynamics was years away.  Physicists were studying radiance.  The Association still needed the old alchemists to rouse the tent during these annual revivals.  Manny left the study with a light step. 

     He sat down at the piano in the living room and began combing songs out of the keys.  He was at his Ouija board.  Notes led into songs, his fingers skipped after them, or stumbled until they warmed up, but stumbled towards elation.  He was in "I could have danced all night", he was where she could have spread her wings when he noticed Florence listening in the entry hall.  When she saw he had noticed her she walked in and sat on the arm of an easy chair.  She was in one of her silk nightgowns, this one lilac.

     He began playing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".  

     "What do you have there?" he asked.

     "A book."

     "It looked like you were hiding it."

     "I was being demure.  I didn't want to interrupt."

     "I didn't wake you up?"

     "I was dozing.  Go on."

     "I was just about done."

     "I think you were just beginning to roll.  You've got it by the horns, don't you?"

     "No, I've been gored."

     "No, you've cracked the case.  Then you come out and play.  You won't admit you wrote something wonderful?  Play me a song."

     "What's the book?"

     "It's a book."

     "Those are the ones they throw at you.  Which one is this?"

     "What makes you think you'd be interested?"

     "Because it wasn't good enough to keep it face down, now you're sitting on it."

     "I am too, isn't that funny?"

     She pushed in beside him on the piano stool.  The book slid onto the chair and he still could not see it.

     "What if I made a request?  Would you refuse me just in spite?"

     "No, there'd be better reasons than that."

     "I know you've been a genius tonight.  You can shine in front of me.  You do anyway.  And I'm subtle enough to know how uncomfortable it is to be discovered basking in gifts.  I can testify that no one has worn his remarkableness more gracefully than you.  You've never had to resort to faking hostility, as other men do, to cover their satisfaction.  They don't deserve the crown of thorns."

     "It was O.K."

     "Just O.K?"

     "O.K."

     "He never swears a great big `great'.  Then give three cheers and one cheer more.."

     "But, the timing is terrible.  Corrosive."

     "Scarlet Ribbons.  Manny, you did wake me up.  Please.  `As I peeked in to say good night..'" 

     "Florence."

     "There's only one way to stop me." 

     Otherwise she would sing on in her hoarse, tuneless whisper, her big eyes wide open, laboring diligently, like a child in a choir, all mugging and pantomimed vowels.  So, he sang, she imposing on a song he considered Andrea's, but still his voice was sweet, and little above a whisper itself when he saw "his child in prayer"; a man leaning into his seventies, father of a daughter with luxurious locks, singing "and for me, Scarlet Ribbons, for my hair", while his kidneys were sinking in mire, carrying that prayer through the night of shuttered shops with a virginal clarity, identifying with the dispensation of answered prayers which is saved for the innocent.

     A few nights later Manny found the book on his bedside table.  He had an appointment the next day with his nephrologist. The book was "Kidney Health: The Tao of Herbs" by Christopher Hilton. 

     Christopher Hilton was a sinologist who had spent years in Asia, and in a snap shot on the back flap with the snowy Himalayas behind him,  offered his own lanky frame and his lantern jawed face with outdoor man's squint wrinkles as an example of renal success.  The brief biography on the back flap beneath the adventurer's photo went on to say he had also written "Summit, Apex and Paragon" and lived with his wife and son and daughter in Oxford-on-Thames, which conjured a cottage and punts, and confirmed for Manny that the man was a fraud. 

     Sinologist-Daoist Hilton had summated Everest, of course, a feat precipitating a cascade of spin off products he could plug in the forward Manny now skimmed:  Two books and cassette tapes. They were records of struggle and obstacles surmounted and victory and epiphany, he promised.  However, for the sake of brevity and context, he had not related in them that the summit gained with its epiphany had followed kidney failure and a long hike back to health, harder and in its way more spiritually testing than Everest, an omission which was to be amended in the following pages.

     Chapter I: Folly.  The book followed the big selling blueprint of autobiographical cook books.  Hilton had apparently studied sales charts before plotting his text.  The reader was to be treated to Christopher's story while learning the diet and prescriptions that would resurrect him.  Here was his time of binge.  Sin and excess, proudly confessed.  Manny had heard worse.  Chris seemed taxed to prove his thesis.  He had drunk and fornicated but hardly in Herculean scale.  Well, here now, the day he leapfrogged from the bed of one sister to another.  Red heads, spangled in freckles.  Red heads, Manny gathered, were the Negroes of Britain, always on fire.  Quenching two in a single day was not a thing to go unmentioned.  One after the other they were left sleeping the sleep of the dead.  Here it was, they were Irish.  And then, without actually being said, but hinted at.  For idolaters, Catholics, the author, naked, cut a figure worth dying for, as these two Celts in turn fell into a sleep with no expectation or desire to awaken. 

     Skip to Chapter III for Despond:  Blood in the pilgrim's urine.  Desultory wanderings, disappointed search for meaning, and now death in a hovel.  And not to be excused from diarrhea just because his sentence has been pronounced.  He shuffles to the outhouse, too sick to hide his nakedness, squats over the hole and in that position of pummeled submission, on the verge of being driven like a spike clear down the hole, he lets go of his past life.  He is squatting in a suffusion of starlight filtering through the gapes in the boards overhead, and he has been left only this clear picture-the light is like the nitrate of black and white photos, he is in the documentary of his condition-the clear picture of what he is, a picture which is, remarkably, free of and liberated from "who".  He is nameless and erased.  He can see his knobby knees and feel the chill on his naked butt, and right there, at the nadir, he touches the Dao and the process of refilling him with universal agelessness begins, the process which effects his cure. 

     Manny sighs and looks at Florence who has left this Giddeon manual on his bed table, but she is watching "Antiques Corral", her favorite show, and does not notice.

     Assayers relate the history and assign a value to objects brought to these conventions, as if to a Lourde's for objects, by petitioners in search of miracles.        

     A man is laying a sabre on the green felt table.  He is dressed in plaid golf pants and yellow cardigan and Manny guesses he has bad teeth by the way he is holding his lips.  Probably not usually a problem, but now he is on TV, which was not his idea, his wife is still pushing him forward as she must have out the door, and he is obviously embarrassed to be bothering any one about the sword, which he plunks down on the table with his head averted, nodding exasperated at his wife.  The assayer, who is of the gigolo school, a defrocked soap opera Casanova, starts back from the table as if the sabre has been pulled white hot from the forge.

     "Where'd you get this?"

     "Well, Ah didn't."  He has a Southern drawl, a pot belly, and is afflicted, like all Southerners with an inability to choose the proper program for his hair. 

     "It's his granddaddy's", his wife says.

     "We don't know that."

     "It was his granddaddy's."

     "Well, maybe it was.  He amassed some sing-u-lah objects. He was gonna do somethin with old frigidares.  He hauled 'im back from the dump. Ah had a time returning 'im.  They was fifteen of 'im."

     "None of that is the truth."

     "Each separate word.  He loved frigidares from the get go."

     "He was a county commissioner.  You're goin' on about his old age.  He was a trusted officer and a shrewd judge of character, in most people's memory."

     "But, it's probably his sword."

     "Ah'm afraid so.  Mercifully, he was called before he had much chance for the AC's.  Ah found this squirreled away in the barn, years back, and since have employed it for yard work, as Ah have never figured another use for it."

     The assessor raised the sabre from the table on the edges of his two hands, as if to give the king his scepter.  He looked up and down the blade.  He examined the hilt and handle.  He returned it to the table.

     "The blade is free of nicks.  And the pommel is still wrapped in the original leather.  Fortunately, you didn't use it to chop cord wood, although, this sabre may well have withstood the abuse.  This is a Davis Sabre.  It was forged at the Conroy Foundry in Birmingham in 1862.  The mark of the maker is still distinct on the forte of the blade.  Only five were made, and they were given by Jefferson Davis himself to five officers of the Confederacy who had distinguished themselves by valor.  Three of those officers died in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and the swords were removed from the field of battle under cover of darkness.  They were not scavenged because none of them has ever appeared in market.  One is displayed in Charleston, South Carolina in the Museum of the Confederate Jerusalem.  Until this day, the others have remained missing.  Estimated value: Sixty-five thousand dollars.  However, you could no more auction this artifact than the Holy Grail.  It is priceless."

     "Manny it's priceless.  That's never happened.  Look.  Look.  It's priceless."  Florence wasn't the only one awestruck.  The hapless weed hacker was catatonic.  Only his wife, in pink petal pushers was able to act before the camera cut away to another group hoping for a jackpot.  She could be heard saying as she pushed into the table, "He loved cold.  He put AC in the courthouse, before that..."         

     On the next table a violin was laying and two women who must have been a few years older than Manny were gazing at it as if it were the Infant in the creche.  There was a resemblance in them deeper than old age.  They turned out to be sisters, but the resemblance went deeper than that.  One had died her hair a septic blond, wore it teased in a bouffant, she was the taller of the two, flabby and gassy, while the other one, who looked pinched and dry, wore black clothes, widow-like or almost French left bank, her hair, likely a wig, with long bangs, coal black, pressed down on her head like a helmet.  They lived together; Manny thought it was obvious.  They resembled each other like an old couple, nothing to do with features, but the identical warping by a small culture.  They had grown together constantly in the presence of the other.

     "It's always been in the family", the blond was saying. "Our father's father brought it with him from Italy."

     "Your grandfather."  The assessor established.  He was a portly man, vest stretched over his pot belly, in a coat with suede scuffers at the elbows, and he had a short, thick beard which covered his cheeks almost to his eyes.  It seemed that some eccentricity was required of the assessors.  It proved erudition or preoccupation or a stalwart obsolescence.

     "Yes, from Cappalone.  Someone in our family played it.  Our great grandfather, we think."

     "Violinists have tragic lives.  We were not told who.  We're Catholics.  I believe he took his own life" the dark haired one said.

     "We were never told that."

     "I think that's why.  A skeleton in the closet.  We were not encouraged to sing.  Marlene had a talent, but it was thought best to let sleeping dogs lie.  We were protected from being swept into tragedy.  It was in the family.  I may have been able to play the violin.  I've always thought so, I believe father thought so too.  It made him especially attentive about me.  Marlene was told to keep her eye on me."

     "Cappolene is in the mountains.  There were more goats than people.  They lived in the houses with the families.  Sometimes you would look in a window and all you would see were goats and they would answer the door if you knocked." 

     "Fine spot to leave", said the assessor.

     "It's a Stradivarious.  He made it for his daughter.  Can you see here, father showed this to us, inside.  See?  Fabriola Genoa.  He engraved it to her.  And then father gave it to us, when he knew he was dying.  He pointed to the dedication again, like he had when we were little.  `For his daughter, for my daughters', he said.  We don't want to sell it but we have to", said the blond. 

     The assessor who had the violin in his hands since being directed to the dedication:

     "Fabriola Genoa.  Beautiful name.  I'm sure it was his favorite daughter.  Unfortunately, no record of her survives.  And more unfortunate, this is not a dedication, it's the maker's mark, `made, fabricated, in Genoa', in Italian. We're in the right nation, but not the right century.  It was made about two hundred years after Stradavarious died, these wood staples you can see inside were not available in his time.  It's not a bad instrument, a decent imitation of a Stradivarious as imagined by a skilled craftsman who probably never had occasion to study the real thing.  You've kept it in exquisite condition, I assume it rarely was taken from its case.  One would not risk damaging a Stradivarious every day of the week.  I would suggest saving it as a precious memento from your father.  Selling it would fetch you, perhaps, five thousand dollars, while no amount could be set on the memories.  The bow could be sold separately.  In any event, don't use it to whisk eggs or beat carpets.  Few people are aware of it, but the bow is often worth more than the instrument, as in this instance, where it would fetch no less than eight thousand dollars.  It is a piece of masterful craftsmanship."

     "Murdered", the dark haired one could be heard saying under her breath.

     "Oh, God they're destroyed", exclaimed Florence.  The small dark one who had recognized the spell but believed in its black magic, was shaking and as the camera cut to the next supplicants, it looked as if she might just have gone staring mad. 

     "Thank you for the book.  Altitude and herbal colonics, I think that's the conclusion."

     "I just skimmed it.  He seemed sincere.  He looks believable."

     "Do I seem constipated to you?"

     "I didn't actually read it.  He looks smart and fit.  He's thin like you."

     "I'm not constipated, Florence. I don't think this Christopher Hilton moves his bowels any more regularly than I, and I don't believe for a minute he has successfully evacuated his mind of Western pollutants using Buddhist enemas.  He strikes me as still being full of himself."

     "I should have read it through.  But, he did get cured, didn't he?"

     "He probably had hepatitis.  Or got lucky.  It happens.  He's a schnorer."

     "Edith gave it to me. When we were at Lou's."

     "At Lou's, dying of kidney failure. She'll not be upstaged."

     "She's trying to be helpful."

     "She has been implying for years that marriage is castrating.  She's fashioned herself a wild woman since her divorce.  She eggs you on, Florence, and you don't even notice.  She's always making fun of us.  And you enjoy it."

     "She's spirited.  I don't take her seriously.  But she has fabulous energy.  She didn't just give me this book.  She was reading passages.  You know how she is, she can be so diligent."

     "Sarcastic.  She can be so sarcastic.  While Lou listened."

     "I think he was dozing."

     "His last few hours and he's got to spend them dozing to cope with her."

     "She wasn't reading to him. She was reading to me. She didn't get to any parts about constipation."

     "I'm surprised."

     "She read about mountaineering.  It's inspiring.  I thought it appropriate.  She has infectious high spirits.  She gave us all a boost."

     "Florence, make me a promise."

     "Anything, darling.  Always."

     "If this cockamamie book doesn't do the trick and I end up with Lou, you will not invite Edith to attend my swan song.  And furthermore, you will not disclose to her where I am buried.  I don't want to hear her prancing hooves on my grave."        

    

       His doctor had a new technician.  A Russian.  Manny liked her gruel-thick, husky voice. She was in her fifties and scaffold gaunt, with square shoulders and prominent bones in her wrists.  She took his blood pressure and had him lie down when she took his blood.  He could not get used to the cold-hot prick of the needle no matter how many times he went through the procedure, which at once every three months was adding up.  It summoned a near/far away presence in his body.  He overheard sedition in these hinterlands, a bitter murmur of rebellion or truculent gossip.  As if his attention, awakened by this pinch, was resented in the rural economies of his body.  There was a drowsiness off there or an affinity for neglect.  The entropy which was descending was as welcomed as an evening ending labor. 

     The blood was dark, the color of berry preserves.  She took two vials. The technician was efficient and the solid strength of her large hands was reassuring, but she was a gothic figure.  His doctor had a harem of technicians.  He wondered what had happened to the ones preceding this one, maybe they worked different days.  He remembered Filipinos, most of them plumb and sociable, although he remembered one who was practically a midget.  The touch of her tiny, boneless hand had seemed illicit.  She looked like a she anticipated abuse.  He had once been naked in front of her, and she seemed uncomfortable, as if she had not seen a naked man before.  He thought he could see a virgin's embarrassment. This Russian would be difficult to affect.  Her hair was a little unkempt, and she did not seem capable of neatness.  Her clothes did not hang properly on her, he spotted a grey smudge of brushed off cigarette ash on her smock, but more than that, neatness seemed too compact for her.  She did not look de-exed, it only seemed that sex with her would entail disappointment, that it would be a disillusioning.  This was not completely unattractive, not in a younger woman anyway, but it was not the material for an affair.  It would not be like marriage, she seemed too gravid to quibble, but it would have a marriage's realism.  Manny remembered that his doctor's wife was "very" pregnant.  She was due in October, if he remembered correctly.  Maybe she had insisted on staffing her husband's office with women who would peel the wandering eye, who if they could not couple sex to the travesty of procreation, would at least pluck it of festival.

     Manny had not had any hope from the time his internist had sent him to this specialist, but that is the same as saying he had nothing but hope, the kind one is forced back on when common sense tells you it is all you have left.  This hope is left to the slyest, slinkiest, skulkiest, schemingist part of the mind, a roommate to jealously.  This con man had presented him with a plan for survival.  The heart of the plan was that he was taking care of the empty times; he was accumulating them in a buttress against the event.  Three a.m. which Manny frequently woke into to feel the sand running out of the hour glass, was given to this character on a commission basis: Each empty hour became more time since he had last seen the doctor, a brick of time between them. It refuted his diagnosis, made it fade in the distance.  All these hours were Manny's hours, out of the doctor's hands.  They were not under the auspicious of his diagnosis, they had not escaped it, but they built a case against it, accumulated a counter reality that was a jumble of everyday repetitions, the less noteworthy the better.  It was like piling furniture against the door to keep out an intruder.  Of course, Manny could not really subscribe to this, it was pretty low rent.  But he couldn't not, either. For example: Normal gas pains of age.  His first reaction, his system was breaking down. These were the stirrings of the avalanche.  Fear, estrangement, despair.  When in the normal course of time the bubble had passed, Manny was not just relieved, he did not just break even.  The skulker earned his commission.  Manny had defeated another sortie from his failing kidneys.  It was not enough that he was not yet sick, that this had just been gas. No, he was better, stronger than before.  His immune system had exercised itself beating back these whispers of kidney failure and in so doing had gained so much muscle that from now on he could consider himself cured.  Any future attempt would be even more thoroughly routed. He had bought himself more life time than he was due thanks to this ordeal under fire.  

     So, at the follow up visit when his doctor used such terms as "slipping", "sliding", Manny found himself stunned again though he had expected it as inevitable.  In fact, the passing of wind had not worked any change on his inner physique, even though each puff was working an isometric toning against the diagnosis.

     "Not much, but a little slipping.  We knew the course things were going, but we were hoping for this snag.  It's still there, but, a little sliding has happened.  We should now do more tests next month.  Keep a closer watch." 

     "More tests?"

     "Same tests.  More frequent.  If something should happen, we don't want it to go on too long before we know it."

     "A month is pretty standard?  We've been at three months. Are you plotting the change?  Could you just as well say two months?"

     "You're not in free fall, we could probably get away with two months. But, I wouldn't want to wait two months, not until we can establish that this is more of the steady thing we've been seeing.”

     “Do you do transplants on seventy year olds?"

     "We're not Canada here.  Aren't you glad we don't have a national health plan?  But, you don't need it, not yet."

     "But, you do it?"

     "We could, theoretically.  I don't suppose we'd be too popular, but there's a waiting list. It's about four years long and you're not on it yet.  So, if next month we found, another slip? The answer is practically no.  You'd be seventy-four. I could never get you a kidney.  Unless, you went overseas.  There's a black market in kidneys.  Poor people sell them.  It's not back alley, real surgeons.  None of us do it, but you always hear of someone, somewhere who will.  Naturally, your insurance won't pay for it.  Or, someone in your family can donate a kidney to you.  Lots of psychology in that.  You'd be right at home.  And the insurance pays, and you don't have to fly somewhere and trust a doctor you've never met and learned to love, like me. And a kidney from a living doner lasts twice as long." 

     "The prognosis would be better if we didn't wait for actual failure, wouldn't it?"

     "Sure.  You want I should ask around?  A lot of this happens in Turkey.  Or, Iraq.  Maybe, I can get you a kidney and a rug.  A real beauty: the rug.  You want I should put the word out on the street?"

     "God, no."

     "It's quite a business.  Prisoners in China, chop 'im up like a stolen car.  A dirty business.  A cess pool, you'll pardon the pun.  Gotta get your hands dirty.  Up to your elbows.  To your armpits, and you're so close your eyebrows get singed.  Nobody loves us.  I imagine it is difficult matching a donner in a small family pool."

     "Why would anyone suppose that?  I'll tell you why.  People think the match is made in heaven because that's what we tell them and how blood is thicker than water, but it's as easy as matching blood types with the immune suppressers we have.  Wham bang.  You convince 'im, we can do it.  But, they got to volunteer.  This ain't China, god damn it." 

    

     Manny is in his study again.  He has his headset on.  He has pushed back the heavy drapes and stands at the window looking across the avenue to the apartment tower on the other side.  Through some optical trick, the building seems much closer than it would if he were at street level. At this height the buildings do not loom, there is no sense of the imposing weight pressing on their foundations, and at night, they seem divested of stone.  The avenue is narrow below him, and it seems he could look into any window and see faces in detail.  Looking into lit windows is always poignant, this piling up of the stolen glimpse tends to dilute the melancholy, and the city is softened. Under the influence of night and altitude he could imagine it as a place where a soft core of human existence, the romantic and familial, the quaint, has gathered and built aeries for itself.

     "In the beginning, the insane and retarded were warehoused together.  We are medical doctors and therefore qualified to treat what were after all, physical complaints.  There was a logic in consigning the retarded to our care.  We could have been, in some cases, more effective with them than with the mentally ill.  We could cure neither, but at least some times, in different hands, they could have received care and comfort and would have been simple minded enough to accept it and be relieved, even happy.  I have seen it, someone beaming with happiness in those subterranean halls.

     Her name was Clara. She had what is now known as Down syndrome, back then she was a Mongoloid idiot. She told me her name. Poor Clara, it meant you were not less than five when you were abandoned with us.  You remembered your family, and fortunately for them, only in your stupid, kind way.  You could not remember the alienation of affection, and the beatings, you never understood them, they were out of exasperation and because you were stubborn, placidly stubborn, but adamantine. Because you could not understand why you were kicked you never felt betrayed or unloved by your parents and therefore never were hurt as abused children usually are.  You never even learned to flinch. I brought you candy bars. Like a farm animal, when you saw me coming you rolled over to greet me and nudge my pockets for the chocolate.  You were fourteen when I met you and sixteen when I left, and in full bloom.  Years could only encrust you. I have never known a happier creature. Children may at one year, two years, three years, experience the same universal happiness as you, but it is lost in a minute, while for you it was your essential being.

     I never met your parents. I believe they stopped visiting when you entered puberty and gloriously refuted the stinginess of their lives. You were built like a snowman, and perhaps the last load of dresses for you came at your parents' final visit, or it was a laundress who brought you hand-me-downs, but you outgrew all the dresses you wore. Yet, you were always in dresses, and someone would put berets in your hair. The outfits were childish, perhaps in sympathy to your retardation or your toddling gait. There was no proper way to dress you. Clothes refracted oddly on you, years slipped and clumped.  Even so, you were beautiful.

     I ran to you every day during my two year incarceration as a resident in psychiatry.  I remember how you stood.  It was bold and forthright, even pleased with yourself, but that self was so lacking in reflection, so simplified, so embryonic, that this pleasure seemed saintly.  You had that mule-headed, opiated aura painted on the face of Saint Sebastian pin-cushioned with arrows. The incongruous unawareness and the immunity to anguish which shows on his face amidst wretched suffering also glowed on you. 

     I know you had a lover.  I know who he was, and I know he meant to take advantage of you.  He was one of the orderlies.  I know he was surprised.  You had vanilla skin, your hair was wavy and bronze and your tongue seemed constantly to be poking around behind your plump cheeks or licking your lips, and you were always hungry.  It's easy to know what he thought, your appetite, your inability to tell a story, your round legs in the too short dresses.  I touched you every day.  I patted your arm coming out of the little puffy sleeves, I petted you.  Your skin was baby soft.  I touched you for reassurance after the tortures.  Like Saint Sebastian you did not respond to the arrows; you were unaware of the cruelty going on around you, and you were oblivious to my touch.  You were like a great breast. 

     He would have been surprised by the compliance in his hand which he could never grasp.  Maybe he rewarded her with candy.  She had a sweet tooth.  Either she would have denied him everything or nothing.  She denied him nothing, but it could have gone the other way.  Did she coo or might she have grunted?  And drooled of course, she often drooled, although not in pearly gobs, but a film often covered her chin.  He might have given up waiting for another coo.  She sometimes cooed over a candy bar, but she was as likely to snort   He may have given up waiting for a sign of tender feeling. Perfected woman flesh. Soft, available, without skepticism. He comes with the idea of a perfect melting together of separates, and instead, his presence absorbed by pleasure no greater than from a piece of fudge, this act lies fast, taken away to a voiceless end.

     Or, maybe, he found what he wanted: The text of himself printed on the blank white sheet, an enumeration of his sin and is assured by the hopelessness of finding redemption. 

     I extrapolated this, Clara, from the flowers brought to you that remained by your bed until they had withered. And then another bouquet, fresh, renewed.  Deduced he had found original sin-innocence violated-and was festooning the altar where he and all that was without sufficient consequence for expiation by love, had discovered the faith that springs from futility and its finality.

     Idiots need to be fed and washed, but the primary trust on their guardians is to keep them from breeding. Them. But what has emerged from this love-making of ours?  Who does not know that the most solicitous touch is tainted with sadism and that the surrender at orgasm falls short of the one at death, and yet we would cleave to that last fully feared moment in our hands, to escape death and its dreams. What self is hoarded in love?  The form squeezes out the poem.  Grotesque and familiar forms slouch out from our coupling: the village idiot, the phylogeny of our ancestors, brute, bloody, wailing and tuneless, mud and gore-splashed.  And the act of love?  Affirmation and cure?  Who can title it?  Brute awe is the most we can hope, but still, fallen away purged, it may leave the imprint of brute at the last, mistaking us, or knowing us.

     You and you, all of you, what expression forever recorded in these huddled exiles here in the asylum was on your face when deep in her, she turned her face to you and her eyes were opened and yes, perhaps, they were opened to you alone, and a tenderness that lies below and is inextinguishable, maybe it too was revealed in the abandoned face, a form of tenderness given to wonder and to love.  Or, was she still recognizable from the last time she sneered and you would not believe this tenderness with less than rage because she would recover from you, and this carried forth to the world in a drooling idiot?

     Not a thousand beautiful children can prove away the one malformation that haunts us: Our death, our birth, the darkness that whelped us and will eat us.   

     But, our children are haunted from the beginning or we would not know them and would not be tender to them. We would run from them as judgements which mock the deformity justice has worked on us during our lives.  Thank the nightmares that make their love real so theirs’ will not be the idiot grace of clean appetite and healthy digestion, but that they will cling for comfort, or we would perish and be thankful.              

     He took off his headset and immediately telephoned his daughter, Andrea, on the other side of the continent.  It would be nearly nine in Portland. 

     Andrea picked up on the third ring, sounding slightly breathless, single mother hooking the phone on the run.  She had a high speaking voice, soft edged and never shrill. It was a pleasure to hold it directly to his ear where its many layers could be heard.  Because it was high it had not changed that much from childhood, and he could remember how sage and insightful she had sounded as a little girl with her then precocious intonations.  She had never sounded much like either he or Florence; she could imitate Florence perfectly for satire but must have always been too aware of that voice’s pleading note to let it form her own.     

     "Andrea, its daddy."  

     "Oh, that's good.  I was going to call but it got too late."

     "We're still puttering along at this hour."

     "I know, but I think after eleven or so phones ringing are alarming, and then you have to justify the call.  It's simpler to wait.  But this is great.  Jessica and I are planning on coming out for a visit."

     "I hope it's soon."

     "Next month.  The Institute is having its session in Connecticut.  Jessica would stay with you.  She wants to visit Franklin's family, too.  It's for four days, then I'd be back and we could all visit."

     "We'd love it."

     "I don't want to leave her with Franklin."

     "We want to see her."

     "She's kind of a stoic. It's not dramatic.  She's not a martyr.  There must be something about me she thinks she has to endure.  But she's very easy.  Well, she isn't.  She digs her heels in, but it always seems very reasonable.  Things aren't really negotiable, but she accepts cooperation without conceding you're right."

     "We love seeing her."

     "Gird yourself to be observed.  She is studying adults.  With curiosity more than awe.  It's grandpa.  You don't need me to straighten up.  Do you want to say `hello'?"

     The line seemed to go dead and then he realized he was hearing Jessica breathing on the other end.  Jessica, at nine, was not yet ready to believe conversations on the telephone were really happening. And Manny had the common adult difficulty of finding something to say to a child and then hearing how fatuous he sounded pretending to be interested.  He would forget what insignificant tale had been coaxed out of them the last time they spoke, and his forgetfulness was a thing they always found strange and necessary to sigh over.  The exchanges were fragmented, he had little idea at the end what story they had composed, but children had a vise grip on detail, and sometimes it seemed compassion for his awkwardness that made them ask about his briar pipe or yellow muffler, though he could not remember why he had included such information when he had last talked to them.  Apparently, to his grandchild he was this collection of objects and ailments, maybe the sound of `stiff joints' sounded funny to her and she remembered it. Florence was famous for a bunion she had been silly enough to mention within her earshot, erasing anything else about her she might have thought indelible, like generosity or love or status as Queen Mother.

     "Hello, Jessica.  It's grandpa."

     "Hello", she said in her whispery voice. 

     "Is it your bed time?"  Of course, that was a bogey man to never raise with children, leave that to their parents.  He was not trying to give her the bum's rush, he was actually trying for immediacy, an expression of how keyed in he was to her daily life, but no child could take it that way, although all of them do think any adult has the right to invoke bedtime as part of their investiture as adults.      

     "No.  Not exactly."  Her voice was whispery but there was a claw in it, a nascent hoarseness which might enlarge with her.  She might grow into a deep voice, he had no way of knowing the course of maturation in Negroes.  If she had not been a mulatto he would have guessed she might become strident, there was more than a slight suggestion of skepticism in that dry snag, or maybe it was objectivity.  Whatever it was, if it should get bigger, it would not be easy to roll it out of the way for patter.  Unless this was the nut that grew into that stately resonance and black earthen voice it seemed every other Black woman had.

     "My bedtime is eight thirty.  And it's reading time, anyway."

     "It is?  And what are you reading."

     "We are re-reading the Little House series.  I'm reading them to mommy this time.  She read them when she was a little girl.  She once read them to me."

     He was always touched when a child recognized they were a little girl or boy.  He must exaggerate how extensive their grasp of their condition was, still he had never known a child to say it less than gravely, and it seemed for that moment they did understand and that when they said it they were standing outside themselves and part of this graveness which was always accompanied by a statement of fact or rights or liabilities, was the premonition that this state was transient. 

     "You like them?"

     "Yes, hugely.  It's about a family, you know.  Our house is small, too.  I don't think I'll grow tired of them.  We get storms, too.  We stand near the grate.  If we wear clogs we can stand right on it.  It's very cozy."

     "Jessica I want to talk to grandpa.  I'll be in soon" Andrea said in the background.  Without good bye, Jessica was gone and Andrea was back on the phone.

     "It's her straighten up time.  She has a lot of soft toys and before I come in for reading she has to arrange them for the night.  She insists on arranging everything in her room.  I can't de-code her taxonomy, but it's not an answer to my nagging.  I don't think.  Certain of her toys have friendships with certain others and they have to be together or they would be too scared to sleep.  Jessica has a very strict order for making cozy."

     Manny regretted Jessica's abrupt departure.  He was fond of the hyper articulateness which she had adopted to include her life in cozier stories than her own more precarious one with a single mother and week-end father.  It was when he saw her that his affection flagged. Children seem to tack from parent to parent as they grow and he when he saw Franklin in her jaw, he had to struggle to hide his impatience with her. Andrea had to slip away as she grew up, but it had gone farther than he had been prepared for, and that distance was ratified by Franklin’s child, obscuring and finally-time would tell-denying him a spiritual identity with her and admitting an intruder whose characteristics of sloth and appetite were the very opposite of him, and who as Andrea's choice, seemed more refutation than denial. 

     "How are you, Daddy?"

     "I'm becoming a character out of Gogol.  They talk to animals or animals talk to them, right?"

     "Daddy?"

     "Pigeons.  I've become overly empathetic. I think they're getting blacker.  Maybe, since they took lead out of gasoline.  I assume it’s mostly car exhaust that dyes the city."

     "Daddy, bad numbers from doctor Adonis?"

     "It's camouflage.  Do you remember Darwin and the peppered moths of sooty England?"

     "Very bad?"

     "Not good.  I've noticed a race of white pigeons with copper highlights, and then there are some almost completely copper with white highlights.  These are not angels, I understand that.  There may be some escapees from roof coops. There is no reason to think they are faking being pigeons, these beauties.  They engage without scruples in the feeding frenzies.  But I'm at the point where I'm encouraging illusions. Carefully. I'm strict.  I try to be.  A lonely struggle.  I waver, often.  My guardianship over pigeons, a compensation. I'm a wreck. Can't meet the eye of my species."

     "Is it that stigmatizing?"

     "Sorry, I didn't mean to involve you but who else?  It really is my preoccupation, but I can't share that with Florence.  I have to be strong for her.  That's certainly better, but obtuse.  Silence reigns.  Around certain subjects.  We may gallivant about others.  She is very brave, for me, about, my condition.  Did you suspect her of strength like that? I'm ashamed, in the face of her courage, on my behalf, to raise the issue.  To whine.  She might, it's another fear, no shortage of fears, fabulous opportunists...to shut me out.  She might, justifiably, if she just couldn't take my humiliation.  I don't blame her, but I need an avenue of whining. For my metamorphosis.  I still remember...Is it poignantly now?  Do I regret the way I was to them?  I was fed up.  Years ago, by their calls.  How did I punish them?  A sigh.  That's sufficient, they're feverish, they pick up on every chill breath.  I yawned.  I didn't have to force it.  These were calls at eleven, at mid-night.  And tedious.  Their obsessions.  And now me.  Nobody really wants to hear whining about nothing.  One's tedium is clear to oneself, but the necessity: relentless.  For nothing more than attention. One realizes this farrago, our life, is about insignificance. As one fades into it, one cannot offer anything of interest, so one threatens, to prick interest. So they'd threaten madness, a great romance.  And suicide.  Crisis instead of trivia.  Transparent.  Work themselves up for the call.  They have to explain, considering the hour, why it couldn't wait, but there is a dearth of imagination, symptomatic really of the condition, and they have to humiliate themselves. It's all they have, ugly confessions, to prove the gravity, beyond apology or responsibility for their actions.  How can you reprove someone who has just admitted they are despicable, too gone for the proud burden of morality?  I yawned. As a shrink, I should have made them more interesting. Failure on both sides.

     Cowards, all of us.  I was the prince of cowards, their advocate.  A lifetime lobbying for cowards has left me the epitome of it, but they could not improve me. I was called and answered, perfect from the beginning. Don't listen to me, that's the only decent thing I can tell you."

     "You're not a coward."

     "Gutless.  I felt it in my guts this time.  Betrayed.  It's in my guts.  Recruiting.  Ah, sweetheart."

     "What did he say?"

     "Nothing.  Nothing at all.  Slippage.  I don't want to have to be strong.  It's certain now.  The shoe will drop.  That's all.  No news at all, to Fortinbras.  To me?  Listen to me.  At seventy, I get the bulletin.  Sweetheart, it's almost twelve thirty here and I'm calling to wail because I can't eat grapefruit. Robbed of grapefruit.  Grapefruit.  I'm so sorry, just grapefruit. I'm sorry for your father to you. The golden apples of the sun, once upon a time. Sorry."

     "I don't need sparing.  It's terrible news.  I've been hoping too.  Because it's been terrible from the beginning.  Why should any of us stand it?  Daddy you made us better than strong. I'm so grateful to you.  You heard and saw everything.  They made you suffer, for them.  What about all of us if you'd been strong? Everything touched you."

     "Don't be grateful.  I pay more attention to the pigeon feeders now.  The competition, maybe.  They're not expressionless.  I used to think they had earned complete absence. Not mad.  Religious pilgrims.  It was something I granted them, from enlightened disinterest.  No strain to imagine them removed from time. Out on their own peninsula and time washing by.  They wouldn't go back to apartments at night.  They were just dropped there, in the act, and then they'd be gone again, plopped down someplace else.  On their mission.  But, jealous now, I've noticed they beam while my flock lands on them and eats seeds from their palms.  They're self-conscious saints, quite happy with themselves, and I wouldn't be surprised if they held the rest of us in contempt. If you noticed them shinning you'd know they think they have escaped death through divinity.  They glow with secrets.  A sweeter madness in its way than thundering megalomania, but be cautious of their schemes, and the curses they hide from their flock.  They'd be street howlers if they had the lungs and birds weren't so easily startled and so easily bribed."

     "Daddy, you're not a pigeon feeder."

     "I don't have nightmares. On anyone's behalf. The mermaids don't sing for me.  I don't see the towers on fire. Why not?  Why is the door slammed in my face?  Didn't I prepare?  Supplicated.  I think I did, but I'm not clean. Sweetheart, I hoped it for you.  I know it for you.  You could forgive me.  You could.  Still.

     “I was too sure. My equipoise, it gave me away.  You can't maintain your poise.  You must scorch your knees on the gravel, grind your ear down.  Down.  To hear the nightmares singing. Andrea, you can hear them. Your generosity blesses you.  You squander affection.  You can hear them, believe them in anyone. Do you remember my starched collars?  You thought they were magical, once, the whole mortician's craft of laundering.  I still wear them. I haven't been ruffled.  My patients intone, convinced they've been washed in sacred water, they chant to me of revelation and premonition.  They've had covenants renewed.  And I pull them back, snuff out the ringing in their ears. They've been blasted, the blow echoes through them, and the insane, they have all known the garden and been swatted out.  They are broken at our feet from the fall, and I listened and talked the churning body out of it.  Help me."

     "Daddy, I will."

     "No, tell me.  I'll listen.  Forgive me.  Show me you do.  I would have buried it.  You knew it.  Three thousand miles was as near as you could risk.  I miss you.  It's what I deserve.  Forgive me now.  Don't spare me.  Tell me.  I want the chance."

     "There's nothing to forgive.  You've always.."

     "Stop.  Forgive me."

     "Daddy, how can I?  For what?"

     "Please."

     "Daddy.  Don't."

     "Tell me I didn't succeed.  With you."

     "Daddy, you're scaring me."

     "Scare me.  Tell me."

     "What?  What?"

     "Leviathan.  Tell me about him. Please. That you escaped whole.  That I don't always...break. That I'm not so thorough, places left unscarred. Would you?"

     "What would you have me tell you?"

     "Leviathan."

     "Daddy."

     "His heart in the water.  Give me the nightmare.  Sweetheart.  A second chance.  I'll listen, don't you believe me?  It dribbles out.  It dribbles out, that's all.  I just get lost. In my dreams wandering the same streets.  Around and around."

     "I love you, daddy."

     "You can't help it. I'm only spared because of you.  I love you, too.  Thank you.  For carrying my heart, I could never ask you, but I forced you.  When I knew you couldn't refuse.  Anything, for us all, blaming yourself when we took advantage of you.   Wounded by the fall of downy chicks.  No extra weight for you, the small package of my affection, my only love, thank you, for tolerance and noticing, cheeping thing that it is."                                  

     From a darkened shore that is only visited in dreams, her kidney had left its mooring.  A quiet sloshing of harrowed ripples at the slow bow, inaudible, but already accomplished while Manny confessed his strategy and his weakling's inability to resist it and his dependence on her to save his soul by a charity without justice.  Both of them crying over the wires.  Manny with all the relief self-pity can provide and also from the wretched, heady and alarming vitality and renewed purpose a total surrender to evil bestows. 

     Imagine a boat.  Dreams are often tardy in employing new technology.  And the tides here are ancient, anyway.  Imagine phosphorescence in the water, a nebular cosmos below as above.  But, mostly imagine silence and drift and vast emptiness and a voyage unspoken, inevitable.  Or a voyage only sensed in nonsense.  The elopement of the owl and pussycat on a walnut shell.  Andrea has now donated her kidney.  But, this exact moment when the decision was made will never be remembered.  The best she might ever do to remember is to parrot a nursery rhyme, and in that code of nonsense she may glimpse the chart of a pilgrimage. 

     Manny and Andrea crying together, awash in the same tide. 

     Andrea:

     Stout and robust, a form that could breast its own tears, and believe this strength of heart repellent to love.  Too strong for others to brave or for them to believe in her surrender or dependence, which were there in full and overwhelmed her always but not with grief, but resilient joy.  Steadfast and rooted and persisting through others' fickleness, without romance and flush with nature, elated with the act of breeding and fecundity with all its earthly embodiments. Raise it over her realized joy. This green arch, its theology happily fallen to earth to be clothed in clay and so change or realize or fulfill each force of the canopy:  Gravity become attraction, light become heat and life. 

     Embodied. 

     The ignited clay.

     Commanded by instinct to make love.  Love made and made again from the force of tendon and muscle and the nectar of wanting that was spun into its core by the lonely gravity of the universe.  The compulsion, its speed and push, swelling the body into a throat to release this aria which, better than song, need never escape our touch or imply service other than its resolution to be. 

     The next day, Manny was able to visit Lou.          

     From Florence's description, Manny concluded the crowd had thinned around Lou, and the mood had grown stale.  He did not enter a lively party, the sense of mischief had left, instead restlessness and a sense of stalled time.  Lou was dozing. He had shrunk and discolored; he looked like a find in Egyptian archaeology: A boy who had been preserved in a clay vase.       

     Pearl greeted Manny immediately; she must have had her eye on the door.  She was not suited to doldrums.  She walked to him with her arms held wide and hugged him tightly, offering him first one cheek and then the other to kiss. 

     "Finally.  Flo got you here."

     "Manny, it's good to see you."  It was Laura, their daughter.  He had forgotten her voice, a kind of over-stuffed settee of a voice, slightly abashed, a good voice for a primary school teacher, quiet, cozy and subsiding into chuckles from self-consciousness.  She lived in the country and he remembered that the ethos out there had seemed to dwarf her into niceness.  She offered him both cheeks to kiss like her mother had and made the same pleased cooing, as if she were smelling baking bread.  They hugged.  She felt tightly packed.  She was a grandmother now. Manny had thought she had gotten her beauty from Lou, the palette of heart wood colors and strong, symmetrically proportioned body, but now in her fifties he could see Pearl in her face, a severe, intellectual cast to her nose, which was narrow and beak-like, and to her mouth, which was small with stern lines at the corners.  It did not lesson her attractiveness to him.  He had always felt that there was no frivolity or manipulation in her. With this constant thinker emerging, even the sharp battle axe of Pearl, the solidity emerged too. She was ballasted.  In Pearl it may have been doctrinaire, but in her it seemed to be balanced temper, and loyalty. Perhaps the reports of Pearl's recent nobility were intimations of loyalty, too.  What had once been stubbornness and righteousness, had pointed her towards virtue, and now in old age and repeated in her daughter, he could see the underpinnings of their beauty: a promise of endurance and serenity.        

     "Good to see you both, under different circumstances, I wish.  When was the last time, Laura?"

     "It's been years.  She should be flattered you still recognize her."

     "Mama."

     "And you, him."

     "I think it was Block Island."

     "That's twenty years."

     "Not since then?  I don't remember."

     "Gabriel was a boy.  I hear he's a father now", said Manny.

     They moved out of the hallway into the room, bumping into each other in clumsy deference.  Beneath the glaze of air conditioning Manny could smell a ripe stuffiness.  The other bed was empty, as Florence had said institutional connections or chutzpa had reserved the room to Lou and guests. 

     An old lady sat in a chair by the head of the bed, which was cranked up so Lou was half-sitting. She was looking at him with lively eyes.  She was Lou's older sister, the only one in his family who was left, and when she was introduced she gave Manny her small hand, which was dry and warm and pleasant to touch, like a stone from a dry river bed, and squeezed his hand firmly.  A knit shawl draped over her shoulders.  The room was not really cold, but she had come prepared to sit, and old people get cold easily. She was a small woman, maybe Florence's height, but with smaller bones.  Florence could never look dainty, although she had begun to look brittle and fragile, but this woman could have once and maybe what he sensed was a remnant of the pugilistic stance some small women took to be respected, but he thought the clue was in her being Lou's older sister.  He could not put his finger on why he had always thought one of Lou's parents had died while he was still a child, probably his meditative silence or something guarded in his enthusiasms-war could have caused it, too-but he was sure now that this was the woman who had raised him, come now to watch over his sleep once again, and dressed as she might have, even as a girl, in the trappings of motherhood.             

     "You go there every year."  Manny continued his conversation with Laura, cautious of skidding into that frothy cheer often bubbling around the sick or dead, trying to find some middle ground, feeling after each word that silence would have been a better choice, but also feeling obligated as a shrink to show professional virtuosity around death, to bring to bear his experience and reading.  

     "I should have, it's really a beautiful spot", he continued.  

     "I was cured of landscapes by Connecticut.  But Block Island has stayed an island for me.  A place of its own. Lou was planting "the orchard".  It was exactly three trees.  And one was a cherry so, of course, it begged Chekhov and we got too much mileage out of that."        

     "We went picking rose hips.  They were in the dunes.  Between two, in a lap, and the ocean was right there. And it's different around an island. You're on the high seas, even picking rose hips. Land shouldn't be counted on. It's a composition of the mind."   

     "Do you remember swimming with Andrea?" he asked Laura.

     "Not really."

     "A sandbank at the north of the island?"

     "I know that.  Past the lighthouse.  I'm surprised we swam there.  The tides are dangerous."

     Lou dozed on, his light slumber seeming wound around him, like a dusting of pollen on a dry twig, some late summer fecundity, bind weed or morning glory, twisted around a hoe. It was a spell of habit or of substance deeper than form. Catching a little dream, as it would be called in Yiddish.  A dream that could fit in the teaspoon size of a nap.  A snooze from before the time the balance had shifted and life become the vapor barely snagged as a nap's dreams had once been.

     Lou caused a small alchemy in the room.  Especially in memory.  It was as if Manny could see his memory's breath, as he would see his breath on a cold day.  Nothing miraculous, but still a change in state, and very much like seeing his breath dissipating, the baroque filigree of it unravelling and disappearing in the air. He felt the separate course his inner life had taken from his own life and that rather than those moments disappearing when they split and veered away, it was out of these moments of thinnest tissue that his memory had built its separate body, as if at those times his inner life was close enough to happening that it could gather to itself elements in the world.  Those times must all be preserved, they were the bones for this internal man. Lou's alchemy was a turning inside out, a quiet flushing of vibrant silences, or if that was not quite it, then a tuning of silence out of its usually disparate keys.  His dying body just by dint of its sleeping made sleep distinct from death, and it was the presence of dreams around it that etched this island out of the black, and by this effect of their tooling of air, the presence of dreams was made actual.  

     "You didn't swim.  Andrea walked on the spine of that sandbank.  So did you, holding Gabriel's hand, he must have been eight or so."

     "Walking out there is different.  I don't think I ever swam."

     "There was a seal in the water.  Just his head above the swells, looking at you.  Andrea later spent a summer on the west coast, on an island, counting seals and grey whales."

     Gabriel had spindly legs and ran along the shore like a sandpiper until you made him come back and put his hand in yours so he would not be sucked overboard off that slick spine.  He was not yet as tall as your shoulder.  You had muscular shoulders, a black bathing suit, cut in a `v' down your back, showing the muscles flickering when you walked. I took the boy's hand from the other side and walked with the sheering suck of the tides, otter skinned, frothing on my ankles.       

     [He knew what Andrea had seen, knew it in the space of a second when Andrea was standing distantly outlined against the sea opening and closing like curtains over the sandbar, and knew it again now, not simply recalled, but opening and continuing to open. There was no mercy in his look, it was angelic that way, it was perfect and cruel, it was all of those things, vacant, fixed, serene, aloof, but it was another thing, too. It was an aspiration. It was not him being cleared out and aimed blindly at himself.  He remained.  And who remained was stranded, and she could be blamed because all that was left behind in him that was cunning and shy was what had not been touched by love and would have changed with it.  What was left longed for what only love can make unashamed.  

     She saw him take the child's hand.  He was a beautiful child, leggy and lithe and quick and with brooding moods which made his heart and smiles worth winning. It may have been this engineering for gambol and trek that had recommended his father, a thinning and shaping of the more pithy strength of mother and her father. Laura with her upright carriage and tight haunches may have found an onus in being a Jewish beauty, a night shade in it a sunrise seeker with all his will-o-the wisp would lighten, and this child with tip headlong, a deep arch to his foot and long shank and high calf, was the thing accomplished, irresistible to Manny, Andrea knew, the lithe, the svelte, the un-bodied spirit free of mud.]

     Lou woke.  He did not seem to recognize anyone for a moment.  He did not look alarmed, only curious.

     "I'm back. Manny?  You threw me for a second there.  Anybody else see him?"

     "He's really here."

     "Give me your hand, Pearl, I want to see if I can trust your testimony.  So, you made it."

     "Been busy.  I am giving the plenary."

     "The plenary.  Congratulations."

     An old couple was entering the room.  The man shuffled in leaning heavily on a thick black cane, his wife at his shoulder helping him to balance.  He looked like he might have once been a farmer, he had broad, stooped shoulders and his hands were enormous.  Or, he might have once been a small town pharmacist; the couple's plainness seemed idealized heartland, and perhaps worn, as he had sometimes seen it, as a retort to Manhattan flamboyance.  Pearl got up to usher them in and Manny stood to offer his chair. 

     "Bert. Midge", Lou said.

     "Waited for the exciting part", Bert said, speaking through labored breathing.

     "How are you, Lou?  You look good", said Midge.

     "That's because she's used to me.  You are dying, aren't you?"

     "Bert", Midge said sternly but with ritualized exasperation.       "They weren't fooling with an old stick in the mud?  I wouldn't have come to see a recovery, not even my own.  Can't change gears like that anymore."

     "They weren't kidding."

     "Well, what do you think of dying?"

     "Bertram", Midge gasped, the straight man in a routine that had been ground out of a marriage.

     "Now, dear, he might welcome the chance.  Got a standing reservation here myself. Anything to yammer?"

     A green cardigan, buttoned crookedly, yarn nits visible, bagged across his concave gut.  His wife was carefully attired, his sloppiness seemed an affected absent-mindedness.

     Lou looked at Pearl and his sister.

     "It's personnel.  I don't mean private.  It's individual. It's different than other things. I didn't expect it to be strange."

     "Well, I haven't got any of that, do I Midge? Wonder if I've had too long to get tired of it.  This arthritis takes its damn time and it's just frosting on the cake.  It's been a long time since it felt strange." 

     "Lou was always a great swimmer", it was Lou's sister speaking.

     "Bert fished. He never missed a season. Shad and bluefish."

     "Forgot about the shad.  I didn't think you had such fondness for it."

     "And you fished for wall-eye.  He had a guide.  For years.  Cottonmouth.  How could I forget that?" 

     "I don't know, but you did.  I called him `mealy mouth"."

     "You didn't.  You idolized him."

     "He deserved it.  An alcoholic and a thief and a liar.  Refreshing.  Married three times.  All at once.  I don't think I ever caught a fish with him.  Wouldn't of used him if I did.  Takes real contempt and insight to masquerade as a fishing guide with only wickedness and stupidity to serve you.  He put all the others to shame.  I guess I'll miss him, alright."

     "Lou wouldn't come back on his own.  We had to wave from the shore.  I'd trip along in the foam, waving like mad to get his attention, and he wouldn't come back till he was blue.  We'd wrap him in a towel, like a boxer, and he'd shake and shiver.  And he'd get ear aches.  And your eyes were all lit up, your hair thick as wax", said Lou's sister.

     Lou looked at Bert, then back at his sister, and said,

     "I wanted to swim to China.  Some planned to dig, I was training for the swim.  Why not?  The world was round.  What a swell deal.  I could go anywhere from where I was."

     "Couldn't hold you long.  You liked putting your belly in the sand and soaking up the heat.  You liked being so dirty that I had to shake my head."

     Lou patted his sister's hand.

     "Sometimes it's like a train ride.  Remember putting me on the train for the army?  Changed like that.  Near and far right here in the room.  Remember when our hands slid apart through the window?  When the train started to move?  It was a small tug, a hint, but you could feel the train in it. I felt lucky about it.  Not right at the time, I wouldn't call it luck, but afterwards I knew I was lucky for the chance.  I get that a lot now, the first feeling I've always felt lucky about, about being here to catch feelings like that right in the bull's eye."

     He talked to Bert.  His voice changed.  An undercurrent of boredom or frustration. He had said these things before or similar things, pushing against Bert's descending weight, against the imposition of his size, the way he would have had of hauling his body into a room like drayage, a beast of burdens, even before the descent of great age and arthritis; pessimism used as a tyranny over intelligence, overruling it or taking precedence.  

     "In the war life was thick and thin at the same time.  Getting killed wasn't strange.  Any hour would do.  There wasn't enough boredom in any hour to build a wall so it would have been absurd." 

     Over the three decades Manny had known Lou he had almost never heard him talk about the war and had credited this to Lou's imagination and enthusiasm for his life.  He was surprised to hear him lapse into it now.  He did not think Lou needed some reminder of past courage or gristle.  With his sister he had been talking of the last time she had been a mother to him.  With Bert, there was heat from an old clash. What had worn at them?  What would the war have answered to?  And in a moment Manny was sure he knew.  The war answered for Lou's beauty. Bert would not have been a bad looking man, not handsome certainly, but the boyish, open cast of his features would have spared him from the sometimes simian look of large boned men, and yet, the persistence of the boy in that large frame, tantalizing, haunted, encased-Lou's ripening must have looked a privilege and exemption. The older man had to have worried or guessed that this beauty undaunted after tests of courage and later attritions, marked a higher conscience than signs of ravaging would have.  It was not privileged or exempt and also, not merely bratty or insulted or disappointed or fed up or bored or contemptuous, which might have seemed a technique for its survival.  Bert must have tried to disprove it, but it must have rebuffed such tests and shown its conscience and love undiminished.          

     "Glad you made it, Manny.  Last chance to force you into the red brotherhood", said Lou.

     "You need brothers?  I got a passel of them, interrupted Bert, "Three of us left, like those witches, but we don't have a good eye to pass around.  We were five.  Warren died.  Eighty years ago, at least, I'd say.  And then another one a few years back.  Which one was that, Midge?  Did you write it down?" 

     "It was Orin."

     "Orin?  There was an Orin?  That might have been sent to the wrong address, dear."

     "Hush."

     "How did they find us?  We didn't attend the funeral, did we?"

     "You know we didn't."

     "Wanted to make sure that you didn't slip it in our itinerary among the concerts. You know I wouldn't notice, sleep through 'im all.  One of those organ concerts, Bach, slip the coffin in at the wings?"

     "We just got a notice."

     “I may not have liked, what's-his-name, Orin.  I can't recall."

     "You loved Warren."

     "I said that?  He did have the best timing.  Locked safely in the long term memory vaults.  Measles.  Like a Polynesian in Paradise.  Somehow missed it the first time through.  He's the only name I'm sure of. He's buried in Iowa.  I don't know where the rest of them are.  I'll tell you how young I was.  I was jealous of all the attention he got and I tried to be pious so I might die too, be so insufferably sweet I'd be called to God at the funeral. My nose was running and I knew that would spoil my chances to get called, but I wasn't giving up.  I wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve and hid it under my coat, God having similar vision to my mother he wouldn't know until too late.  I told my mom Warren would be cooler now, he'd died of fever, clever me, and I was just hoping god was listening to how innocent I was, because besides his getting so famous dying I didn't care whether he froze or sunbathed after pulling this off."

     "Bert, that's not true.  He's the reason you left Iowa.  The family was never the same again."

     "I said that?  If I could spare the blood, I'd blush.  I must have been wooing you.  Melting your heart.  Too late for you now, dear.  Well, he was ripe.  Plucked like that."

       "You worked with Lou?" Manny asked.

     "I hired him.  Worked for me over twenty years until I retired."

     "Lou inherited your post?"

     "Oh no.  Never did.   Wouldn't have wanted it, anyway."

     Lou opened one eye, "That's true."

     "Too much real politics.  Preferred his spectroscopy, didn't you?"

     Lou nodded tiredly.

     "I'm an M.D., I had to stay inside my limits.  Lou got to look at the pretty pictures while I got arthritis shoveling...the manure.  M.D.'s are considered vets around the institution, aren't we?"

     "Grooms."

     "The patients always get in the way of the cure, which is our fault.  Mud to the elbows.  I'm still farming."

     "You're retired, Bert."

     “I don’t like corn that makes me unpopular.”

     "Au contraire, Bert, it was once your staple, not Lou's," said Pearl. 

     "Never."

     "I seem to remember you had it stuck between your teeth during the Vietnam War."

     "Still had my teeth then.  You've got a long memory.  I defended him."

     "You counseled silence."

     "Patience was what I counseled."

     "It sounded like silence."

     "I defended him.  The Institute did not feel it appropriate to take a position.  I simply suggested he look around and notice who he was offending. He was including the institute as a silent partner.  We're a cancer clinic, and I remarked how nobody was thinking of firing him, none of these war mongers, though they could have trumped up charges on his qualifications."

     "And you don't think that was a tactful threat?"

     "It never was. The worst you could say about us was we're dowdy.  We are not set up to re-act like that, and given the nature of our work, it was a damn great group of guys to work with, which was worth remembering in the heat of the moment."

     "And less worth remembering, Bert, was the steady reference to your magnanimity in hiring him and the test in circumspection he was putting you to."

     "That's thirty years, Pearl."

     "It smells fresh as yesterday, Bert."

     "So, Bert, have you two met?  My wife, Pearl.  Pearl, my boss, Bert.  I don't want either of you to think I ever served wimps.  And Bert, she's followed your advice about patience better than I have all these years and is still waiting to hear you admit that you didn't fire her husband out of largesse but because I was indispensable."

     "Hogwash.  One of us had to act mature."

     "Now's another chance."

     "Well, you..."

     "Wife, Bert, that's my wife."

     "Thirty years."

     "Long enough."

     "This is a mugging.  I was sensible.  Midge, that's all I can remember of the whole thing.  People didn't stop getting sick.  That should be remembered.  Entirely indispensable, Pearl.  How's that?"

     "A good beginning, Bert.  Doesn't that feel better? You’d regret not admitting it.  Manny will back me up on this. These things can't be left unsaid.  Manny?"

     "Pearl, it's that happy optimism that's killing Manny's trade.  It's the grim profession."

     "That's economics."

     "Well, it's a carnival compared to psychiatry."

     "Daddy, it's not grim."

     "You're speaking from experience?"

     "Lou, you know she was."

     "So, who'd you find out was to blame.  Me or your mama?"

     "Nobody's to blame."

     "Pearl, does that mean we were ineffectual?  Neither of us left an impression?'

     "Daddy, you left deep impressions."

     "Like your mama says, now's the time to tell it."

     "But, nobody's to blame."

     "See what you guys have done, Manny?  You're the guys who've cured them.  It's not going to be easy leaving you without a grudge, it's kept your mama alert.  Pearl, you'll see to that won't you?  Lest she forgives and forgets.  There's still undeserved suffering out there. Laura, you mustn't be so quick to forgive. Don't think about putting your mama on the back shelf, she's a clever plotter and she has her reasons and they're diabolical.  Keep looking over your shoulder, she hasn't lost a step."

      Manny had given up his chair to Bert and was leaning against the bed that had been left empty in this double room.  Lou motioned him over with a withered arm.   

     "Manny, I need you to show some backbone here.  You are respected by these two gals.  They'll listen to you.  I need you to tell the shy one there to beware of soothing.  She is a masseuse and she lives in a colony of masseuses.  They all do a lot of soothing.  She's from a crankier lot but she's doing well up there and it's a cause for worry.  Only you could do this, Manny.  M.D. and psychiatrist.  Tell her that blood is thicker than water, it's your stock and trade. No peace without justice.  Pearl, I wish you weren't so satisfied being a grandmother. Too much nachas.  You're turning into a harmless fuddy duddy."

     "I beg your pardon."

     "Happiness has pulled your fangs.  How will you two manage, when you get along so well?  You'd think you hardly knew each other." 

     Bert rapped his cane on the floor.  Midge asked Manny if he would take one of Bert's elbows and help her boost him out of his chair.  Bert crossed his arms and each taking an elbow they jockeyed him to his feet.  Manny wondered how Midge managed this at home.  He was so big, it must be tempting to rest his weary bones.  He had sunk lower and lower in his chair, any time he might yield to the urge, take advantage of a nap to not wake up.  She had become his shepherd of sorts.  Throwing a pebble now and then to start him moving again, poking him with sticks, what was left of life in the old body being only irritants, the old beast, reluctant to move and feel his bones grate on each other, the sad thoughts of a life time's warehousing dragging him down into slumber. 

     Bert brushed Midge and Manny back with a stiff breast stroke motion of his arms, and then rummaged with his big, knobby hands in the pocket of the cardigan until he had found a small bag.  He put it in Manny's right hand and closed it around the bag and then held the fist in his big hand.  He was reluctant to release Lou's hand.     

     "You were very good, Lou.  You made me look good. Thanks."

     "You're welcome, Bert.  It was good working for you.  Best years of my life."

     "Hah."

     "Oh yeah, they all were, every sweet year."

     "Every sweet year," repeated Bert.  He was a man who had purposely and with relief found no sweetness in science, a member of the deacons who count on science to verify mechanism, not light, as the universal principle underlying beauty and ripeness. Manny's complexion was unusual among them.  Even after a winter in the labs, when his skin had paled it still held a muted tan, like timbre in wet ground.  Manny knew then while Bert continued to hold Lou's hand that Lou had been his repository for a love undone.  Manny was sure this was the first time Bert had ever touched Lou during the whole forty years of knowing him.  

     "Lou, he didn't mean half of what he said.  We went back to Iowa for years", said Midge, putting her hand around Bert's arm.  Bert finally released Lou's hand.

     "You're not a doctor.  You've never been disappointed by a patient.  By all of them, actually.  You get used to it.  I stuff their tongues back in their mouths and close their eyes, at least I did for a while, but I stopped.  I got a peculiar feeling from it.  Like it was mischief.  They'd failed me.  We start out with superstitions.  And they die and look like idiots.  Of course, you have to believe them, it's a death bed confession.  I was only eight.  He got sick about the time I was pretty much better.  Some of my other brothers still had it, but you get the picture.  I brought it home.  I'd had the fever and floated, the way you do at 103 degrees or so.  You know how they keep the room dark, and they kept a wet cloth over your eyes and forehead.  I know better, I made myself know better, but it's hard to shake the eight year old.  I snuck in, sat next to his bed."

     "We should go, Bert.  He loved Warren.  He was eight years younger.  Worshipped him", said Midge tugging at his arm, hard enough to make him stumble a step, but he regained his balance,  and used all the slag in his stiff body to plant himself, bringing his wife up short, awkwardly, almost with a jerk.

     His big black shoes looked huge, and impossible to move, orthopedic shoes with thick crepe soles and broad, round toes.  There could never have been a time he could have been rushed from a room.   

     "That's not the point.  I thought: I'm just too little.  You know, at eight, the bed sometimes comes with the dream.  Like a boat, and then, when you're delirious, even more.  Sometimes you float over the whole room.  But, I thought, I'm too little.  Warren gets to keep that, but I had to give it back.  Those sweet dreams.  He got to keep them.  Stole them, from me.  And I never got them back." 

     "Midge.  Where are you, gal?  Steady me. Can't feel my feet anymore except when they hurt.  She's more than I ever deserved.  She's put up with a lot.  I've done that for her.  Made her good.  I believe I've saved her.  It's the one good thing I did." 

     "Come on gal.  Push me along.  I'll take my leave now, Lou.  Ladies.  Slim.  Forgot your name, but only once, so don't be insulted.  So long.  Midge?"

     "Yes, Bert."

     "Make our good byes for us.  I think I'll say the wrong thing.  So long didn't seem right."

     "Good bye, Lou.  Pearl, so good to see you again."

     "Good bye, Lou.  That's all it needed?  Depend on you, woman.  Lou, see how I need her?  Good bye, that's all it takes.  Get me out of here.  Old eyes, pissing like race horses.  They do that.  Good bye.  Lou.  Lou?"

     "Bert."

     "Sweet dreams, Lou."      

     And they were gone.  The rest sat quietly in the room.

     "Manny, you ought to go out to Block Island.  You and Florence.  Don't you think so, Pearl?"

     "Of course."

     "Of course.  You heard that.  In twenty years you're out there once.  Pearl, what were we there for, the last eight years?  What is it, eight months a year?"

     "April until Thanksgiving, what is that?  It is eight"

     "So, promise me, Manny.  You'll go out there."

     "I've meant to."

     "So, promise. It's nice out there.  Make the promise."

     "I'll try."

     "Make the promise.  OK?"

     "Come on, Lou.  What is this?  If he wants to, he'll come out", said Pearl.

     "Uh-huh.  Promise."

     "All right.  I'll..."

     "Yeah?"

     "I promise, but I'll have to talk to Florence."

     "Yeah, but you promised.  Pearl, when he gets there, put him out in the orchard.  I built a bench out there, Manny.  You heard me, Pearl?  Put him on the bench."

     “I have to run. Plenary tomorrow.”

     Two nights later Lou died. 

     He had been dreaming.  He hardly had the strength to stay awake.  He had to organize to do it.  It was a difficult project.  He compared it to putting up a circus tent.  He had to rally the crew and set them to work.  Opening the senses, admitting the pains and insults, working against his will to resolve them into their places and components: The turgid flow of his blood precipitating into his veins and cold limbs from a twilight glow in his drowse, the warm flows of urine into his diaper (an indwelling catheter had proved too painful and since he was mobile, unnecessary) the porter colored urine, returned to cold and irritation on his bed rashes from a pleasant summery enveloping of his dreams.            

     He had dreamed:

     He was on a bus trip and for some strange reason he was going alone.  He had a family.  Why wasn't he taking them along, and why was he travelling by bus when he owned a car?  And where was he going, anyway?  These were all puzzles, but they seemed the musings of a daydream, dilemmas for a person he was only imagining.  Maybe he was imagining a life he might someday have.  He must be heading to Fort Dix, to be mobilized for Europe.  Well, he was not prepared for that, he didn't have a duffel bag and no orders to report that he could remember, and he must have gone AWOL to be so out of synch.  What would they do with an old man, anyway?  Not even the army could make much sense out of an old man reporting late for duty. 

     His nose was practically touching the window.  They were driving through countryside in Indian summer.  He was a little cramped but there was a gainliness to his cramping.  He had his khaki clad leg propped on a little sill, there was some cockiness to that he hadn't seen for a while, and even the way he leaned his elbow against the window, it was lazy, but it was lazy in that luxurious, hedonistic way you had when you were young.  Where his sleeve pulled back, he saw his thick wrist covered in black hairs.  He had on a pair of shiny black shoes, he thought GI but that didn't seem quite right, but they didn't look like his shoes, and miracle of miracles, his knee, bent the way it was, didn't hurt at all.  

     Was it a cloud overhead, or did they pass into a tunnel?, but sometimes it would go dark and he would catch a glimpse of an old man's face reflected in the window where his face should have been.  The old man was sleeping.  Lucky that, he probably would have jumped a foot if he had been looking back at him, as it was, he felt curious about the old guy.  His face was deeply carved, his cheeks hollowed out, and he didn't like the looks of his open mouth.  Well, it wasn't howling, but it just looked too damn tired, he looked too grateful for sleep, like he'd barely made it, but if you had to run just to make sleep, which is what it looked like he'd had to do, what happened if you didn't catch the ride?  Did you have to stay awake?  He didn't see how that could be enforced, but then, where else could you go?  He decided he liked the old man's face, liked studying it once he got over the scare of seeing it floating outside the window.  He would just about carve it that way himself, if it had to be done.  He favored the brow ridges, the closed eyes were sunk too deep, but the forehead, he could live with that, he liked the beard that ran along the jaw line, and the tuft of goatee.  He might have changed just that expression of exhaustion.  The geometry in the features attributed to character, he was content with that. The guy looked a little too stern, but no meaner than what could be blamed on the effort to keep going.

     The countryside was familiar, old farm land carved out of forests that still covered the intervening mountains.  Farms in the valleys and bottom lands; a banking up of land, a place made of pocketed places where landscape eased down on the land and earth hefted itself up into landscape, land mixing in a word and somatic dough, tucks where time got folded into the batter. 

     They passed through a small town built on two sides of a river that had cut a deep gorge upholstered in autumn yellow shinning bright as metal, the river stippled with whitecaps where the swift ribbon sheared against the rocks in rooster tails, a fisherman standing in the glide, cantilevered pole, a stencil wedged in a fractal of time, and the bicycling boy gliding backwards past the windows, held stock still, knees tread milling, spokes florescent in their whirl, seams and artisan cavities in time and in its viscous wake, the stopped clock on the steeple putting its foot in the door of one hour held open forever. 

     They round a curve and the view opens up and the canvas is stapled to the wall by trees' glowing crowns.  It is like a landscape in moonlight, how it is seen through-the-looking-glass in a photo negative, but here not in ghostly nitrates.  They descend its climbing scale, down the palindrome from white into color.  In this heavy October light, mountains, sumac, Rose of Sharon have shrugged off the shouldering of function that earthbound them, and bound in light more securely than they were by matter, their shapes no longer crusted interiors, they become a step for light to alit on, a prism for it to vagabond in clay. 

     They were deep into the country and the bosomy hills gave off a soporific warmth that glazed his cheeks and the corners of his mouth and tickled his temples through the half-opened windows, but as they wound their way farther and farther the journey was not winching tighter. He knew he had been on the bus for a long time; he had made a nest for himself on the seat as you do when you have been traveling for miles.  It's just a feeling, but you start to claim the seat and its perspectives, rejecting alternative seats, making it your home ground.  But he could not remember why he was travelling and where he was going.  He felt he might either be heading for trouble or escaping it, and while he worried about its catching up with him, he also had that glorious feeling of being lost when everything becomes unstuck. 

     "We're here to see the leaves."

     An old woman addressed him waiting for him to recognize her or else for him to agree with her, but for some reason her simple statement seemed impossible to translate, as if her sentence had been an object dropped out the window and was already behind them on the road.  He could recognize everyone on the bus, but it didn't seem possible that he should.  Here was a girl cuddling a lamb, why should he have known her?  The family with crates of chickens and a donkey, it was somehow terrible that he should know them.  They were refugees, why should he recognize them in their hour of sadness?  How could he possibly know them by these strange things they cherished which were desperate and comical to be taking with them?  Leave them behind he wanted to say, but felt it would be mean.  He felt guilty about seeing them this way or heartbroken.  His heart had just been broken.  He could not remember what had been said, but it had broken his heart.  His life had stopped right then.  It was lost back there on the road where the old lady had spoken.  He was culpable for the dreariness that let him see futility around him.  It takes one to know one.  His heart attack had slowed him down. He had put a calculation on happiness from then on.  He had failed his heart, had they been compatible he would never have had his attack, and afterwards, his accommodation was too pert; that supposed sufficient replacement for what he had had.

     "Pearl", he was sure he was calling her in the hospital room but he was not, she was reading by his side but the room he spoke into had nacreous tints of morning, and he said, "Why'd they name a red head, Pearl?"   She was waiting for the punch line.  It was an old joke with them, and he had thought, for once, he was going to be able to export to the world the conclusion to those long skeins of pure logic we spin in dreams, and here it seemed he was just reaching for an old chestnut.  "Because I love her", he said which was the truest thing he had ever said and this astonishing conclusion, the product of an inspiration whose lineaments he had seen in his dream, would blow her away, as it had him, with its discovery of the inevitable twinning of those two words, love and Pearl.  

     The crown of a single maple was stuck behind his eyelids. 

     Like looking through a kaleidoscope or the blossom of             fireworks. 

     A red leaf cumulus raftered with black branches. 

     The leaves rustled in the heights. 

     The crown filled his eyes, the leave bunches like nebulae           and galaxies, a cosmos whose reaches were filled with              sugar. 

     He liked the grate and sizzle of his footsteps on the              gravel; he skated his soles on the ball-bearing pebbles. 

     If I have a stone in my shoe, I know I'm not dreaming, and he had a stone in his shoe, near the ball of his foot, but it did not hurt, not a bit.  He was happy with himself for letting gravel tumble in over the tops of his shoes, for scuffing along in the way that bruised the toes of his shoes.  It had never been mischief, it had been duty; he was obligated to the tartness and scruffiness of boyhood, as a member of the clan, obligated to his talent.                                                 

     If the stuff of dreams were more amenable to carpentry you might build a single gold bird whose own emptiness would crank up into motion and itself startled, flap off somewhere that had no dreams or to somewhere only dreamed, where never tarnished, it might continue forever since it had no regrets.                           

     Dry leaves blowing down the well headlights dug in the dark.  Empty cowls scuttling, swept off, twirling and blowing, glimpsed in their underworld migration.  They would make a fugitive sound if he could hear them, a rattling sigh as they churned and were swept away, those last weaving falls touched with grace and melancholy, flights of sad fancy, daydream and rue over and done. Falling, surely falling, to dreamless sleep.

     A sheet laid out below him, bursting apart by the pressure of swallows white breasts, who in the acrobatic course dart past in upward flight, wheeling around his intrusion with the indifference of birds, adding him into the world of objects, refusing him entrance into their clairvoyant tailoring of sky.       

     "I'd like to rest for a while, from resting.  It's getting me sea sick.  Pearl, when this is all over I'd like to build some bird houses.  One for each sect.  I want to invest in bird houses.  Will you invest me in bird houses?"

     How clear she looked. Damn if he wasn't seeing Pearl making herself from her name.  Pearl making a Pearl, is what it was, a Pearl machine.  Building herself around the stone of herself, a stubborn woman she'd always been, and more power to her for remaining true.  It had become a thing of beauty, hadn't it, this pain in the neck? 

     "Bird machines. I think it's a smarter investment at this point.  I definitely want to switch my daydreams from aquaculture.  The future's above.  A bigger ranch and they'll work for a song.   Investing in sky farming is perfect for a loftmensch.  No heavy lifting, just holding on to the concept is deed to the homestead.   

     Bird houses. Sky nets. Including: Clouds, vault, celestial. To catch a song.

     So, if you would, invest.  Or allow me to be your agent. If an octopus made pearls, it would come out a chandelier.  And if a bird sang in winter, it's a chanticleer. You have to think: Pearl by another name.  Pearl farming, but differently. Just add sky.  

     Life’s been my oyster. Pearl. Pearl?

     A family of deer were eating fallen apples.  A doe, her two fauns and a yearling, in their ash-silver winter coats.  He noted their black hooves, like ballerinas' toe shoes; the only tentatively suppressed bolt in each tip-toeing step, picking their way through the grass with knobby-kneed, muted prancing steps. Each step tugging pleats on its transparency.  Between, he thought, a time between time hanging enchanted and precarious. It was a rare privilege to spy on them inside their fragile peace, looking in unnoticed at their shiny black snouts, and their Egyptian eyes, so beautiful and spiritual, catching them in the eddies of their domestic moods, heads down rooting for the rusty little apples, tail flicking a fly or suppressing a snit, standing flank to flank in a bovine sisterhood.

     Blackbirds had gathered on the lawn.  He had always liked their golden eye. They were standing in rows like lawn ornaments.  At this rate, it would not be long before the grass was covered with them. 

     A woman walked towards him, holding out her hand in an imperious and elegant way.  To be kissed, it might have been, so elegantly was it offered.  Her eyes were dark and her nipples showed through her blouse in what he felt was a display of intellectual freedom.  She was saucy and she dared him something, and he thought she was daring him to recognize her and take the consequences. Obviously, there was a price to pay if he did, and he was being goaded for being less heedless of consequences than she was or just as likely, for daydreaming his way out of them. She was not going to humor evasion; her breasts underlined the point. It had already been decided, and not wearing a bra, it was convenience or literalness, not assertion as he had first thought, but a concession actually to him and utility, matter-of-factly contracting with romance's day to day schedule, a strategy to get out of the way of the heart and facilitate repetition with plain habits grounded in faith, certain of his return and dedicated to it.

     She was reaching for his hand, also held under joint account.  She had been waiting for him, and while waiting had been counting blackbirds. 

     "Seventy-nine", she said. 

     "You didn't need to bother."

     "Now you don't have to."

     He would have and he was glad he would not need to waste the time that they might now use for a walk, or much better to make love, since she was young and willing. 

     And it was to be.  In San Francisco that day, landscape of green hills, blue sea into silver glint, wind stretching the clouds, they met and it was love at first sight, first sight again, which is only love stepping out in the world.  She walked towards him where she had seen him approaching the picnic tables in his soldier's uniform and took his hand, a red head whose whole fiery temperament had been tempered to the sure seizing of that entrance of love into its time, bold and wise and elated at the steps of her life finally reaching secure ground for the time being, for time being.           

     He surfaced again from his slumber.  Pearl had taken his hand. 

     "It's confusing", he told her.  "It's getting sticky."

     She was the only one in the room. 

     "I wouldn't mind hanging on, just to inconvenience them, but I don't think I'll get much kick out of it soon.  If I owed anyone any money or a chance to spit, I gave them the chance."

     He nodded and looked at her with his eyebrows raised and his lips pressed tight in a "chin up" smile.  He rummaged beneath the covers and pulled out the little paper bag Bert had handed him.    Inside was a small bottle for eye drops with an eyedropper's rubber nipple cap.

     "Pearl?  Do you have your compact?"

     "In my purse."

     "Would you..? What is it?  Powder your nose or put on your face?"

     "You want me to leave?"

     "Oh no.  I want to watch you.  It'll make me feel lucky.  Give me the purse.  Come on."

     She brought it to him. 

     He fished around, made her keys jangle, pawed the heavy leather coin purse and then the bill fold with its leather strap and snap, plump with credit cards.  He had a dreamy smile on his face; he clinked the loose coins in the bottom of the bag.

     "A lot of ballast in here."

     He savored the objects in her purse, all of them familiar but still slightly sacrosanct because of their location.  He probably had never been in her purse before.  He pulled out a kleenex with a stain of lipstick on it.

     "I'm a lucky guy", he said, opening the compact and looking at its pad of rouge and mascara.  "If I believed in an after-life I wouldn't be able to stand missing these things.  I always thought they were swell.  He handed her the little plastic case.        "It'll run", she said.

     "I'd really like to watch you do it."                   

     He had trouble opening the little bottle.  His hands were swollen nearly tight.  It was like wearing mittens.  How had Bert managed to transfer the morphine to this tiny container with his arthritic hands? 

     Pearl was watching him around the little mirror.

     "Please, go ahead.  The front of your hair."

     "It's already fixed."

     "It always is, but I like that part.  It's kind of daffy.  Fiddle with those bangs."

     "I don't have bangs."

     "And if you did they're already be in place.  I've just always liked that finishing touch."

     Finally, he got the cap loosened and squeezed the nipple and brought out a dose of the liquid.  He put one drop beneath his tongue.  It would take more, but he thought he might throw up if he took the necessary amount all at once. When he felt the drowse really coming on, he would dispense the rest.  Six drops would do it. 

 

     He waited for the morphine to be absorbed and then took a drink.  His last drink.  He could hear himself gulping.  He remembered drinking from a water fountain as a kid.  He used to gulp the water then.  Gulped everything he drank, it was so dandy to quench your thirst.  The water had a metal taste and it had dunned hollow going down the drain.  It had slapped on the stone bowl.  He had been flying a kite. He had run and run, looking back at the kite bobbing on the string but refusing to lift much, a clumsy package trailing behind him and trailing its rag tail, the string stiffening and pulling, tacking erratically, but as soon as he let out more line, drooping down again almost to the ground.  And then, he broke through a spell of futility, the ground suddenly dropped away, and the kite wrenched itself from its leash and started to climb, the bobbin on the stick spun in a hazy blur as the string slid from side to side unwinding, and within a minute the kite was a speck in the blue still tugging with a strong will to rise.  The string hung in a lush shape molded by the wind.  He had wanted to let it go.  Only a loop tied at the end was holding it back.  He let it lift his arm from the shoulder.  If only he could have gone with it.  He was breathing those deep, relieved gasps that are scary, magic fun to a boy, and he was looking up at the kite and it was uncannily, vanishingly distant, but mostly it was just blue, blue, blue and it was tugging at him, distance itself or blue itself, he was being made to fall up.  And then he had gulped and gulped the water at the fountain and remembered even the metal taste and leaning against the fountain on his toes so his shirt got wet and how hard it was to turn the faucets of those fountains with a little hand trying to keep the arch of water going, and it was because he had just found out that he would never fill up and he was eager to do everything he knew again in this new light, try them all again knowing they would go inside him where there was plenty of room for them to stay.  It was not thirst, it was trying everything again in the light of his being there and taking special notice of them and putting them away after he had used them.

     It had remained where he had put it. 

     When she was finished putting on her face, Pearl kicked off her shoes and padded to the light switch.  Turning it off left the room dimly illuminated by a glow from the bathroom light down the short hall. 

     "Gimme some room, Lou."

     She lay down next to him.

     "Lou", she again, a little differently.  She curled in next to him, lying on his arm.  He put his arms around her.

     "Pearl was the best I could ever come up with. Your dad beat me to it. I wasn’t being lazy. The house is shingled and painted.  Daughter married off, kids of her own.  We got the bulbs in the ground for next year. That's a good day’s work for Lou.  Sorry to leave you, Pearl, but I think I'm gonna catch forty winks.  I'll never stop loving you, it's easy.  I can do it in my sleep."

     "Good night, Lou.  Sweet dreams."