Forward

Let’s get a few things straight about being an author. One: Literature has only one theme: Death. Two: Teach in such a way that no one can object. Three: A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown. Even if you did not pay attention in class because you were a distracted artist, you learned the markers, such as these, that would come to define your place in the world. They gave you pause, and they made you think. They defined you. In addition, you paid attention to the greats in your field. In my case, I cannot forget the names Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Miguel de Unamuno.

I made a serious study of modern philosophy. When someone in the current day says, “existential crisis,” I honestly do not know what they mean. I am here; I am a human being; this is me. Your doctrine wants to marginalize me. I am proving your doctrine wrong by who I am and the way I am and how I live. Thank you, but I live well—if not so well on a given day, I have a nice cup of coffee and a gluten free fried doughnut, and I mostly get over it. I must reject large parts of your doctrine because it is wrong. That is existential—take life the way it is at first, from the start, before anything else—and there might be some kind of life-crisis attached to it. Is that what other people mean, a pitched battle of wills? It does not seem so, given the context, most of the time.

From sentence to sentence, scene to scene, I believe I write compelling fiction. You can probably place me somewhere at the high-end of literary fiction. It is not zany, madcap fiction to be sure. If my characters are gay, as they might be, they are not having an identity crisis: They are out there living the hell out of life and asking very, very big questions.

In the vast literature of the world, only two writers have touched my soul: Plato and William Shakespeare. Plato did the maieutic bumpkin routine with Socrates, like this: I am not an expert on that subject but let us explore that together and see where it takes us. These probes into the thought world ended up informing lives, with ideas we still cannot get out of our heads—thank God the dialogues have been preserved through­­­ the ages, mostly by monkish scribes, it seems. When, in college, I read the Apology of Socrates, I was moved as never before. I ended up thinking this: Democracy was a new experiment for the Greeks. They elected a senate. The people gave the senators representative power. They, the senators, decided that Socrates did not respect the gods enough and made him drink poison hemlock. Why the hell did the people let them do that?

Shakespeare’s fool in King Lear has always defined for me the art and the craft of writing. Let the character tease the high and mighty. Have him murdered. Let that tragedy become one of the most heartfelt moments in literature. Enjoy the comic relief. Let him have his glorious moments on the stage—and feel the pain.

If, in this work, I have got halfway there, I am pleased. If I have got all the way there—well—I promise to be gentle when I touch your soul.

I broke through as a writer with the novella Licentious People. Quite a few people have asked me about the meaning of licentious in my title. My characters give each other the license to be themselves and to challenge conventional thinking. It is a twist on the normal meaning, referring to a person who takes license and acts badly in the world.

Overone is a stage play, which I have made as readable as possible. Forgive me if it is a bit challenging for the general reader; however, line for line, scene for scene, big idea for big idea, I believe it is a fun read, if a little startling in where it ends up—no spoiler here! The third act is a musical unto itself. It can be adapted and played with by producers and directors, as long as the acting parts are kept in place, as they move the story forward.

Feel free to follow your heart’s desire and do public readings of this play. I don’t care about that. If it becomes a full production, well, bring me into it, of course. I know I have detractors and gatekeepers and all kinds of lousy sons ‘a bitches suppressing my work—go fuck yourself: I am on the warpath now; I will curse you to the next generation—oops, I didn’t mean that. I will not do that. I will be the diffident little servant of the arts that I have always been; however, I will reach out to bookstores and arts academies and high-level readers and promote my work and get it to stand on its own.

My critics are phony; they use any excuse to hold me down. If the pen is mightier than the sword, I will most certainly have my day. It is not a secret to me that my work is widely read on the internet; it is pirated, and I am not paid or given credit for it. I am half blind and not picture-perfect enough to stand near the top of the literary world. I may have tested poorly on standard psychological profiles here and there, showing me to be some kind of sexual pervert. I am not any kind of sexual pervert. I don’t care. I did not know I was gay, and I was stupid about it. Forgive me. I will make LGBTQ look as normal as possible in fiction.

We always say eww of other people’s sexual practices, but we can never allow ourselves to say eww about who they are in their souls and how they fulfill themselves in the world. They are our fellow human beings—love them and respect them. We are all partners in tending the earth, this beautiful place we all live on.

Save eww for people doing things you don’t like in online porn. If you have any other take on the matter, shove it up your ass.

The long short story A Dream of Eschaton is about man who grows up to be a great stage actor and movie star. The narrator is his life partner, his male lover. The main character grows up well nurtured in the penthouse of a prominent hotel in Vancouver. He and his sister are enthralled by literature and art. Their youthful visions tell us what it means to live and love—and get there.

Lieutenant Lasset—can I say this? —is a Columbo episode, I did not pursue permissions, so I changed his name. I leave the ending a bit sketchy because I do not understand the nuclear weapons science that must be part of the story. I abandoned the story for something like eighteen years precisely because I did not understand the science of nuclear weapons. If it is made into a movie, others, with solid knowledge of the science, must provide accurate details.

Ragamuffin Days is a pocket story, a very short story, I wrote for a National Public Radio pocket story contest some years ago.

Knotty Pine takes its setting from the home of my Aunt Martina; she and her husband owned a converted mill on a river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is about childhood best friends.

The Last Aesthete tells the story of a woman discovering her place in the world. She is involved in the arts during her college years; later, she discovers her gift for etymology—the meaning of words. She becomes an expert at some tricky forms of Anglo-Saxon verbs. She and her female partner live in a home built on the back forty (forty acres in the middle of a country square mile) of the family’s ancestral property.

Running Lines is a little ditty about how creativity works in the minds of an eleven-year-old and his middle-aged uncle when they meet by chance in the parking lot of a warehouse store. If I were more ambitious, I would make it work as my own Waiting for Godot.

OVERONE

Plays and Stories

By John Battle

Table of Contents

Overone: Screenplay

Licentious People: Story

Ragamuffin Days: Story

A Dream of Eschaton: Story

Knotty Pine: Story

The Last Aesthete: Story

Running Lines: Story

Lieutenant Lasset: Teleplay

Overone

A Stage Play

He is lying on her bosom, perhaps from a side angle; they talk, as they often do. He is about fifteen-years old.

Act 1

Mother/Thea: Did you enjoy practice-driving this morning?

Son/Will: Here is the thing, Mother: Do you remember the concrete carrier that took the left lane—off, some distance in front of us?

Thea: Yes.

Will: He raised a rooster-tail of water spray when he drove briefly on the rumble-strip, where water was left from an earlier rain.

Thea: Did it make a rainbow?

Will: No, just a rooster tail, a large one; it went far up into the air, which was all the more striking because the weather was pleasant and sunny, and the road was dry.

Thea: So. What?

Will: I thought I saw time-eternal, and I was in it.

Thea: Is eternity past or present?

Will: You have posed a false dichotomy: Eternity is all of time.

Thea: Until it ends.

Will: Until it ends, as it might end—for part of the world, but not all of the world.

Thea: That is true: Part of the world will never end. You know, people live their lives badly within false dichotomies: They may say, “Shall I have cake or pudding for dessert?”

Will: The difference between them is minuscule, yet people may think they have answered one of life’s eternal questions.

Thea: What is nothing?

Will: Who am I?

Thea: Overone.

Will: That is my name.

Thea: It is who you are.

Will: Let’s do our three-line poems now. Describe something in two lines, and I will say what it is—more or less—for the third.

Thea: Corn stalks quiver in the breeze

The air is so clear

Will: After the storm

Thea: A thin ripple of clouds

Spread low across the western sky

Will: Vermilion lined with gold, in autumn

Thea: Suddenly, street sounds fall

Through the open window

Will: Because it is spring

Thea: The poplar grove that edges into sumac

There on the rise where the sun sets most of the time

Will: Makes a crazed crackle on the edge of the world

Thea: The furrowed field

Turns to mounds and dimples under snow

Will:  When winter comes

Thea: The wind gust that lifted the morning haze

Spread yellow leaves out over the road

Will:  A thousand confetti

Thea: Now, do your new one.

Will: Crickets go krii-ket

        Frogs go rib-bet

      What do I do?

Thea: The idylls of the gods were not lost on you.

Will: When we command the very forces of the world, how can we not know what it is?

Thea: The beauty of it.

Will: I am a demigod, then, Mother?

Thea: Yes, something like that. You are an entity, containing the Trinity; yes, I think so—but, in truth….

Will: “I don’t care.” You always say that, Mother: Learn to care!

Thea: I care about larger things: The fate of the world, the beauty of the Earth, instilling proper values in my child. Let us make high-sounding speeches about those things.

Will: Let’s. I might say damn or hell though.

Thea: Yes, curse, but not too strong, though. I like the way my father cursed. You learned it from him. I miss him; I miss his folkways and peculiarities.

Will: His foibles and charms. You’re half right: He was a storyteller.

Thea: That’s his expression: “You’re half right.” He was a dialectician.

Will: He could adopt different ways of speaking?

Thea: No, he reasoned with precision. It is a term of philosophy.

Will: Explain.

Thea: (In the air, she marks the points of an inverted triangle) There is this, that, and the other thing—he     always settled on the other thing.

Will: Okay, I am a writer: I start writing history; then, I write fiction; then, I write historical fiction to cap it off, just because I know the other parts so well.

Thea: Correct. I have invented this, the supreme dialectic: Everything—everything—has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything we know in this realm.

Will: Does it describe human history? Anyway, it is a sad one; where is the dynamic energy? End, kaput, sayonara!

Thea: The end of things as we know them is the beginning of things as we don’t know them.

Will: What if the end is nothing?

Thea: We won’t know, and we won’t care.

Will: I suppose. What if all that we know is a staged illusion?

Thea: The bad dream of other entities?

Will: Or good one.

Thea: If this life, this world, this realm is a staged illusion, live like a philosopher king.

Will: Because it’s everything you’re ever going to have, no matter how real or unreal.

Thea: If this existence is not a staged illusion….

Will: Live like a philosopher king—and hope that it will continue on and that you will become some kind of ecstatic entity in a place with glory and power that goes on forever.

Thea: Some kind of, some kind of something—better than nothing.

Will: What is my role in the world?

Thea: You will manage the eschaton.

Will: Eschaton is what?

Thea: The end-time.

Will: Will the world reckon time by my name when I am gone? I assume this is one of my trainings, and the end is not soon.

Thea: You are immortal; you will not be gone.

Will: When I have left this mortal shell—this mortal shell.

Thea: I would rather not speak of such things. Choose one of these: Julius Caesar or The Holy Redeemer.

Will: Julius Caesar.

Thea: You have the reckoning of time within you.

Will: All of time?

Thea: Time itself.

It takes his breath away; he weeps briefly.

Will: Let this cup pass from me.

Thea: This cup will not pass from you; this is not Gethsemane; we are redeemed; it is easier now.

Will: I will send people to hell? Am I master of this world?

Thea: Is it your wish to send people to hell?

Will: No.

Thea: Exactly what part of “master of this world” do you not understand?

Will: You are a smarty.

Thea: It’s lonely at the top.

She plays with his hair, stringing it out at the sides with her fingertips.

Will: Life is one good meal at a time—and a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine—or two.

Lifting himself from her side, he turns toward her.

Will: Sometimes you try to make me look like a clown.

Thea: You are poking me in the knee with your thing. Be careful.

He lies back down.

Will: Sorry, I forgot—I am at that age.

Thea: Your eyes are puffy; your face is swollen; your skin is oily; your hormones are flaring—you are the definition of awkward. In a year-and-a-half, you will be a man; you will get over this. Technically, you will be a man, but still my child for a while.

Will: Handsome as ever?

Thea: More so.

I get great pleasure from poetry. Do You?

Will: Number two on my list.

Thea: Number one is Onan?

Will: Yes.

Thea: Get away from me!

Will: No. Understand me!

Thea: Do you think of males your own age or females your own age?

Will: Onan and homosexuality share the beauty of sameness. Self-love, similar-love, other-love: Homosexuals dwell in similar love; they have an overwhelming advantage for compassion and understanding.

Thea: You would think—statistical advantage anyway. I want you to remember all of this when you are older. Don’t pretend you didn’t know. Right now, you wouldn’t know what to do with a clitoris if it poked you in the face.

Will: However, long term, my thoughts run to females. By the way, I would rub it with my pubis until we both felt very nice.

Thea: You are not a clown. I wish you well on those adventures, perhaps five years from now.

Will: It’s a plan.

Thea: You feel like a lost soul at this time of life; I have felt it, too.

Will: Lost souls meet erotic ecstasy. What could go wrong?

He intertwines the fingers of both hands and pretends to convulse with electric shock.

Thea: Almost everything.

Will: Nature lays down a gauntlet, and we succeed or fail based on the whims and desires of the moment; it is mean and a little stupid.

Thea: It is a kind of test.

Will: Mother, tell me why these words run through my head: “The world turns on a star at the edge of Heaven.” It seems a prayer, a slogan, or an incantation.

Thea: It is the order of things.

Will: I have always asked myself, growing up: Is it the outer edge or the inner edge?

Thea: We are at the edge of Heaven: What difference does it make?

Will: (long silence)

Thea: The inner edge.

Will: This is Heaven?

Thea: This complex world, it is Heaven.

Will: Is this some proving ground for lost souls?

Thea: Have you ever thought about this observation: There is no accounting for genius?

Will: Only that it must be true, for genius appears without apparent cause.

Thea: There is some accounting.

Will: (In a seasoned, deeper voice than his own, adopting the tremble of a family elder proclaiming truth.) Lost souls and demigods.

Thea: Do you mean lost to salvation or lost in the world?

Will: Lost in the world, lost in oneself, lost between here and there.

Thea: What is Heaven?

Will: The great unity of souls who exist in happiness and a permanent state of grace. Think of a turbulent time; it has just passed. You sit down to read a book; there is a light source, perhaps a window. You sit to read; you sip coffee from a cup that is set upon a side table—one that you refinished yourself and were proud of. You notice that the air is not damp as it was the day before. The air is dry, and the breeze is cool, the one that comes in from a nearby window, half open. It is an hour or so past sunrise. You have the living, visceral memory of the past days that were troubled, and now you sit cozily, ready to read a volume of fiction—existence has reached a certain perfection, with this cozy feeling, and the breeze, the book, and so on. That is how it feels: a turbulent time—this life—followed by eternal rest.

Thea: But that is not everything: You have the memory of everything, both good and bad, the history of the world, everything that was; it is present to you, its vivid reality, and you come to peace and joy and wisdom—that is the state of grace, the feeling of rest.

Will: It is not boring, it is not dull, it is not repetitive. It is blissful, an eternal moment like that; after effort, you feel that things have come round right. It is unknowable and yet to come—where is our bliss here and now?

Thea: Believing this is as close as we come to bliss here and now. My question is: What have we to do with the Heavenly souls?

Will: We nurture them. Will they end with the end of time?

Thea: No. Say, “the end of the world” instead. It’s usually what we mean.

Will: Are the heavenly souls the neutrinos that fill the universe?

Thea: The answer is almost certainly no.

Will: Let us not think of that: One life at a time.

Thea: You’re smarter than you look.

Will: And I look smart, too. I must be a genius.

Thea: No doubt.

Will: Lost souls and demigods!

Thea: As we perfect our craft, we bring ourselves to our end, the end of this aspect of time, our time, the end of our usefulness.

Will: It is mean and a little stupid!

Thea: (She hugs him from behind, with her arms draped from shoulder to ribs.)

Will: Earth is the most beautiful place in the universe. Why are we changing Gods?

Thea: (long silence)

Will: We aren’t. Who is watching the world?

Thea: It is autonomic. You. No one.

Will: (breathes heavily)

Thea: Did you have a good bowel movement this morning?

Will: (slightly cynical) Yes, Mommy; thank you for asking.

Thea: The world is better for it.

Will: God—fully divine and fully human—I will go mad.

Thea: You have named yourself.

Will: Jesus!

Thea: You have named your other self. Holy Ghost.

Will: Stop. Besides, language has moved on: We say Holy Spirit now.

Thea: Holy Spirit. Fully divine and fully human. It has been the ruin of better men than you. (She rests her clasped hands on top of his head.)

Will: (standing up) I doubt it.

Thea: It’s an expression.

Will: “To thine own self be true.” “All’s well that ends well.” I can recite the wisdom of the world; yet I am not wise.

Thea: You are Willie Shake-a-spore.

Will: I think you have named a fern, Mother, or the sex organ of a bee. William Shakespeare.

Thea: Him too (obviously joking). Make your wisdom. Do it now. I will start you off with a stimulus.

Will: I shall try.

Thea: The beginning of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons.

Will: In the spring, there is a certain slant of light that puts sunshine on our breakfast table. I shall call this next thing a dalliance: You might laugh.

Thea: I won’t laugh.

Will: I have a beautiful dalliance in my mind: ham and eggs and toast, or oatmeal with butter and brown sugar?

Thea: Ha ha.

Will: Traitor. The rolling hills where we live have just turned green. There are pastures, other people’s pastures. Chilled, moist air fills the landscape. If you walk into the breeze, it drives the chill into you. I am happy for the moisture come back to the air: The dry air of winter cracked my skin. Sometimes, in the spring and early summer, roiling clouds cross over here in a hell of hurry. I am dazzled and dazed and a little afraid: the tall clouds change shapes rapidly; the top parts grow and shrink and threaten to drop their rain; they move across a blue sky, and the clouds are both glowing at the edges and shadowy within. This storm of wind and clouds that moves across the meadow beyond our home belongs to me; it is mine, as a son, a daughter, a mother, a father of humankind—forget divinity. It is mine. It is the dynamic force of the world. Own it. Smell the ozone on the wind; hold the rain in your hand: It is yours.

There is a slant of light in spring that puts the sun on our breakfast table. Flowers push through the ground around our house and the outlying sheds and under the boxelder trees that cover the property. The honeysuckle, wild olive, and Juneberry bushes bud, and, at the wet edges of the land, pussy-willows send out their yellow anthers.

Thea: What breakfast has your father made for you, short-order-cook that he is?

Will: Ham and eggs and toast and a cup of black coffee.

Thea: We sit with you and enjoy the same.

Will: Yes. The exquisite beauty of the moment: It’s all there is; it’s all there ever was!

Thea: (Claps her hands) Bravo! I am Thea Overone. Have you ever thought about that?

Will: Leave out the “a” and what have you got?

Thea: Your father is Twain Overone.

Will: Ranking below you and me in the cosmos. Trinity upon trinity. Whaaaat? The mysteries of life unfold. Gee willikers, Mommy. However, this does not conform to the guidelines of the Magisterium.

Thea: The teaching authority of Christendom. They know what they know: They don’t know what they don’t know.

Will: Enough said. I am Will Overone—read id, the Freudian id. No wonder the world is messed up.

Thea: You have been through death and transfiguration, and you still have a sense of humor.

Will: That—is an undiscovered country.

Thea: Which you don’t fully understand yet, because you are only beginning to understand who you are.

Will: I am older than Methuselah.

Thea: You are older and wiser than most of us.

Will: Mother, I have noticed something; it is upsetting and odd. I love the great artists of the earth, all of them, in all manner of expression.

Thea: Yes?

Will: At the creative edge comes a death-wish. They spend themselves, and when they have spent themselves, they are the least here. They are shadows of themselves; they edge toward nothing, and yet they give to the world great beauty. Why is it like this?

Thea: They have seen the eternal light; it shines on them, and it calls to them. On the other hand: What the hell is rest for? Rest! You don’t have to keep working! You don’t owe anybody the expenditure of your energy to the last ounce.

Will: How about this: Artists are not highborn and lack the knowledge of how to exist in the world.

Thea: The highborn are not highborn; sycophants, psychopaths, and scoundrels, most of them. Greatness unmoors the soul; it matters not who you are. Take some rest; come back to it another day.

Will: Peaceful sleep sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Thea: Very nice. By the way, an artist is anyone reaching for the stars, but this is required: I am going to use the generic you.

Will: Understood.

Thea: You must start with a blind aspiration.

Will: The will, the desire, the dream—raw, born from intuition.

Thea: Name moments from life or art or someone else’s life, minds you visited for study, when you were defined, or that other person was defined.

Will: Charles Dederich, Synanon, Northern California, Mid-nineteen seventies. Jim Jones, People’s Temple, Jonestown, Guyana, late-nineteen seventies. The movie Blade Runner, 1982: In it, a psychiatric screener asks a man a question: “You are walking across a desert; you see a large, land-based tortoise on its back, flailing its legs in the air. What do you do?” He is a near-human, but not quite human. He is at a loss; he doesn’t know—I never saw anyone fail an ethics test before. That bit, that little moment of empathy, was left out of his near-human intellectual and emotional capacity.

Thea: Left out on purpose.

Will: Yes. Also, Nowhere Man, John Lennon, nineteen sixty-six. Also, same movie, Blade Runner, we listen to the Replicant creator talk about the implications of his work; he created them, he altered the course of human events; he had no regrets; he shrugged—more or less—though one could see it was dicey: The future he created. In it, one of the replicants from the race that he created killed him in a fit of impotent rage. The future that he created killed him.

Thea: Never do that. Never create a future that will kill you. Each of these makes me sick at heart, except Nowhere Man, but I kind of get it—someone above it all, not fully invested, yet the world could come in and take him for a hell of a ride at any given moment.

Will: Mile Markers; they tell us who we are before we even know it.

Thea: Self-fulfilling prophecies?

Will: Revelations.

Thea: The journey is everything, what you experience, what you know, who and what you love. The artist—you—you start from a moment of blind aspiration, and you feel with the profoundest awareness every step of the way. And one day, you arrive.

Will: You can’t start in the middle, the finest schools, lovely family, happy life?

Thea: Sadly, no. Knowledge is easy to acquire—but vision is not.

Will: (His eyes well lightly.) Do they know when they get there? Do they get it? Do they understand?

Thea: (She kisses him softly with deeply puckered lips, her face in perfect profile and his straightforward.) No.

Will: We love them for what they do. Are you unmoored?

Thea: No.

Will: Why did you beat me as a child?

Thea: I did not beat you; your grandmother hit you with a switch she took from the spirea bush at the end of the porch from time to time. It was almost playful.

Will: Why did you let her beat me?

Thea: She had a will of her own.

Will: It hurt. Final judgment goes like this: If the difference between what you could have been and what you were is too great, you fail. Feeling like a failure is a hell of its own.

Thea: I’m sorry.

Will: The God of the cosmos said, “I’m sorry,” some rolling thunder, please. Are you fully human?

Thea: No.

Will: I am—it hurt.

Thea: Suck it up and sally forth.

Will: Is “sally forth” your best choice of words?

Thea: Yes.

Will: Sally forth. I want to say, too: This is understanding; it is a place called understanding. Spend yourself; take it to the edge; but step back and be stupid for a while. (Adopts a rhythmic voice.) Don’t need no more of that same old corn pone. I want your best. But take it easy sometimes.

Thea: Corn pone: cornbread with no sugar, prepared in an iron skillet. Mmm.

Will: (Over-pronounces all the words.) Corn pone and chicken cacciatore: now, there’s a meal.

Now, they sit side by side in overstuffed chairs.

Thea: There are two forces in the world.

Will: Good and evil.

Thea: No.

Will: Time and love.

Thea: No. (Long silence, then hints.) God by another mother.

Will: Time and understanding.

Thea: Yes. (Will begins to feel feverish and slightly chilled. This obsessive remembering has exhausted him. He lies on the floor by his mother’s feet in a loose fetal configuration. She reaches down and runs her fingers through his hair and stops to feel his forehead. She says in a declarative voice, not a questioning one.) Too much.

Will: Speak, Mother.

Thea: When you go to that empty place in your soul.

Will: You know what nothing is.

Thea: And yet there is something. There is a certain longing, and you know what eternity is: nothing and everything. This epoch, that era, a particular dispensation: The history of the world.

Will: And ice cream sundaes on Saturday afternoons.

Thea: Yes. Every moment of joy that every human being has experienced. You own it; it’s yours, the cumulative experience of every human being, felt viscerally. Hate, love, war, rivalry, understood as particular and real.

Will: Were the bad parts necessary?

Thea: The human experience was necessary. Artists, visionaries, philosophers got us closer to the truth.

Will: I am starting to feel better. I am calming down.

Thea: (She leans over and looks him in the face.)

Will: We are facing a transformation, a new dimension, not heaven, not hell, not earth.

Thea: We feel it within us; we know it. We sense the gentle power of what is to come.

Will: The power of everything that was and everything that could be, within each person a dynamic force that cannot be fathomed.

Act 2

Twain, Will’s father, enters.

Will: Uh, oh, tag team, tag team—I’m running.

Twain takes him by the shoulders and hugs him hard from behind.

Will: Be careful, I am at a vulnerable crossroads, Mother says.

Twain: At what stage of life would that not be true? I don’t care. The child is in the man; you need to get over that particular mind-fuck. Change, grow, heal, become you.

 Will: Daddy, your language is too coarse; we are delicate souls. 

Twain: (Twain says the following with precision and force into one of Will’s ears.) We struggle to use language. We are spirit beings. You are more human than we. We love language, but we do not always say things right.

      You are the second coming—this is the end of the world.

Will: (He cries and talks through his anguish.) Where is my palace?

Twain: They were all taken.

Will: Here we are, on a gravel road on the edge of the county. I have no scepter—when the mullein is ripe, I shall take one from the pasture. It is a fitting staff, no? 

Twain: Saint Joseph is always posed with that lily-on-a-stem.

Will: I shall take a mullein, then.

Twain: Ostentation is failed greatness.

      (Twain turns Will around, and Will touches Twain with the flat of his hand in the middle of his chest.)

Will: Greatness is here.

      (Both parents appreciate the sweetness and grace of the moment, and, in their separate places, become misty-eyed.)

Will: (continues): What Yeats said about the second coming…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                  …doesn’t really apply, does it?

Twain: You can slouch toward Bethlehem if you want to, but the deed is done. People invent phrases, men and women invent phrases to approximate the truth. They are whistling in the dark—at best—at the very best.

Will: Why do you say that?

Twain: You are the truth.

Will: “The way, the truth, and the life.” It gives me a chill.

Twain: The truth—all that matters.

Will takes a position in front of his father now, his back to Twain’s front; Will lets himself fall full force onto Twain. His father must hug him hard from behind to brace both of them and keep them from falling to the floor.

Will pleads: How will I do this, Daddy?

Twain: You will work into it. Look how much you have learned today. In addition, I don’t know. It’s your territory.

Will: Leading up to it, people will know—they will start eating each other. Morality and ethics will not hold.

Twain makes the world go away except for the three of them who suddenly exist only in a gray void.

Twain: Did people start to eat each other?

Will: No. Bring the world back.

It comes back.

Will: (continues) You are a traffic cop on the road to heaven, a glorified traffic cop—also, a very humble deity. How did you learn that trick?

Twain: I can’t remember. In some months, maybe a year or so—don’t know—we will have a vacation in San Francisco. We will meet a Saint. Be nice.

Thea: When have we not been nice?

Twain: You will be tempted: a great being—but a lesser one—you will test his metal. The prick in you will come out.

Thea: I am a woman; I can’t be a prick.

Twain: Trust me. We will do the hokey family routine to put him at ease.

Will: Aw, shucks, Pappa.

Twain: Exactly. Still, judge the moment; the family we will share time with may exceed our expectations.

Will: Do the two of you live in other people’s lives the way I do?

Thea: Do you mean be absorbed for a time in another person’s life?

Will: That is what I mean.

Thea: Yes, it is a great joy.

Twain: Never heard of it.

Will: You do it subliminally, I guess.

Twain: Perhaps, give us an example.

Will: I am living someone’s life now, mind sharing. Listen for twenty minutes, and I will tell you a story. If his thoughts do not fit the story-telling form, I will alter them to make his memories tell a tale. Some parts may be fragmented, and incomplete as free association can be.

Thea: Understood. Where are we?

Will: In a café in San Francisco. I am going to say “I” for “he.” At this moment, I am remembering his late childhood /early adolescence, growing up, and his journey to the West.

I sat on a ladder that was leaned against the wall, outside the house, just below the gable of our upstairs rooms—our, being that of my three brothers and me. The two girls were older and had left the house, so it was my three brothers and I living in it, with our parents. I was nine years old. For the first time, I became aware that I could see through the country section—meaning a square mile—to our friends’ house, that is, the friends of my next-older brother and me. I am the youngest. Our friends were fraternal twins, who lived half a mile away as the crow flies, but by road it was an eighth of a mile west, and slightly more than a half mile south.

In their field once, between the pasture and the edge of the cedar woods, they invited us to see a dead cow. The four of us stood there and studied it. My brother and I had never seen such a thing. You could say it was ugly and disturbing, but it is a fact of life—one life form living off another. It was mounded, not lightly covered, but piled high, with small white maggots. It was not much of a cow anymore, mostly consumed as it was, and writhing with an impossibly large load of maggots.

Anyway, I had not known that I could view their house from mine—it was always a trip over the roads or across rolling fields, some pastures, some gone wild, hosting a great variety of thorny bushes that we called scrub, with a stream that ran most of the time, unless it was an especially arid July, and it went dry. It ran east all the way to the river—the river flowed south and was three miles from our house; clearly the land had a mild downslope headed that way.

I studied philosophy in university, and I came here to San Francisco when I was twenty-eight. Two friends and I packed ourselves and our belongings into a mid-sized sedan and drove here. When we first started to wind our way up into the Rocky Mountains, driving from the Great Lakes, I was sure the pronunciation of the place name on the sign was Medichini Bow, but it was Medicine Bow—doctoring, pharmacy—Medicine. I was too fancy for my own good: If only I had recalled some of the Western movies I watched on TV as a kid.

I am sitting now beside the sidewalk wall, about three feet high, capped with a concrete slab—well, it has a peak and slopes gently downward on both sides of that center ridge. Is that a slab? Still, people sit on it with their boney asses; they sit down all over it, hanging their legs in, or hanging their legs out toward the sidewalk, or they straddle the middle with their butt crack, pull their knees up to their chest, two in a wall opening, and talk all day about nothing—if they are actually exploring the possibility of nothingness, that would not be a bad conversation.

This poem is running in my brain, by W B Yeats—for your information, I have not fallen out of love with anyone, and love has not got old; I simply like this poem.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars [fireplace grates],

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

It is odd and funny and comforting how we remember things, how things come to us at times; the synapses of different feelings and thoughts and sights must lodge near each other in the brain. I often think of windless summer days at our home, way out in the farmland of the Great Lakes, way out in the farmland.

There we were, with the big world around us—I knew it from books and movies and television, and I knew that we occupied this little place in it. I think about how I was not grown up yet. We were in our schoolroom, which held both seventh and eighth grade, at a Catholic elementary school, bussed there thirteen miles from our home in the countryside. I think about how I pointed out the state of Florida on a map of the United States. I said it looked like something, and my friend, standing beside me, misunderstood. He said, yes, it does, but I meant that it looked like a cow’s teat; it swells on each side just where a cow’s teat does.

My older brothers milked cows in the morning, but I never had to because the local creameries decided that they did not want unfiltered milk anymore—that is, by the time my next older brother and I were mature enough to milk the cows. The thing is, whenever I see a small holy font placed on a door jamb for dipping your fingers in, I think of this sequence of things, because a pretty large map was mounted on a wall near the door jamb, which had that small holy water font on it. The thing is, I could not even talk about the other thing, the penis of the male human body, because I was not ready yet, so I let the mistake stand. The mixed feelings this brings up matter a little less each time I remember it. I forgive myself for not braving the moment. It’s life; that’s the way it goes. It’s okay.

Our minds work like this all day; it’s kind of pleasant. Sometimes it’s better than watching TV or reading a book, especially when I feel and remember windless summer days in the sometimes too-hot upstairs rooms of our home, during summers with my family, and I can connect all the thoughts and all the feelings, and all the memories, mixed with desires—and I’m grown up now, and I know what they all mean, and I can say just about anything I want.

Getting back to the look and feel of the café, I sat here on my second day in the city. I thought vaguely of café society in Paris and of the beat poets in San Francisco, who slightly preceded me. I thought of Paris, where people had great disputes about small points of philosophy: What is absurd? What is existential? In what manner are we free, and at what cost do we arrive there? How do we hold it all together? I thought of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as I sat in this chair in this café, both then and now. Do people have philosophical conversations in cafés in San Francisco, or do they refer only vaguely to the world of ideas?

It is a coastal desert; here, we do not need walls or window screens to separate us from the street. There are no flying insects, not enough to speak of. You leave the windows of your home or apartment open all day, and you might see two house flies circling endlessly in the middle of the main room, in a haze of autumn light: It’s too cold for them. Well, yes, they do have philosophical conversations in the cafés of San Francisco.

Here, Skyler, my mind-share man, is working on his anger about over-inflated car tires. He does not care much about anything he is thinking here. He is just letting his mind run and freely jump from one thing to another.

He overinflated my tires, that passive-aggressive psychopath at the oil-change station. What? He has one number in his head: forty-four pounds per square inch? He is just north of passably handsome. He has dark peach fuzz over his upper lip. His hormones have not come in right, or he is just made that way. He is approaching his late twenties. He is expressionless, which makes him seem cool and detached. You think it is the result of wisdom and life experience and professionalism. The fact is, there is not quite anybody home—that’s all. Nine pounds over. I have one tire that has a slow leak, so every two weeks, I check the pressure in it, on my own; they were all too hard except the one that has a slow leak; that one only got down to about normal. I had to let air out of the other tires and add a little air to the one with the slow leak, using a portable compressor that I plug into an extension cord and take out to our car, parked in the driveway.

Someone like that, a psychopath, may develop a certain cold, detached way of talking and gain a foothold on the world stage. It’s like this: American pragmatism meets political psychopath; it does not go well. Cult of the personality is anathema to pragmatists. Spare us the big shot falderal; we don’t like people like that. We want to go home and have a simple, honest meal with simple, honest folk: Take the hysterics, the histrionics, the hate, the exaggeration, the bullshit, and stick it up your ass. Go fuck yourself, Jack! Yak yourself to death on the world stage; knock yourself out! PLEASE! To quote a song lyric, “Yakety yak: Don’t talk back!” Let me change that: “Don’t look back—they might be gainin’ on ya!” …A little random here

Religious leaders on the political right oppose abortion, but they do not always approve of those who come into the world, right out of the womb, just as they are. My considered response is: Find the courage of your convictions or get the hell out of the trade! Because it’s phony; you are not radically honest; your belief system is full of half-measures. The road to hell is paved with half-measures. In addition, you have become addicted to self-serving lies—you no longer speak with authority or conviction. You have become ignoble. “Will it pass muster in a court of law?” is not the same as truth, radical, liberating, authentic truth, spoken from the profoundest understanding of what it is to be alive.

As a schoolboy, I memorized the Gettysburg address. Now I am thinking of these words: “The world will little note, nor long remember….” He would have been right had he stopped there, but it was a term of art, hokum in other words. He took it and made the most memorable speech in American history.

It was my second day in the city, and I sat in this café and thought about how hard it was on my feet, going up and down the hills of San Francisco—the trouble comes with holding yourself upright while walking down a hill on concrete sidewalks—you nearly lose muscle control, because you have exhausted the tendons in your heels.

Thea: Floppy feet. We must go there next year to have our floppy feet.

Will: We shall. Here is one more thing I want to summarize about him. He is always getting even. With him, it is an art. He does it in his mind; he does not do it out loud. Remember, I am going to tell you something that he would never say, unless it were a serious contest of words, which is something he never does. He simply centers himself by rhetorically setting things right; he gets even—remember, it is art.

Thea: A centering technique. You are his Plato; you will share the master’s method with the world.

Will: Yes, I am Plato to his Socrates—I am the explainer. Do you know, Mother and Daddy, that when I read Plato’s Apology, The Apology of Socrates, it changed my life? I saw myself in the words of another for the first time.

Thea: Beautiful, and sad, and poignant—and wrong—what happened to Socrates!

Twain: One who did not respect the gods as the authorities would have wished.

Will: Somewhere in ancient literature, I remember some folk having a dinner of something like Beef Wellington, only the meat was lamb—I was amazed. The cook in the kitchen put something like bread over a pot of stew toward the end of simmering and baked it, and they had a meal.

Thea: Satyricon—I think it’s in Satyricon—a genuine masterpiece of defiant, gorgeous, and lush writing.

Twain: I read it out loud at least once to you both.

Thea: Continue this thing you were saying about him.

Will: He hears that Franklin Graham has said something bad about gay people again. He imagines himself in an interview with a journalist. The character—the internal voice—he has created for himself is the greatest writer of the past five-hundred years, perhaps the greatest literary stylist the world has even known.

Journalist: How do you feel when Franklin Graham makes pronouncements about gay people, as he did last week? They are sinful; they engage in sin when they have sex, it is offensive to God.

Skyler: What I honestly think is, his father had certain oratorical skills. I think this about him specifically: another D-level celebrity with an opinion. I don’t like people who talk about whole classes of people and characterize them one way or another. But here is my question for you. You speak to me of some dumb son of a bitch whose name I barely know. I am the greatest literary stylist of the past five-hundred years. Why do you not speak to me of method, of craft, of art? Do you want to get yourself on all the news sheets on the internet because you got me to say something about this stupid bastard who only ever expresses judgements about whole classes of people? When I was in college, that was the definition of stupid. When you were in college, what was the definition of stupid?

Journalist: The same, exactly the same.

Skyler: That is my point. Do you even have a literary question? Did you do your homework? Yes, I take about a year and a half to complete a story. Most people think you get up in the morning, and you work at writing. I don’t. I take a drive to Stinson Beach, the twisty road on the hills along the coast. I enjoy that. I am not an “environmentally friendly” artist, am I? Then, I have some coffee at a little café around there. And I drive back, and I think. It’s peaceful and lovely and relaxing, though not particularly environmentally friendly, as I said.

Journalist: Why don’t you interview yourself; you’re obviously some kind of genius.

Skyler: Yeah, why don’t I?

Will: He folded his intense dislike of someone into a not very sincere argument with a journalist. That’s the method. His judgement about the D-level celebrity stands strong from that conversation, and the fact that he likes to drive and think, not just sit down and write.

Twain: I think he loves journalists; he has no issue with them; he simply created this scenario to clear his head and set things right in his mind.

Thea: He truly has something interesting to say about life. Well, I am sharing a life now; she is long deceased, although our lives, mine and hers, did cross in time. I will share it with you. I shall use the third person.

Will: Her memory lingers on in the places that she occupied.

Thea: Yes, fiercely. My story is rather short. I am driving our car past an old Grange Hall. When I was a girl, I attended wedding receptions that took place mostly on the upper floor. It was a large, open hall. Downstairs, in a sort of half-basement, you got food and beverages, appropriate to the occasion. As I drive, I notice the covered entry located at the front corner of the building. I wonder at the large number of wasp nests under its roof. The structure is open, and the roof of the corner entry is covered in green shingles; the underside of the roof and the posts that support it are painted bright white. The daylight bounces around the underside of the roof so that it is intensely bright. I wonder what it is about that bright underside of the roof that makes wasps want to build their nests there. Why not place a nest in the shade, instead of this bright white place, whose intensity will blind anything going to and fro. I remember a memorial wall somewhere in that place, perhaps at the top of the stairs that takes you from the first-floor half-basement to the second, where there is a large, open dance floor, made of wood.

Grange, by the way, is an old agricultural society that promotes knowledge of farming and good practices. There used to be a plaque proclaiming the building’s original purpose, but it is now gone, and the hall is in private hands. There is a middle-aged woman in a slightly faded black-and-white photograph. She is placing whole, butchered chickens into a large boiling pot, which sits atop an open, wood-fueled fire, supported with stones; this cooking pot is somewhere on the property, not far from the building and the road that passes by. Two elderly men in overalls are holding a rather long plank which contains eight, whole butchered chickens.

These people are having some sort of gathering as autumn approaches, a dinner gathering. That woman putting chickens into the boiling pot is completely lost to history. We will not remember her name. She is gone. A nameless functionary of time, lost except for an unexplained photo in an old hall at the corner of this and that road. What did she do to propel the world forward?

She knew all the things that I just said. She knew that she would not be remembered in the history of the world, but she came to wisdom. She did it on her own. She stood and looked at that photograph thirty years later. It was a warm, sunny day. The July sun had dried the fields. The crickets chirped as the afternoon wore on, and the breeze subsided.

She knew it, this thing, when she was the woman in the photo, and she knew it, standing, looking back at herself. This is something like her thoughts: “I stood there putting chickens in a pot, and I stand here now. The same sun shines: I breathe the same air. The landscape is forlorn, and I am here. I went to many church services and did many civic things. I considered the words of the minister and looked out at the yellowed, July fields, full of overripe hay; the smell of summer was on the dry, still air, and I thought to myself—I thought to myself: Why not be kind?”

Will: This is why we live: to earn heaven, to come to wisdom, to increase the store of good. She was a great soul.

Thea: That close, that close to sainthood. She laid down a personal marker in the wisdom of the ages.

Twain: And the world will never quite be the same.

Thea: (Speaking to Will) Earlier your father said, Whistling in the dark. Idioms are hard; I am afraid I may misunderstand someone’s meaning and say or do the wrong thing.

Will: Give me an example.

Thea: Old-Blood-and-Guts sent soldiers to their certain deaths at Normandy that day. ‘Old-Blood-and-Guts’ does not explain itself—it stands in for whatever general sent them to their deaths that day, while facing an entrenched German army, when their amphibious vehicles delivered them at the shore. A more difficult one is pissing in the wind or pie in the sky.

Will: Pissing in the wind refers to men; it is a mistake you should make only once; you will learn your lesson very quickly; it suggests a useless exercise: He can’t get a loan to buy a house when he has been working just three months; he’s pissing in the wind. Pie in the sky by and by is an empty promise: If you do me a favor in this matter, I will owe you one, for sure, definitely, you can count on me. But, of course, you cannot count on that person—pie in the sky.

Thea: I know where the bear shit in the buckwheat, I know my ass from a hole in the ground, I am clued in, I get it. 

Will: (thumb and forefinger gesture) That close, Mother, that close.

Act 3

For general readers, what follows is mostly a mini-musical in the middle of my four-act play. The scene is a converted horse-riding stable on the farm of the Overone family. Students and faculty from a nearby Arts Academy put on a show. The audience consists of friends and neighbors of the Overones as well as arts patrons from the entire region. Be patient with the stage direction; it is required to make Act 3 work.

Two days later on the Overone Farm

The stage or film director and other professionals must make most of the decisions here; these are guidelines and suggestions. There will be professional performances, from among the pieces listed below, starting with Little Boxes, but the professional performances should be preceded by performers talking, practicing, and settling into what will become well-polished stage performances, with some improvising; that is, there is a place for performers to talk to the audience about their inspirations. Two examples are provided: one about a sculpture at The Louvre, Nike of Samothrace or Winged Victory of Samothrace, and another about the award-winning film 24 Frames.

The family lives thirty-five miles from a renowned performing arts academy. The programs include dance, acting, and music performance. The Overones have made a one-time large horse-riding hall into a performance hall, with sprung floors and a stage that can be wheeled anywhere in the space and locked into place. The space is equipped with theater lighting. The seating could be bleachers, or folding chairs, or permanently installed seating, as from a demolished cinema, for example. Students and faculty from the nearby performing arts academy and guests and their families fill up the space.

We will spend some time before the musical pieces with the performers as they gather, talk, and practice; performers of this entertainment should choose an appropriate number of pieces from the list below. They should be done with movement, like folk dance, pieces of classical dance, and modern dance. A standing chorus is unsuitable.

The look and feel of Angel City Chorale, when performing Africa by Toto, is energetic and wonderful—I hope at least this level of liveliness can be adopted for Act 3.

Performers can pick and choose the songs best suited to their talents and interests. They should not be limited to only these.

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Sonny Bono

Missed Connection by The Head and Heart

Gloryland (If you have friends in Gloryland who left because of pain…) By Ralph Stanley. This version can be seen on Youtube; he sings acapella, with the Clinch Mountain Boys: Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys -Gloryland

Simple Gifts by Joseph Brackett

Shortnin’ Bread by James Whitcomb Riley

The Dangling Conversation by Paul Simon

Poses by Rufus Wainwright

Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends by Kris Kristofferson

April Come She Will by Paul Simon

Dear Prudence by Paul McCartney and John Lennon

Once Upon Another Time by Sara Bareilles—the version performed at the Kennedy Center, with a small orchestra and two added singers.

I like the feel of Benedictus XII by Karl Jenkins in his Armed Man – A Mass for Peace; perhaps it can be implemented as an interlude.

Off some distance from the center, five singers, male and female, will tap dance to the song What do You do with a Drunken Sailor. This will not be featured but can be seen as an idea some performers have; they spontaneously decide to try it out. Other such practice pieces can be added around the performance hall.

In general, the performers will act as a flash-mob, maintaining waves of movement, or certain gatherings of activity, that allow folk dancing, beautifully, for Simple Gifts, for example. The stage is on lock-wheels; it is moved to the center of the space, which might look something like a basketball gym.

Performances move onto the stage (solo performers especially) and back into the group.

At a certain point, The flash-mob huddles in the middle of the main floor to allow several jazz or modern ballet numbers—the scaled-down orchestra may play part of Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring (Aaron Copland pieces) to allow for interpretations like those of Martha Graham, that is, at the periphery of the huddled flash-mob, perhaps moving up and over the stage at some point.

All the song interpretations should be spirited, lively, lush, beautifully coordinated among the choral voices and soloists—and those moving on the stage. One or two of them might be quiet, lyrical and haunting, such as the version of Gloryland cited above.

The performers are middle school and high school students, with mostly settled voices, from a nearby arts academy.

The friends who follow just here are siblings, who are now a trans-male named Sami and a trans-female named Nat. Will is on good terms with all the members, and they sometimes interact with him. They all speak in a kind of hip-hop, as much as possible—it seems to be random and about nothing, but always ends up being about something.

Sami: They stayed too long at the fair.

Nat: They lawyered up and talked among themselves, and the revolution came and went. And the world was utterly changed.

 Sami: The dumb fuckers didn’t even get it; the world was utterly changed.

 Will: (waves a finger to get in, and says, with artificial sadness and obvious overacting) They stayed too long at the fair.

 Sami: Lawyered up is in no way a reference to any ethnicity.

 Nat: Manhattan hoodlums.

 Sami: The Jew you killed at Buchenwald will remember your name.

 Will: He judged the tenor of the times.

 Sami: And the tenor of the times judged him.

 Nat: He was found wanting.

 Will: He was found wandering around out there, with blood on his hands. Dripping.

 Sami: A glory hole banger.

 Nat: What does that even mean? You cannot even know what that means. Besides, we may have mixed metaphors.

 Will: Is that like when a second orgasm chases right after the first one?

 Sami: Porn, it means porn. And uhm—uhm—yes. Find the Jew in you; find the person of color in you.

 Nat: Find the trans woman in you.

 Will: And shout it from the hills.

 Friend 1: Find the normal, the cisgender in you, and just try to fit in—please.

 Everyone shouts very loudly: Yay!

The young people practice the history of dance. They do a vaudeville, hands-across-knees routine, three of them, moving across the stage. Someone may use a shepherd’s hook, clumsily missing them while this happens:

Dancer 1: Shallow people running off at the mouth.

Dancer 2: Shallow people running off at the mouth.

Dancer 3: If you do what they say, what’s the best you can hope for?

Dancers 1, 2, and 3: Shallow people running off at the mouth.

Thea and Twain show the guests into the performance hall. It has the dimensions of the original building, a riding hall, now, with a wooden floor.

Thea: This is where we go to church.

Twain: No practiced rituals—church (gestures at the space).

There is no limit to the age of the people who have arrived for the evening’s entertainment. They may be members of a general audience, arts academy staff and their families, and parents and siblings of arts academy students. There should be no concern regarding casting for any characteristics of the person, except a decent level of skill for the tasks they will do, for example, sing and dance and speak intermittently.

Many people are around the place in different stages of practicing their routines and bits and running through their parts of several part choral songs. The activities in different parts of the hall should always be visually interesting. They are perfecting their performance. We drop in on different sets of practice groups or individuals.

Performer 1: He pursued the hollow trappings of fame and glory.

Performer 2: And he earned them.

Performer 1: He’s smarter than he looks.

Performer 2: He would have to be.

Performer 3: It wouldn’t take much.

Performer 1: I have nothing in common with that sniveling, penthouse brat!

All Performers: (long silence) Enough said.

I call this hip hop of the mind: The performers search within their true selves and express many things: insights, ideas, observations, wishes, hopes, disappointments, and truths about life in the performing arts.

They take turns, For example,

Actor 1: Your shy self says, “That is the best I have ever done—I am a genius. Your shy self says, “Bow down.” Those who know say, “Great, but it’s not good enough.”

They may use familiar expressions from music and literature to reflect gushy sentiments—some may reflect the end of the world and thoughts about God, using lines from songs, hymns, and whole refrains.

Actor 2: The world, the wisdom of the ages; I am but a poor boy whose story is seldom told.

The cast should invent them, even if awkward and amateurish—it is important that the artists express themselves at a personal level. Both polished and profound and unpolished and awkward examples should be allowed.

Here is one example. The speaker is animated, chopping the air with his hands; the performer speaks in a beat-style of plain-speech poetry. Any performer can cover this one. Other performers will invent their own beat-style pieces that work in a similar manner.

Performer:  At the Louvre, when I was four

I thought about an omelet and crusty bread

At the café that we had passed, not too, too far from the museum

But here I was in the Louvre, and there she was:

The Nike of Samothrace, a masterpiece of Hellenistic art

What is that? She is mounted on the stairway to heaven

It doesn’t go anywhere—the stairway

Well, it goes to her—maybe that’s somewhere

Shiny, carved-marble wings that go on forever

Twice as large as life. A masterpiece

I dreamed about this richly carved, imposing statue

Someone is watching over me: A Hellenistic angel

It’s a warm feeling that comes to me sometimes.

Her head is gone, and her arms aren’t there

But, at the age of four, from her

I got an overwhelmingly powerful feeling of safety and goodness

Ya gotta care about a damaged angel

On the stairway to heaven.

The following beat piece should be performed, as it matters to the progress of the story. It can be given by another performer.

Performer: Abbas Kiarostami saw God and made a movie

Greasy snow is on the tinted window of a car

The view we have is from the back seat

The greasy snow slips

The top part of the window becomes clear

Through it, I watch a yearling deer feeding on tall, wavy grass

Growing among a stand of poplar trees,

Furtive, wary, jumpy;

He continues to enjoy eating from the tall, wavy grass

That grows in the poplar grove.

Why am I remembering childhood and first experiences?

Well, why would it not be greasy snow

Sliding down the window of the back door of a car

Motorized window, warm, heavy snow sliding off it

Then, a yearling deer enjoys the hell out of life

As it stands and eats from the tall grass

A hundred fifty yards down the ditch and across the field from me

It is the first clumpy snowfall of the season, driven by a light wind 

The snow is sometimes blindingly heavy as it falls across the scene

Good art completes a moment you had a long time ago

You see it again because somebody represented it

And it completes a moment

And you don’t think about it anymore

It does not come to you when you are rinsing the dishes

The way it used to

The moment is complete,

And you are you, and life is life, and thoughts are sometimes sweet.

These bits by the performers, in their own words, will just end the setup to Act 3. Vocalists and musicians will from now perform the songs listed above. Those performances will be followed by a closing trumpet piece, described below.

This last segment, after the musical numbers, will include an exchange of words among a few characters, including the featured trumpet player. His is the last performance; it is coming up shortly.

The speech that follows should remain a fixed feature: A different cast member each time—if it plays well that way—will give it.

Performer: Do you know when you see a nice documentary, or read a good book or story, or read through a good magazine—you come away knowing this: The operative word is being; the subtext is nothingness. Artists—great ones—know the silent places in a story. They show us the empty pop bottle in a dimly-lit kitchen or linger while passing the camera along the baluster on the second floor, that is, the one that goes around the stairwell—and therein are a thousand stories and feelings and memories. They know this, too, great artists: With every truth we tell, every truth like this, our eyes sparkle with tears. What we mean is: I hope I am in the arms of God, and I hope this is the story I am supposed to tell—that this is the story I am supposed to make happen—this is how it is supposed to go—and I am free to make it up as I go along, just like this. 

The hall is being rearranged for the final piece. Twain and Thea are standing. Trumpet player David walks near them.

Thea: You make life worth living. You are so handsome.

Twain: And fit.

Thea: I have known you since you were born; you are Will’s closest friend. You must know a lot about each other. 

Arts academy student David has perfect muscle tone, without being bulgy; he is mostly highly fit from physical activity, like regular rowing, and seems older and more settled into late adolescence than Will. Twain and Thea speak with him during the hall’s rearrangement.

The scaled-down symphony takes the stage at the center-back of the space. The main stage has been moved there on its wheels and locked down.

David: I have butterflies: I will play a six-minute trumpet voluntary now, perched in that power-line basket parked at the back wall. It’s painted to look like the sunset rays. I will be accompanied by three other trumpet players and a small orchestra. It is the most wonderful trumpet voluntary ever composed, long, and elegant, and grand, and beautiful. I wanted them to let me do Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland, but I have to premier this new one. I have not played it flawlessly yet, and I might mess it up.

Thea: You’re a student; you’re allowed to mess it up—if we get the essence, it’s good enough.

Twain: Fanfare for the End of Time; I saw it in the list of pieces. Will and I were walking across campus, and I heard you and the others practice it on the outdoor stage. It brought tears to my eyes, even with glitches here and there.

David: People want to feel my stuff, students my age, females, males.

Twain: Don’t let them feel your stuff. Your stuff is your stuff. Say No. Unless it’s the right person, and you are okay with it, of course.

David: Why do people want to do that? Why don’t they leave me alone?

Thea and Twain surround him and embrace him, from the sides, avoiding his stuff, his potentially excited stuff.

David: Put your hands here (he leads both their hands to his chest over his heart). I know who you are.

Twain: You are Archangel Gabriel.

Immediately, Twain and Thea’s eyes well up with flowing tears, their chins go ugly and strange, and they cannot contain their amazement.

Thea: You have always been his angel.

He instantly transforms into a larger-than-life, golden guardian angel figure that one might see at a mausoleum or great marbled hall, holding a sword that runs from his chin, with its handle, to its tip on the ground. It happens so rapidly that two small feathers flutter to the ground from the upper right corner of his wing. Then, as quickly, he goes back to being David, hapless, handsome, arts academy student.

David: Union rules prevent any further demonstrations on my part.

A female classmate named Emily comes over, as the three of them continue their talk.

Emily: Did you just turn into an angel?

David: Magic—performing arts—magic.

Emily: Do it again.

David: No.

Emily: Does everyone have a guardian angel?

David: Yes.

Emily: Point to mine right now.

David: Union rules prevent any further disclosure of….

Thea: …trade matters.

Emily: Some stuff is private, and personal, and embarrassing.

Twain: Is it really?

Emily: I cut myself. I cut myself just a little sometimes on my thigh.

David: (Pulls her hard to his side by putting his arm around her torso.) Okay, don’t cut yourself; don’t cut yourself. And, oh: Slap that son of a bitch into the next century.

Emily: How do you know?

David: I don’t know. I am really a cowboy. Cowboy wisdom is all I’ve got.

The three of them embrace her; then, she rejoins her performance group. She thinks something like how the arts academy is unreal and beautiful. Why should there not be archangels on campus? Anyway, he is not my archangel.

Next, Twain asks David, who has begun practicing tricky transitions on his trumpet, how he has liked this form of life, since they are all facing a new existence, and David is becoming anxious and wary.

Twain: How was it?

David: I reveled in my time.

Twain: It is not the end of humankind; it is not the end of angels; it is not the end of Gods: It is the end. Forlorn hardly contains it, but this is true: leap is not something else; faith is not something else; they are this: Leap of faith.

David gets that red, wrinkled, deeply pained face, and cries, rushing to hide his face in their embrace.

Three minutes later, he closes the performance night, playing flawlessly the beautiful new trumpet voluntary.

Act 4

A year and two months later

They are in an ice-cream parlor on Hyde Street in San Francisco, taking a rest from walking up and down the hills of the city. The parlor is in the middle of one of the slopes on Hyde Street. They are making their way back to an aunt’s home in Diamond Heights, after exploring Nob Hill and the Wharf. They plan to descend to Market Street and get public transportation. They would not be walking the whole distance to Diamond Heights.

First, they will meet up with a family, who are friends with Twain’s aunt who lives in Diamond Heights. She is not with the group because she is beyond walking the hills of San Francisco. She has described them as charming friends, and Twain has perceived one of them as most likely a living saint. Will mind-shares with Skyler but has not connected him with his own great aunt, because those thoughts and images have never come up in their sessions. 

Skyler has a son with Down Syndrome and an older daughter and son in their late twenties. These two are twins. Skyler and his husband Roberto have fathered these three children with the help of lesbian friends. The older daughter and son are married with children, but they are out for a walk with their two fathers and brother today, as it is the younger brother’s birthday, and ice cream is his favorite treat.

They all have exchanged pleasantries. Will sits across the seating area (three square tables joined together to accommodate all) from Mark, the youngest son. Will leans across the table and kisses Mark on the side of his head.

Mark smiles with a newfound joy.

Mark: Why has God come to Earth?

Will: To say goodbye.

Mark: “Goodbye” means God be with you.

Will: As I said….

Mark: Am I a pure spirit?

Will: That close, which is good enough. You are a saint.

Mark: Heaven feels good.

Will: You have shortened the time between this moment and eternity. You have faced the particular challenges of your life with determination and grace and wisdom, which is rare.

Thea: Rarer than you could know.

Mark: You have usurped the slogans of a thousand years. (The older sister-and-brother twins come over and stand behind Mark. They are named Beatrice and Slater.)

Slater: Hellfire being one.

Beatrice: Brimstone being another. Do all the saints recognize you, the three of you?

Thea: We have little experience; saints are rare.

Twain: (Twain turns to Thea and Will.) A person who wears a T-shirt that drapes from his shoulders to his waist without touching his belly is a specimen (talking about Slater).

Thea: A specimen. I’m gay now. No, that’s your line. (Giving her attention to Will.)

Will: A specimen, I agree. You have always said it about such individuals, but that is not my line. You love fit people. It is your aesthetic; I do not share it. I don’t care much about it.

Thea: All God’s creatures?

Will: Yes. (The twins are extraordinarily good looking—and intelligent and kind.)

Mark turns in his chair and puts his face into Slater’s abdomen and sputters like a toddler at play, doing let-me-slobber-on-your-belly-button-and-make-fart-noises—as he has always done. The noises are muffled by the fabric of Slater’s T-shirt; the shop is a bit warm, and he has removed his jacket. When Mark pulls back from grinding his brother’s belly, some saliva and some mucus from his nose have changed the color of Slater’s turquoise T-shirt so that it is blotched with darker spots. Slater encourages Mark to make a mess of his T-shirt. When they are done, from behind—Mark, seated in his chair—Slater embraces Mark by draping his arms around his neck and resting his hands on his upper chest and his elbows on Mark’s shoulders.

Skyler is at one end of the thrown-together tables, and Roberto is at the other.

Thea, Twain, and Will talk.

Will: You know what has happened!

Thea: We know. (she points at herself) The universe. (she points at Twain) The galaxy, the road to heaven, the solar system and a bit more, something like that.

Twain: They are professionals; they outplayed us. Even Pretty Man: He understands.

Will: Here is the thing: He understands “to be or not to be” on a cosmic scale. They understand life—these people. It’s not like he’s saying, “to be or not to be, yeah, I understand that; look at me, I’m the prettiest thing on the street!” He understands it profoundly and truly and fully—and he doesn’t give a damn. He’s still going to have fun. 

Thea: He is insouciant—he doesn’t even care—that he possesses, that is, saintly beauty.

Will: They have won—and this is the way I see him: He is going to be walking down the street in Polk Gulch, and a timid, young, gay man is going to sidle up to him, admiring his body and pleasant demeanor and cruise him. Slater is going to keep walking and pull him to his side so their jeans rub. He will say to him, “I know all about life, I know all about gay. Biologically, I am the child of gay parents; I have been raised by two dads. The fact is, I am ninety-five percent straight. I have a lovely wife and children. Do you think I am going to mess with that for a tryst with you? No, but I will buy you a mocha cappuccino at that café up the street.”

They know life and death as though they had been in the trenches in one of the wars; the desperation, the smell of death—that horrible, mind-piercing stench—and there with them, a soldier with dirt caked on his face is taking his last glance at the world; these places are lonely. Men and women on the battlefield, seeing it all, being together, the desperation, the heartache, the pain.

These people we have met understand it—they got to sainthood because they were taught to care and pay attention. They have guessed at the power and the beauty of the next life; all of this has given them grace and poise and constancy. Five saints; what the hell can we do?

Thea: What they had to do was take the hard facts of their own lives, assess them realistically and arrive at the best humanly possible wisdom—that is no small thing—they went to all the places in the heart and soul of man (Her eyes sparkle with tears at these words). Spirit guides are hobbled by convention, and they are usually clueless about the epic struggles of other human beings. These five each had to do it on their own, with the help of good upbringing.

Will: As I heard on a TV commercial once: “They did it the old-fashioned way; they earned it.” Meeting five saints was my rule, and they have filled my quota.

Twain: We will lose our divine status. We have made ourselves obsolete. We will enter an omniscient world that is eternal, and that we know not of—none of us (makes a circling gesture that indicates everyone in the shop).

We will be assumed, all living people that is, into the next life, body and soul, but we will become solely souls soon.  There will be no more human vacations to try things out. There will be no more Earth; the physical world will be obliterated; and the spiritual realm will reign, on and on.

This end-of-the-world will not follow the laws of physics. The history of the world was never captured right by men and women. Eternity is self-sustaining. It does not need overseers.

(Speaking to Will) I will give you one last gift. It has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with this world and its charms; there may be one that you missed.  (He kisses him briefly on the temple and conveys to him the fullest sense of sexual joy. It takes about thirty seconds. Will registers pleasure, not too loudly, but clearly, and he ejaculates profusely.)

Thea: You are going to go into eternity wet now.

Will: The memory of it. I don’t care, Sweet Mother. I want the world to go on.

Thea: But promises-to-keep will prevent that from happening.

Will: The world turns on a star at the edge of heaven.

Thea: No longer omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent are we.

Will: The vast upheavals of history, mere anecdotes in time. We have completed the journey: We are free. 

Twain: It is vast, monumental—even the upheavals of our minds, Gods’ and humans’, the thought-world sprawled before us, good and bad, right and wrong, truth and beauty.

Thea:  What the hell was it all for? 

Twain: Was it to inform the vastness we are going to now, the nether?

Will: It was a smart world, full of meaning. It will be a smart end, the beauty of nature, the complexity of the soul. We will know them fully, as we cannot know them now.

Twain: That kind of faith does not exist. We are driven on. Who knows why or how?

Thea: I want to linger, Twain and Will. May we?

Will: The family, family (he repeats the word, using air quotes, intimating their betrayal and trickery; he means no disrespect—he means only to indicate “them,” those who brought us to our end) own a rambling villa halfway between here and Oceanside.

Thea: We shall invite ourselves and think about it.

Will: The most momentous event in the history of the world: We shall invite ourselves and think about it. (He now suggests something about the power of saying something and then making it happen the way you wanted it to, that is, the power of God.) They said it out loud, and then, that’s how it happened. They were gods for a moment in their time and place. They were good gods. 

Three months later

The Overone family decided to stay a while and share time with the large, extended family. By this time, they have had many adventures, having spent months together.

A year and five months have passed since the opening; it has covered two birthdays for Will; he is now seventeen. The Overones have been mostly at their home in the Great Lakes, but they all, these two families, have spent time back and forth, enjoying the Great Lakes region, the whole family from San Francisco, breaking up and doing different activities on different days, following their own interests: performances and events at the performing arts academy, driving into Ontario and visiting the Toronto Art Gallery, attending the Grand Rapids Symphony, touring the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, walking long stretches of beach along Lake Michigan, especially between Ludington and Leelanau, and many more activities.

The Overones took in all the cultural places and events in San Francisco and surrounding places—too many to list.

They, the two families, are in San Francisco now. This day, they end up all at the large, rambling villa. The villa, belonging to Skyler and Roberto, was once the administration center of a religious college. It is designed along the lines of the Ahwahnee hotel at Yosemite National Park. It looks both up and down some of the hills of San Francisco. It has a vast glass wall from which those in the house can view different communities of the city. They make a habit of sitting on four joined sofas to watch the light on the many stucco structures as the afternoon fades; it is a kind of teatime.

The characters are:

Thea, Will, Twain, the two fathers Skyler and Roberto, their son Mark, introduced earlier, their daughter Beatrice (twin), her husband Hal, their three girls, Girly, Roma, and Gin, their son Slater (twin of Beatrice), wife Sylvia, their boy and girl, Casey and Wilma, close in age and temperament, and Twain’s Aunt Maggie from Diamond Heights.

Roberto sits at a large wooden kitchen table that functions as a worktable when meals are being made. He is thinking this, and Will shares it in a flash of awareness.

Roberto: (inner voice) I sit here, and over there on the counter is a red mug. I drove across the state with my niece to buy it at one of those outlet malls. A high-quality French ceramics maker created it. It is red and is shaped slightly like an hourglass, really meant for tea, but it is my coffee cup.  The world will end, and my atoms will mingle with that red mug upon the counter. I have been to many places in my life and time—why am I thinking in song lyrics here at the end of the world? I do not know; They are mine now. No one will know that I cheated. I will let my thoughts be whatever they want to be. I have been many places: why not the blue sky: My atoms mingle with the blue sky or the green grass or the loamy earth, but not this time, a red mug that sits upon the counter, dirty from this morning’s coffee; we will join eternity at the same time and the same place. 

I have had so many pure and beautiful experiences, paintings in museums, an ancient vase in an exhibit case, lighted perfectly all around. Why not one of these; am I not worthy? Why a red mug on the counter? Only because I used it earlier today, thinking it was a cup of coffee and me and my thoughts, my relationship with the universe, not in the largest sense, just my thoughts and the world as usual. What goes on, what lasts? What is lost? Is it completely different? 

If you have ever asked yourself, Does the world end with a bang or a whimper? you were wrong—you were wrong to ask.

You study a language, and at first, you think you must learn verbs to be able to express yourself; then, you come to the understanding that phrases and clauses are better—you can say important things when you learn phrases and clauses. What you thought was okay, but there was something better, and you got into that groove. There are tens of thousands of incongruities, small ones, annoying ones, irritating ones, slightly disheartening ones. You kind of get over them, but why were you wrong at first? Why didn’t you know?

You believe in peace, or at least you think you do, but then you come to the understanding that you could not possibly have understood the moment-to-moment, day-to-day implications of what you believe, how it must fit into the very fabric of your heart, your soul, your being, how it must define you. This incongruity, this always-forever incongruity between an idea and what it really means, a wish, a desire, and how it is really fulfilled, it humbles us to our core. What do we know; what does it mean to know? We believed in peace and civility, but we came up short because of some difference between wise and unwise, the here and the now and the forced belief in pie in the sky. The major upheavals of history; we thought they mattered, but they didn’t—all they did was get us here—to the end, The Very End.

What is it like to go from foolish to wise? Would it not be uncouth and strange, leaving us feeling like a country bumpkin who was too busy with life’s struggles to know the refined pursuit of truth and beauty? Or is learning the difference between a Persian cucumber and a pickling cucumber and when to take either to market enough? Does it count? Will it give us the full feeling of ownership, along with everyone else? Will we bridge the incongruity? Will we like it there?

What learning process lies ahead? Have we paid our dues, and having done so, do the doubts go away? Is what I am thinking bad faith? The difference between here and there is always incongruous, but I think it will be the better world we have always tried to make. We will leave behind the doubts, the bullshit and do what matters. We have learned enough about the one incongruity that defines us, the physical versus the spiritual. We have arrived: Art and literature have combined, and we have got there.

On the practical side, this too I know: When I eat melon and toast, and have them with a cup of coffee in the morning, pieces of the flesh of the muskmelon move down my throat into my esophagus and peristalsis, the kind that goes down, not up, massages my lungs on both sides, and this loosens phlegm in my lungs, and I clear my lungs of these pieces of phlegm and then I breathe better, and the better breathing lightens my mood; I am light-headed and my thinking is clearer. Is what comes now very sophisticated like that? Is it at least as smartly designed as the human body, different parts do this and that, and then we feel better, or possibly worse, depending on how these parts work together? Is it evolved and smart? Perhaps we have made it from our own life experiences, and it is very, very smart indeed. Are we happy and cozy—overall?

What is the relationship of good to evil? Number one: Is the dynamic between these two necessary in order to be happy—sometimes? Number two: how does this continue into eternity? How do we feel superior and smug and happy when there is no contrastive reality that we feel and see and know—know deep in our souls? How do we exist? How is feel-good sustained when there is no feel-bad. I love the world I know—especially thinking of the other one and how I do not know it. I am not the first to say that—but I may be the last. How did God create eternal life and not make it smart?

These are age-old questions that have haunted our existence. Age old, now come real. How can I be as happy as I was, playing cards with old friends, seeing them and talking about how we have all come round since we were six and started school together? I don’t know anyone who quotes Gertrude Stein, but I shall. “Rose is a rose is a rose” No more, no more tautological truths, everything is nothing: We have said it all.

Skyler and his son Mark are in another part of the villa. The two of them are at his desk in his office. Skyler is behind the desk. Mark is beside Skyler, off from the space behind the desk. They face a small recording video camera. They recite in unison poems each day and place the video on an internet site meant to promote the academic skills of people with Down Syndrome. In unison, they perform as real communication (the style I prefer: “I went to the supermarket and bought some sugar”; “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” They are the same, exactly the same—never recite poetry as fancy, old words you do not quite understand. They are sentences you are saying to someone else—speak the words as you would any real, moment-to-moment communication, the words to William Shakespeare’s sonnets numbers 74 and 73, in that order. They recite them perfectly. The words of sonnet 74 are a bit hard to understand, but the sonnet’s meaning is clear once you absorb it. Number 73 is popular and well understood.

74

But be contented when that fell arrest


Without all bail shall carry me away,


My life hath in this line some interest,


Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.


When thou reviewest this, thou dost review


The very part was consecrate to thee:


The earth can have but earth, which is his due;


My spirit is thine, the better part of me:


So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,


The prey of worms, my body being dead;


The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,


Too base of thee to be remembered.
 

The worth of that is that which it contains,
 

And that is this, and this with thee remains.

 73

That time of year thou may’st in me behold 


When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang


Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 


In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,


As after sunset fadeth in the west, 


Which by-and-by black night doth take away,


Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. 


In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire 


That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 


As the death-bed whereon it must expire 


Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by. 
   

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
   

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

They then go to join the others at the glass wall that looks out on a hilly, lush-with-greenery, residential part of the city. The equipment is left running; out the window, it captures a street uphill from the villa they live in, all the way to the horizon. It is lined with old trees, not excessively tall, and many stucco homes, mostly in pastel tones of blue and green and ochre. In one spot on a not-very-steep segment of the street are parked at the curb two modest sized, shiny, silver, travel trailers. They are parked one behind the other.

Somewhere in the city, some members of the extended family have acquired the Japanese-style bread, called shokupan, a version that is gluten free. Shokupan can be called milk bread or pullman’s bread. It is quite common anywhere in Japan to have it with coffee in the morning. It is square-shaped and sliced rather thick, toasted and buttered. The Overones have had shipped from their home in the Great Lakes, an exquisite, organic version of chocolate milk, several gallons.

Toasted shokupan and hot cocoa are this afternoon’s tea. Will sits in the middle of the four lined-up sofas and talks with Casey and Wilma. Each sofa has three stands, with very modest-sized round tops, made of maple, one stand arranged in the middle and one at each end; the end stands are shared by two sofas, and have tops which are a bit larger.

Casey: So, you are God.

Will: (Obvious, loud) Is there someone here who could tell Casey and Wilma, so that I don’t have to talk myself up?

Hal: Does it matter?

Will: Maybe not.

The children are about eight and nine, Wilma being older. They have been on sightseeing excursions together, but the talk was about other things than Will’s being God.

Casey: My sister Wilma and I are gifted.

Will: I can tell.

Wilma: We remember every word we hear.

 Casey: We can use any given word in a sentence forever after.

 Wilma: She made many shallow observations; it was the stuff of hubris, not experience.

 Will: She is a politician; she has a campaign bus, emblazoned with the words “We the People….” Do not make the mistake of believing that she represents the values of our founding fathers. She is an autocrat, using false slogans. There is a special place in hell for that kind of hubris.

They both clap with exaggerated vigor for about two seconds.

Wilma: In the hereafter, what will it be like?

She breaks a large chunk of toast, dunks it in her cocoa, takes the small plate it was brought on and puts it under her chin; the toast is sopping wet. She puts it in her mouth, chews it a little and swallows it. She wipes a small dribble of hot cocoa from her chin and wipes it on a paper napkin. Casey slurps heavily, so everyone hears, from his cocoa mug and shoves a corner of buttery toast into his mouth, chews it off and chases it with cocoa to soften it, then swallows the chunk almost whole.

Casey: We are the authors of our own existence; we are great authors—always above the material—we lay out the milestones and chart the path with wishes and daydreams. We even know where it ends—if we really think about it.

Will: Eternity is the truth of everything, and the beauty of the world. We live in it, and it lives in us.

Casey: We are heterosexuals. She likes the boys in school, and I am starting to like the girls in school.

Will: You may be oversharing, but, okay.

Wilma: We don’t have to work at knowing who we are. We are lucky.

Will: Anyone who walks around in a supermarket with an infant strapped to their chest, quietly ticking off the items of their shopping list—they all know it all; they have learned it; they are using it, they get it; they care. It makes no difference.

The boy and girl want to cry, but they don’t.

Will: (He starts to well up.) Oops, something got in my eyes (Dabs his eyes with the backs of his forefingers).

Wilma: It’s tears, Stupid.

They both turn and tickle him on the sides.

Will: (giggling) Don’t touch me; don’t touch me.

Narrator: Sometimes when we see or hear a great artistic performance, we are sure we have met our maker, or some part of him or her—but when God is sitting next to you on a padded sofa, you haven’t a notion.

They all sit and watch the light change on the hills of San Francisco on a mid-October afternoon. They sip cocoa and chew off pieces of bread. They talk on.

Will: (speaking to Wilma and Casey, calmly) Do you see the horizon, the top of the hill? Something there looks like a heat shimmer.

Casey and Wilma: Yes.

Wilma: We do not have heat shimmers in the city; we see them only in m—movies. (she hesitates, and then understands).

Will: Hold me. (They both hold onto him hard and hold their gaze out the glass wall; they glance toward their parents and aunts and uncles—they all come to the same wisdom at the same moment—they understand what is happening; they line up, each one of them, between the sofas and the plate-glass wall as if for a group portrait. They hug each other from behind, and they watch the world come to its very end.

The video camera in the study keeps running. We see its exposed viewfinder; it holds steady on the same hill; it is steady for what seems too long, fixed on an image without movement or change; then, the only movement in the frame is the two shiny travel trailers, that now glint in the light; they are lined up at the curb; now, they rotate from twelve o’clock to ten o’clock; the forward trailer blends with the one in back of it; their molecules join, and the moving wave takes them in and continues its approach toward the glass porch.

The End

Licentious People 

The arc of time cut cruelly for Sister Jean Patrice. She loved poetry and teaching and writing, but now she loved people, specific people, a couple of sweethearts, men actually, in love with each other. Of all things, an old nun dying in the arms of lovers, neither of whom was her own, except that Zac, the blonde one, was her grandnephew, and, in that sense, was her own. Jorge was the dark one, and so beautiful. They were professionals. They took home-care lessons in the nearby town, and they would give her sponge baths and change her bed sheets when she messed herself—when it came to that. She knew they would do it without embarrassment. And she wouldn’t be embarrassed either because that’s how things go in the end. But she didn’t know she would miss them so. At least she had the idea she would miss them, the way people miss those few bright, charming others who enter their lives and then leave. Who really knows what missing means when one is gone, really gone? She would miss missing them; she would miss missing altogether.

She walked as much as she could each day, generally four miles, which could be done either around the section or straight out two miles and then back. As she walked on this bright, sunny morning in August, she studied the chalky white-and-yellow butterflies that gathered on the road. “Old habits die hard: that must be it,” she thought as, up and down the road, by the hundreds it seemed, they landed in fairy rings in the dust. Sand and gravel had piled up at the edge of the road, more with each passing vehicle, and the middle had become a washboard, from lack of rain.

The loose sand, combined with the number and size of the undulating hills in that part of the county, made her treks laborious. Her lungs ached, and her side hurt as she trudged the up slopes. It made sense that the butterflies gathered at the edges of rain puddles where they could lap up—or whatever they do—the water that oozes through the sand. But to do the same thing on a dry road; what was the sense of it? Well, perhaps landing in fairy rings was more important than any real benefit from doing so. Maybe it was in their nature, and that was all. She could not see the pastel butterflies of August, even when they were dead things stuck to car grills, their wings still wavering in the breeze, without thinking of Sister Justin.

At the end of an afternoon of writing on the board in the fourth-grade classroom of St. Philip Neri Elementary School, and just before leaving, Sister Justin rested atop an empty student desk, and spoke offhandedly to the last lingering students. As she did so, she crossed her arms at the wrists and held her shiny palms up on the hump of her black satchel. Chalk dust, sometimes yellow, sometimes white, filled the deep creases of her fingers.

It was in Sister Justin’s classroom that she learned multiplication and music and world geography. In truth, she remembered Sister Justin whenever she had to add a column of numbers by hand. She had explained to young Claudia (the name her parents had given her) once when returning an exam that most of her mistakes were attributable to not keeping her numbers lined up, so that as she added a column of numbers of varying lengths, she wandered. But mostly Claudia remembered one event in Sister Justin’s classroom. She had a tendency to speak superstitiously, but she was, at the same time, the best of the eight nuns at the school, at least when it came to forthrightness.

During a religion lecture, she attempted to explain the wonders of creation by saying: “…and if the sun were to move one inch closer, we would all burn up.” Claudia quickly raised her hand, stood up in the middle of the aisle and explained, “But, wouldn’t it be the same, Sister, if we stood on our tiptoes?” The old nun did not withdraw her assertion, but the next day, near the end of class, she called Claudia up to her desk in front of the other students. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a scapular medal—a thin, wide stainless-steel cross with raised circles with religious scenes impressed within them on each side; she presented a carefully packaged one, with the medal mounted on white cardboard, the chain gathered at the back, and the whole thing covered in cellophane. Making no particular connection to the lecture of the previous day, Sister Justin commended Claudia for her “scientific mind.”

Sister Jean Patrice insisted on taking leave from her order, the Order of Teachers, O.T. for short, when she was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. The order’s mission was to gain an appreciation of every field of academic pursuit and, by writing and teaching, show how it revealed God’s wonder. She had taken leave and, as well, the royalties from her recently published books in order to come home to the house she was raised in.

Walking now, on a long, coolly damp downslope, where the tall maples, oaks, and beeches touched overhead, she recalled where she had photographed Dutchman’s Britches in the spring, and she remembered the big maple tree at the base of which her search for the rare Solomon’s seal had ended. It struck her now as odd that she brought everything to bear—her education, her travels, her teaching—on this simple place where she was born. Thirty-five years earlier, as a graduate student, following her instructor’s urging, she had, in the audio room of the University of Michigan Library, listened to the old Caedmon long-playing records of the great poets reading their own stuff. Now in this quiet place, with light barely glinting through the tall branches, on a dirt road through a woodlot outside Hersey, an old logging town in the middle of Michigan, she heard T.S. Eliot say, in his perfunctory manner:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,

And snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

The last words were spoken with a kind of dying sound, as at the end of a profound speech in Hamlet, when the actor wants to signal that the speech is done, and that it is now up to the hearer to ponder its meaning. But perhaps she was wrong about how he said it—it was a long time ago. Her job in the afternoon would be to make friends with Jorge, Zac’s xeux, the term they used for each other, pronouncing it zoos. They had met on a particular December tenth, and when they had a jeweler make pendants for their third anniversary, they looked like x-u-x, but it was hard to read, so they changed the spelling. The word was their attempt to advance the cause of the search for a suitable term for gay spouses, at least male ones, since it still had something to do with Zeus and their being gods to each other. Since the one God seemed to have abandoned them, that seemed fair enough. It also had to do with sex, otherwise why the concentration of X’s in just a four-letter word? What would the women think of? Perhaps they would use Sapphic. 

The couple had planned it all out, even to the extent that they said people could say xeux-pair, xeux-couple, or xeuxes, at will. What were the chances of it catching on? —zero, concluded Claudia (that was what she was called now). And, as with any term applied to a minority, religious, ethnic, sexual or other, or one that had anything to do with sex, for that matter, the users ran the risk of it becoming a joke. Claudia thought, “A word like—I don’t know—FUCK? It’s a bad word; it’s a good word; it’s a curse; it’s a joke. But people still enjoy doing it, and in that particular moment, the word does not have a particularly bad connotation. Another choice might be? —NUN.” Her father used to say, “Do you know why they call them nuns? —Never had none; don’t want none; that’s why.” It was his predictable summing up of the foolishness of religious sisters. He was sure to work it into a discussion that followed the sometimes dismayingly stupid actions of the nuns at the school where Claudia was a student. (The bad grammar was mocking—her father worked with structural steel in the summer, but in the winter, his occupation was reading.) He never applied the saying to his daughter Claudia, first because she had never done anything that could be called dismayingly stupid, and second because in fact she had probably had some, having joined the sisterhood only after college and a stint as an English teacher overseas. She revised her thinking: xeux would catch on if it weren’t found to offend anyone too much.

“Dismayingly stupid”: Claudia had written about one such incident that occurred during her elementary school days. Her article was published in the quarterly journal of her order, titled simply Wonder. Sister Gaudini, the eighth-grade teacher when Claudia was in the eighth grade, had the habit of disciplining—perhaps humiliating was more accurate—the farm boys who failed to prepare their lessons. Claudia knew that they did so only because they were too busy farming, especially in the autumn and the spring. She stood them at the front of the classroom and made them promise to do all their homework for the following day. When, one time, one of them made a clownish face for his sweetheart, who was in her seat, she slapped him on the back of the head. He subsequently fell to the floor and convulsed for half a minute. It had all been planned—Claudia knew from the way he had grinned at his sweetheart.

When he stood up without a word and began to stare at the floor with a hebephrenic grin, she beat him on the back with the bottom of her fists, until his horrified classmates, Claudia included, struggling against a great reluctance to speak sharply to a religious woman, began to shout, “Stop, stop.” That too had been in the boys’ calculation. Their failure to do their homework finally became Sister Gaudini’s humiliation, instead of theirs. Claudia’s article had discussed the fact that poetic justice is sometimes the only art of the poor farm boys, and that, being teachers, it is an art form we should learn to appreciate rather than despise, even when we ourselves might be on the cusp of menopause and might be stymied by a certain bewilderment all our own. It wasn’t a month later, on a sometimes-sunny day in May that Sister Gaudini saw the end of a rainbow touch the grassy hill between the school and the woods.

On that spot, with her own hands, she built a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the form of a fieldstone grotto and a carefully rendered, white, marble statue. To the end of fostering this art of tough kids and rebels, Sister Jean Patrice instituted the Court of Poetic Justice in every convent and every classroom. She said that in her life, at least, the Court of Poetic Justice would always be in session, and that it was a chance for anyone anytime to bring home to her the nature of any harsh reality that she had somehow missed. Lessons should come by way of creative dramas—the more inopportune, the better for driving the point home. “It’s not just your pet peeve, and it’s not just a bug up your ass, it’s the truth, an important truth, something that will help all of us be better people,” she always said.

Claudia had accurately predicted the slow decline she was experiencing. She had come in January after finishing the fall at UCLA and remained in fairly good health. The boys arrived from Chicago on a day in late May after Zac had finished the winter semester at the University of Chicago. Jorge parked their red Volkswagen Beetle revival in the long east driveway, just off the east end of the south arm of the porch where there were a few steps that had recently been renewed with that greenish-tinged, treated lumber. Within the porch, the unpainted wooden frame of the screen door bore dark smudges where people took hold of it above the handle to hold it open, and the screen was filled with grease and dust—grease from Aunt Lucille’s frying chicken, and dust that wrapped around the house from the road. Aunt Lucille, short, and round, limped to the door. When she saw Zac, she threw her arms out wide, and, in the deep shade of her old kitchen, yelled, “Johnny Boy, my sweetest, my best, most handsomest nephew; give me a hug!”

Johnny, as she called Zac, for it was one of his names, hugged her hard and said, “You know, Aunt Lucille, ‘most handsomest’ is ungrammatical.” Zac un-self-consciously pronounced Aunt as Ahnt, the way New-Englanders do.

“I know, Johnny,” Aunt Lucille answered, “but, guess what….”

Together they intoned her favorite declaration, “I—don’t—care.”

Then Lucille hugged the adorable Jorge, and they exchanged kisses on the cheek. She reminded him, “I have thought often of the lovely day we spent at the Art Institute last summer. I will not forget seeing Grant Wood’s American Gothic right there on the wall, and your enlightened explanation—and that wonderful, restful restaurant on the lower level.”

 “I enjoyed it too, Aunt Lucille,” said Jorge.

Zac and Jorge graciously observed the rights and privileges given to heterosexual couples, and everyone who knew them, knew it, so there was no surprise when Jorge laid claim to Aunt. It was delightful to have these sophisticated, accomplished young men give her a title, out here on a hilltop in the country, where their words echoed beneath the porch and traveled beyond to live somewhere in the dead stillness that existed for acres and acres, perhaps even up into the still blue sky. One never had the sense that the male partners demanded or took rights, for, with them, being a real couple was a practiced art.

Claudia heard them arrive. She heard the muffled conversation, partly as it floated up the stairs and partly through one of the open glass panels of her room. She waited for them to come to her room so that they could see her in the place where, together, they would spend much of their time. Claudia’s atelier was a twenty-by-twenty-foot glass room on top of the house. She recently had it fitted with two-inch-thick tatami mats and a long, shiny Japanese table of a color somewhere between brown and orange—perhaps rust was the name of it.

For ventilation, a couple of the glass sections on each wall opened, like French doors, onto screens. The room smelled deliciously of green tea all the time because of the fresh green rush the mats were covered in. Seeing rush grow in the Japanese countryside, as Claudia had, gave her an appreciation of how different it was from rice straw, the thing many people suppose the floors in Japan are covered with, when in fact it is only the rough filling of certain tatami mats. She slept there in the middle of the room on an authentic, wool-stuffed Japanese futon.

In the first week after their arrival, the xeuxes decided to test her. Zac knew all her writings—he would focus on her, Claudia Zane, Sister Jean Patrice Zane, and her writings on Japanese Literature for his Doctoral dissertation. For many years, she had been the last word on Japanese poetry. Zac and Jorge, on their own, decided to use the methods of the master. Certainly, she was knowledgeable about sexuality, and valued the sensual part of life as essential to understanding poetry; she had written that book about the women and men of the sex trade in San Francisco. She had even attended the Hookers’ Ball, in the years when it was fashionable, along with the sheriff and the mayor and other city officials. That was during her years at San Francisco State. But, still, she had vowed sexual abstinence.

Zac and Jorge slept in what amounted to a finished attic, a kind of half-level between the second floor and the atelier. The staircase to Claudia’s room took up a part of the wall of their loft, which had small, turret-like windows halfway between the floor and the ceiling, turret-like because the plaster tapered almost to the edge of the glass. One afternoon, with their clothes on, at the base of the stairs, Zac pushed Jorge up against the wall of the stairwell. He kissed Jorge hard, repeatedly slapped his bottom, and held him, arms-out, pinned to the thin wall, which served to drum everything up to Claudia’s space.

Discouraged by this display of rowdiness on the part of the young men who would be so important to her in the coming months, she asked in a voice that had naturally shifted to a higher place, “Are you boys fighting?”

Jorge responded quickly, “No, Sister, we’re having fun.”

Claudia shot back, “I’m not your sister, and stop having fun.”

They were careful to shed their shoes at the bottom of the stairs before heading to her strictly Japanese room. Then, they bounded up to find Claudia sitting, her back straight, atop a blue Japanese cushion at her long table.

Zac said enthusiastically, “We were testing you to see what you really think about us. And you failed.”

 “Well, thanks a lot,” she replied, somewhat bewildered.

Zac pressed his point, “You’re a knee-jerk nun.”

 “I am not. I thought you were fighting. If you were in the middle of a violent sex act, well, forgive me,” she protested.

Jorge said, “It wasn’t violent sex. We were making out, just to test you.”

Before her, on the table was a prayer book with smudged pages, bound in flexible blue leather, a kind of breviary.

Zac said, “If we disturbed you, we’re sorry.”

She kept them from leaving by quickly asserting, “No, you didn’t disturb me.”

 “Listen,” she said, “I know that you two need time together. Every Thursday and Saturday evening, I will be watching my favorite TV programs in the living room until ten o’clock. You can use my room if you like.” She added, “Another thing, I like what you did just now. It’s important that we understand each other.”

 “Okay, then, we’ll explain your fault,” Zac said bravely. “We were playing around to get a response from you, and we did. The point is, judge each event fresh. Don’t rely on instinct or training or allow prejudice to assert itself. Don’t let your life provide the punchline for someone else’s joke. Judge everything for yourself. This idea came to me when I saw a university classmate of mine pictured in a national magazine at an encampment of neo-Nazis. He was standing beside an older guy, and they were both giving the Nazi salute. I didn’t even know he was a white supremacist.”

Claudia responded, “You must have been appalled. Do you know him well?”

Zac explained, “I went to a few movies with him, and we took a few trips to the mall. When I talked to him about being a white supremacist, I said, ‘You’re playing a part in someone else’s joke. It’s not even your own joke. It’s not even original. The skill the world needs in the future is not how to separate ourselves from other people but how to manage life in a complex world. What you’re doing is dumb.’ Anyway, that’s the lesson for today,” Zac quickly concluded: “think before you judge.”

He hadn’t tied up the loose ends of his thoughts, but it didn’t matter. Such talk—the half-baked wisdom and earnest musings of the young—was music to the ears of an old professor. She said, “Remember, the Court of Poetic Justice is now in session.”

Abé, she stopped them and asked, “Do you remember that movie—it was made about twenty years ago—called Our Sons? It starred Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret.”

Zac and Jorge both said yes.                                

Claudia elaborated, “The Julie Andrews character said it all didn’t she? —when she confronted the Ann-Margret character in her mobile home, The Ann-Margret character was unsure whether she ought to see her son in the hospital where he was dying of AIDS. As I remember the story, the son is a fan of classic movies, and he and his lover spend some time talking about movies in the hospital room. Ann-Margret was worried about what the neighbors might think of her having a son who was dying of AIDS. Did I make it sufficiently clear that she lived in a trailer park?”

 “Yes,” said Jorge and Zac together.

Claudia continued, “So, at that point, the Julie Andrews character—the healthy lover’s mother—slaps the Ann-Margret character hard across the face. And then she delivers the best dressing-down speech I have ever heard. She says, “Your son is dying, you stupid bitch! And you’re worried about what the neighbors think?”

Zac got up and took a place beside Claudia. He put his arms across her shoulders. He kissed her cheek, and, misty eyed, said, “You’re the greatest, Auntie.”

The next day when it was time to read, she took up a place next to Zac, and touching her plump finger to his chest, said, “The Court of Poetic Justice has an important finding to deliver.” Slowly, and with grace, she said, “In here beats the heart of a Japanese girl.”

Zac beamed so that the skin of his cheeks shone. He said, “I know.”

So, the doctoral candidate got reacquainted with his famous aunt and mentor. She had encouraged him to study in Japan when he was a high school student. She said it would help him get a head start on a career in Japan scholarship, and she was right. She even visited him twice in Nagoya, once on a sabbatical semester and once during a free summer. She knew when she visited him the second time that he was gay and lost, and she told him so. He was well on his way to becoming prissy and aloof. She sat across from him at a small kotatsu table, with the electric cord of the foot warmer wrapped up under the table for the season, on a sweltering June afternoon, on the tatami floor of his small student apartment near his high school.

She said, “Find a partner and stick with him. Don’t waste your life trying to understand how different gay is because it’s not. Nobody in the free world cares anymore—or they shouldn’t. Do something else with your life. Contribute something to the world; you’ve got the ability. When you watch a romantic movie, don’t sit there thinking how much you don’t get it. Instead, think of the male lead doing everything he’s doing with the classmate you had a crush on last month.

Being gay is not different. It’s the same, and it takes only a little enlightenment to see that.” She had a way of turning shame on its head. She continued, “An eighteen-year-old man shouldn’t have to wonder why a man and a woman hold each other close and put their lips together. Hold a young man your age close and put your lips on his if he’s agreeable. That’s what it means.” She had written that rather popular book on the practical wisdom of street hookers and hustlers, some of whom were transgender. It was this wisdom that she imparted to her grandnephew.

He was left dumbfounded. He didn’t think he needed to think about who he was, but if she was right, he had a lot of work to do. She provided a final anecdote as she held tight to both of Zac’s hands across the cheap, wood-grained, laminate table top. Zac attended a high school connected with an old German Catholic University. To gain fluency in the language, he had completed his senior year of high school there, taking regular courses, and now had made the transition to the university, where he could take some of his courses in English. Claudia said, “Zac, this isn’t the best place to be gay. But the truth must be served, or there is hell to pay. As a budding creative genius, you must see the sense of that.”

She gave a lengthy illustration. “I was on an electric bus that was making its way across Twin Peaks in San Francisco recently. Three young people sat in the back as it made its way around a hairpin turn. Then, one of the bus’s arms came off the overhead electric track; the driver set the brake and got out in a very precarious spot in the middle of that uphill turn. It was quiet with the engine off. The young people had just got off a shift at a crisis intervention hotline. I could tell by the things they were saying. There was a handsome young man, boyish looking, with curly blonde hair, perfect skin, and red lips. He was about twenty-two and smart. They were all smart, and their conversation was animated. The handsome young man wove into the conversation a hopeful assessment of his situation. He said he hadn’t felt like hurting himself in three months now—whatever he actually said, I understood what he meant. He was feeling a lot better and working at the center was helping him gain insight.

That moment disabused me of something I had always believed: if you’re smart and good looking, you’ve got it made. At that moment I realized that that charming, beautiful young man would not make it to thirty-five. I wasn’t being pessimistic. I felt he was going to check out early despite all the brave things he was doing to deal with his problem. I apply this lesson to gay people. They are too damned humble. They spend too much time on the outside looking in, and they get the wrong idea. And they have an “awe shucks” humility when people are the least bit kind to them. You’re not on the outside, Zac. You’re on the inside. You’re with me. You’re an insider. Get used to being gay, and do something with your life, Zac.”

Zac and Jorge had been xeuxes for nearly five years now, since their undergraduate years at Michigan and all the way through Zac’s postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, which consisted of teaching and writing. Jorge was a gifted painter and graphic designer who worked out of a studio in their home in Chicago. His big, beautiful paintings might as well have been assembled from torn paper because that’s the effect he achieved, with large sections of solid color that worked to represent people and landscapes and wildflowers.

Since Claudia was something of an expert on wildflowers, she had an opening with the beautiful, reserved man. Jorge had none of the artist’s moods. He was wide-eyed and happy, happy studying nature’s designs and making pretty pictures from them that everyone liked. And since he was fulfilled, he probably would not demand more of his talent than that. She was mostly tired of playing dowager empress to his eunuch, “playing,” for he was certainly not a eunuch, and she was not quite the slave to empty formalities that a dowager empress would be; she had had enough of it in the convent—superiors and novices acting out that eternal, tedious melodrama, poisoning the atmosphere, and occasionally forcing those around them into stunned silence caused mainly by obsessive dysfunction.

Their relationship was not so bad, hers and Jorge’s, but she wanted a really good relationship with the men who would soon be seeing her off. There was also that matter of the night before to discuss with Jorge. She suddenly realized that she liked the music of their names together: Ruben Jonathon Zachariah Zane, and Jorge Opal Sanchez.

The three of them were paying guests in Lucille’s house. Lucille Zane-Monk was her name. She was born out of wedlock, married, and widowed eight years later when her husband, the sheriff of Osceola County was shot dead stopping the holdup of the Reed City Bank, one calm, late-autumn day during deer season. She lost her only son at twenty-four at a country crossroad in a two-car accident, before the road authority was in the habit of putting up stop signs at practically every corner, as they do now.

Lucille was Claudia’s niece, her eldest sister’s eldest daughter. So, they weren’t far apart in age: only four years separated them. The house occupied the highest spot in three counties, set nicely off the road, in the middle of the section on the south side of One Mile. It was a foursquare, cut-stone fortress with a shiny metal roof. Rising up through the roof of the two-story house was the glass structure—it seemed to pick up the center of the pyramid roof and telescope it ten feet into the air. Some had called the room on top of the house a cupola, but it was equipped as a penthouse, including a frosted-glass bathroom. Claudia now referred to it as her atelier. In San Francisco, or Yokohama it would have been a place from which to watch the ships come in.

Claudia’s grandfather, a lumber baron, had the glass room built with the house so that in his declining years—and with declining eyesight—he could sit and read books by the bright light of day and watch the weather move across Crapo Flats to the south. The east yard, which sloped sharply away from the house, was mostly an uncontrolled sumac grove now, but the neighbor maintained the other yards with a mowing contraption he pulled behind his tractor, the kind used to mow golf courses. No one anymore cut the hay from the fields below the house, and they were beginning to fill with scrub: honeysuckle, olive, and locust trees.

On returning home from her walk that sunny August day, Claudia rested in the cool shade of the porch at the back of the house. The yellowed hayfields lay along a ravine so deep that it had always seemed to Claudia, even when she was growing up, that it should have a river in it, but the high rolling land she lived on was just some mistake of the ice age. Claudia remembered the evening she stood atop the large pink rock (“as big as a car” they used to say) at the top of the slope in the east yard.

It intrigued and pleased her that the shadow of a girl of twelve could stretch so long as it dipped down across a small ravine and up onto the next round slope, all colored gold by the setting sun. She held out her arms, closed her eyes to the sky, and whispered something into the wind: “I want to live like this; please, God, let me live like this.” It did seem to her now that she had nearly lived her whole life on the verge of either religious or creative fervor. Whenever she recalled that moment, she remembered, oddly, the next thing she did. She went into the house and watched her favorite television program—television being fairly new in their home—Industry on Parade.

The program satisfied her great need to know how things work, for it covered in detail the process of manufacturing everything from glass milk bottles to automobile fenders. Looking out across the fields from the back porch was akin to looking out of an airplane window. The land was a patchwork of green and gold and brown. The tops of all the hills that stretched for some distance between their house and the flats were closely shorn pastures, with barbed wire fences marking exactly the place where the slopes became too steep to plow. The same fences extended along the roads. At moments like this, the shape of the land got into her body and produced a kind sympathetic rhythm. She breathed, and blood flowed through her veins in harmony with the undulating land.

Cricket chirping came from the lower reaches of the hay fields and filled the air, and their sound was joined occasionally by the high trill of a lone cicada. In her youth, Claudia was sure that the strange trill of the cicada—that incessant mechanical vibration often heard on a windless summer afternoon—was a sound the power line emitted when it got overloaded. But in Japan, where she studied and later taught, she came to know cicadas and their sounds. In a tree-filled park in the middle of any major city, the combined sound of them threatened to vibrate people out of their skins. And, at the end of summer, when they are dying, they develop a white haze on their wings and bodies as though dipped in whitewash. When they are like that, in the late stages of life, they fly unsteadily, and sometimes dive directly into people’s foreheads and then fall to the ground and die.

Claudia walked into the kitchen, where Jorge stood at the long porcelain sink, gutting a dozen yellow perch into a shiny metal bowl. During his college days, he had been a prep chef at a good restaurant in Ann Arbor. The clean smell of fish flesh filled the pristine air of the dark kitchen, sheltered as it was from the sun by the porch that wrapped around the south and west portions of the house. It was approaching noon, and the smell of breakfast had evaporated, though Jorge would soon be boiling water on the black commercial stove and pouring it through coffee grounds placed in a paper filter, set atop a vacuum bottle: that way they could drink good coffee all afternoon.

Cindy, the xeuxes’ apricot standard poodle, was still getting used to life in the country. She stood beside Jorge sniffing the air incessantly, and sometimes dropping her head and gulping to gain control of the saliva that was coming forth. Claudia took a seat at the prep table, which was made of thick pine planks finished only with wax, so that it was yellow. She made the dog sit, and then, from behind, put her arms around her neck. When she kissed her on top of her head, she only half looked, because she was mesmerized by Jorge’s busy hands. She could not miss even the remotest chance that he might dangle a fish intestine in front of her nose.

“Where’d we get the fish?” Claudia asked.

“Nathan and Betty were here a half hour ago. They were fishing at Haymarsh this morning,” Jorge replied.  He turned to the dog and commanded sharply, “Cindy, relax—a few more minutes, okay?” As Jorge said the words, Cindy looked repeatedly from his mouth to the floor, as though he might be eating fish guts, and might accidentally drool some of them on the floor. “Are you afraid we won’t feed you? We always feed you. Relax.” With that, he gave Cindy an air kiss. Cindy yawned; then, she circled once and lay down beside Claudia. Her bones clunked noisily against the floor, and as soon as she was resolutely in place, she gave out a human groan of disappointment. At last, she had given up all hope of getting a raw tidbit.                                                                        

When Jorge had finished cleaning the fish, Claudia put a wok over a large gas burner, and, when it was hot, added a good splash of olive oil. She turned on the powerful hood fan, and Jorge poured the fish guts into the wok where she stirred them around until they were half cooked. They combined the sautéed fish innards with rice, fed Cindy a warm bowl full, and put the remainder in a plastic container on the counter to cool.

Putting her hand in Jorge’s Claudia said, “Come out on the porch, won’t you, Jorge?” On the west porch, shielded from the strong afternoon sun, they faced what could have been a summer postcard, framed by the deep shade and the giant, skinned timbers of the old porch: blue sky, purple hills on the distant horizon, and yellow hayfields. They sat in the heavy, rough-hewn swing seat, suspended from the timbers. Claudia took up a corner of the seat and made Jorge lean against her so that his head was roughly at her abdomen. Pulling back his bangs with her shiny fingers, she kissed him on the forehead. Then, she asked, “Where are the adults?”

With the shortest of ironic giggles, Jorge explained, “Well, Sister, the police officer came here this morning, and Zac and Lucille took him by the hand and are making him take a plaster impression of the footprints by the little girl’s window.”

“Call me Sister again, and I’m going to kiss you on those pretty lips of yours,” said Claudia.      

“It’s okay, Sister; it’s just you and I,” Jorge teased.

With that, she pecked him on the lips.

He announced, “I love you, Junie Moon.”

“And I love you, you gracious man, but why Am I suddenly Junie Moon?”

“Whenever a girl kisses me, the name Junie Moon comes to my mind. To me every girl is Junie Moon,” explained Jorge.

“I’m a girl?” inquired Claudia.

“Yes, you’re a girl,” Jorge said definitively. “You’re my Junie Moon.”

He continued, “When we, Zac and I, were undergraduates at Michigan, the theater department put on a dramatic reading of the book Tell Me that You Love You Love Me, Junie Moon. That’s how we met. We were both alone, and he was seated next to me in the middle of a row. I was trapped. He was bobbing his knee frantically. Then, he stopped, crossed his legs and put his knee against my hand, which I intentionally held wrapped around the armrest. I didn’t move my hand, and he didn’t move his knee. I was not even sure he could feel my hand through his cream-colored corduroys. Then, suddenly during a shouting scene on stage, he asked me, “Are you gay?” He asked the question the same way a person might ask, “Where did you buy your shoes?”

I responded, “Yes, and you?”

He said, “Yes,” and we both beamed.

“If you had said ‘No’ it wouldn’t have fazed him,” said Claudia.           “He’s so cocky he would have removed his knee from your hand and continued watching the reading.”

Jorge explained, “That, and bob his knee—I said I was gay mostly so he wouldn’t return to bobbing his knee, which was bothering the hell out of me.”

Claudia cackled. She gave the impression of a boozy old literature hound who smoked too much. In fact, she had something in her of the distracted quality of Elizabeth Taylor’s best performances. Of course, she neither smoked nor drank, except to have an occasional glass of wine. It was the liver cancer beginning to weaken all of her body’s systems.

Jorge explained, “Then we got to know each other, and we realized that we were both scared of the future, and we were lonely because we wanted to accomplish real things with our lives and not just figure out after being with a hundred men, ‘Yeah, we’re really gay.’”

“You’re a beautiful couple. You argue with each other sometimes, but you defend each other to everyone else. I like that. And you consciously force others to see you as a couple.”

“We practice being married. It’s important for us. Zac’s father is not going to be there when I’m dying. And my parents aren’t going to be there either. It’s we who will be taking care of each other. It’s he and I.”

“Oh, Jorge,” she said, “your words are brave and true.” She delivered the words with a dying sound as one might produce at the end of an important speech in Hamlet.

She thought briefly of what men’s fantasies of love must be. He was pretty, she was old, and with her arms around him, she felt as a man must feel with his sweetheart resting her head on his bosom. His was, she thought, perhaps the most irresistible face in the world. His skin glowed brown, and his lips could only be described as soft, full, and, by contrast with his skin, a powdery orange color. They were lips without corners. The whole circle of his mouth was soft, translucent flesh, filled up and holding the light like a water blister. She knew then what it was like for him and Zac. She felt the heat of him, the strength of him. Finally she said, “The very idea of the two of you being peeping Toms. How strange. People are just acting strangely because we three interlopers are in the neighborhood.”

“You know, Zac won’t be able to get any work done today. He’s really upset,” Jorge said.

“Matt told me that the boy who harassed you last night is Corinth’s cousin’s son,” explained Claudia. Corinth is Matt’s wife, across the road.” Claudia continued. “I talked to Matt on the road before I took my walk. He was working on his mailbox.”

“So, the story’s all over the neighborhood,” said Jorge.

“Sure. Two adorable young men walking their poodle in the cool of twilight past a farmhouse on a quiet back road, where there lives a mother, raising two children alone. What could these young men be but child molesters?”

Jorge talked about the incident, “After a while he would not listen to our explanation. He said he had called the police. Then, he turned his radio up and followed us fifty feet behind with his bright lights shining on us.”

“Zac was hoarse this morning from shouting,” Claudia observed.

“The scariest part is he seemed ready to kill us. He was so angry at us for walking past his cousin’s house. I have never experienced such irrational behavior,” said Jorge.

“Why was he so threatened?” asked Claudia.

“Something might have happened at his cousin’s house, but to be so angry and wrong about us—I’m scared,” explained Jorge.

Just then, Cindy flipped open the dirty screen door, and, seeing their embrace, gave one loud bark, and then stood as though waiting for an explanation.

Jorge lazily sing-songed, “Come here, Cindy.”

She responded by barking once more and loping off into the yard.

Claudia said, “It might be someone using you as a scapegoat.”

Jorge added, “Somebody who thinks, ‘I can do my weird sexual thing now because gay people are here, and everyone will think they’re the bad ones.’ He’s jealous.”

“That young man’s family and my family have lived in these parts for nearly two hundred years, and it has somehow escaped his knowledge that we are a people not to be fucked with,” Claudia explained.

Jorge was displeased by her choice of words. “Have you ever said that word before? You say it as though you don’t know how to pronounce it. You say faahk or something.”

She enunciated, as if addressing the wide world, “Do—not—fuck—with—me.”

“That’s offensive,” Jorge said. “Please stop saying that word.”

“Sometimes you have to stay angry, Jorge,” Claudia said, defending herself.

“I want to solve the problem,” Jorge explained. “Zac and I will be here for a while.”

“Yes, until my liver gits me,” Claudia concluded.

“Yes, until yur liver gits ya,” Jorge tried on the accent. “I want to live here in peace. I don’t want to be afraid to walk down the road.”

 “Walk down the road as though you owned it,” Claudia asserted.

“Yeah, with a gun in my pocket; then, I’m just another psychopath. Don’t you see, Claudia?

Jorge placed his hands over Claudia’s on top of his chest.

He continued, “His name is Dorn. The police officer talked to him at his house after he questioned us here. He made him call and apologize—it was after you went to bed. Zac didn’t want to talk to him, so he put his dad on the phone, and his dad had a lot to say. He said, ‘Hey, you know, young fella, you’re not the only person who gets upset. You’re not the only one in the world who’s looking out for the people he cares about. Listen, you do exactly what you did last night again, and you’re the one who’s not going to be welcome on these roads.

We know mentally handicapped people. We have all kinds of friends. They’re going to be walking on these roads, so you’ve got to change your ways, son. You call up and offer an apology after scaring my son and his lover—not now, son, not now. They’re closer than most straight couples. They wouldn’t do a thing like this. They’re going to be here studying with my aunt who is a literature professor and a nun, so back off.” With that, he hung up the phone.

 “He reported his feelings. That was smart. He didn’t get too excited,” Claudia said. Then, she mused, “Life is a cool medium.”

Jorge narrated some more, “After he talked to Dorn, Zac ran to his father. Betty sat at the table with her head down, sobbing. Zac hugged Nathan, saying, “Oh, Daddy.” He could hardly breathe because he was talking and bawling at the same time, so he started to hiccup.”

 “They had a guilt-fest,” Claudia concluded.

 “Then, I hugged and kissed everyone, and I cried,” Jorge said.

“When the officer arrived at the house last night, he seemed very level-headed. I was confident he would do the right thing. Perhaps he has an idea who it was at the little girl’s window,” Claudia said.

Then, she changed the subject, “Now, for lunch, let’s sauté butter-flied perch fillets and steam some fresh green beans from the west garden—and we’ll dress both with butter and lime juice.”

Jorge concluded enthusiastically, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”         

That evening, they were, after all, able to pick up their reading. Despite the very real traumas of the moment, they all understood how to take art seriously. That summer, Zac and Jorge were reading to Claudia the final great four-book series of Yukio Mishima, which he titled The Sea of Fertility. They were halfway through the last story, The Decay of the Angel, having finished Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, and The Temple of Dawn.

When reading, they always sat on zabuton at the long Japanese dining table in the brightest corner of the room, but out of direct sunlight. Sitting before the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, their minds took off across the countryside and went to distant places, even to Tokyo and Yokohama and Izu Peninsula, places that figured prominently in the stories. They all agreed, after studying the early chapters of The Decay of the Angel, that the signal-house scenes—all inclusive—were some of the most charming and best realized in all of literature. They began to think that the novel was likely one of the best in literature as well, perhaps on a par with The Great Gatsby for its compactness and beauty of language.

They read the four novels in translation, because Zac was scheduled to teach them in the fall of the following year, and that was something of a target for all of them. Sister Jean Patrice had that much time to get her dying done.

Autumn came. Outside her room on the west side of the house, the full locust tree reached over the roof toward her room. Seated at her long table, she studied what the autumn sun did to the golden leaves of the locust tree that were arranged on fronds of a dozen or so individual leaves. It was the kind of day the Japanese call akibaré, a crisp, clear day in autumn when the edges of everything stand out in sharp focus. Claudia had written somewhere when discussing the soul of the poet that sometimes in a moment we experience the fullness of time, or in a phrase the fullness of life. In the gold color and the crisp shadows of the locust tree, all the autumns of all her life came back to her.

The autumn moment that stood out, however, was neither crisp nor clear. She thought of an autumn morning when she was twenty. She sat in the same place, but higher, at a library table, looking at the gray dawn and clutching a cup of coffee in a milk-glass mug enameled tan on the outside, with an aurora sheen, the kind that filled the cupboard above the sink then. A heavy blanket of fog covered the flats, and the silvery sheen of the sky lit up the dark wood floor.

She dared to pose the question of where life was taking her. It was with a sense of foreboding that she realized something like a calling. She would become a religious sister, and she would spend a good part of her life overseas. She sensed it clearly. Then, she thought about how to prepare herself, for she knew that teaching others how to be Catholic or even American was precisely what she did not want to do. “How much more interesting it would be if I were the one to learn by immersing myself in a foreign culture,” she thought.

She had nursed several colleagues in their dying months. One of them had said that sometimes the pain is too much and that her body didn’t always work right, but that as long as her mind worked, she could remember. That’s what Claudia was determined to do—remember, instead of lying there thinking about how unfair it was that she would be dead at sixty-five. Aunt Lucille sat with her often after each meal at the kitchen table and reminisced about people and times and places. She thought about how the landscape and wandering around in it throughout childhood and playing games at home and talking with family on a Saturday night about all kinds of things and listening to adults recite from memory long bits of Yukon poetry had shaped her.

There were times when she envied others for their life and vitality, and there were times when it pained her to count herself out of the future when it came to discussing life and careers with Zac and Jorge. In late autumn she took to her bed, the Japanese futon laid flat on the floor. By the time the leaves were off, she was using a firm foam wedge to raise herself up during the day in order to look out the glass walls. She was more and more under the care of Zac and Jorge.

On a day in December between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the snow started. Claudia saw it first as a kind of haze between the house and the dull-gray trees that stood on a rise in the middle distance. Something in the slant of it said that a storm was settling in and that it would fill the country before it was done.

February was frigid. Early in the month, an ice storm coated everything. The land shone like chrome. A couple of weeks later, the wind scoured the newly fallen snow off the hills and revealed the ice once more. The cold, cold land. To be going through the changes of death with the land like that. She was forlorn to be leaving the cold earth, and going where?

She wondered—she wondered deeply. It was good when the xeuxes read to her. Sometimes they read from her breviary. The old familiar words settled her mind and calmed her prickly nerve endings. She couldn’t always speak, and sometimes her eyes didn’t work properly, despite the cleaning and dabbing the boys did to get at the profuse mucus that coated them, but she could always listen.

In early April when the snow had finally gone off, on a particular rainy day, it looked like autumn again. The soaked and still smartly colored maple leaves lay on the ground in the north yard, and, as though hinged, flip-flopped in the wind.

At the end of April, as she lay dying, she pushed aside the pain that came from every inch of her skin and inner organs, and she pushed aside the sure knowledge that it would soon be over in order to use her last conscious thoughts. Her breathing labored, she made herself think over the haiku she had composed during her time in Hersey, some of them taken from earlier experiences. She had written them out for Zac and Jorge to send to her publisher, who would await Zac’s forward, which would, of necessity, mention her passing on the such-and-such day of the such-and-such month of the year 2010. Those haiku would complete the five hundred collected poems of her career. She composed them free style in English. Her rules were simple: three short lines that capture a moment of realization and refer, however indirectly, to the season.

 In the spring of the previous year, as she drove along U.S. Highway 131, returning from a visit with her oncologist in Grand Rapids, she had observed blackbirds hanging onto cattails that had come through the winter, with the brown parts all exploded like cotton, ready to release their floating seeds. The rush and the long, blade-like leaves that went along with them were yellowed and dry. Blue-black clouds quickly moved across the sky, and the whole scene—the new green grass, the birds, and the cattails—were caught in the quickly changing light. Sunshine barely glinted through the clouds.

Out by the road

Blackbirds cling to last year’s cattails—

Bobbing in a sudden gale

In the fall before she got so sick, Nathan had driven her to the local campus to participate in a Japanese Language and culture course by explaining the influence of The Tale of Genji on Japanese art. She sipped coffee from a plastic mug through a sipping hole in the lid, as their car descended into a deep gully. The tops of oak and maple and beech trees were visible. Then, the car gently settled below the brown, yellow, and gold of the trees caught in the morning sunlight. It was like falling into a gigantic pile of leaves and losing oneself.

The gully is gold

With beech trees in morning sun;

I sip coffee.

She remembered how, in June, before the hay is cut, the swirling gusts of wind work their way across the deep green fields.

The summer fields glint and swirl

In sunlight broken loose

From the racing clouds

In the autumn, when she was at the local university, she crossed the main thoroughfare and came upon a scene of devastation. The first hard frost of the season had caused all the walnut leaves, along with the scuffed and bruised walnuts themselves, to fall to the ground all at once. It was like stepping on something alive. The leaves were green and velvety and soft, piled up on the lawn.

Overnight, the still-green fronds of

The walnut tree fell

In gentle layers on the lawn

She had arrived in January, four months before Zac and Jorge could get free from their obligations in Chicago. She walked the forlorn, glistening, snow-packed roads of the section and noticed for the first time that not only in art but in reality, deep snow shadows are blue. A white-domed pasture glistened on one side of the long, steep hill, and a drifted-over hayfield sloped off the other side of the road. At the base, a pine grove came almost to the edges of the road, leaving the lower parts in blue shadow, not very different from the blue winter sky.

Snow glints on the hills,

And in the gully, the pine grove

Casts a blue shadow across the road

When she was a child, she and her mother built wood stacks after the wood cutter had come and dumped a load of cut wood on the lawn. What seemed to define these moments was sleet, something between snow and ice, bouncing like buckshot of the yellow pieces of hardwood that she took from the disorganized pile to build an organized stack.

Winter started

The way it always did—

The sleet came before the snow

She grew weary and stopped thinking of when and where. Mentally, she recited them one by one.  

The noise of it,

Sleet falling

In the cattail rush

___         

An old elm tree, knee deep

In a yellow wheat field:

Will it drown in the waves?

___

Hailstones blown by the storm—

I mistook them

For cherry blossom petals

___

I stood, studying van Gogh’s Irises;

The woman next to me wore

Lily of the valley perfume

___

Studying van Gogh’s Irises,

I could think only of the yellow light

And the long shadows of spring afternoons

___

Noise from the alley

Falls through the open window

Because it is spring

When she had finished reviewing her haiku, she began to think of an endless line of half-grown locust trees that ran along an endless length of three-strand barbed wire fence that divided an endless run of pasture. It was an often-repeated scene from her dreams. She liked it because it was happy and hopeful. When she woke up in the morning after having dreamt this dream, she was always happy and hopeful. There was a cow path, a worn cow path, that formed a narrow lane, and on both sides of it were the locust trees. “And the fence is over to the south of the whole thing,” she thought. “The cow path is between the two rows of locust trees, and somewhere is a house and a barn, somewhere off ahead, a house and a barn.”

It seemed important to describe these things to herself and get the location of everything right. And then she began to feel cheated. She thought, or rather, felt all at once, ‘My last fully formed word as a conscious human being: barn. I knew lots of words. I was a teacher. I was a writer. Barn, it seems pointless.’ And then she saw them clearly. She would miss the xeux-pair—if missing meant anything now. Their chins were covered with pin pricks, their quivering lower lips turned inside out, and their faces wet. They came to her side then, and each put his face to hers. They lay beside her.

When her heart stopped, her throat became an organ unto itself, violently plunging into her chest to open it for air. And finally, the useless effort stopped. The skin of her body turned blotchy, some areas purple and some white because of the irregular way the blood settled.

At her burial, after the church funeral, with a cool breeze whipping the microphone on the podium set up at the old cemetery, Zac talked about how death informs life and how death slowly becomes a thing we are not quite so afraid of. Jorge read from her book of haiku and added a few from the classic literature, mostly by the Haiku master Basho. He carefully chose ones that related to the moment and ones that captured the great beauty of the beauty that surrounded them at that moment.

A few days later, although the weather was still cool, Zac and Jorge were lying on striped towels, one powder blue, one burgundy, at the beach at Saugatuck, a resort on Lake Michigan. They lay cheekbone to cheekbone with their legs going out in opposite directions, the better to produce a running commentary on the scene before them. All of what they said had the effect of whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears—in addition to lying cheek-bone-to-cheekbone, they were also mouth to ear.

Jorge held his arms up and spread all ten fingers to the sky. He moved his hands in the sky, playing with ways to shield his eyes from the sun, which was shifting red and settling low in the sky.

Jorge flipped over and brought his face to Zac’s from above. “She kissed me like this,” he said. His kiss was soft and warm and long.

When they were finished—Jorge still hovering over him—Zac asked, “Upside down?”

Jorge countered, “Passionately. Then I said, ‘I love you,’ the way lovers say it.”

“She did not kiss you passionately,” Zac protested.

“You weren’t there,” Jorge said weakly. Then, he lay down and asked Zac, “What’s the most cynical thing you have ever thought about me?”

“The Court of Poetic Justice is defunct,” Zac reminded him.

“I know, but it’s opened up a new way of thinking for me,” Jorge exclaimed.

“’His looks won’t last,’” Zac replied.

“Hmm,” said Jorge, playing with the hair just in front of Zac’s ear on the far side of his face with his left hand, because that was the easiest place to reach.

Zac responded, “But I’m teaching myself not to care. I’ll still change your diaper when you’re old, as long as I can remember you the way you are today.” He continued, “What’s the most cynical thing you’ve thought about me?”

Jorge said, “It’s related to what you said. I think of that quadriplegic actor and how he and his wife still have sex. They’re still dedicated to each other, and they still satisfy each other’s needs. I used to be afraid that we didn’t love each other like that—well, that you didn’t love me like that.”

“Yeah, like you’ve thought about it so much more,” Zac said.

“I have, Baby,” Jorge explained.

Zac turned over and brought his face close to Jorge’s. “I don’t know if I can get used to kissing upside down. Where do I put my chin?”

“I’ll show you where to put your chin,” Jorge said suggestively as he stroked Zac’s hair. It was disorienting, pulling his blonde hair back from his cheeks with his face upside down. Jorge continued, “With the sky behind you, you look like an angel. Let your arms slowly spread out in the sand and lower your face to mine and kiss me. Then, I will surely die, kissed by an angel.”

That’s exactly what Zac did; then, he lay back down, his face beside Jorge’s.

Jorge, as proof that Zac was not the only ancient soul on the beach that day, quoted from William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality. With practiced charm, in pair-shaped words, he said: 

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Zac said, “Your words are brave and true.” He added, “That was beautiful”; then, he turned and kissed Jorge quickly on the cheek.

Jorge said, inquiringly, “Claudia said that to me once: ‘Your words are brave and true.’”

Zac explained, “That was her expression. It’s a reward for having the courage to say something beautiful that’s true,” Then, he added, “If you had continued you would have got to the part, ‘And all the earth is gay.’”

“I know, but it’s not, so I didn’t,” Jorge elucidated.

“I thank God every day that I’m gay, because I get to be in love with you,” Zac enthused.

Jorge said, his fist suddenly clenching all of the hair on top of Zac’s head, “Your words are brave and true.” But he forgot the dying sound, or perhaps he was incapable of making one.

Zac giggled with delight as Jorge held tight to his long, silky blonde hair.

As the cool vermillion sun dipped below the jade-colored waters of Lake Michigan, on a sandy bluff, tufted with tall grass, above the pounding shore, it could be said that the gods were laughing.

The End

Ragamuffin Days

She closed the book, placed it on the hall table that rested on the wall below the staircase, and finally, decided to walk through the door. The key that locked it dangled on a short silver chain around her neck. She had the job now of walking to the middle of the section—country square mile—trudging over a sand-hill and gathering blackberries. Her family called them long-blackberries. They grew wild and abundantly on the shady side of any barren hill in any section in her part of the world. Their flavor was special: It was somewhere between elderberry and black raspberry. The season for black raspberries was over, and the season for elderberries was two months off.

The yard that she surveyed from the porch was burned dry from a two-week drought; it often happened in mid-July. Against the boughs of a large white pine, she saw something like a dust swirl, or the weird phenomenon of a flock of birds making sudden changes in unison. It was a swarm of gnats catching the rosy glow of sunrise. Mourning doves hooted, one from the ornamental maple—it would not in its lifetime grow taller than twenty feet—and the other from the dense center of a thorn-apple tree that stood at the edge of a grape arbor in the far corner of the yard. A tractor putted in the distance, probably someone at the far side of the section hauling round bales to the edge of the field, where they would later be encased in tubular vinyl.

One thing she knew: She would get her pant cuffs wet on the way to picking blackberries, and then gritty with sand. In mid-summer, when the mourning doves hoot and the sunrise is rosy, the half-grown clover of the three hay fields she needed to cross would be drenched in morning dew. Other mourning doves would continue hooting as she picked blackberries, and, at some point, she would begin to feel insecure: It’s a fool’s errand; the tarts won’t be any good; the puff pastry resting in the refrigerator is overworked; the cream to go on top won’t whip; I’m wet and dirty; what’s the use?

The silence of these parts made her thoughts all the more poignant and piercing to her conscience. In the city, traffic was second nature; here, you studied the sound of a car on the road as it approached from nearly a mile away, or, if you happened to live on a gravel road, you studied the plume of dust that rose up behind it even before hearing it.

This is what she had written in her diary before trekking out at dawn to find wild fruit: These are our ragamuffin days. At the end of Dies Irae, they sing, “Amen.” I am probably now at the farthest reach from this “Amen” that I will ever be, I, being myself and not a child any longer, and not yet being old or infirm—these cannot be faulted, of course.

I am saying only that we must revel in our time, whenever and wherever it is. The melody that is under this chant for the dead that begins “Dies Irae, Dies Illa,” is the mournful hum of the world. For now, I shall break the mournful hum of the world by adopting my very own style, not as when Mother said, “What are all these little dribs and drabs of things at the back of the refrigerator? Throw them out!” That is the mournful hum that I shall, for now, not adopt. I will gather fruit and make tarts for my true love.

The End 

A Dream of Eschaton

You are a fat old man who gets to say what’s what, and I never agree with you: That has been my relationship with the world. Once, when I was a sophomore in college, I attended a guest lecture at the arts center. This center, I will tell you, apropos of nothing, was named for a graduate of our school, who became a State Supreme Court Justice. When I attended there, it was a college, but now it is a university; the school was founded in the late 1800s to educate the lumberjacks who were short of work because they had recently finished the job of cutting down all the trees. I made a habit of going to these guest lectures because I could learn something about style and elocution, things that interested me, though they were not my subject. Sometimes the speakers’ presentations were compelling; other times not. For example, one lecturer talked about the adaptations that sea creatures make in order to survive at great depth. This time, though, the speaker was a last-minute substitute.

I went to this college near my home as an art student. Yes, it was near my home, but it was not down the block. I had to drive there since we lived in the country; you could call it a country estate, or you could call it a neglected farm. Take your pick, but perhaps neglected farm is closer to it. My mother raised some animals, but the rest of us took little interest.

My uncle was the farmer—he knew the market price of heifers and steers, and which grain to buy in a given week for his feedlot—my family members were all in the building trades, electrician, carpenter, ironworker. In any case, at school, I soon learned that I preferred academic subjects to the commercial art trade; but there I was, headed toward graduation from a two-year course in applied art. I had to design product boxes, potato chip bags, and magazine spreads. I grew to find these tasks somewhat tedious, though certainly not entirely boring, as they were about the communication media, which I liked. Certainly, I did not dislike art as such, but doubted whether I wanted to spend my career painting pictures to illustrate in vibrant, photo-realistic style, sandwiches and mayonnaise jars.

Once, I did just this; I took a photograph of a deli sandwich, which I had purchased, and which I had set upon a cake pedestal; then I turned it into a tempera painting on illustration board. Tempera on white paperboard was the common method of creating advertising images then. This sandwich was pastrami on rye, and beside it I had placed a small mayonnaise jar. The professor, upon seeing my piece, admired the technique, but observed that a certain slice of cheese was thicker than it ought to be; it should be thinner, he said, and it should lie snugly over the pastrami it was set upon. To this, I responded with what I thought was obvious to everyone who had ever owned a garden or planted one, “It’s not cheese; it’s a slice of yellow tomato.”

I supported my claim by showing him my original photo. He conceded, though he clearly did not like the whole idea of yellow tomatoes in sandwiches. I knew of them and even liked them because, as an adolescent, I helped my childhood friend pick his mother’s garden. Our harvesting the garden was made necessary by the fact that his father was at that time in the middle of a long bout with alcohol-induced psychosis and had to be institutionalized. He was by times well and not well, and by times in and out of the institution, which was some seventy miles away.

My friend’s mother planted a garden and found a day job as a housecleaner in order to get by. It also helped that they received food assistance, which, at that time, was provided as surplus food: things like dried eggs in a steel can and cheese in a big, long box. I especially liked dried eggs when they were reconstituted and prepared in a skillet, mostly because everything about fresh eggs seemed rather yucky to me when I was a child. My mother had the opposite opinion: When my own family was on food assistance for a time due to my father’s extended hospitalization with tuberculosis; she opened the cans, added water, and fed these same canned, dried eggs to the three or four pigs she kept in the barnyard every summer.

Harvesting the garden, due to the difficult circumstances of my friend and neighbor’s family (they lived around the section about a mile, which happened to place them in the next county) was something I did, despite the fact that I have always hated the soil. If it had been planting the garden instead of harvesting it, I would have made any lame excuse not to be there. It is the powdery grit on my skin that I most dislike. I cannot even think about clay pots in a garden shed in spring: setting them on the wooden shelf and filling them with soil to prepare for transplanting tomato seedlings, the sound they make scraping along the shelf over the sand. I am paralyzed by such things; often, I have to stand still and clench my teeth.

When I was in college, my neighbor’s father was well, having recovered from alcohol toxicity and its mental effects. I used to see him mowing a particular triangle of grass near the football field when I was on my way to the library. After his successful treatment, he was able to get a state job in campus maintenance. He asked me once at church why I never said hello to him on campus. I did not have a good reason, except he scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, not me personally, but his antics, the things he did, pulling shotguns on people and threatening them.

What is hardest to reveal about this sad saga, which was full of trauma and heartache from start to finish—it is almost a repressed memory—is the day my neighbor’s father’s father, in his eighties, nearly deaf, approached our house through a pasture. Only my mother and I were home on that mid-summer afternoon. His mere appearance in the field across the road disturbed her; it was nothing like him to saunter across the section. When he was at the fence, I glanced; I knew who it was from his profile. At that moment, Mother set out for the door. He had been beaten, and the daylight illuminated the broken, jagged edges of skin that hung loose on parts of his face.

That day, he did not enter our house, but made his way, at my mother’s behest, to his oldest granddaughter’s house, located four miles in the other direction, and he lived there for the remainder of his days. My mother was not unsympathetic; perhaps that is shown by the fact that this old man, beaten and physically injured, first thought to come to our house. My mother was highly religious; for her, everything was full of portent, and, it is my belief, that she did not want me to see this particular example of human cruelty.

Yellow tomatoes: Well, yes, if my instructor had ever bothered to grow yellow tomatoes in the garden as my best friend’s mother had, because she preferred their low acidity, he would have known what a slice of yellow tomato might look like in a sandwich, piled high with meat and lettuce and sauerkraut and painted as an illustration.

This last-minute substitute speaker at the podium was tall and otherwise big in every dimension: he had a shiny, large face, and he wore a shiny light gray suit. He could afford to have a well-tailored one that fit nicely over the extreme plumpness of his middle. At the start of his lecture, ushers in the hall handed out silver-looking plastic coins, the size of an American quarter. On one side was a representation of an Indian-head, taken from a discontinued version of the American five-cent piece, called a Nickel (the metal it was made from)—Indian here refers to a native American tribal chief. This one had eagle feathers in his hair. The Indian head on this representation of a nickel was clearly roughhewn, and this I took to mean that it represented a “wooden nickel.”

There never has been such a coin as a wooden nickel to my knowledge; however, the average middle-aged smart-ass of the time (this was the same person for whom joshing around was the highest form of wit) might say to a young person about to graduate school, in other words about go out there and make it on his own in the world, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I suppose, this could be understood as the short version of Polonius’ Advice to Laertes in Hamlet, which contains the line, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” However, it lacked some portion of its grace.

On the other side of this coin—the money side, I would say (no pun intended)—was written in raised letters, the words “A Round Tuit.” The words might otherwise have been “In God We Trust” or “E pluribus Unum,” but this one had on it only what it was supposed to be: A Round Tuit. When used in the first instance, this expression, it seems to me, is dismissive and petulant.

Here is an example from someone who has been reminded of a certain task: “Yes, I will rake the leaves off the myrtle in the far corner of the yard before the frost comes. It’s right here on my list. I have every intention of doing it, Dear, when I get around to it.” Well, once you “get” a round tuit handed to you, you probably have no more excuses for delay, like that of watching a televised game of golf on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon. You must go out and act your part in the world, even if it is only to rake the leaves off the myrtle, because the time has come.

About this lecture, though, to state it briefly, I must say, the speaker did not well understand at the outset which joke he was going for. He muddled them; it was embarrassingly dull from beginning to end, this despite the fact that the president had proudly introduced him at the outset. By the end, when the president took the podium again, he was sheepish and hesitant. This is what I read into his manner and words: “That was a stupendous waste of time. We might better have cancelled. But, hey, you were sports. And isn’t that what life is about? You will no doubt go to other convocations, and they will not turn out as expected; some of them will be dull like this one. Isn’t this good practice? It served a good purpose after all.”

How that relates to anything, you could not know. I will tell you by the end of what I have to say, but let me portend: You have heard the inklings of a cosmic event, a shift of some sort. Scientific speculation has begun to buzz. Perhaps a realignment of Earth’s magnetic field, something predicted for a long time. No, it is not that. I will tell you, but first, I will tell you another story about someone I know—it hardly serves to say someone I know, but that is the story I shall unfold for you.

Pierpont is his name; he was given his great grandfather’s middle name, which had been his great-great grandmother’s family name, lest it be forgot, which, in any case, it was, except for the fact that he now bears this rather odd given name. When he is not called by that name, then, he is called Pip; this was started by his grandmother and perpetuated by his kid sister, though, as a child, he did not particularly like it. He was raised, along with his sister, by his grandmother at the top of one of the grand, old hotels in Vancouver.

They occupied precisely the space under the blue-copper roof atop the thirty-story structure. One feature of their lifestyle was this: Dinner was served from the hotel kitchen, but breakfast and lunch had to be made. On a winter’s day, Pierpont would sit for long periods of time looking out from one of the eyebrow windows set into the steeply sloped copper roof. If you are capable of picturing an inverted coffee filter basket; it is not a cone, but a ridged, oblong, tapering thing. That was the shape of the top of the hotel; otherwise, the building was a sturdy granite structure, with 500 rooms, counting suites and the one residence, which was theirs.

His grandmother was the last benefactor of the family fortune, last because the corporation that now ran the hotel had cut the family out of further revenues. At the center of this space sat a large, old Franklin stove, and around that, in a semicircle, was arranged a large area of sectional seating, which was upholstered in burgundy velvet, and set with deep buttons; this seating was placed a safe distance from the often red-hot, and sometimes white-hot stove. Around the stove was effectively where they lived in the winter. The large space under the weathered copper roof was what amounted to a two-story house, with a great room, braced with rough-hewn oak trusses, which held up the heavy roof, and private rooms in the lofts above, along with a small attic space, with roughhewn boards as a floor.

His grandmother was a good cook but did not love that task as much as one might. She limited herself to simple but delicious fare, that being soups of all kinds and breads to go with them. She also served baked beans at every midday meal. Pierpont and sister especially savored beef barley soup, with coarse Italian bread. Scalloped potatoes were also commonly served.

The kitchen was off the great room, and that was where they ate their meals most of the time. For breakfast though, they both cooked and ate by the wood-fired stove. Grandmother Lydia let the flames inside the firebox die down so that by nine in the morning, they, the three of them cooperating, could put slices of bread on specially lengthened meat forks (tools from another century) and toasted them over the embers. Pierpont did not realize that he had become attached to that way of making toast until, in the outer world, he found the toast inedible. His opinion when something like this: What is toast without an oaken char? It is a roofing shingle, certainly not something to be eaten.

They also had a long-handled iron egg coddler, that held up to six eggs; you had to put cooking oil in a cavity and break an egg into it, then hold the whole tool over the coals to cook the eggs so that the yolks barely ran when put out on a plate and cut with a fork. Grandmother Lydia placed slices of potato on an iron griddle and placed it on top of the stove, which was too high for the children to reach. There, the slices cooked unadorned, which resulted black-blistered, slightly thick ovals that were drizzled with a mixture of melted butter and olive oil once they reached their breakfast plates. Fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice often went with breakfast. It created a strong smell of grapefruit coming from the kitchen, where the rinds rested on the counter. To this day, for Pierpont, the mingled smells of toast and eggs and coffee and grapefruit is a powerful memory.

Hotel staff brought two loads of wood per day in what looked like large canvas satchels with leather suitcase handles and placed them in a warming box in the vestibule of their suite. The staff, some hauled wood, others served dinner, came to refer to Lydia, as La-di-da, for her insistence that everyone speak proper English around the children. An accent was fine, but verbs and nouns had to match, and all comparisons had to end the nominative case, as in, “This is a portrait of my Great Aunt Ida; Grandmother Lydia is younger than she.” When the staff made the least grammatical error, they were corrected in front of the children. One must not run slipshod through one’s cultural heritage, was her view. Why she was insistent in this way, no one knew for certain, except that she thought that once you learned the right way of doing something it became a second nature, you were much better equipped to influence others and earn a living. It would give you a leg up.

The staff who came to their residence did not disdain her. La-di-da simply became their code name; “La-di-da wants the lobster meat taken out of the shells and diced for the children. If you do not take every one of the bones out of the sole, La-di-da will let you know; the boy cannot have so much as a fragment of cartilaginous fish bone in his mouth without starting to gag and retch, and then she has to remove food from his mouth herself.”

When winter storms came—they are fairly rare in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada—it could be fiercely cold by the slanted walls. The interior roofline of their residence was steep and cold, covered in lath and plaster. To the outside, there were two rows of eyebrow windows on each side of the blue copper roof. One was rather high on the roof, and the other was low, but for Pierpont, a window pocket in one of the high windows, one that gave a view of the bay and the harbor, and everything in between, was where he thought about everything. He was often joined there by his sister, though she was not above playing with dolls in the great room by the fire, while he played and imagined all about the house.

Each of us has defined for ourselves a reference point where we place the beauty of the world, a reference, a trip in the mind that no one can dispute, because it is ours alone. For Pierpont and his sister it was lying on the rough planks of the attic space and looking out one of the wide dormers that gave them the best, high-up panorama of the city. They got their faces up to the glass and studied almost everything in its radius. Sometimes, when an early winter evening was calm, and mildly foggy or misty, all the air and all that stood in the air, that is, the city itself, existed in a muted, hazy blue, all of it, from the late twilight sky to the streets and the buildings, the traffic lights, the harbor, and the bay. It was not deep black punctuated by light. It was haze, and the street lamps and signals themselves were diffused, muted.

This was the light through which you could imagine the rest of your life. You could take turns with your sister, adding details to a story that became a touchstone for the rest of your days. Later, in deep winter, they watched the ice sheets slide off the roof into the grates below, designed to catch them, break them up, and melt them, with boiler exhaust. It was exciting to watch a heavy snowstorm, to observe the pyramidal skylights visible on other buildings darken with the increasing snow load, and the rooftop patios with sturdy pediments topped with balustrades of carved limestone get covered in snow. If it were very cold and windy, as occasionally happened in that region, a particular swirl of wind would lift the fine, cold snow that had landed on the dormer roof above their heads, raise it into the air and make it dance as a specter in front of their eyes.

In winter, Pierpont and his sister Phedra played games by the stove, board games such as backgammon, checkers, Chinese checkers, which uses marbles, and Go Fish, which was a card game played with a poker deck. They also enjoyed playing miniature snooker in the upstairs rec-room. They watched television, but not very much. Their Grandmother read stories to them throughout their childhood, and then they read stories to each other as soon as they were able, stories from well-selected books from the public library only a few blocks away. Lydia, to start with, and the children themselves finally, developed what is today an astonishing facility with language. They also each possessed a remarkable ability to seek comfort. They were not going to be bothered by the tribulations of the world for very long; they were compelled to sit by the fire and read a story or listen to one read out loud. Their ages at this time: Pierpont was eight, and Phedra was six and a half.

The first time I saw Pip, as I have nearly always called him, I walked up a hill behind him in Seattle. He stopped, held his arms up and turned his body around in the light of an old, red-and-yellow marquee mounted above a recently renovated theater; it had been converted from a movie house to a live theater. This was accomplished largely by deepening the stage and building an entirely new, tall space at the back of the building for the purpose of swinging scenery. In that moment, when I first glimpsed him, he was happy. On the white letter board was written REOPENING IN DECEMBER. The lines of lights at the top and bottom of the marquee blinked randomly.

I took note in that short moment how extraordinarily handsome he was, in a too-white, pasty sort of way. He could lose his looks at any moment because it seemed he did not know a great deal about exercise. He had a golden, curly goatee that was entirely under his chin. I saw all of this as he basked briefly in the lights of the marquee. I had got off work at 7:00 PM. It was a rather gloomy evening. My day job was and is city inspector, electrical.

To put myself through graduate school at the University of Washington, I returned to my family trade, and moved west. I had been pulling wires and making connections since I was twelve, so it was not that big of a challenge to pass the test and become an electrical inspector for the city of Seattle. I worked late sometimes in order to meet with renovators and homeowners. I had had some sort of vegetable, gluten free, protein, sandwich at a place I sometimes go to, and was headed for the nearest bus stop. Pip seemed the picture of a placid, smart, happy vacationer. I could tell also that he had a kind of nurtured soul; I supposed in no small part that this was due to the person walking at his side.

I supposed she was his young wife. When they saw me, they straightened up and acted right and headed up the sidewalk again. She briefly leered back at me, then made him take her hand. Of the two of them, he was clearly the one who needed looking after. “Sweet couple” I thought, strangely beautiful, oddly naive: How do people like that survive, or even come to be in an urban environment? A lot of us with more savvy wear a hard shell because we are scared most of the time. We don’t have an inner smile; we don’t have an outer smile: we don’t smile. I wore a tool belt of testing equipment and lugged the rest of my gear in a full-grain cowhide satchel. I must have looked a mess in my dusty Chamois and dirt-glazed genes, but that is what happens in a day’s work in and out of an old crawl space.

The next time I saw him, it was for an electrical inspection. He had had a small house in the hills above Seattle renovated. He had for about nine months had the role of Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet sewn up at that same theater he was basking in the glow of before. He had been busy with other obligations and had only recently shown up in the city. The renovations were handled by the woman who accompanied him only a week before on the street. She was his advance person.

He opened the door, a twelve-foot-high oak door, which took some effort to swing back. It was not a big house, but big enough; it had a great room, which made the scale of the door appropriate. From the great room, a mahogany staircase led to a balcony, and off this balcony, was a series of small rooms.

High in the middle of the open space hung a black wrought-iron chandelier with fat yellowed imitation candles that each had a rim of fake wax-drips at the top, where it met the flame-shaped chandelier bulbs. This one detail struck me because it hinted of the Mediterranean style, which is a design style that I rather intensely dislike—picture heavy pine boards as the exposed frame of a sofa; these heavy pine planks are stained dark walnut; a slight scalloping of the edges of the boards is their only decoration, which may be merely an imitation of wear; upon this frame has been placed a set of cushions upholstered in plaid, made in the colors gold, brown, and orange, on a field of cream: this is the Mediterranean style, at least as it is known in the North America; who knows whether they actually like this style or whether it is dominant in the towns and villages that surround the Mediterranean Sea? It is heavy, it is clunky, and it is never suited to the space it is in, in my humble estimation. It was born as a style of decoration in the 1970s, and it will never die. It lives on in every dank basement on the continent.

As a stand-alone piece of lighting, though, I must admit that I found the wrought-iron chandelier acceptable. There I was, at the door: His good looks and kind demeanor intimidated me. I learned only in that moment that my default position goes to saying only the shallowest possible things. I played it gamely, though I knew I was being stupid. See for yourself.

Me: I am here to approve recent electrical work. Why are you wearing tights?

Pip: I am Romeo.

Me: I am Julian; glad to meet you.

Pip: You toy with me.

Me: I’m Julian.

Pip: I am Romeo in a play; I have a fencing lesson in twenty minutes, in the backyard. My name is Pierpont. People who know me call me Pip.

Me: I don’t know you, so I’ll be calling you Pierpont. In my mind, you are already standing at the point of a pier about to commit suicide amid the jagged rocks and crashing waves.

Pip: Nice! You are standing there with me. The tower light is spinning wildly out of control for some reason. I will push you onto the jagged rocks and crashing waves, and your body will never be found. Call it murder, and you’ve got a deal.

Me: No, it’s a device.

Pip: Oh, I know what it is: Points for that! Why are you wearing that dirty, blue chamois?

Me: I see your point. Why don’t parents name their boys Romeo anymore?

Pip: When I begin to care about that, I’ll let you know. An odd thing happened a few days ago when I was putting that starburst on the wall with scraps of plasterboard. Some of it arrived broken, so I used it up making that. I nearly fried myself driving screws into the wall to hold the long, pointed pieces up, and now that outlet underneath doesn’t work.

Me: Let me see your driver.

Pip quickly presents it.

Me: You were in no danger of frying yourself; it’s insulated, but you might have set the house on fire if there were paper or debris in the interstitial. It looks like you didn’t do that, so you’re fine. However, I cannot do my inspection with part of the wall covered like that. I need an open wall. I know that you covered only that particular area, so that you could make the starburst and coat it with plaster and make a design—nice job, by the way—but the additional coverage, where the starburst isn’t, will need to be removed. It will not be hard since there is no plaster on it, no mud in the joints, as we say. I would do it myself and leave your art piece in place, but you will have to, in addition, go behind the starburst, loosen up the wires and complete a splice within a metal junction box in the open space below because you shorted out the existing wires when you were screwing those pieces in a random manner over the surface of the wall, clearly without regard for possible electrical wiring behind the board, and whenever that happens, you cannot just cut out the bad part, and put some wire nuts on the house wiring—we call it Romex— and join them, because, that kind of repair could fail in the future, especially with a power surge, and you cannot have wires dangling within the wall, so you have to have that repair done be a licensed electrician before I can approve the new electrical work, so that you can finally cover it up with plasterboard.

Pip: I’ll have the work done this evening. Come back when it’s convenient for you, daytimes, between 11 and 4. Thanks.

Me: ‘This evening’—meaning that you will do the repair yourself.

Pip: I already paid for the renovations. I am planning to do the plaster myself. In the meantime, I will take a whack at that last little electrical repair myself.

Me: Turn off the house power. It’ll take twenty minutes, tops. The lamb chops in the freezer aren’t going to melt, so turn off the main. Get a square junction box, nail it to the nearest stud, and make the splice. Do you have wire cutters; they are often called side cutters?

Pip: I have a hacksaw and a paring-knife, a sharp one.

Me: Don’t hurt yourself. You’ve got to look pretty on stage; by pretty, I mean handsome.

Pip: Pretty slash handsome. Who cares? I am a good-lookin’ guy, no?

Me: Since you are a professional actor—obviously this is not an amateur production with one such as you in it, though there is nothing wrong with amateur theater—could you recite for me a sonnet of Shakespeare? I may seem like a working schlub to you, but I read the classics, and I love them. I have Gielgud on my sound system, and I listen to the sonnets when I am out walking.

Pip: Do not tell me what I think of you; it is not yours to do. We actors, we are petulant ingrates between jobs; we are schlubs. You are the picture of grace. Ready?

Pip plants himself steadily on the floor and recites from memory William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106

When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,

Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,

I see their antique pen would have expressed

Even such a beauty as you master now.

So all their praises are but prophecies

Of this our time, all you prefiguring;

And for they looked but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing:

For we, which now behold these present days,

Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Me: Jesus, Man!

Pip: There was a preacher once who, in giving a funeral address, quoted a great work of poetry. In doing so, he, without giving enough consideration to the beauty of the words, lilted all the rhyme and galloped all the meter. When it came time for him to go up there, alas, he was barred from the kingdom. One must know the way of poetry.

Me: Theoretically.

Pip: Words to that effect—words to that effect are written on the gates of heaven.

Me: So they are.

When I said those words, “So they are,” I truly did not know what I thought of heaven, but I truly thought I might have gone there. I was smitten. I had no right to be, but I was. What a beautiful nature I saw in him! As soon as the fencing teacher arrived, he opened the big door again and said, “See you around, Pal.” He welcomed in Dr. Singh from the Physics department at school. She had in her arms all the gear for Pierpont and herself. She did not recognize me, as I had taken only a large lecture course from her.

Moving on: Who is the greater figure, Samuel Johnson or James Boswell, his biographer? Who is greater, Socrates or Plato, the philosopher or the man who set his words down for us to know? Surely in the latter case it is Plato: Without Plato, no Socrates, puzzle solved. Socrates would have been a sketchy footnote to the history of the world at best, without his every word and action recorded by Plato. He was known in his time to only some few hundred students. Influential as they perhaps were, one does not think of oneself as standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants. The record is nearly everything. In the former case, Samuel Johnson was an accomplished scholar; James Boswell was a shockingly good writer. They are about the same, except for this: Johnson’s work has been bettered in some respects; Boswell’s record of Johnson’s life hardly has. We are back to it: The record is almost everything.

In that spirit—I am probably the better one here—I will tell you more of Pierpont’s story, and mine. I earned a master’s degree in American Lit, enough to say I know what I’m doing, not enough to show off—unless I actually do something. To that end, more of the story: They do things differently in Paris. Pierpont was at the Printemps Department Store in a prominent district there, while on vacation with his grandmother and sister.

He wandered into a kind of half basement of the store: low ceiling, sounds muffled because everything within the expansive but tight space was lingerie; flesh-enhancing spotlights focused on undergarments he had never seen before. A woman, in what seemed theatrical makeup, wore a black bustier (this is not a comparative form— “Joan is bustier than Sophia,” as could be said, I suppose, in English if the matter were to come up—it is bustier, the French word), accompanied by only the smallest ruffle of a skirt.

She was a salesclerk and a good model for undergarments, being medium height and small-boned, with a well-toned body, including her arms, legs, abdomen, and torso. She waited on a customer, doing the things that department store clerks do, taking credit, bagging goods, and sending the people on their way. She possessed efficiency and style, while being an excellent demonstrator of this particular piece of clothing, which, one should say, amounts to an outer-ware corset. She was authoritative, she was assertive in the way that an excellent salesman should be, she was sexy.

He was twenty on that day. His Grandmother planned a nice dinner. Shopping was a momentary diversion. Pierpont—here is the matter—knew that all of it, the staging, the presentation, the illumination of the nearly sculptural garments in the quasi-basement of this famous department store was beautiful—he knew it was beautiful, but he did not know why. In addition, he did not know how or what or any of the rest of it. He lacked in himself what was needed to fully apprehend the scene. He took it in; he thought; then, he cried tears of religious sorrow.

His interests did not take him there. However, this matter, all by itself, is not one for sorrow but one for joy. Here is joy: you will always know how to find a nice birthday gift for him, your partner. Buy a tee-shirt with a cute message on it. You can easily guess which message will please him. You will not have to think very hard about appropriateness, taste, and so on. There’s more. Think of this: You will have better skill at comprehending the lyric: You’re the one that I’m dreaming of, Baby, you’re the one that I love. Your mind’s eye will train on the right things in order for you to apprehend the world correctly. Tears streamed down his face as he completed his way up a short set of stairs and out the door. Under the large frame of that door, he met his sister.

She said, “Your eyes are red. What’s wrong?”

He said, “Musty basement, some hideous allergy. It’s full of lingerie, anyway.”

Let us say here only that Phedra gave her line a fey reading: “I know.”

He said, “Get off it. I had a boyfriend when I was twelve. So what?”

“So did I,” she said.

“Yeah, the same one: Freak!” he said.

He did not fully realize his vulnerability at that moment. He was sure he had it under control. It was the only time in his life that he became a whimpering, convulsive slob. He fell into Phedra’s arms and cried profusely. She has a long neck and long, shiny chestnut hair, hair that leans toward sandy. He placed his face there and cried like a child who had been lost and then found.

She was younger, but she comforted him. She put her hand to the side of his head, held him there and said, “You’re full of genius: talented, handsome, destined for a good life; it won’t stop now, Pierpont. It’s going to be a good life: I’ll help you.” She took him by the shoulders, held him up, and met his eyes. She ran her fingers through his hair, which was naturally full of auburn curls; she said, her own eyes welling: “Pierpont, you’re a good prince because you know everything, and yet you know nothing.” She held his head to her neck again. It did not take long for him to take himself off her shoulder. He dried his eyes by pressing the tears out of them with his middle fingers, and then running his fingers through his hair. Recovered now, he kissed her sweetly on the lips.

Lydia came alongside them with shopping bags on her arms. She said, “The two of you are just the sweetest couple. Did you ever consider that you might be gay, both of you?” She knew the truth that was transpiring between them. She hit them on their backs with glossy shopping bags and held the two of them tight to her bosom; then, in turn, she rubbed her cheeks in their hair.

She could recite snatches of poetry and prose to suit any situation, but this time, she performed for the two of them with perfect eloquence, in her best whiskey baritone, Sonnet number 29 by William Shakespeare. They joined her halfway through.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

For them, it was like a prayer which they had learned to do in a kind of polyphony, each taking a different register.

When they had done it, Phedra asked Pip, “What do you think of Gem?”

This had always been their name for her; it was what Pierpont said before he could say grandma, and it stuck.

Pip said, “I think she is a sweet nothing, because the gods have been whispering sweet nothings in her ears for a long time, and she knows nothing but.”

They got on each side of her, and took bags from her hands, locked arms, and walked down the street toward their restaurant, making light sounds in her ears that consisted of mostly P’s and S’s, something like Psssst but without the “t” at the end.

She said, “I am yours; you are mine, the ones I love. Let us all get tipsy on Alsatian Gewürztraminer.

Phedra said, “Before dinner?”

Lydia said, “Before, during, after. It is the only wine I love.”

I hardly need to say everything, do I? Pierpont is presently in the next room; he is most likely doing role research. He is a fabulously successful actor, mostly on stage. He cannot sing, so we have to leave aside the musicals. He is mostly known for his vocal delivery and his method. He is brilliant at it, but there is not much else to recommend him as a great being in the world, except what strongly recommends him to me. He is an extreme comfort seeker. He wants me to hold him when we watch a movie at home, or he wants to lie with his head in my lap and watch the screen sideways. He has spent enough energy on putting together the parts of his household. Now, he will not spend more energy on it. It is complete.

At this moment, he is most likely eating his daily raisin sandwich while sipping a hot drink, perhaps coffee since it is 11:00 in the morning. He used to cut in half a croissant and put raisins in between, held in place with a little lemon curd if we had some, but finally he instructed the bakery at the base of our street to make a hard French roll from simple bread dough, but to form it around a handful of raisins, cut slits across the top, glaze it with egg wash, and bake it in a very hot oven. He did not need the extra calories; plain was good enough—no lemon curd. It has now become a staple in that shop. We buy four at a time, a two-day supply. Well, as I was saying, he is here, and he is like that. He does not enjoy the outdoors, but I have turned him into a reluctant cyclist. We ride eight miles a day in good weather. If it is three days of bad weather, we don yellow rain gear, and go out anyway.

When he was younger, he was convinced that love was a passionless thing. Then, he discovered that it wasn’t. Let us say that our love has been very good. Our souls are nurtured, and we can go out into the world and work ridiculously hard. Our lives are full of passion. Getting sweaty in bed with someone you really love sets you up for a lot of right things. It sets things right, and you have focus and clarity.

Phedra married a man she met in medical school. She was long interested in practicing medicine internationally. She fell in love with a like-minded man. His mother was a Belgian princess of some sort, and his father was one of the Masai people of Kenya. I am a two-day-a-week caregiver for their children, a girl and a boy, in that order. After two months on assignment, Phedra and her husband George come into the house; they get on either side of me; I put my arms around their shoulders, they lock arms and squeeze me very hard like an animal. They call me a saint and all that sort of thing. He is tall, and he eats too much; it all goes to his belly. The middle of his belly meets my body at the ribcage. I think about this because he has been infected, perhaps infested is the word, with all manner of intestinal parasites.

When he is stateside, he takes a regimen of powerful cures that are supposed to get these parasites to unhook themselves from his innards. I do not enjoy that level of proximity to that many crawly things, but I love him; whatever else he is, he is a true believer. Phedra eats more sensibly and does not have to go through all of that.

You would think that this gene combination would make their children beautiful, and it does, but they are not physically beautiful. They have too many teeth for their mouths, their jaws are misaligned, their smiles are crooked. One of them had a clubfoot at birth, which required treatment with a brace. The other has scoliosis, which also requires support with a brace. They are nine and seven. They are extremely bright and utterly normal except for their physical maladies.

They stay with various people, a lesbian couple we all pal around with, another couple their parents met at school: Pierpont’s grandmother, who is alive and well, has them in Vancouver for part of the summer. However, this seems like their home, partly because when their parents are here, they have no house, and we all live here. We have added a small, efficiency suite to the side of the house.

I should say this about the people around me. They love one another intensely. I am a participant and observer. Love and affection: I can take it or leave it most of the time. My family is not that close. I will also say about them that they are either A) running an elaborate and successful Skinnerian experiment in behaviorism –I sometimes feel that there is a larger plan, and that I am not fully clued in–or B) they are brighter than any other people I have ever met. This is how far I take it when I am lying awake at night when Pip is out working, or in another state or province or nation or world capital working: Phedra married a doctor and is in international relief medicine. Pip is the best actor of the last 100 years. Who made them like this; what made them like this?

The short version of Skinnerian thinking might be: Raise them like royalty and try to steer them in a certain direction. Here is the kicker. I am a tradesman by day—still doing electrical inspections—and an artist by evening. Twice a week, I am responsible for these kids. I am fascinated by how they learn: a big word here, a little word there, a four-letter word they use to test how far they can go, and suddenly a quirk of conscience that seems right, time and place, but how would they know? And I want to influence them.

When I am with them, everything is about the correct line. I am an old eccentric with them (I am not old, but with them I am) flailing my arms, voicing age-appropriate literary works, and all I have in mind is getting the line right; writing the line right and reading lines in character to make them interesting. I realized only recently that I am quietly observing them and timing everything they say, and everything I say in return, toward one end: I want them both to be Shakespeare. Okay, this is the last thing I am going to say about it. What was John Shakespeare’s, William Shakespeare’s father’s, trade? He was a glover. He earned a living as a glove maker. He also became chief alderman or mayor, or something like that. He was a tradesman with civic responsibilities. His fortunes rose and fell and rose again. I think I will avoid the falling part, myself.

I will return now to the earlier story. I had hoped to write something like the Satyricon, a fragment of literature that sets on edge the powers that be, but which, nonetheless, makes it into the history of the world. I had hoped too that Pip would have a long and distinguished career. I must tell you that those hopes are now gone. My ambition was not a great one to begin with, but it was mine. Now: No history, no world, no anything. I have told you this story so that you may take it with you into oblivion.

Call me generous. They say—the indeterminate they, that is—the odd rumblings in the world are not familiar. They are not signals of a shift in the Earth’s magnetic alignment. They are odd and troubling happenings that can only be attributed to the final cataclysmic, the utter end of all that is. It is not as though some corner of the world is flickering like a bad hologram, but rather that the very fabric of the world is coming undone.

People speak of gravity as having a certain force. Electromagnetism has a force. The space-time continuum ought to hold itself together. But there is something more; it as though Poseidon, the god of the sea were suddenly manifest: we thought that it was superstition, a bizarre conjuring, perpetuated by a few madmen a long time ago, but now, we have to deal with this sea god manifest, a thing with real power over life and death, our very existence, the god of all things tangible. Well, that is what it’s like. There is a force we have not properly calculated. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared—an impressive finding, but now, as with all else, it is utterly beside the point.

Is there some chance that our best experts are misreading the force? There is no chance. Is God extra-universal? Probably not. If he were extra-universal (existing outside the known universe), would he be the enemy of time, and would that save us? Yes. That is what faith has been all along: God is the enemy of time, life eternal. As an old song lyric goes, “Down here, we’re dust to dust; up there’ we’re glory bound.” But it does not fit the schema. All is all; there is nothing more, nothing above or beyond or beside the all that we know. There is no room in science for the Kingdom come. The end of time is the end of all. It is odd how we see reality next to nothing.

When you are a child, not having a raspberry jelly roll with your orange juice in the morning, compares well with the emptiness of nothing. Limping broken hearted through a couple of years of your life is not a bad comparison. The emptiness seems a vast nothing. That is, until you know that nothing really is nothing, the absence of everything. Are we mere specters, electronic particles in someone’s game? No, we are not that. I do not know what we are, but we are not that. Why do we exist? I don’t know. Why is it ending? I don’t know. It’s a cruel joke, isn’t it? No, it is not. We were here. We had meaning: It is what it is. The stirrings of our brains lead us to love or hate or homicidal furry, as in war. It all had meaning. Much of it was wrong, but it had meaning. As in a dream? No, as life lived out, not as in a dream.

I am not one for new words, but here’s one: Nothing-left-of-it-ness. Once I was in a resort town with Pip. In that town was a beautiful bay. We were there for two weeks, doing research. Pip had to train as a caddy for a film. He knew nothing of and cared not at all for outdoor sports. He spent some of his time in the golf course work-shed soaking up the look and feel of this town in northern Michigan. To this day, he can imitate the people he hung out with that spring, cold spring, I might add, in and around Traverse City. He learned the long, drawn out “well”: it went up and down in tone more than once, and ended in a high whine. Pip is very decisive when he speaks, so it is extremely odd when he uses that word, pronounced that way at inopportune moments to feign hesitation.

He was an excellent caddy in that film: enough said. It was a period piece, so he wore tan knickers, a tweed cap, and saddle shoes. He had never been in a place where people do an outdoor trade, so he was completely fascinated by every aspect of the golf world, from greens keeping to driving, chipping, and putting. When he practiced caddying on the course—with the golfer clued in to the fact that he was an actor studying for a part—he said things like, “I recommend a three iron; I think you’ll have better luck getting out of the rough, which seems to be early-growth timothy, I would say.” It did not matter if it came out gibberish; he needed only to practice his timing. The player would respond with something like: “Thanks, Man, but it actually calls for a 7 this close to the green.” Before they could finish the word seven, he had pulled it out of the bag and was handing it to them.

There was a certain recreational trail in that town. At the midpoint of the stretch of this trail that ran through town—it also went way up a neighboring peninsula—was a rental place where we once got a peddle-surrey with a candy- striped top. At other times, we walked near sunset on the trail.

This is the point I am making. The trail ends on a rise before you would get to a busy street. It ends before you have any inkling of that busy street. You have a willow wetland on one side, the asphalt trail that ends on a high rise, and so you see nothing beyond it except the sky, and, if you take a few steps farther, the west arm of the bay, and on the other side, a sidewalk and some nondescript bushes, but you do not see any indication of the urban world you are in. However, this time I am speaking of, there was a smell in the air; a smell of cooking grease, the moist, flavor-loaded smell that comes from industrial frying. It reminded me of the tavern in my hometown where on Friday nights they fried breaded shrimp, and the only vent for the whole place was a slowly rotating eight-inch turbine ventilator, the kind that looks like a mushroom carved into a pinwheel and used as a garnish on a fancy platter of food, set in the roof over the galley kitchen to remove the cooking smells. They never work well, and your clothes, if you have spent much time in that place, end up redolent of fried shrimp and whiskey and beer—no use trying to hide the fact that you stopped in at the tavern.

On this walk, in this place, viewing this odd rise at the end of the trail, there was a moment when I fazed. I grabbed Pierpont by the waist to steady myself and to remind myself what was real. It may not have been the thing to do right there, right then, but it was disorienting, this illusion that there was nothing left of it. The city was there, but I could not see it. The bay was there, but I had to take another five steps to begin to survey its expanse. My senses perceived this place for a moment as the cosmic end of the road, and it overwhelmed me.

I have never liked shrimp. I was not Catholic enough to care about switching from meat to seafood on Fridays; I don’t think to eat from either one of those food categories for long stretches of time, so it was unimportant. In this particular instance, what filled the air was the result of a Mexican Restaurant getting ready to open for the evening, frying up tortilla chips. After thinking about all of this, I wanted nothing more than to drink a glass of heavy beer in the grease-laden air of an old restaurant; we found something like that on the west end of Front Street in that town after an additional mile of walking on urban streets. Now, I always think that this is what we should do when there is nothing left to do.

The worst of times that were, if they did not kill you, are merely quaint. It is the end of time. It has been a dream of eschaton, this life of ours, and now it has come, the eschaton: We are done. Time is old; money is expensive. These are fuzzy tautologies. A proper one goes: A rose is a rose. Tautological statements are inescapably true—and unavoidably tedious.

That must be why we do not go around saying them all the time. If you say anything else, then perhaps you have made a judgment of some sort, or, at the very least, you have gone beyond what is fundamentally true. “I bought some cream-colored roses on Tuesday.” Oh, you bought them; how far did you go for these roses? In doing this, did you drive your car and needlessly pollute the air? What is cream-colored? Did it also contain a little pink? I should think that would be much nicer, cream with a blush of pink. Why should these lesser tautologies rule our existence? I do not know, but they do. It is not the fatal conceit at the heart of tragedy that is our end; it is the end of time. Time is all our tragedy.

There are forces in the known world, and there are unknown forces in the unknown world. Then, there is the only one that matters: Time. It is an unaccounted force. It has been consumed in our hurtling on. We have entered the event horizon. Do you remember the beginning of my story? In case you did not know, I will tell you: Time is the fat old man who gets to say what’s what. In case you did not know, I have told you.

Pierpont did not understand everything beyond the narrow focus of his career. He did not care about the issues of the day as much as he could have. He lived a small life, which was enough to feed his great talent. The truth about that is, it didn’t matter. I loved him. Until when? I think you know until when, but I will say—I will say it: Until the end of time.

Oh, say nothing to mark the time, for example, “I will work an hour in the garden, and then in the afternoon, I will direct the handyman in arranging the storage room above the garage.” Do not plot a course of action; it will make you sad now. You might be in the middle of it, and then, it wouldn’t matter anymore. It does not mean, do not do anything; it simply means that such things are now full of ennui, so avoid making plans; do not mark the time.

Start a fire in the fireplace and drink a glass of wine. You can do this much in sequence without a great deal of planning, or hard thinking or, to be truthful, doing very much. You will not have to think about how time unfolds, or will stop doing so sooner than we would like.

We have lived with a fundamental error. Here is the truth: Time itself will break our atoms; we will feel it only as an easement, and we shall fade into a gentle haze, we, the world, all that is. Do not fear the end; it is unstoppable. Time is over; the world is done. It has been a dream of eschaton, this lowly life of ours, and now it has come. Adieu.

This jeweled orb, This water world, This storied Earth, Our noble species: Sah-yoh-nah-rah.

The End

Knotty Pine       

When the night breeze carries the scent of flowers, it makes you think. That’s all: It makes you think, perhaps way back to another period of your life, when the same scent and the same cool night breeze was a new experience, mostly because you were newly aware of sentimental attachments, having hormonal changes alter you as they did. Let’s be plain: you were going through puberty when this idea first registered. An aside here: It has often occurred to me that a great writer can take such an ordinary experience—ordinary in that every human on the planet has experienced this change—and invest it with world-historical meaning and make a great story out of it. It has also occurred to me that a neurotic parent can do the same, and she will not even make a name for herself.

                  To return: It is a clear, dark night; the air is cool, and rising on it is the scent of lilacs. The cool scent enters your open window from the yard downstairs at the back corner of the house; it swirls, and lifts, and you take it in: The coolness, the scent, and the fact that it is late spring, a time of year that you have seen come and go, and have lived through several or many times before. They pervade your thoughts and dreams: the scent, the cool breeze that stirs on the darkest of nights, and the season.

How many blossoms are open at night? The list must include lilacs, although I do not know for sure. It does include other blossoms that bloom on bushes. If you are on a hiking trail an hour after twilight when the moon is full, you will see them. And if you stop to look closely at these flowers that bloom in the moonlight, you may notice some caterpillars dangling from the twigs under the flowers. You may mistake them at first for catkins, but you will learn that a plant with catkins does not have large-petaled-flowers, because catkins are simply another, odd, dangling sort of flower. And if you touch one of these larval worms out of curiosity, it will be warm still, from the heat of the day.

There is not much warmth to be gained from the moon, is there? So, it will be from the heat of the day, not two-hours gone. They will be fleshy, plump, large, translucent, white caterpillars, glistening there in the moonlight. They too come out at night; they are the caterpillars of moths that will live at night, and now they grow on this night-blooming shrub along the hiking trail, where you are, well after dark for God-knows-what reason; perhaps you were restless and needed to think; you started well before dark, but the night caught up with you, and you kept walking because you still needed to think. And occasionally a lone cyclist will pass you and say hello before you even recognize that anyone is there. He is going from town to town on a bicycle instead of a car because he works odd shifts at the glove factory that is being phased out; it will be moved offshore to another country before long. All they have at the plant now is odd shifts. He must get to work, even though he is temporarily without a license because he had been drunk while driving, and his license got suspended.

Now, I would like to speak in the first person instead of speaking about the night breeze and so on. There are those who would say that great literature is a prayer for mercy; it is a prayer at the cosmic level. I am largely in agreement with this. One only needs to read Cervantes or Shakespeare to know about literature at its finest—both being very early practitioners of highly charged, fictional, or historical storytelling, I might add. And we only need a little empathy with the people in those stories to begin to abhor the miserable human condition and to experience viscerally the overpowering need for a great deal of mercy. If literature at its best is an extended plea for mercy, then I can only logically add: God help us! Now I have added my own words to this prayer.

Now, here is my story; it is wrapped in a sentence that I heard once a long time ago in a television documentary about an important writer. I say that only to connect to it. Of course, more importantly, it is a truth of my life, perhaps a central one. This author started one of his fiction stories this way, “The first time I killed a man was in a windmill.” As I said, he was dedicated to fiction. However, I am not—and I repeat: The first time I killed a man was in a windmill. He was not a man, but a boy my own age, between eleven and twelve, then— I should add, then for me; forever for him.

 The mill I allude to did not run by wind, but by the surging force of a river that flowed past it; so it was a water-run mill. If I were to give you all the details, I would also tell you that it did not mill wheat into flour; rather, it milled logs into boards for the furniture industry that thrived around there some time before, say in my great grandfather’s time; I am quite sure of this because he came to this country from Ireland by way of England, where, it must be said, jobs for displaced Irish were in short supply. He was a fair and honest man who figured the board feet of all the timber that had been skidded by horse teams into a staging area and then each log individually sent down a wooden flume where it splashed hard into the deep and surging river.

The mill, where the logs ended up, was now the property of a distant relative of my great grandfather. I say distant because it was on his sister’s side, not his; those names get lost over time, sadly, and one is never quite sure of one’s relations. The young family purchased it to make a cozy weekend getaway, and they had a plan to convert it entirely into living space.

We had access to it, my friend and I, as long as we promised not to go near the railings, which were not well secured anymore. There was a kind of mezzanine or catwalk from where the belts and pulleys could be worked on—we were not allowed to go there; however, the cupola that capped the entire structure was deemed safe since the roof it was mounted over was strong and had held its shape for more than a hundred fifty years; what’s more, the stairway leading to it had held up over the years, not the least for the fact that the entire structure had a roof of heavy-gage steel. The rafters were trussed up near the peak; this feature didn’t interfere too much with the lofty interior volume appropriate to a sawmill.

The cupola’s roof was also finished in steel, which was some job because it was a slender dome—consider the pointed end of a chicken egg standing up—with eyebrow roofs over each of the four dormers. The inside of the windows had wide ledges and deep-set casings made of large timbers covered over in knotty pine, that would hold an eleven year old boy; we braced ourselves entirely within the window case and raised ourselves up by placing our feet firmly on one side of the of this casing and our backs on the other, thus bracing ourselves within the window firmly enough to inch our way up the eight-foot high space.

Once high within the window, we perched for as long as our legs could stand it. From there, we looked out and surveyed the river and the neighborhood that had grown up long ago around the mill. Occasionally, in mid-summer, the shrieks and giggles of young people, both locals and college students, floating down the river in tire tubes, reached as far as the cupola. We called them tubers.

I guessed that in the space between the ceiling and the roof there lived a family of squirrels, because the debris on the floor contained the broken, empty shells of black walnuts as well as beechnut husks. The other constituent, beer-bottle caps, was our doing. We always took the bottles themselves home. My parents would not miss the full bottles (who can remember whether he drank eight or nine bottles the night before), but the empty bottles had to be there for returning to the store.

Why should an idle summer day, drinking a bottle of beer­—one between us—with a friend high up in an old cupola be one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life? I have learned of painting and music and drama; I have had many beautiful experiences in nature. It is not the memory of a stolen pleasure that makes the moment stand out; it is living and doing—entirely on our own during summer recess. It is being. Perhaps it is being relative to nothingness, as some thinkers have said; the two of them, shall I say, are closely bound when you are on summer recess from Catholic school, and you are eleven and a half.

My name is Martin; his name was Calvin. He was the handsomest boy in school, and everyone liked him. He was also very, very smart. His parents were poor, and, I don’t want to be rude, but I must be honest, they were not very bright. I watched him once when we were both, by chance, at the gas station at the same time. I was on the far side of our car, half asleep, leaning against the tan, leather-upholstered door pull. He saw my little sister and waved slowly with a big open hand, the way Mickey Mouse waves in a parade, except Calvin had all his fingers. The finish of their car was sun-damaged; it was hazy, the way a blueberry is hazy, except the color that showed under the hazy blue, the previous color of their car, was faded burgundy; the finish was patchy, and the old Nash (they were old even when I was young) was rusted at the rocker panels and fenders.

I was struck by the contrasts of his life. His parents were both moderately mentally handicapped. They had met at a halfway house for independent living, a program run by a nearby teachers’ college. They were already through most of their training, like cooking and driving and managing money, when they decided to get married and have a family, a family of three, the two of them and Calvin. I could see where he got his good looks. His father had an angular face, along with a bad haircut. On Samuel Beckett, the same haircut—different tufts at different lengths, pure black, parts of it slanted like a field of wheat after a hailstorm, not recently washed—showed the independence of a free-thinking artist.

On Calvin’s father, it meant only what it was, a bad haircut. And his bronze face was full of lines even in his early forties. I later learned that his perpetual yachtsman’s tan was the result of an untreated blood disease that damaged his body and all the systems in it by holding onto too much iron. Hemochromatosis was the name of it. In fact, it could have been easily treated by the old-fashioned method of bloodletting every month or so, that is, if it had been detected sooner. Anyway, it killed him by the time he was sixty. Calvin’s mother was a little overweight, and she had a rosy, round face.

They were nice, and they were good to me when I went to their home. She made banana bread on Tuesdays. I never liked sweets, but I ate it with enthusiasm on Tuesdays throughout the summer. I drew the line at milk; I hated milk (still do), so she made breakfast tea for the two of them and me to have with the banana bead, while Calvin drank milk from an extra big tumbler, and it seemed he could never get enough.

In any given situation, as a child, I always thought about what was not right with any given life I observed. In the simplistic way that I assembled life’s wisdom then, I was sure that Calvin was limited. He would learn to be a nice guy to his parents, his challenged parents, but he would never rule the universe—as we speak of it now. There was too much specific knowledge needed to do what he needed to do, and simply too much to do; how would he find the time or interest or energy to accomplish much more than that?

Now, however, I am quite sure that I was wrong; a life skill is a life skill, and it may serve you well. He already knew how to be a good friend to me. Sometimes he even combed my hair. He stood in front of me, and, with great attention to detail, applying dabs of styling cream as needed, patted and combed through my frizzy, sandy hair until it lay in plastered waves. He did for me what he did for his father: Got him ready for church, except, usually, the two of us had no intention of going to church. 

The cupola’s interior was finished in V-grooved knotty pine. The shellac that covered it had retained its orange color over the many years since the cupola had been finished on top of the roof of the sawmill. The stairway up to it was built upon the planking that covered the entire upper part of the dark, voluminous building. We climbed about nine oddly steep steps that were painted red and that had accumulated some wear on the treads, footsteps having worn down the soft pine they were made of; in addition, the paint had a fair number of chips in it. A glow from the dorm windows filtered evenly from a grated opening in the floor of the cupola. This soft glow lit the otherwise brown space like Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, everything flesh made beautifully alive over a field of burnt umber.

Brass fittings ran through the floorboards of the decking, and what looked like furnace chains ran through them; above, in the cupola, these chains connected to large transoms within the dorm windows, and below, they were fitted with bulbous iron handles, painted yellow for visibility at the center of the workspace. Calvin and I always adjusted these to fully open and left the entry door ajar so that a steady flow of air would move either up or down through the building. That, and the spaces between some of the exterior boards, always made for a change of air.

I will tell you the story of his death the way I remember it now, with most of the emotion gone. It may come across as gruesome, especially the dream parts, but you must remember that the dream parts are not real. His mother, when we left the house, sometimes warned me not to hurt him in the leaves. She remembered that when he was little and they buried him in leaves for fun, his bronchial tubes closed up and he had struggled to breathe. This was his first experience of the leaf-mold allergy that continued to afflict him. After that, they never let him near the ground in the fall or the spring, when leaf mold is most active.

The sign of his having a reaction was his strange coughing—weak and persistent, seeming almost a psychological tick—and repeated attempts at throat clearing. His throat began to tickle; then he knew that he had to take a spoonful of honey or drink water—if that was all he could get hold of—to quell the tickle and keep the allergic reaction from progressing. Another thing: He could not go near lawn-mowing machines because they kicked up the thatch below the grass, and this thatch contained great quantities of leaf mold.

On the knotty pine ceiling of the cupola, there was a simple attic door, a rectangular cutout, covered from the top with trap door that you moved aside like a manhole cover to get to what I guessed was a dark and dusty ceiling space; it had on it two wrought iron handles, painted shiny black, a little larger than the door handle of a garden shed. After leveraging my way up the window case on my feet and back, when it seemed I was high enough, I leapt and grabbed these two handles. Everything to do with the ceiling, which we had safely sat beneath in the open space of the cupola many times before for great lengths of time, unknown to us, was dry rotted, including the moveable trap door.

The door came down, some of the ceiling with it, and I fell five feet to the floor. Down with it came a flood of molded leaves that were dry and musty. Millions of spores hit Calvin’s lungs, and his bronchial tubes clenched. He never breathed another drop of air. He looked at me with a mixture of panic and puzzlement; why would his lungs not take in air. I poured beer in his mouth; same thing: It would not go down his esophagus. He was getting weak, so I didn’t stand him up; I snuggled in behind him; then, I pulled my clenched hands hard into his body below his sternum. It did not work. I laid him down, pinched his nose and breathed hard into his mouth. I used all the force I had; I was panicked. I used a lot of force, but his pipes would not open.

With his last bit of strength and at the far edge of consciousness, he put his hand on my shoulder, signaling me to stop. Then, he positioned me and pulled me hard, my chest to his chest. That took the last of his strength, and it used all the breath he had in him. He died at that moment. In my dreams, however, his death goes on. He always throws himself down the steps, convulsed with fear; then, he falls down to the work floor. He lands with his back on the eight-foot-diameter saw blade. It cuts through the ribs on the left side of his body and pins him. He finally opens his eyes and reaches toward me in this helpless position. His lungs take in air, and his stubborn bronchial tubes open, just in time to be flooded by blood, which is dark in color and begins to spurt from his mouth. He is still looking, not at me, but at some random point in space; his hands go down, and then he dies.

Calvin’s grandfather on his mother’s side had been a literary scholar. In his dotage, he said some useful things. He once said to Calvin and me: “Tragic heroes do not fence with poisoned foils—they are crucified—they are always crucified; that’s how the human species does it.” He continues, “That is my only objection to Hamlet, otherwise a masterpiece.” To show you a little more of what I mean, this was his assessment of Christianity: “It is either a peevish philosophy with many exemplars, or it is a beautiful philosophy with few. I say it was once quite beautiful.” He had a habit of saying things like that, and just leaving them.

His parents forgave me; they were much more sophisticated than I thought. They saw how Calvin’s death affected me, and they forgave me completely. Their pain was unspeakable; mine was beyond comprehension and did not end in my youth. Do you know the slats that go between the boards of a wooden structure when the builders want to make it extra airtight? They are called batons. Half of the batons were gone from the sawmill’s exterior walls; this left gaps between the exterior boards.

If you have never experienced it, I will explain to you the particular way the wind works, coming through open slats, in a large, airy, wooden structure. It blows in among the boards, especially when there is a windstorm, with little or no rain, and it howls; it is a particularly large howl; it fills the space; the whole place becomes a kind of ethereal pipe organ. It is a sound that overwhelms you when you are suddenly alone in a large, cavernous space like the old mill where we spent some of our summer afternoons. This sound, whenever I hear it, or remember it, or dream it, makes me think that I am falling through a great vastness at the middle of the Earth. Such a feeling, such a sound, when you have killed someone, as I have, in the time and place I have described, will invade your dreams, even when you are old. 

You may think my ending enigmatic, or prosaic, or poetic; I do not know, but here it is:

When you have said that knotty pine is visually busy,

You haven’t really said much.

Either you like it,

Or you don’t.  

—I don’t—                                                     

The End

The Last Aesthete 

At mid-afternoon, a meteorite streaked briefly across the eastern sky toward Lake Chickwa; my navy-colored fleece lit up gold at the edges the way it does when I am sitting at my computer at seven in the morning, and the sun is coming in at a certain slant as it ascends over the horizon. I questioned whether the electric light that I use to light my workspace, a brass swag extended over the antique dining table that I use as a desk, could possibly shine so brightly. It was not possible, I concluded. Indeed, it had been something odd—bright light in the afternoon. As it happens, that modestly sized metal meteorite could not have centered itself better in Lake Chickwa; all the houses and summer cottages, and all the boats and yards and automobiles got a light coat of muck, similar to chicken droppings on a tin roof after a couple of rains.

They don’t hit that hard—meteorites—because they are slowed by the atmosphere. Not long after the impact that summer afternoon, the county historical society gathered together a few thousand dollars, then recovered the meteorite from the lake, and put it on display in the large yard of the old French-style house that contains the Historical Society—the three-story structure is capped with a mansard roof, which identifies it as French. The meteorite now takes up a quadrant of the physical space around that old house: the meteorite was set within what had been a vast bed of lily of the valley and among large old maples. Townspeople learned to say nickel-iron as one word because that is what most durable meteorites are made of, and that is what this one was made of.      

I grew up eight miles from that Great Lakes town I describe; it holds a modest sized university. Now, I will ask you this pertinent question, pertinent because it is about my field, Linguistics. Do you know a phrasal verb when you encounter one? You probably don’t. You probably have never heard the term. There is a strong possibility that you do not care. I am with you on that, except it is my gift. I consult on the important dictionaries of English Language, and I am adequately paid for my skill and knowledge. Here is an example of what I mean. If you say, “The child looked over the window ledge,” you are probably saying that the child stood on the tips of her toes and was able to look out the window—perhaps barely—across the top of the window ledge. By contrast, when a colleague says, “After lunch, I will set aside some time to look over that report,” then the meaning has changed. Now it is akin to review, peruse, study. That’s when these largely Anglo-Saxon components become phrasal verbs.

There are many aspects to consider. For example, if you are inclined to drop the prepositions from the ends of sentences because someone told you to (I wish everything were that easy. Let me be your Svengali; I will lead you on the right path. Trust me!!!!), you must not do so when you say this: “That is something we should all think about,” because, yes, think about is a phrasal verb, and if you drop the preposition, you will say something that leans toward the autocratic: “That is something we should all think,” rather than what you most likely intend, something gently persuasive.

Well, I have established that I have a job, and that I am a language person and that I have a career that pays some money.  I also have a partner. Here is who she is. She is slender. She buys pullovers, fancy ones, that have three-inch zippers at the neck. They are black, and the zippers are gold in color. She will put one on in the morning, standing in front of our ornately carved rosewood mirror, the one in the living room, mounted high enough (it is large and heavy) that it shows either of us only from the waist up. She will say: “Don’t let me down, Geoffrey. This time get it right. Make me proud. This is your moment.” 

“Awe, you’ve done it again,” she will say after she has adjusted the collar to stand just so around her slender neck. In truth, she is a disempowered hooligan. She must keep herself in check all the time—from being too aggressive, too mean, too assertive, toward everyone, all the time. She largely succeeds, but, if we say, “normal,” she is a pretender to that very particular throne. She has many interests. She plays hockey in a little park in the city that freezes over. It is a grassy park with a depression; the Parks and Recreation people flood it on an optimal day in early winter, and it freezes, and there it is: a frozen pond about the size of a hockey rink. In the summer, you don’t even know that it had been there; it goes back to being an undulating, grassy spot among the structures of the civic center, the courthouse, the opera house, and so on. 

She plays there on Sunday afternoons in winter, in the brutal cold. We park our car, and we walk in through deep snow, our breath steaming in short bursts, equipment in hand. I stand and watch her play; I stand and stomp and pack down the hard-frozen snow. It is my habit as an observer to watch other people do the things they enjoy, things that are impossible for me to understand fully. I could be home where it’s warm; instead, I am here. There is something I like about bulging, padded-up people, the rumble of blades on ice, and the clash of players as they converge upon the puck. The players are mostly friends, and they will come to our house for cocoa in an hour or so. It is a Sunday afternoon, brilliantly bright because of the full sun, but we are having an unexpected cold snap, and it is not likely to end too soon. 

Standing there, at the frozen pond, I thought of this moment from my childhood; it is similar in most aspects. My older brothers have gone deer hunting in November; I have taken up a place by the potbelly stove, reading a recipe book; one of the recipes is for salt-water taffy. I have brought a floor lamp over to my small, grass green, cloth-upholstered chair because the middle of the living room is dark on an overcast winter afternoon. Outside, the snow on the ground is a little melty. The temperature hovers around freezing; amid the snow, there are patches of still-green grass, left long in September at the last mowing, and some patches of dirt, especially where the cars are generally parked, at the top of the driveway and along the porch. The sun is nowhere to be seen, and the clouds are thick. The stove is wood-fired, with a door for putting the wood in; this door has three rows of small mica-filled windows that glow yellow or red, with changes in the intensity of the fire. 

So, I am there. I am doing what I am doing, thinking about cooking (I am perhaps twelve), the technique of pulling candy, and I am thinking hard about why anyone would put vinegar in candy. These things are puzzles that must be solved. Then, my three older brothers come in. One of them has got a deer. They are loud, and suddenly nothing else matters. They take off their jackets and warm themselves by the stove, wearing their tan canvas overalls and white sweatshirts, with the straps of the overalls riding over their shoulders, until they let the front flaps down. Their faces are still ruddy from the cold, and their clothes begin to steam. I am captivated even if I do not care. I live now not far from that house, in the back forty, as we call it, among the white cedar and the ash. It is generally quiet on summer afternoons, and the scent of sage that covers the far western hills enters our house on the lightest of breezes. 

When he died—my father—strangers dressed in suits arrived with a hearse and removed his body from our house and put him in it. The black, elongated car had a door that opened horizontally, and it contained on its exterior some chrome trim. Many, large black crows—most or all of the local brood—occupied the tree on the other side of the house. It was a very large box elder tree. They silently landed and took individual places among the branches. It was a hot day in August. This action of crows is a tribute. They do it for the fallen among them, when one of them is taken out, dead on the ground, killed by a bee-bee gun: a senseless death, not one after a full life—that’s what makes it so—but they are reverent. Each joins the others silently. They stop all their cawing for this. They stay for five minutes, and they leave just as quietly. They, one by one, drop off their branch, fall freely into the air and then begin to fly. 

He did not like them, and they did not like him. In fact, he did not particularly like the tree they were in. Boxelders: they will grow everywhere if you let them. He liked the songbirds, and he liked the little ones that stay and winter over. He liked jays well enough, but he did not care for their greedy ways. He loved robins, gentle birds that return and nest every year. These crows, though, used their loudest, most offensive caw whenever they spotted any one of us in the yard.

It seemed they did not want us to get on our bicycles and ride up the road and around the corner to our friends’ house. They followed us a third of the way and called from every perch. That day, the day I am speaking of, they watched him being put into a hearse, and the hearse drive off, down the hill and down the road. I have often wondered why they did so. This question has always been the start of my inquiry: What is it like when all your nemeses are gone? Well, perhaps they had asked that question. Perhaps they knew the answer. It feels like this: Where do we go from here?

I used to sit in our living room when I was a child on a big green sofa. It had on it a design in looped nylon. Some areas were high, and some areas were set in relief. The motif was large banana leaves, rendered this way in fabric that covered a boxy, stuffed davenport. I stared up at the wallpaper, not because I was dazed but because I felt like it. The main object of its design, it seemed, was a large leaf or a petal—if it were a petal, it would have been oversized, about ten inches in diameter, roughly. As I recall, the wallpaper was printed on a field of hunter green, and this leaf or petal was white and black, with much shadow; the light-to-shadow balance was fifty-fifty, or slightly greater in the favor of white. It was either that, a leaf or a petal, or it was nothing—that was a possibility, nothing more than a rococo flourish.

I studied this object because I wanted to pin it down; I wanted it to be a leaf of cabbage, one of the large outer ones, the kind you throw away when you are making coleslaw, but one that you might in fact use by wilting it in hot water, if you were making stuffed cabbage—Golumpki, the Polish call them. I did not want that thing to be a petal of the peony flower, which is a large, globular flower, similar to cabbage, but smaller, always smaller, and nothing like it in scent, the whole flower, that is, rosy versus pungent, not similar at all: Thank God for that. Why did this concern me? Why did I care? I do not know: I was a child. It was my preoccupation. What does it matter?

Perhaps I am a peasant for wanting cabbage instead of peonies. It’s a better diet, anyway. Well, I think I can say this: It is not perhaps, I am a peasant. There are many things that show it, for example (no offence at all to the aficionados among you; I am a lesser person for not knowing this), if the conversation is about the relative musical strengths of Mozart over Verdi, and, further, the merits of the operas, Così fan tutte and La Traviata, I will gamely engage the subject, and feign some knowledge, but, in truth, I do not see the point of it; I am afraid I never shall: Words—words and music—just music—just words; for me, it is always words.

When I was in college, I joined a theater group, and enjoyed a great deal of time with the people there. My job was that of a rather bad scenery painter. However, it came to the point that I did not paint the scenery—all I had to do was draw the outlines of the backdrops and objects within them, interior or exterior, and then others took over and painted the large canvases, and sometimes gauze for mid-stage scrims. I drew a small grid over the director’s scene plan and then transferred this to the canvas within much larger but proportional grids. This ended up as a lot of lines and curlicues. My friend at the time, and now my partner in life, and I started to hang out at the home of the wealthy man who started the theater; that is, he had had it renovated, and added a three-story, glass entrance with a staircase visible through the addition.

While gathered there, we, members of the theater group, talked about set design, lighting, great acting, and the great dramas and musicals we had plans for. His friend, who always was about the house, was a fine actress. She was African American; he was not. They were the same age, give or take. She did not live there; she lived five blocks west in a little house that did not cost much to buy or keep up. His house was a fancy thing: three floors, with a color scheme that went on and on, burgundy for the shakes within the gable, one row ending in points, and the next in semicircles, moss green for the main field, and pale yellow for the sashes and the ledger board, that marks the place where one floor ends and the other starts. 

We spent one particular hot summer day there, looking at photos from past productions of A Doll’s House. Should we go spare; should we go period; should go with our own taste? We ate all our meals together that day. He employed a cook as well as a part-time gardener. The gardener was a talented actor but could not do stage parts because of his mental/physical malady, so he worked as a handyman and gardener. In fact, and did a great variety of local television commercials, even voiceovers—he had a mellifluous voice.

He shared this mid-day dinner with us as well. He had an odd case of turrets; he could not help but interrupt to say inappropriate things. It caused him a few times to make odd insults toward the fine actress who was generally there, and generally shared many hours with him each day. I will not repeat any of them here, though I know them rather well. It was I who suggested to him a thing he could do, and he did it. Now he cursed insufferably about the state of the yard, the horrors of environmental science, and corruption of local politicians, hardly any of which was true; they were not at least fully so. This was tolerated; though his conversation was not always interesting, it did not contain racial insults, even by chance. The thing he accomplished was to limit his subjects, as I had told him to do. This left me to wonder whether all such ranting, coming from turrets or not, might be merely a defect of mental wiring.

Juliana and Daniel were their names. They had cooperated that spring—it was now August—in planting flowers along the top of the retaining wall. That wall was made entirely of cut fieldstone. It was built wide at the bottom, where the soil pressed hardest, and narrow at the top—only two stones wide—where the pressure from soil was lightest. Bernard, the owner of the house and, in addition, the theater in the civic district, was happy to explain the details of everything in and around the house.

He had hired it done and coordinated each project’s completion. This took the skills of many craftsmen, and he was intimately familiar with many of the trades around the city. The breakfast table in the kitchen was nothing more than a slab of concrete, dyed cobalt blue at the time of its making, filled with hefty pieces of sterling and gold: it seemed to represent the sky at twilight, most likely early dawn, for that is when they, he and Juliana, sat there; in truth,  on the opposite side of the house from the dawn, and quietly watched the light fill up the house and creep its way up to the middle of the sky. It is that time of morning, when the dew is heavy—in August—and makes the air that much more breathable as it lifts from the ground and cools and softens it. 

It is a bit of a slope, that street, and the wall goes from eight feet at the corner to a mere three feet when it meets the property line to the north. It adjoins the sidewalk. At breakfast that morning, served by Cecelia the housekeeper, Juliana, noted that the cosmos flowers, supported on straight stems with wispy foliage, and their too-perfect gradient petals—for example, burgundy to pink—stood too high on their stems. She registered her complaints to Bernard: The dwarf cosmos had bolted. The seed packet she had bought in the spring clearly declared them as dwarf and showed them as such—only eighteen inches high, growing in a border adjacent to a boxwood hedge.

She declared that though Daniel was a fine performer/actor, he was only an amateur gardener. He had used too much of that damn powdered fertilizer, and that had caused the cosmos to grow unnaturally spindly, so that they might fall over at any moment, there, growing three rows deep, at the top of the retaining wall, where the wind gusts are sometimes strong. Bernard said no, they were normal cosmos, not the dwarf kind. Surely the package was wrong. To him, everything about them appeared proportional, nothing wrong. At the seed plant, things got mixed up. It happens, he had said.

They were lovely there, he explained to Juliana, at the edge of the yard, moving gently in the breeze, with no danger of the stems crimping suddenly and flopping over onto the sidewalk because they had “bolted.” He said that word, and held it there in the air between, where he proceeded to infuse it with disdain, masterful interpreter of the written line and rhetorician that he was. It was a contentious and erroneous claim that would not serve any good. They were both used to applying the skills of drama to their daily conversations. For her part, she knew that the next big wind would tell the tale; she said nothing.

We finished our work in the early part of the evening, having decided on the staging of A Doll’s House; and we all took up places at the breakfast table. Cecelia had gone out to the open-air market where she purchased a peck of early apples; from them, she had made Tarte Tatin. She now served it to us at the cobalt blue table on fluted porcelain dessert bowls, because the size of them made room for ice cream and would allow the ice cream to melt over the warm apples and pastry. The humidity had increased as the day progressed. The air conditioning Bernard preferred was to leave open all the windows on the upper floors and let the air lift through the whole house. In other words, we felt whatever the temperature was, whatever the humidity was, whatever the breeze was. 

At sunset in August, often the air does not move; it may begin to do so, if it is going to, a bit after dark. On that rise, in that part of the city, we had our own view of the horizon, though there were houses all around. As we sat there, eating French apple tart, exchanging words about the upcoming production, and praising Cecelia for going out and finding new apples this early in the season, and again praising Cecelia for making the best coffee, and on and on, we were stifled by the heat, exhausted by decision making, and the air seemed liquid with a haze that hung heavily over the city; the haze began to take on color from the reddening horizon. The large orange ball of the setting sun shimmered brightly between the tall buildings of the city center.

The too-tall stems of the cosmos turned into glistening vermillion on one side; suddenly a stiff breeze erupted, swirling all the trees—until their leaves turned up—and whipping all the utility lines. A breeze this far out-of-time, in the early evening could mean only one thing: a change of weather, perhaps dryer, perhaps a cold rain, but something. If it was rain, we had to get up and run about the house and close all the windows, but if it was not, what did it matter? At that moment, none of us had anything to say. We stared long out the westward window: The haze was pink, and the sun was orange, and the cosmos danced.

I graduated the next spring, and that ended that phase of my life. I went on to many more years of tumult and uncertainty and tossing around. It wasn’t good; it wasn’t bad—it was I, figuring things out. There is only one more part of this story; let me talk to you about it now.

Sometimes, propped up on our double pillows in our giant log bed, way out in the back forty of my family’s property, we engage the world in a way that seems strange, as little pinpoints of life in our little perch, with the windows still open and the scent of sage that covers the sand hills still filling the rapidly cooling evening air. We do what we call WOW, that is, Walk Our Wits, until we fall asleep. Do not expect great things to come of this; it is, after all, a fall-asleep mind game. I hardly remember anything from these talks. The only goal is to say something as a volley to something else that has been said. Although I am a language scholar, I make mistakes with words and phrases all the time, because if it is not a time when I must be a scholar, off duty, as it were, I do not really care: In fact, I make it a habit not to care. It is dreaming out loud. Here is an example: 

I say: It is a topsy-turvy world we live in: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

She says: That’s not topsy-turvy. The rich have become our servants: That would be topsy-turvy.

I: We shall live well and get our revenge that way: A turvy-topsy world, then.

She: Quite so. Then, we shall dispossess ourselves of all such platitudes as these. 

I: It is my great hope.

She: And mine, I assure you. Let us live well. Let us call this our salad days.

I: Add some red radishes and a nice vinaigrette, and “lettuce” do so.

She: Say something grand!

I: (With forced gravity, going deep with my voice, and adding a tremolo) I have lived this long to come this far: I have joined the immortals: We are gods in our own time.

She: Grand, very grand: What does it mean?

I: It is a dream before sleeping. Why should it mean anything?

She: I shall say something I have thought recently, grand or not: Love is blind, and that’s as it should be, but, in addition, and quite differently, it is mean and stupid toward the world.

I: That is not a dream before sleeping; it is a wish come true. If I say I love you—I would do so, except it is not a passion I want to awaken at the moment—it is not with indifference: I am jealous—and mean—and stupid, in the process. 

She: If you love me, you will let me go.

I: No, I won’t. If I let you go, you would not be mine to love.

She: You have made my point: It is both mean and stupid.

I: And it is love.

She: True. We always know what to say because we have the same author.          

I: It is funny: I have thought of that before.

She: Of course, you have. Now describe something in nature. 

I: It seemed a winter storm had passed; I looked out the porch door. There, I saw the spirea; it was in full bloom, and the bows hung heavy with clusters of tiny petals. In the deep blue of late twilight, I could not tell the difference, piled-on snow, or clusters of little white flowers.

She: Say something nice about gay men. 

I: Two men, without the harsh judgment of the shallow world, may fall in love and stay that way forever, with a passion that neither earth nor paradise can comprehend. They are the same, and yet they are different. It solves a philosophical conundrum. We should love them all the more. For other people, the words do not change: The two men who have fallen in love are different, that is, what they are doing is different. Why can we not understand; what is hard about that?

She: I do not know. Here is something hard: How do ideas count more than people?

I: It is the gift of the nincompoop: Shallow thinkers promote their ideas more vigorously than the wise. 

She: And therein is the history of the world.

I: We cannot say that the world is young or that we are old—only that we have changed.

She: You are speaking grandly again. I do not know whether the world is young or old: Perhaps we have changed.

I: (Growing sleepy) I would like to say something to the broad world before I am done, lest I digress.

She: You digress a great deal. What is it you would like to say to the broad world?

I: I am here, and I am queer; go fuck yourself!

She: No, say, Thank you.

I: Thank you for lightening our load.

She: Don’t be gushy.

I: You are not queer; you are there. Find that sweet love we all want. Nothing matters except that sweet love we all want; nothing matters except what’s between us, that sweet love, not the flowers in spring, not the beauty of the moon. 

She: Not a cool day in summer, not a warm day in fall, just that thing we all want.

The End

Running Lines

He is eleven and a half. He has reached the back door of their midsize sedan. He has walked ahead of his father out of a wholesale warehouse. He got greedy on the way out and ordered a chocolate milkshake in that area where they have picnic tables, and customers can eat a Caesar salad or share a medium pizza. He is holding some kind of freaking dark blue tee-shirt to his chest, and his smart phone is plugged into his ears with the phone in the pocket of his corduroys made just for it. He is awkward mentally and physically because he misjudged how to open the door of the back seat. 

He does not want to set his milkshake on the car’s roof because he has seen that too many times. His father asks him if he will be able to handle it. He says nothing and flips open the door with a couple of awkwardly placed fingers on the door handle; he does not change his expression even a little. He keeps everything intact. He does not know how beautiful that moment is, but I do. His father may not know it either, but it doesn’t matter because I do: A person just being himself in the world, trying like hell to be unfazed, but actually being fazed as hell by what is going on.

He looks at me and he says with a slight air of disdain. “Running lines, Uncle Nate?”

I say to him, “Running lines, always running lines—the progress of a scene.

His name is Frankel; he says, “You are my Jewish uncle. Pull your pants up.”

“Fuck you,” I say, “Are you still practicing speeches in front of the mirror for long stretches of time?”

He replies with words from Winston Churchill, “We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender.”

He continues, “But my voice is quavering, I am going through the change.”

I say, “Oh, Jesus—fuck that noise.”

He says, pretending to need to hold his voice steady, “We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender.”

“You will change the world,” I say.

He says, “Want some halibut? We’re going to make halibut now.”

I say, “I am going to make it.”

He says, “Christian love is the greatest thing to ever happen in the world.”

“Why are we talking about Christian love and Alaskan halibut in the same breath?” I ask.

He says, “You are a better cook than Daddy. I like halibut. Other religions, races, ethnicities, and proclivities are beautiful in their own right, but they lack something.”

I complete his thought: “They don’t know where the glory is. There is no room in their philosophical makeup for the power and the glory that define us. They do not get the lines of poetry right nor the most powerful words of human thought because they do not know that empty place in the middle of our lives and how it pains us to think of it, and how glorious it is to fill it up with what’s right and true and glorious.”

Frankel replies, “You are a maieutic master; I think you will teach me a different truth.”

I reply, “If maieutic means cursing like a truck driver, you’ve nailed it. All social engineers are eleven-year-olds.”

He quickly corrects, “All eleven-year-olds are social engineers.”

I say, “Chasing down every goddamned bad idea under creation instead of loving people. People, people, people, a person, people, people, individuals, the whole world full of people. Goddamn it!”

Frankel says, “What is it like to live life without knowing one of the greatest thinkers and writers and dramatists the world has ever known?”

I grab him by the ribs on the other side of him and hug him for the briefest moment to my side. We lean on the side of the sedan. He raises one arm; he is lanky for an eleven-year-old. He swings it awkwardly around my neck.

I say to him, “You will never know.”

He understands my meaning, and he cries tears that are droplets, and they join one after the other and run in a stream down his face.

I add, as if out of nowhere, “Tedious and repetitive.”

He said, when his tears were done flowing, “Ouch.”

I have seasoned and sauteed in butter, the halibut. Everyone is seated at a patio picnic table. The table is silver from weathering outdoors, and dark gray; the top surface boards are somewhat warped. The end grains of all the planks are nearly black from long exposure to the changing weather. Frankel’s mother and slightly older sister have joined us for dinner: the halibut, French fried potatoes, and coleslaw, which is dotted with many red flecks, resulting from shredded red radishes.

Cherry blossom petals drift in from the neighbor’s year-round tea garden, where she has planted a small grove of those same trees that grow along the Potomac in Washington D.C. The neighbor has a rather vast yard with different slopes and rises. It is mid-to-late spring in the Great Lakes region of the United States.

The family has added spring-loaded fiberglass chair seats to the larger than usual picnic table, eight of them. The diners relax and bob back and forth toward their individual plates of food, and then away from them, eating fried potato strips and two-inch squares of gluten-free, breaded pieces of halibut filet, cooked to perfection in a cast-iron, enamel-glazed skillet.

In our dinner conversations, we always try to invent a world that works. We debate freely and regard discussion as brainstorming; ideas are rewarded and never critiqued, except in the most aggressive devil’s advocate way.

Uncle Theo, “I thought we defined hollow leader by the Wizard of Oz.”

Twenty-year-old Kelly, a music academy student, plays NBC’s notes on a toy xylophone, and announces, “Brought to you in living color on NBC.”

Cousin Mildred, in her seventies, “Why don’t people learn from art?”

Uncle Theo, “I am deathly afraid of hollow leaders.”

Cousin Mildred, “I mean all people.”

Uncle Theo, “They are entertained by it. What more could you ask for?

I say, “Discernment is not their gift. Entertain me. Could you do that? Entertain me.”

Frankel, “Did you ever think of this: Children, most of the time, they don’t walk or run or fly. They dance. Small children, I mean.”

Uncle Theo: “Children under five. They have dreamed of the cosmos, and they trip the light fantastic.”

Cousin Mary, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. They have only just let go of their parent’s hand to skip about on the tiles on the corridor of the supermarket. They are checkered light gray and white; they avoid all the cracks, like a lover’s obsession.”

Kelly adds, “Annie-I-over.”

Frankel, “Throw the ball over the house; they must catch it before it hits the ground. If they don’t: Ante Over.”

Cousin Mary, “They skip rope. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very fuzzy, was he?”

Kelly says, “How about this, ‘Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a ‘fella, made a mistake and kissed a snake. How many doctors did it take?’”

Frankel asks, “Are they only happy, upper middle-class children, the ones skipping about and making rhymes at the warehouse store?”

Uncle Theo, “They will all go home having met their desires, but no, children, just children. They dip and twirl; they stretch their arms out and pirouette, as they intone moody things or pleasant things or needy things to their responsible ones. They are the only charming people I know of.

Cousin Mildred: “They are the only ones small enough to do all that—and call it fun.”

Father: “In our minds, we don’t walk or run or fly.”

All: (conscious of being silly) “We dance.”

The end

Lieutenant Lasset

Screenplay

It is Cherry Blossom Time in the Grand Traverse Bay area.

Lieutenant Lasset and his wife are having dinner at a prominent Bakery Café in Traverse City, Michigan. It is the peak of cherry blossom time, early May. He is seated at a big round table covered with a white cloth. It has two servings of whitefish, half eaten. Wine and French bread are about the table. His wife has gone out on Front Street to buy a present for tomorrow’s wedding. A sincere poet stands on a slightly raised stage and announces his poem without the use of a microphone.

The beauty of the world

The dishwasher and the waitress sit under the pink awning.

At the back of the Chinese restaurant

The kind of awning they put up at garden parties.

They sit taking a cigarette break in the noonday light,

All pink and glowing

Perhaps they visited Japan

During hanami and learned to

Like the gaudy pink

Of drinking parties under the cherry trees

Spring nights, in parks, all strung

With lanterns, the ground covered with

Straw mats and woozy men singing karaoke

From just before twilight to ten, when it gets chilly.

A thin ripple of clouds spread low across the western sky

A lattice of deep pink and blue in the setting sun

Some of the clouds below the crack

That reveals the sun have turned the color of blood oranges.

And lime-colored rays decorate the crazy roman-candle sky

The ladies in the churchyard said, “O, Mother of God!”

I was baptized in the faith too.

This year, it was cold

And the pond in the field stayed right through blossom time.

They’ll have a hell of a time planting corn with all the rain

Where the wild cherries grow

You see them bloom in the spring.

Chokecherries make me think of fireworks,

Tapered bunches of blossoms

Bouncing on the bush

Wild red cherries

On tall copper-shiny trees

A stream of petals curls way out

Across the sodded field

Those blossoms—they have

A smell like the finish of a good cabernet

A little like the hawthorn’s

Strange beauty—silk and buttermilk

But, not as strong as that

And there’s a freshness to it,

A fresh greenness to the wild cherry blossom

—Sophisticated spring

When I was a boy

We set a mattress in the hawthorn tree.

The haw-tree we called it.

It took on the appearance of

A windswept, overgrazed tree

On the plains of Tanzania

We lay up there and studied the stars.

Black-sky-diamond-nights

Fireflies or falling stars

At the edges.

If you stare long enough,

Everything fades except

What’s at the center

Of your vision

Mind the thorns on your way up,

Climbing up through the center of the tree

The well-worn limbs

With the bark all shiny and smooth

In my stocking feet or bare feet

Under my feet, the smooth old limbs

Gave me a feeling in the middle of my body,

An ache, a longing, a dizzy satisfaction

I called it vertigo.

Had I called it by its name—

Had I known, I would have called it SEX.

Lieutenant Lasset looks out the back window of the restaurant. Two middle-aged women are making their way across what seems a maze of ramps and wooden walkways that form a bridge across the Boardman River that runs between the restaurant and the municipal parking lot that sits just off the west arm of the big bay—the Grand Traverse Bay—which is not visible. Also within view is a green dumpster, near the building. 

The evening fog has formed strange strands that are like too familiar pets. They seem to want to cling to the nearest body, and the women brush them away. The large window, which Lieutenant Mark Lasset’s table stands in front of, is built solid, and is now a slightly sparkling medium gray against the incoming fog and increasing darkness, and the track-lighted interior, sparkling and shiny, seems all the warmer in contrast. 

In anticipation of the women’s arrival, along with two other guests, a waitress dressed in black, delivers five glasses of chilled Chateau Chantal Gewürztraminer. The wine comes on small saucers piled with cherry blossom petals, with a few floating on top of the wine in the glasses. She has removed the whitefish, along with all of the service of the main course. In the middle, she sets one large sized blue souffle dish containing something decorated with cocoa powder. On its charger she carefully places five small dessert spoons, in such a way that they are perfectly radial. It appears that Mrs. Lasset has made a conscious plan not to rejoin the table. Lieutenant Lasset observes all of this thoughtfully and bemusedly. He applauds, along with all the other guests, when the poet is finished.

The women enter.

Nancy: Uncle, it is so good to see you again. It was good of you to come all this way for Tyler’s wedding.                     

He rises. She kisses him on the cheek. Michelle manipulates him into position and places a prolonged kiss on his other cheek. He is pinned between them and delighted.

Tyler and Beth, his fiancée, arrive just after them, but by the front door, instead of the lower-level back door. The two young people shake Lasset’s hand and greet him politely. They all take seats. The waitress brings one last item, a fresh bottle of a sweet Italian sherry called Marsala.

Michelle: Uncle, it is the height of the cherry blossom season, and you must be initiated into the cherry empire, our little world in the Grand Traverse Bay.

They all take one petal from their wine glasses and place it in the middle of their foreheads. Lasset hesitantly and awkwardly complies.

Tyler, completely unafraid, leans his mouth toward Lasset’s face, and, placing his hands squarely on his shoulders, licks the pink petal from his forehead.

Beth: Now, what principle of science does that demonstrate?

Tyler: Saliva is thicker than wine.

Nancy: Precisely. (raises her glass) To another good harvest, and best wishes to our son Tyler and his betrothed, Beth.

They all drink.

Lasset: This is wonderful. What is it?

Tyler: It’s a German wine with a long name, Gewürztraminer. Vintners make it right out there on Old Mission Peninsula (points to the narrow finger of land which juts straight out into the Grand Traverse Bay and divides it in half).

Michelle: Many experts agree that this is one of the best examples in the world. Tell me what you taste, Uncle. Examine the aftertaste. What’s in it?

Lasset: Cherry blossoms.

Nancy: Oh, please. Taste it again.

Lasset: Roses. I taste roses.

Beth: (is busy placing a row of cherry blossom petals around her lips). Right, you have it, Uncle: it’s roses.

Tyler takes each petal from Beth’s lips with the pointed tip of his tongue, hides it in his mouth, and they kiss perfunctorily.

The rest, using the wetted tips of their index fingers, remove the cherry blossoms from their foreheads.

Seeing that it is the last sip of wine for everyone, Tyler starts the final toast, as though using a musical pitch pipe. He holds up his glass.

Tyler: Aaaah.

All: (except Lasset) Ah, the sweet nectar of life. (They imitate W. C. Fields in beautiful harmony except at the end when some go up and some go down and some hold on and some go short. Then, they drain their glasses.)

Nancy: Uncle, please open that bottle of Marsala.

Lasset tries. He manages only to move the screw cap within a range of about an eighth of an inch.

Tyler: Let me have that son-of-a-bitchin thing! It’s scored (he says, after examining it) but the separation ring is not perforated.

With his powerful, shiny thumbnail—all buffed up for the wedding—he cuts a perfect ring over the score mark and twists the cap off. He sets it in front of Nancy.

Nancy: To my taste, they never put enough Marsala in the tiramisu—they, meaning no one, no one does.

She adds a full quarter cup to the fancy bread pudding. They each grab a spoon and eat about two spoonfuls.

Coffee is served in China cups.

Michelle: Did you know, Uncle Mark, that Tyler is a complete and perfect heterosexual?

Lasset: You don’t say! What does it mean to be a perfect heterosexual?

Tyler: It means I’m not interested in having a night out with the boys. I’d rather spend my time with women; I’d rather be in the company of women all the time, but I do have one good friend. I do not know why he is not here right now.

Nancy: No one knows what it means, really. He’s a pure heterosexual, and we’re so proud.

Beth: Why are you so proud that he’s heterosexual?

Nancy: We’re just proud that he is who he is. That’s all.

Michelle: On the Kinsey scale, most people are in the middle. Some of us are over here; and others are over here. Tyler is over here.

Lasset: You mean there’s a scale that shows where we come out?

Beth: Yes, it’s a very old idea.

Michelle: I read recently that homosexuals have a more highly developed moral sense than most heterosexuals.

Nancy: That’s because we have to go through life thinking about it more. Uncle Mark, we must seem like bonobos to you, with our lovey-dovey affection.

Lasset: What does bonobos mean?

Beth: They are a sub-species of ape. They are just a little bit closer to us than chimps, and that makes them our closest primate relative.

Tyler: I saw something like this on a TV documentary: A female has found the male’s stash of bananas, and she starts eating them. The male comes along, and he starts a fuss and takes an aggressive stance. And then she lies on the ground and invites him to have sex. In about five seconds they complete the sex act, and neither one of them is really upset anymore.

Michelle: They do it all the time. They’re insatiable.

Tyler: But we’re humans. We sublimate.

During cherry blossom season, the restaurant runs a bento service, providing traditional Japanese box lunches for people who choose to picnic in midday or at evening twilight in the cherry orchards that are scattered throughout the Grand Traverse region. Nancy and Michelle have arranged for a wedding reception the next day on their own property. Tatami mats, made of Japanese rush, will be placed on the rolling hillsides, covered with cherry trees. Red and white striped curtains—seven feet high—will define the large space in the orchard for the reception. There will be a bar and the usual services.

Nancy stops to talk to the middle-aged Japanese woman behind the counter who prepares boxed lunches.

[For the rest of the story, English speakers need to read only the lines written in English where both English and Japanese—represented in Roman letters—are present.]

Nancy: Did you find mountain burdock for tomorrow’s wedding bentos?

Keiko: We bought regular burdock and pickled it; it is beautiful and delicious, just like mountain burdock.

Nancy: (speaking dreamily in Japanese) Yama-gobō natsukashii desu ne (Mountain burdock is such a happy memory for me.)

Keiko: Me too; and it is healthy.

Nancy: It is my favorite pickle.

Keiko: I also included one pickled plum in each bento.

Nancy: Wonderful. Thank you. See you tomorrow.

Keiko: Ten o’clock at the orchard.

Nancy: Yes. 

The next day, after the wedding, in the cherry orchard, the guests sit at long tables that are short-legged folding tables covered with pale green clothes. Each guest has a bento box—shiny black lacquer with red lacquer edging—that contains food appropriate to hanami, in this case cherry blossom viewing. The guests slap their tables and demand, “Kiss, kiss.” The bride and groom interrupt their enjoyment of their meals to quickly kiss.

Tyler occasionally glances at the empty place where his close friend Abrashi should be, at the corner of the head table. He wonders what could be wrong.

Kenji Hikawa, Tyler’s pen pal and life-long friend, is wearing a man’s wedding kimono because he was the best man. He picks up a large bottle of gold-labelled sake, and fills both their rather flat, fancy, ceramic sake cups. The bride and groom cross arms and drink. Then he (a young-seeming, Japanese, twenty-three-year-old, extroverted and engaging enka (country) singer) refills their cups and his own, touches cups with both of them, and they all drink the saké in one gulp.

Kenji gets up, takes the microphone off the karaoke set and does a heart-felt version of the Sukiyaki song to enka orchestration.

Lasset, seated next to Nancy and Michelle at the head table, claps enthusiastically and shakes his head in incomprehension at how such a cute, young man could possess such a powerful voice and assured delivery. The young man then sings the folk song Sakura Sakura.

The others continue their conversations softly.

Lasset: My, what a marvelous voice Kenji has.

Tyler: He’s a club singer in Nagasaki, and he’s breaking onto the national scene.

Beth: He sent us a tape. He was on the Year-end show—it’s a six-hour nationally televised New Year’s Eve countdown. He’s so handsome, and his voice is so classically inflected.

Lasset: He’s a heartbreaker.

Michelle: He’s breaking my heart, the way he sings “Sakura.”

Kenji rejoins the table. Lasset enthusiastically reaches for his hand.

Lasset: That was wonderful, wonderful!

Michelle: (kissing Kenji’s hand) What a marvelous artist you have become, Kenji! I am proud of you.

Kenji: Thank you, Mother Michelle. I am pleased to meet you Keiji Lasset.

Next Kenji and Tyler take advantage of the silence to re-enact for the whole party a famous scene from their favorite Kurosawa movie, complete with loud grunting in Japanese and weak sword play with only their fancy chopsticks.

Everyone claps, especially Beth, who seems to love them both at the moment. They bow to their audience when they are finished.

Everyone returns to eating.

Nancy and Michelle and Tyler sing Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan in an enchanting, ranging harmony.

Nancy and Michelle sing Little Bitty Tear. Tyler returns to eating and flirting with Beth and talking with Kenji; the parents are only too aware that they are baring their souls about their only child leaving them for another woman as they sing the piece.

When they are finished, with sensuously greasy lips, Tyler goes up to the stand and kisses them each on the cheek.

Tyler: (with perfect sweetness) Thanks, Mother. Thanks, Mother.

A shiny jetliner bound from Chicago to New York crashes into the water just off the Lake Michigan Overlook of Sleeping Bear Dunes, a very steep slope, covered with coarse gravel, at the edge of Lake Michigan. It ends up on its belly in the water, relatively intact. However, it is clear from the nature of the impact that some people have died and that many more have received injuries.

In the bright light, and in the slightly breezy air, inflatable slides unfurl, and the people who can, exit and gather on the nearby shore. They have mixed feelings, having hurriedly left the plane, knowing that, except for fear of an explosion, they could have helped others.

In an instant of time, they have had the most difficult experience of their lives, and they have had to make the most difficult decisions; they are in shock. The juxtaposition of the calm, beautiful water, the plane resting on a sand shelf, the clear blue sky—with the bright sun—and the steep bank of sand at a steady, imposing angle to the scene is disturbing, but also strangely beautiful.

The guests at the outdoor wedding reception, five miles away, on the Leelanau Peninsula, hear something like a buzzing, the weird, loud drone of jet turbines self-destructing while the pilot tries to regain control of the wildly out-of-control plane. The sound comes to them broken on the wind. When it stops, they do not think much of it. Perhaps it was a small plane climbing, fighting the wind, and now it has leveled off and is flying straight.

Lasset: (taking a drink of the deep red wine in front of him, smacks his lips, examining it) what kind of wine is this?

Beth: It’s cherry wine.

Lasset: It’s wonderful, and it doesn’t taste like maraschino at all.

Everyone goes silent and looks at Lasset because he has initiated their favorite lecture from Nancy.

Nancy: Uncle, don’t say maraschino. It’s cherry wine, real cherry wine. In this region, we grow tart cherries. They are the type of cherries you think of when you think cherry, for example the cherries in cherry pie—the classic cherry flavor. I regard maraschinos as an aberration. They are Royal Ann Cherries that have been soaked in brine for a month to remove the color and sweetness and to preserve it. Then, it is flavored with almond, and sweetened, and then colored artificially. I write a letter of protest every time I find one of our regional products has been contaminated with maraschino cherries, like Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream. Montmorency cherries have a marvelous, stout flavor. They should enrich the products of our region. Of course, we sell our Royal Anns to packers, and some of them turn them into maraschinos. We deliver fresh fruit in good condition. That’s as far as our responsibility goes. And almond flavored cherries are fine in cocktails and on top of sundaes, but that’s the limit.

Tyler takes the bottle of cherry wine from the ice bucket in the middle of the table, holds it the way a sommelier would in a fine restaurant, and teasingly lets Lasset examine it. 

Just then a completely unexpected wind shear (severe downdraft) occurs. The petals that literally carpet the ground between walkways of Astroturf explode into a flurry, having been lifted off the ground and taken from the trees. Petals settle everywhere on people, on Beth’s fancy black and pink silk top with big sleeves—they seem to suit the design—and on the tables.

Tyler: (pointing to a place under a nearby tree that has on it only a scattering of cherry blossom petals, compared with the thick layer of a minute before) Look, Uncle, it’s a hatchet hammer.

In response to the plane accident, the park service workers removed from storage a rope system, a series of fifty-foot ropes secured by five-foot long spikes with eyelets at the top for tying the lengths of rope to. The passengers who are able assist themselves up the steep slope by grabbing onto the rope, changing each fifty feet. The others and their goods will be lifted by helicopter, one of which is from the coastguard, and is beginning to take the injured to the nearest hospital.

As a worker is driving down the topmost spike, at the peak of the slope, he encounters a kind of soft, tough resistance—the spike doesn’t want to go in farther and bounces back at the hit of the mallet. He pulls it up through the soft sand—all of it is soft because it regularly shifts around with the wind. The stake comes back with clear evidence of blood, although it has sand clinging to it. He says, “Hey, come look at this.” And a few of his fellow rangers come over.

The head ranger responds after smearing some of the sand from the spike between his thumb and forefinger, “It’s fresh blood, but I don’t think anyone, or anything is alive down there; still, we’d better get some shovels and find out what it is.”

Soon, a ranger has driven in a stake ten feet from its intended location and others have set to work digging with shovels over the location of the bloodied stake. Within minutes, they have revealed, four feet down, the headless body of an athletic young man, clothed in blue nylon jogging pants, with two white stripes down the sides and a burgundy jersey. One of them comments that the decapitation is very ragged, suggesting crudeness or cruelty or the use of a crude implement. This ranger used to be a conservation worker, and she can tell that the body was placed in the sandy grave within the past seven hours, it now being eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning in early May.

Now workers are using the same idea as before to lay down treated lumber planks to relieve the climbers of having to struggle through the heavy sand-and-gravel screed that covers the slope of the Lake Michigan Overlook section of the scenic-mile-drive through the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Through drilled holes in the ends of the planks, they are driving down five-foot stakes to anchor each twelve-foot section on the slope, eventually to install a single series of planks all the way up the very long slope.

The nearby parking lot has been turned into a triage center, complete with a party tent, with blue and white stripes. What amounts to a morgue has been set up at the downhill far end of the same parking lot. There the decapitated body of the young man is taken on a stretcher. The body is covered with a sheepskin from someone’s car—the next best thing to a sheet, given the circumstances. The body is transferred to a heavy plastic body bag. When it is zipped closed, it is sadly obvious that the body ends square with the shoulders.

Suddenly the frightened scream of an eight-year-old girl pierces the air. The rescue workers who are loading the decapitated body into the rack of a morgue truck quickly shove the stretcher into place and run toward the source of the scream. A black-haired woman, rather tall and slender and elegant, cradles her daughter in her arms and rocks their bodies back and forth. She, the daughter had been idly playing in the sand, occupying herself in front of her distraught mother, who continued to survey the scene of the wrecked plane. She had extricated her daughter from under the slumped body of her dead husband and had got both her and her daughter away from the scene as quickly as possible.

The girl had been taking great scoops of sand in both hands and moving it from one place to another, an idle obsession more than meaningful play, but in doing so, she had created a large divot over the period of five minutes. She encountered what she considered the fine black roots of a nearby small poplar grove. She intended to clear them away from her digging spot, but instead she began to pull up a severed human head. She had only revealed the left cheek when she reacted in horror. As her mother took the child in her arms, she kicked at the hideous sight, and concealed it under a dusting of sand. They had taken up a place on the exact opposite side of the dunes slope that can be considered the public viewing area at the top of the sharp incline, where signs read, PLEASE USE THE DUNES CLIMB TWO MILES NORTH; DO NOT CLIMB THIS SLOPE; IT IS EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS.

The single female ranger working at the top of the slope sits down beside the sobbing child being comforted by her mother; she eventually makes them stand and leads them away to a nearby boardwalk constructed directly on top of the sand, installed in order for tourists to cover the usual distance across the top of the dunes and to view from a long way off, the old, black mound that is eroding away year by year, that the printed literature ties to the elaborate Native American mythology that explains the stark, strange slope at the edge of the Lake Michigan.

Many more law enforcement authorities are working on the narrow beach below, deciding who will get airlifted and who can wait. State police, and police and sheriffs’ offices, including emergency crews from three counties, have responded to the call for help from the eight park rangers who were on duty in the vicinity, either at the seven-mile drive or at the nearby dunes climb, getting ready for another spring Saturday of people going up and down the well-manicured mound at the edge of Lake Michigan near Glen Arbor.

A couple of rangers had intended to arrive late to the wedding reception, but instead remained on duty. When one of them took a moment to call to explain, Michelle instantly offered the services of all of the guests and all of their vehicles to be supplied with single drivers to allow maximum occupancy for the trauma victims who needed to be shuttled to nearby hotels and hospitals, and, if necessary, the homes of wedding party members. Soon, all the vehicles were lined up along the approach to the Lake Michigan Overlook parking lot, and people were guided to the vehicles by emergency workers and driven off.

The young men of the wedding party and guests went into service, aiding those who were able but simply too shocked to climb up the improvised path of planks and ropes. The remaining guests at the reception made the best of it by sipping saké and wine and nibbling at the bento lunches. They could only guess what was going on at the scene because they were on purpose staying off their cell phones to allow for emergency communication.

They had to resume using their phones when the peak of the crisis had passed in order to get a ride home. Out of boredom, most of the group decided to walk around the orchard in groups of three and four—they did what the Japanese call hanami; they looked at the cherry blossoms and tried to appreciate the season, that is, given the fact that there had been a great accident at the shore a few miles away, apparently caused by a freak gust of wind or some airless belch from some ancient Earth event that suddenly manifested.

The FBI is in charge of murder investigations within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Lasset had taken a family of four to the hospital in Leland to be looked at for possible internal injuries. He would not be called upon for a second shuttle, so he stood at the top of the slope of the Lake Michigan Overlook. A middle-aged, fit female ranger in uniform with her hair tied back came up to him.

Ranger: Are you Lieutenant Mark Lasset of the Los Angeles Police Department?

He stood with his finger over his mouth, still amazed at the destruction below.

Lasset: Yes, Ma’am, it is I.

Ranger: I have an urgent phone call from Randy Milken, the regional FBI director.

Lasset: (after routine talk) Yes, sir, 8:30 tonight at the hamburger joint on West Front Street. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Eight thirty sharp. I will be there.

He hands the phone back to the ranger, saying, I don’t know how Mr. Milken knew that I was here. (He pushes back his hair and rubs his temples.)

Ranger: Let me know if there is anything I can do.

Lasset: Oh, thank you, Ranger Scott—reading from her name tag—but you have your hands full here. I’ll get my nephew or someone to show me the way. You know we were having his wedding reception way out in the orchard somewhere when this wind came up—I guess they call it a down shear—and, poof, it exploded practically all of the petals off the cherry trees and picked the ones up off the ground and seemed to suspend them in the air. I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s my nephew down there with his pen pal—he’s a wonderful singer, his pen pal. My, what a singing voice he has. You should hear him: like an angel.

Ranger: He is an angel, helping that dazed father and child up the slope. It’s not easy trudging through that gravel. From a distance it looks like pure sand, but it’s really gravel. Your feet can get stuck in it. It’s a little easier if you take your shoes off.

Lasset: He’s fit, that’s for sure. I couldn’t do that.

Ranger: About twice a year we have to helicopter out a middle-aged man—maybe he smokes, maybe he’s overweight—who has had cardiac arrest. We post these signs, but still, on any given day in the summer, the slope is dotted with mostly young people who’ve decided they can handle it. Today, I thank God for the young people on the slope from your wedding party. They’ve been so helpful.

They both look down at the scene.

At the hamburger joint

Agent Randy Milken stands up to greet Lasset, shakes his hand: Lieutenant, you’re looking very fit.

Lasset: You too, Agent Milken. What a tragedy at Sleeping Bear. You must be a very busy man. Thank you for inviting me to dinner, but I’m afraid I don’t have much of an appetite.

Milken: I understand you’re here for your grandnephew’s wedding. I’m sorry to take you away from family matters. Where’s your wife?

Lasset: She got a call on her cell phone just when the rest of us were exiting the restaurant. I met her on the street. She was distraught. The neighbor called and told her that our basset had accidentally eaten chicken bones and had a ruptured intestine and had to go in for surgery. She had a present all wrapped up for the bride and groom, so she handed it to our niece Nancy.

Milken: You have no doubt heard about the murder at the dunes.

Lasset: It isn’t one problem but it’s a dozen.

Milken: Isn’t that the truth. Lieutenant, I know that you had planned a rare, for you, two-week vacation in our lovely region, but I am going to impose on you by making a very serious request. I must ask you to take over the investigation of the apparent homicide of that young man at the Lake Michigan Lookout.

Lasset: You have identified the body?

Milken: Yes, it’s Abrasha Jardan, an up-and-coming entrepreneur in the area—I believe he was involved in the art trade.

Lasset: This is off the subject, but do you know what Kenji said when he addressed me? He said cagey Lasset. Why did he call me that?

Milken: He called you Keiji Lasset, K-e-i-j-i; it means inspector.

Lasset: Does everyone around here speak Japanese?

Milken: Oh, please, children study it in school now; they grow up on anime, and they become knowledgeable of Japanese without even trying. As for me, I took it for a year in college, so I manage pretty good.

Lasset: Well; you mean manage pretty well, don’t you? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m doing what my wife does to me all the time. She got a new book called, What Everyone Should Know about Grammar. I am nothing if not persnickety now.

Milken: Lieutenant Lasset, when I said, “I manage pretty good,” in my mind, I put quotation marks around the word good.I was using it in an ironic way—an intelligent person like myself, using the vernacular, as it were.

Lasset: Really? That’s subtle. Either that, or you’re lying.

Milken: Lying, that is a harsh word, Lieutenant. Say, I’m quite a language snob myself. Give me one of your wife’s lessons.

Lasset: “A,” eeh, is a letter of the alphabet, not a word.

Milken: “I am going to trade up to eeh better car,” like that?

Lasset: “Do not use that infantile word in my presence, ever, ever; do you hear me?” said Lasset in a weak imitation of his wife’s delivery.

Milken: She’s training you pretty good, uh, pretty well, isn’t she?

Waiter: What’ll you two have?

Milken: I would like a well-done hamburger, no cheese, no mayonnaise, but everything else.

Lasset: I want the same thing, and don’t put it in a bun, please. I’ll have some French fries too if they’re not coated.

Waiter: Hey, Jason, are the French fries coated?

Jason: We slice’m and dice’m right here, sir—they’re not coated.

Waiter: I slice’m and dice’m myself.

Lasset: Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the French fries. One more question: Do you put anything in that fryer that has breading or any kind of wheat product on it or in it? Don’t yell at Jason; just tell me.

Waiter: That vat is filled with tallow, and nothing goes into it but hand-cut potatoes for French fries, sir. Our menu has been designed to comfortably accommodate those with wheat allergy, which is more and more prevalent these days since the hybrid field variety grown widely today has gone heavy on the protein named gluten.

Lasset: Thank you; you have been very helpful.

Milken: Gluten allergy?                     

Lasset: Yeah. The Doc, he told me I’ve had it all my life, but I only figured it out ten years ago when an officer I often worked with started to get MS. I was talking to her, and I said, why don’t you do this: Stop eating everything you eat now and eat different things. If you drink a twenty-ounce bottle of soda pop every day, drink water instead; if you eat bread, eat rice instead; if you never eat fresh fruit, start, because I have heard that many neurological conditions are caused by environmental factors.

Milken: Did it help her?

Lasset: Not a bit. But I practiced my own medicine, and I ate completely differently for three days, and I felt better. By trial and error, my wife and I narrowed it down to gluten, which is present in wheat and barley and so on. Now, it seems like one molecule, and it all comes back—the bloating, the dry eyes, everything.

Milken: Hmm, I’ll be damned. What else does it do?

Lasset: I feel half buzzed all the time, and I sleep too light. I can’t get deep sleep the way I should. And it irritates my bowels.

Milken: One molecule?

Lasset: It seems that way. When I was cured, I drank a glass of beer. I thought, “It’s brewed; it’s not distilled,” right? “so, elements of the grain can remain in the beer, but is it still gluten, or does it break down to something else?”

Milken: It’s still gluten, right?

Lasset: Yup, I had a three-day attack.

The plates are served.

Milken: No more pasta, then?

Lasset: The key is “simple,” simple, pure foods, with nothing added, and lots of fresh ingredients.

After their first bites, Milken speaks.

Milken: Tell me you’ll take the case, Lieutenant Lasset. My office is overwhelmed with work right now; we need your help on this hideous slaughter at the headlands dunes.

Lasset: Did the killing happen at Sleeping Bear Dunes?

Milken: Take the case and tell me, Lieutenant.

Lasset: Because if it happened at the Dunes, the scene has been decimated.

Milken: I understand that, but if not for the other tragedy, this crime might not have come to light for decades, that is, the evidence for this crime.

At the Morgue in Traverse City

Medical Examiner, Ann Croix: As you can see, Lieutenant, someone went to a great deal of trouble in the manner by which they separated the head from the body.

Lasset: It’s like they intended to make a melon boat. What’s that tool chefs use to make perfect zigzags like that? (He takes his notepad from his trench coat pocket and is poised to write.)

Ann: I don’t know. I’m not much of a cook, Lieutenant. I cannot guess why the neck above the collar bone was cut in such a way. But I can tell you that these cuts were not the cause of death. His left arm was pierced, and all the blood drained from his body. That was his cause of death.

Lasset: Is that a painful way to die?

Ann: Having your blood drained away by someone you don’t want to drain your blood is surely a most frightening experience. As for the moment of death, I do not see signs of trauma. He would have slipped into unconsciousness without a great deal of pain, I think.

Lasset: I am going to ask an odd question: Is there any chance his severed head was the centerpiece at some sort of grotesque dinner party?

Ann: His head was exposed to the air for several hours before it was buried in the sand at the top of the big slope. By noon tomorrow, we will know more about how it was treated before it was put in the ground.

Lasset: He was killed somewhere other than at the National Lakeshore?

Ann: It looks that way. There is not a great deal of blood at either site.

Lasset: Was he handsome?

Ann: Yes, extraordinarily so. In life, he was a charmer. For the local art museum—an excellent one, I must say—he put together a large exhibit of ancient Middle Eastern bronze castings in January. He was there every day, hovering over it and talking to visitors about it. He had great knowledge and taught me more than I thought I wanted to know on the subject.

Lasset: He was twenty-four?

Ann: Twenty-six.

Lasset: If you had to guess, why was he killed?

Ann: Because he traded secretly in treasures looted from the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities. Someone considered it—one or two items he traded—to be blasphemy, trading treasures with the infidels, people of the West, so someone killed him.

Lasset: Did he trade in looted treasures from that Baghdad Museum?

Ann: I don’t know; you asked me to guess, Lieutenant. As I was examining his body, I asked a series of what-ifs—that was one of them.

Lasset: Now, explain why his head was removed with these particular cuts—same thing: if you had to guess.

Ann: It’s the only knife the stupid son of a bitch had. Remember what Sherlock Holmes told Watson, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Lasset: All I have to do is eliminate the impossible. Let me see: It’s impossible that it was an act of nature or that it was self-inflicted.

Ann: I can corroborate: these cuts were not an act of nature, and they were not self-inflicted.

Lasset: By the way, does everyone in these parts use such colorful language? Last night, my nephew, my grandnephew, used the adjective son-of-a-bitchin. I could not imagine that I would hear such an expression.

Ann: Midwestern slang; it’s a thing of beauty.

Lasset: Thank you for your help, Dr. Croix.

Ann: (shaking his hand) You’re very welcome, Lieutenant Lasset. I can have those lab tests in your hand by eleven-thirty tomorrow morning.

Lasset: (Lasset nears the door) Good night.

Ann: Oh, Lieutenant Lasset, one more thing. Abrasha Jardan was a great friend of your nephew, Tyler. Why don’t you talk with him? Talk to Abrasha’s mother, too. She is an amazingly insightful and plainspoken woman.

Lasset: Thank you, Ma’am, I will. (leaves and allows the door to close)

At the Cherry Orchard

Lasset walks among the cherry trees, fruit producing ones, not ornamental ones, that are rather large, rather tall. The red and white fabric wall that surrounded the party billows softly in the breeze on a sunny Sunday morning in May. One corner has come untied from its post and flaps without noise but reveals the ground beyond the enclosure. Blossom petals move back and forth on the rush mats that remain on the ground—due to the enclosed space, the wind moves in small vectors within the space.

For some reason he takes up the place he occupied not quite twenty-four hours earlier. He dusts the Zen cushion of sand and pink petals, throws it back on the rush mat and sits. He recalls the moment when Tyler pointed out the hatchet hammer beneath the cherry tree. He glances at it now. He concludes that it was left behind by a tradesman who pounded wooden poles into the soil, the ones that support the red-and-white, large-scale bunting that defined the dining area for yesterday’s reception. Its handle was wrapped in stick tape, not because it is sticky but because that kind of cloth tape is used to wrap the handle of hockey sticks. It was wrapped with orange stick tape to give it extra grip and comfort in the hand of the user. Its combined hammer head and hatched blade glinted in the sun, but its handle was partially concealed by dirt and the recent drifting of cherry blossom petals. It was a hammering tool. It was not evidence; it did not matter.

It was the kind of morning when a stiff breeze coming across the lake shuttles pop-up cumulus clouds rapidly across the landscape. The air is notably cold, and the sun is warm. Lasset sits there lost in thought. He enjoys the momentary sizzle of the sun on his face and hands, which are clasped in front of him, because in the next moment the gloom of a cloud, stretched out with a trailing tail, will settle over the scene he has been placed in by forces larger than himself.

A corner of the large bunting has come loose and flaps with an insistent noise now. He takes note of the petals scattered on the tabletops and on top of the lacquered boxes, black with red borders, their contents perhaps beginning to turn after twenty-four hours in the weather. Someone had the presence of mind yesterday to close them to keep the bugs out—Michelle gave orders no doubt, professional, attentive to detail, always anticipating what needed to be done, in business and in life.

“Quintessential spring” was the feeling that he was not quite putting into words as he studied the scattered blossoms on the table. “… it is no longer the springtime of my life,” was the rest of it. Another inhumane act, another investigation: “Cause, cause, cause; cause and effect: if this is the effect, what is the cause? Money, eighty percent of the time; drugs, twenty; out of control rage, sixty (the categories are not exclusive); rage about not being treated properly by the rest of the world (the frustration of the powerless), thirty percent of the time; perverted sexual desire as a direct cause of homicide, almost zero.

He stood and faced the direction of the lake; in his mind he pictured blue water, not tropical blue, something deeper than that, something that comes from ice and snow melting, all the ice that surrounds the lake in the winter and all the snow that melts and runs into the lake from the land, through all the rivers and streams that cut through the land.

Then he posed a question to himself about Michigan: There are rivers that run to the Pacific Ocean, and rivers that run to the Gulf of Mexico, and rivers that run to the Atlantic. There is a dividing line somewhere for streams that feed the Mississippi and streams that flow to the sea. There must be a similar dividing line in Michigan: some streams flow to Lake Huron, some to Lake Erie, some to Lake Michigan, and some to Lake Superior. Where is the major east-west dividing line?

Nowhere near the Leelanau Peninsula he guessed, but somewhere nearer the middle, for, after all, the orchard he stood in was practically at the shore of Lake Michigan; the lake was beyond a rise or two that way. He pictured the blue water. The flapping of the canvas curtain made him think of a small sailboat he used to take out into the water off Malibu; it made him think he ought to try it again.

Visiting Abrashi’s mother

Mrs. Jardan lived in a fieldstone house of an impressive design, and with impressive details, such as a spacious veranda on top of the portico that covered the entranceway. For a fieldstone house, it was remarkably uniform: Its corners and other lines were delineated perfectly, due, no doubt, to the careful choices of what stone to put where by good craftsmen. The stones were not even partially cut or flattened, as they sometimes are, but were carefully chosen for size and shape to make everything look the way it should—a column is a column, a balcony rail a balcony rail, and walls are flat.

On the opposite side of the three-story house was a round room that took up altogether about as much space as the portico. It was three feet thick at the bottom and two feet thick at the top, three floors above, where it was capped with dome of colored glass, mostly milk glass, with an amber dove here and there, taking flight over some foggy sea, suggested by the representation of some craggy rocks and a wind-swept tree at the western border. Of course, it was protected by a plate glass shield.

When Lieutenant Lasset was escorted to that room by a properly dressed maid, it was not the sound of the horn being played, the beautiful sound, that filled the three story stone column—the walls were stone through and through—and not the black starburst in a white field, rendered in highly polished granite that made up the floor, nor was it the strikingly attractive woman of about fifty who sat in the middle of the space practicing a classical piece on a French horn. What he noticed was a picture window, with an ancient, gnarled plum tree outside it in the yard, with a good twenty chickadees jostling for space on its branches.

He stood there enchanted by the music and the birds and the scene.

Before she was quite finished, she opened her black eyes, looked at him and said, “I can’t remember how this all got started, but it is a need in me now. I am Ortese Jardan,” she said, rising and extending her hand. She wore a gold tunic, and her hair was streaked, black and white.

Shaking the tall, distinguished woman’s hand, Lasset did not detect the least sign of grief. Perhaps he should have understood it in the lonely French horn piece, but he did not see it in her eyes or her manner.

Lasset: Lieutenant Lasset, on assignment with the FBI, here to look into the cause of your son’s death two days ago.

Jardan: Please come to the kitchen, where I will serve you coffee, Lieutenant Lasset.

Lasset: Thank you, ma’am. (She guides him by the small of his back to the kitchen. It is light-filled and finished entirely in tiger maple.)

Jardan: The god of clichés has asserted himself again, Lieutenant Lasset: The good die young.

Lasset: I am very sorry for your loss, Ma’am. The shock must be overwhelming.

They both drink coffee from grass-green China cups decorated with gold filigree at the top and bottom. Hers has a rich dose of cream in it, which she has stirred in at the counter.

Jardan: Do you know what I dreamed last night, Lieutenant Lasset? By the way, please call me Jardan—I know it’s odd, but I prefer my last name. Call me simply Jardan.

Lasset: Yes, of course.

Jardan: I dreamed I was in the deepest forest on the darkest night, and I heard my baby cry, and he kept crying, and I was going to find him no matter what. I would blind myself on the stumps of limbs sticking out from living tree trunks, and I would tangle my hair in the brush, and I would stumble, and I would crawl, and I would find my baby. I would follow his sound, and, no matter what, I would find my baby, in the deepest forest, on the darkest night, but he is gone, Lieutenant; he is gone. I cannot save my baby.

They both choose to sip their coffee and study the coral buds on a dwarf apple tree, trained like a bonsai; it grows in the flower bed beyond a window of the breakfast nook—the window’s accordion doors have been folded back.

Lasset: (Studying the tree.) Were you close to your son?

Jardan: He was a professional; I am a professional. We had dinner twice a week. When he was an infant, I changed his diapers. I watched him grow into a handsome man. I loved him. He was too good, Lasset. I would be working in the perennial flower beds, and he would drive up in his purring little sports car, not an expensive one, just a little one, and he would wait for me to look his way and then he would wave at me from behind the steering wheel, and then get out and pull some weeds or deadhead the flowers with me, or he would hold a rose for me to cut. Sometimes I would be shopping downtown, and I would walk past one of the cafés and he and Tyler would be at a window seat, and they would raise their hands from their coffee cups and wave their fingers in exactly the same way and smile sweetly in a way that said to me, à tout à l’heure, because we were having dinner in three hours’ time, and I had to go home and cook it, eggplant parmesan, or vegetarian ratatouille on egg noodles. They were both vegetarians.

Lasset: Were they always good friends?

Jardan: Yes.

Lasset: Did they share hobbies or interests?

Jardan: When they were teenagers, they skied non-stop every winter. If I wasn’t busy, I took them and waited in the lodge and read a book. More recently, they were both taking up weekend carpentry. They helped me with my never-ending project of redoing the fireplaces and replacing the crown molding in all the rooms of our house.

Lasset: Did they have a falling out recently, Jardan?

Jardan: No.

Lasset: When was the last time they worked on your renovation project?

Jardan: Two Saturdays ago.

Lasset: May I see the worksite, Ma’am?

Jardan: Follow me, Lasset.

Lasset: You have a lovely home?

Jardan: I provide the money; others provide the work and ideas.

Lasset: Being a professional horn player pays well, does it?

Jardan: Adequately. However, my father was a wealthy industrialist; I inherited much of his money.

Lasset: (Continuing to talk as they walk up a lime-green, plush, winding staircase) What brought you to Michigan?

Jardan: We are Turkish, and you might think that we would vacation in the Greek islands or somewhere like that, but my grandparents bought a house on Old Mission eighty years ago, and, believe it or not, we have always vacationed here. When I was a girl, we spent summers here. I always admired this house when I walked by. When we had to park our car five blocks from the center of town—because of a parade or a festival of some sort—we often parked on this street, and I would stop and study this house. There are lots of stone houses, but none so complete in its daring architectural detail and its simple beauty.

Lasset: It is impressive; I must say.

Jardan: Do you know how some Americans can go to Tuscany and fall in love with the stucco mansions, and become an aficionado of the place and the life, and so on?

Lasset: Yes, yes.

Jardan: Well, the same is true for me. I love this place, and its people, at least the ones who have some cultural aspirations, or at least will give a nodding respect to it—that takes in most, Lieutenant Lasset, I assure you.

Lasset: You play horn with the symphony, do you?

Jardan: No, Lieutenant Lasset. I teach at the arts Academy. Its name is Interlochen.

Lasset: Oh, I see.

Jardan: I sit in with the Detroit Symphony on occasion.

Lasset: How far away would that be, Jardan?

Jardan: Three hundred miles on the dot.

Lasset: Do you drive?

Jardan: In fact, I do not.

Lasset: But you can drive?

Jardan: Practically speaking, I cannot. I am an artist, and I am in a constant state of distraction, that is, until I have to focus to perform or to conduct a master class, which is all I teach. The world is a much safer place without my driving in it.

Lasset: I see.

Jardan: (Giving Lasset instructions as they approach the third-floor ballroom) You will have to put your shoulder to that door, Lasset. It is very hard to open. Unfortunately, the house continues to crack and settle, and it affects the upper floors especially.

Lasset: (Turns the brass latch, slams into it hard with his shoulder, and opens the door. His voice echoes in the large vacant space that contains at the center four sawhorses supporting a carpenter’s bench. An eight-foot length of unfinished oak rests clamped to the bench; it has been routed with finished grooves along its top edge, and the job of cutting keys, notches, along its lower edge is one-third finished. As they take a place in front of the workpiece, Lasset takes a rectangle of steel from the soft pine workbench at the place where work has stopped.) Would you say that this piece of steel is cast or tempered?

Jardan: (Takes it in her fingers and feels of it.) It is tempered. It is the broken off prong of the key-cutting tool that Abrashi and Tyler ordered on the internet. I told them to order two, but, no, they weren’t sure it was the right tool or whether they could use it well, so they ordered just one. Why waste money? they said.

Lasset: It looks like they were doing a good job.

Jardan: They were very smart, and very careful, and they worked very well together.

Lasset: Was Beth jealous of their close friendship?

Jardan: In a better world, Lasset, Abrashi and Tyler would have been the ones to watch—in a better world, mind you. Was she jealous? If she was, they didn’t care. They were self-assured; the false notions of limited minds did not spoil them. Like most aesthetes, they were not easily swayed from their notions of the beautiful, the gorgeous, the sumptuous, the delectable, and, quite simply, what worked.

Lasset: Their friendship worked.

Jardan: They were so assured of their heterosexuality that they forgot about boundaries. Tyler would readily put his hands on top of Abrashi’s when he judged that both their sets of hands were needed to make a particular cut in the wood. A bullish heterosexual man would not accept that, but he would also miss something. Sometimes the prettiest person in a room is another man, and one can be drawn to him. They didn’t drop everything and kiss madly. It wasn’t like that. What do we love, Lasset? What do we love, if we do not let down our guard and love the truly beautiful and honorable nature in us? If we see the beautiful and honorable, and we do not love it, then we continue on a false trajectory, looking for something that we will not love when we find it—we will become stiff and afraid, like most creatures on this planet—victims of the many false doctrines.

Lasset touched the prong only by the edges. The broken edge looked as though it might have been bent back and forth forcibly, perhaps starting with the use of a hammer, until it separated. He put it in the center of his folded handkerchief until he might get to the kitchen and ask Jardan for a sandwich bag.

Lasset: Did you ever help them when they were working?

Jardan: No, but Beth sometimes did. She liked them both. Of course, she kept Abrashi at a respectful distance, befitting a bride to be. Truthfully, I do not think that she was jealous. As one who truly loves, you want good things for your beloved, including good friends. And as far as emotional boundaries, Abrashi and Tyler knew where they were, and they observed them. Their physical boundaries weren’t always where a bullish heterosexual would expect them, and you could look at them and think twice, and you could think kind or unkind thoughts. But they were largely unaffected by such ideas—why live your life according to a crude person’s set of rules when they aren’t going to lead anywhere good anyway? Calmly reject them, and calmly assert yourself. Let us not live in beady-eyed fear of people we don’t like anyway.

Lasset: Sometimes you get ahead of me, Ma’am. I can’t think that fast. Where do you go to get a better world? That’s what you made me think. Where do you go to get a better world, like the one you describe? Maybe that’s what we need: a better world. Instead of doling out punishments around the world like an angry father, we should use our noggins, put smart people to work to make smart plans for making friends of our enemies. But I don’t think too many people are thinking creatively along those lines.

Jardan: Sadly, you are right, Lasset.

A pop music program hostess from Japan visits Kenji Hikawa

The Front Room is what the Traverse City family has named their pie restaurant; it occupies a space in front of the stately orchard house on Route M 22 that goes up along the west side of the west arm of Grand Traverse Bay, along Leelanau Peninsula. It seems that Michigan is a place dominated by peninsulas, being divided as it is by two large peninsulas, the upper and the lower. If the east side of the Lower Peninsula, the Lake Huron side, contains the thumb, well then, the west can claim the little finger—and that would be the Leelanau Peninsula.

The young Kenji Hikawa, an emerging vocal artist in Japan, has been asked to remain in the area for the duration of the possible homicide investigation. Within hours of the jet plane accident—a separate matter—he accompanied Tyler to the site to help the lame and the injured make the difficult ascent of the Lake Michigan Lookout at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore so that they might be taken to a hotel or to a medical facility for examination and treatment. Lieutenant Lasset had nothing to do with his detention.

On the Monday morning after the crash and the discovery of the dead body of Tyler’s lifelong friend, he simply had to make a live appearance on Fuji Television’s “Top Ten Countdown,” in Japan, a primetime broadcast. At seven twenty-three sharp in the morning, by American Eastern Time, he opened with McCartney and Lennon’s “The Long and Winding Road,” in English. It is not usual for an enka singer—essentially a singer of sentimental ballads (Oh, why did I leave that little town in Eichizen on the Japan Seaside; it is so beautiful; I miss it because now I am living only a typical life in Tokyo)— to cover a song in English, let alone a pop tune, but it was decided for him that since he was detained in America, he would make the most of his reason for being there—the wedding of a lifelong friend. The friends had spent time together since the age of six, two weeks in Michigan one summer, and two weeks in Osaka the next. It was also decided that there would be no mention of the true reason for his detention.

So, when he opened with the song outside the big oak doors to the Front Room, the family’s pie restaurant, with Tyler and Beth poised inside to greet him, with the fill-lights glaring off the shiny door, it was appropriate: “The long and winding road that that takes me to your door will never disappear….” When he entered, he handed Beth the Microphone and placed his hands on their backs and walked with them across the room.

He takes the microphone back and walks around the room alone, taking in the view from the picture windows and going to the racks of pies cooling just after the morning batch has come out of the oven. He continues his stylish and heartfelt rendition to the end. He bows slightly and smells deeply of a pie that has been placed on a table in front of him.

The restaurant serves only pie and coffee. A friend of the family makes the furniture which fills the large open space: comfortable, rough-hewn, fallen-log picnic tables. They have recently started to serve pasties (pronounced with the “a” of apple, the nasal one), which are traditional Cornish meat-and-potato turnovers that were meant to be wrapped in linen cloths and taken down into the coal mines to serve as midday meals; in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the tradition of taking such a lunch into the mines was continued by the iron and copper miners. In the region where pasties are served—now more out of nostalgia than need, as trendy food, the Upper Peninsula and the northern reaches of the Lower Peninsula—much is made of the difference in pronunciation between the word for the food product, pasty, with the “a” of apple, and pasty with the “a” of ape, which, in everyone’s mind, refers to the glittery tassels on the nipples of striptease dancers. As it happens, Tyler is a big fan of cherry pie. The front room is famous for serving the most flavorful cherry pie in a region, a region where there is a great deal of expertise in that trade. He has invented a very stiff version of cherry turnover, which he calls cherry chutney pasty [a of apple], because it contains some raisins and nuts as well. It is meant for taking on hiking trips and cycling tours. Tyler’s cherry pasty is made with an extra amount of cornstarch, so that the filling ends up a semi-solid gel. It has somewhat fewer cherries in it to allow for the stiffening agent. When Kenji finishes his song, to great applause by the staff of the shop and his friends, Nancy, Michelle, Tyler, and Beth, a female announcer steps in and hurries everyone through a rehearsed piece. She uses English that she is sure her TV audience will understand; otherwise, she speaks Japanese.

Announcer: This is meat pie, a famous regional food. It is called pasty (with the “a” of pass). Kore wa kono chihou no tokusan no pasty (with the “a” of pass) to iu miito pai desu. (Now she holds two green tassels made of Mylar tinsel against her shirt to demonstrate; she slightly emphasizes the one she is holding with her right hand.) This is a pasty (with the “a” of play). Kore ga peisuti desu. (She teases the camera with one, then returns it to her beast. Tisk-tisk style, she waves her finger near the camera lens, brings her face into the frame behind her waving finger, and leers. She speaks.) Never say (like play) pasty (holds tassel out) when you mean (like pass) pasty. (Like pass) Pasty no koto wo peisuti to itte wa ikemasen.

The camera moves to a turnover on a pewter plate (she holds it up). Then the camera does a rapid succession of changes between her chest and the plate as she says, peisuti (tassel), pasty (pie), peisuti (tassel), pasty (pie), peisuti (tassel), pasty (pie), then just the different “A” sounds: (pl’a’y), (p’a’ss). Kenji takes one of the tassels, holds it to his left chest as the announcer holds the other to her right breast. They weave enough to make the tassels twirl, grinding their hips in the process. They do one more round of pasty/pasty, pasty/pasty, with each of them holding a tassel, as the camera moves between the two items. The announcer finishes speaking.

Announcer: “My God, you make one mistake, and they hate you forever.” Ah, nante, hazukashii; haji wo kaita wa.

She raises her head proudly, adopting a pouty expression to demonstrate that one may have to bear the insult of being rudely corrected at a local shop for making this mistake.

[When one sees the word on a menu board for the first time, how does one know how to read it—you just pronounce it the way it looks to you—and you end up in the middle of a cultural faux pas.]

Lasset has arrived and has taken a seat with Tyler and Michelle and Nancy and Beth who are at a picnic table, witnessing the routine. The announcer has been told of Lasset’s arrival. She goes down the row, pausing behind each of the guests at the picnic table.

Announcer: This is Nancy, Tyler’s mother; this is Michelle, Tyler’s mother; this is Beth, Tyler’s bride—they were married only two days ago; this is Tyler, Kenji’s American pen pal. Kochira wa Tyler-san no okaasan no Nancy-san to Michelle-san desu; soshite kochira ga Tyler-san no oku-san no Beth-san desu. Futari wa kekkon shiki wo futsuka mae ni ageta bakari desu. Kochira ga Hikawa Kenji-san no buntsu tomodachi no Tyler-san desu (She puts her arms around his neck). He’s so handsome and lovable. Oh, you should see his wife; she is throwing daggers at me with her eyes; wu-hu. Tyler-san wa nante kakko ii deshoo. Okusan mo mite kudasai. (Putting two fingers in front of her own eyes) Oku san ni okorarechaimasu ne! Uwaa! (She shudders with fear; the camera moves to Beth’s face, which is sweet and kind, proving the announcer’s exaggeration). And this is Keiji Lasset. There isn’t anything wrong; he is just here for the wedding of his grandnephew and is taking a long holiday. Soshite kochira ga Lasset Keiji. Shikashi nanimo okotteorimasen. Kekkon shiki no sankasha desu.

She takes Tyler by the hand and leads him to a table where she will demonstrate the advantage of his turnover, the one with a special, thick filling, by comparing it to a turnover with the kitchen’s normal cherry-pie filling. She picks up the cherry pasty with the normal filling. She takes it in her hand and attempts to carry it as she might a clutch purse, walking in place and swinging her arms. It immediately cracks, and she puts it back down on the pewter plate, saying in English, with a tone of disappointment: “Oh, please, this is really too much!”

Now she takes the improved cherry pasty that Tyler has invented; she carries this one too as a clutch purse, and it performs very well: “Now this is more like it, eeh? “ Kochira no ho ga ii desu yo ne? “It is meant for taking in a backpack while hiking or doing a cycling tour of the pretty peninsula that surrounds us.” Kore wa haikingu ya tozan ni motte ikeru yo ni natteimasu.

Now Tyler and Beth and Kenji serve the announcer and the crew members who are not too busy, a normal slice of cherry pie, with a just the right size scoop of vanilla ice cream. The announcer speaks with very over-the-top enthusiasm, so that one might think she is being sarcastic.

Oh, my God; this is so wonderful; it is super delicious (she includes a good amount of ice cream and pie with her second bite); oh, I am in heaven now: oh, yes.” Nante oishii deshoo. Sugoku oishii maru de tengoku ni iru yo da wa.

The camera shows others mildly enjoying the very good coffee and cherry pie a la mode. Nancy, Michelle, and Beth wave goodbye to the camera from their safe place on the picnic table near the exit door. Tyler, still behind the demonstration table, with a view of the kitchen through the serving counter, is poised to say goodbye while standing with his arm around the announcer and Kenji, but Kenji steps out, and leads Lasset by the hand into the picture—Lasset has been inspecting the pie racks. Lasset bends more than he needs to to remain in the shot, and gives the peace sign. They all wave goodbye enthusiastically as the announcer speaks goodbyes from Leelanau County, Michigan.

Nancy goes to Lasset and interlaces her arm with his.

Nancy: Do you see the sign? (Points the to one above and in back of the pie cooling racks.)

Lasset: (Reads) This is a GF kitchen. (Reads the fine print under the letters GF) Gluten Free.

Nancy: We are cherry farmers, but my favorite pie—truth be told—is wild red-raspberry-wild-black-raspberry, or blackcap as some say, mixed. If you say yes, I will cut us some.

Lasset: Yes (with a laugh).

Nancy chooses two China cups for coffee, cuts and serves the deep-dish pie on burgundy-banded and gold-trimmed dessert plates, with three small, round scoops of ice cream, knowing that it is his breakfast—she serves one scoop with her pie. They take a seat at what had been the demonstration table for the crew. The crew is breaking down the lighting and equipment.

Nancy and Lasset engage in strictly small talk, how the broadcast had to start at seven twenty-three in the morning Eastern Daylight Savings Time in order to appear in Japan at eight something in the evening the same day, Monday, what an impressive voice Kenji Hikawa has, what assured style, how unfortunate it is that he has been detained. Lasset savors the delicate, non- wheat, pastry, the intense flavor of the wild black and red raspberries mixed in equal parts and sweetened by careful adjustment—the baker must sample the berries often to assess just how much sugar will be needed for a particular pie to give it just the right amount of sweetness to develop the flavor of the fruit, without overpowering it, which can turn it simply joltingly sweet, as too many American confections and pastries are. 

He savors the ice cream’s ability to soften and smooth on the palate the flavors of wild fruit and buttery pastry. He just finishes when suddenly it seems that all of the tornado sirens in the world have been turned on. People are used to hearing them on the first Saturday of each month when they are tested and adjusted for about three minutes, but they have never heard them on a Monday morning. The lead technician of the Japanese TV crew uses his radio receiver to pick up the nearest radio station. The report is remarkably candid: a cracked nuclear device, a small one, with a barely noticeable leak—possibly the first example of the much-feared suitcase bomb—has been found amid the jumble in the cargo hold of the jetliner that crashed three days ago. People must clear a five-mile radius, including land and Lake, while specialists remove the leaking device.

Michelle immediately makes a plan: she will fuel up the orchard’s personnel carrier—purchased from Army Surplus—which is used chiefly during harvest time to take workers from worksite to worksite. She will go to the gas station three quarters of a mile down the road and come back in ten minutes to pick everyone up, including the restaurant crew, the film crew, and family. They will put only one vehicle on the road, and, in fact, by acting quickly may be able to stay ahead of the traffic jam to come.

When she returns, they are all standing outside, having locked up all the buildings. They pile into the carrier and roll up halfway the green canvas sides so that they can enjoy a view of the lakes and the rolling vistas of Leelanau Peninsula as they head for the town of Cadillac, where they can feel safe and have lunch.

Lasset is seated between Tyler and Beth on the side benches of the armored truck.

Lasset:  Mrs. Jardan is impressed with your work on her ballroom. Will you keep it up, now that Abrashi is gone? I think she would appreciate it very much.

Tyler: I was supposed to work there tonight, but now I won’t be able to (shouting in the sunny, clear air to get above the drone of tires and the onrushing air).

Lasset:  You grew up together?

T: Yes. We understood each other the way few people do. I wanted to see him succeed in the art world. We were devoted friends.

Beth: He loved Abrashi; unqualified, he loved him.

Michelle is next to Beth; she puts her hand on her heart tenderly, and her eyes become glassy.

Beth: They were both in a school for autistic children between the ages of four and eleven. Their symptoms were by times severe and by times moderate. Their parents began to socialize and to experiment with diet and other methods to help autistic children to focus better and to function better in society. Mother Nancy began to read for her own improvement about physical and spiritual healing and was going through the weeks-long process of ridding her body of toxins. Except at school, Tyler was eating the same food. He started to show signs of improvement. Researchers have found out that some autistic children respond to this diet, but not all. It is not clear why. Soon, Jardan was enforcing the diet with Abrashi, and they, all three parents, became very strict about avoiding gluten especially for themselves and their children. Luckily, Abrashi improved too. The first time they enjoyed the heat of a fireplace, they enjoyed it together. The first time they laughed at clownish antics in a movie, they laughed together. The first time another human being hugged them, and they hugged back, they were hugging each other. So, you can see how close they were, Uncle Lasset.

Lasset:  Just Uncle, or just Lasset is fine.

Michelle bites her lip. Nancy smiles at her sympathetically from the opposite bench.

Tyler doubles over, puts the tops of his fists to his eyes and cries.

Abrashi’s funeral is delayed until his body could be released by the medical examiner.

They continue to make their way on surface roads toward Cadillac, avoiding the freeway. Their plan is to drive down the peninsula to Manistee and then drive on 55 to Cadillac.

It turns out that the radio announcement, although it seemed candid, was much less candid than it might have been. There was not one neutron bomb onboard the plane, but thirty-seven of them, concealed inside something that looked like soccer balls reduced to two-thirds their normal size. Only one had a small leak. They were covered in a thick, hard rubber, with normal sized sections of soccer ball material stitched together—the configuration was a little clumsy because the individual patches of the ball appeared somewhat outsized. The sections were different primary colors: yellow, red, and blue, with the addition of green. They seemed like nothing so much as extra heavy soccer balls, intended for some related sport or for arm strengthening practice—if thrown back and forth, they would build up strength.

As far as anyone knew, the collection in the plane’s hold amounted to the entire arsenal of neutron bombs from around the world. A few had abrasions on the applied rubber surface. Had the one small leak not developed, they might have gone undetected. That was the most disturbing fact. It might mean that terrorism had taken an altogether new turn.

The equipment at airports might not catch plastic explosives every time or even more conventional powder explosives, especially if the carrier is clean of all residue from making of or handling of such devices, and provided the devices are sealed. But the equipment that checks passengers and carry-on bags, and checked-in bags is very sensitive to radiation. It had been thought that the background radiation of nuclear devices could not be masked; the signature was well understood, and it was believed that the signature would emit through lead or human flesh just as easily, if it happened to be surgically placed inside of someone, but there they were, thirty-seven perfectly quiet, perfectly ready nuclear devices.

To say that they were quiet is not quite accurate. The fact that there were thirty-seven nuclear devices on board an aircraft did not represent anything particularly new—human error, or whatever—but thirty-seven nuclear devices that, if detonated, could forever alter the course of human history because they were cloaked, because their predictable and constant release of radiation was no longer a tool for detection because it had been effectively cancelled—this was a cosmic shift.

Gathering the world’s supply of the largely untested theater nuclear weapons was no small feat either. These neutron bombs were a weapon conceived of and brought into existence in the mid-sixties and early seventies. A few hawks had said at the time: try them out on the battlefield the next chance. Get the suspense over with. They were nuclear, yes, but really not much more than extra big cannon balls—part of the tactical arsenal. If you exploded one above the gathered enemy forces, you would have a lot of dead bodies because of the radiation, but the percussive force would be limited to the air, and little damage would be done to inert things, such as buildings, bridges, and roads.

Upon discovery of the massive explosive potential of the assembled devices in the cargo hold of the jumbo jet bound for New York from Chicago that had crashed on the east shore of Lake Michigan, all air traffic, except military, was stopped. Experts surmised that the devices were not armed, but in storage mode.

The film or television viewing audience is made to realize the importance of these nuclear devices without words, but by following workers in safety-suits examining the devices. The danger is not great; only one of the devices was damaged enough to release a detectable atomic signature. The devices still appeared as toys or sports implements.

We take in an airplane view of the slope of the Lake Michigan Overlook; we see a middle-aged, slightly overweight man in khakis and a camouflage shirt walking a little-used trail, possibly a deer trail, through the underbrush to the side of the Lake Michigan Overlook, where the land is solid and the trees well established. We see the head of the regional FBI office holding a bill of lading for the apparent rubber balls. We see Abrashi Jardan’s name on the top of it.

Lasset had spent a good part of the previous day going over his apartment with the help of a local police officer. He found nothing of importance. Now, FBI officers are in the apartment, looking for clues to his import-export contacts and if there might be an obvious source for the colored rubber balls that ultimately became the hiding place for the stash of small nuclear weapons.

We see expanding foam sprayed on the rubber balls, all of them, cracked and whole, to turn the mass of them into a cohesive mass that will stay together when the section of the fuselage that contains them is lifted by helicopter and taken to the nearest, long-abandoned, underground nuclear test facility, or, if the threat is deemed immediate, deep into the Canadian tundra. It is feared that their casing has been so altered in rendering them undetectable that a way to permanently deactivate them may not be found.

Marine welders are busy cutting the cabin away from the hold and the hot spot away from the rest of the plane altogether. Then, they will fasten fresh bulkheads to the free section, to make it a cradle for the nuclear bombs. Those who have the time give some of it to contemplating what would have happened had the entire load been exploded on an approach to an East Coast airport, most likely Kennedy because that was its destination, but who knows whether people were aboard ready to take over the plane perhaps by turning of the cloaking device and revealing the true nature of the cargo. In that case, the hijackers would need to offer a false promise of safe return, or the crew, safe behind their secure cockpit door, would simply ditch the plane in the safest way possible.

The lead farmhand drove them toward their destination. Two members of the television crew joined him in the cab of the drab green personnel carrier. Three other members sat in the back. They talked among themselves. Suddenly, one of them made room for himself beside Lasset. He wore army greens and polished boots, his chosen style of dress, for he had nothing to do with the Self-Defense Force in Japan. His name was Masahiro Honda.

Honda: Lieutenant Lasset, how long would it take for someone to come from New York to Leelanau?

Lasset: He might be able to get to the area within five hours if he flew from Kennedy to Detroit Metro and from Detroit Metro to Cherry Capital Airport and rented a car and drove the rest of the way.

Honda: I think someone will come here to set off the bomb by remote control. He or she will be the same one who planned to do it when the plane descended over New York. Why would he not carry out his plan? A trained terrorist will complete his mission—to do as much psychological damage as possible. If others have found out his plan, he will try even harder to make his plan work right under their noses. He will do it, or die trying. He has no desire to live anyway. He has a desire only to complete his mission.

Lasset:  Setting off a nuclear device by the biggest sand bank in the country—what’s the point?

Honda: You cannot ask, ‘What is the point?’ He does not ask that question. That is a convenient question we can ask because we would like to believe that the world is full of rational thinkers. However, it is wrong in this case. He thinks only two things: bomb; push button. I am sure he is at the crash site now, waiting for the best moment.

Lasset:  When is the best moment?

Honda: The moment the bomb is airlifted out. The maximum effect of that bomb is achieved when it is several hundred feet in the air.

Lasset:  Does everyone know that?

Honda: In my heart, I am a dedicated pacifist, but, at the same time, the armaments of war fascinate me. I have an intimate knowledge of every weapons system around the world. I read all the journals, Jane’s, and so on. It has been my hobby since childhood. It is because of this that I have studied English.

Lasset: How would a person set off a nuclear bomb remotely?

Honda: I do not know precisely the workings of small nuclear devices, because they have not been written about much, and because people suspect you are a terrorist if you read about such things on the Internet, but usually a nuclear weapon achieves critical mass by precisely compressing radioactive material with a medium sized explosion contained within the bomb. This initial explosion can be triggered on the device itself when it is released from the doors of a plane, or remotely by any number of radio devices. Then the main explosion follows when atoms fly around so fast that they start bombarding each other so frequently and with such force that they all start to come apart and release their pent-up energy—that’s called nuclear fission. It’s a chain reaction that builds and builds until there is a powerful explosion and release of radioactivity.

The story takes a different turn, suddenly.

The viewing audience sees one of the ferry boats that runs from Ludington Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. It is clearly out of place. It is only an eighth of a mile offshore. A massive brigade with a massive arsenal starts out from the ferry boat in safety boats. Others fly in by helicopter and drive in using armored vehicles from a nearby National Guard base.

The plane had encountered a strange airless pocket, but landed nearly intact, with most onboard surviving. Abrashi had the soccer balls with tactical nuclear weapons inside ready to unload at Kennedy; then, be flown to an Icelandic volcano, dropped in and destroyed. They were the gathered world supply, taken by secret forces, powerful men and women, to meet their end. It would be a symbol: Take the nuclear weapons that fit in a gym bag and destroy them, because, because, because, you can. Make your point; then, start on the nuclear silos with warheads mounted on rockets. Bring the world around to your point of view; destroy the whole nuclear arsenal, all of it. They were secret believers, at the highest levels of power.

Abrashi had helpers at Kennedy, and the plan was all laid out. When the plane crashed at the edge of Lake Michigan, the very, very massive secret society changed its plan. There was no limit to their expertise. Get the soccer balls off the plane; take them to an entry point to the world’s largest natural gas storage field that lies between layers of bedrock shale—an odd formation that exists not so very, very far from that crash site. Lower the soccer balls into that storage field. The gas will destroy the weapons in a matter of weeks, without releasing radiation; it will simply dissipate the weapons by attacking all their components and breaking them down.

Abrashi had a very rare blood type. He gave blood every six months. This was done in private; it was intended for a royal family in case of emergency. During the blood draw, the blood taker had a quiet seizure and died. Abrashi was unaware until he became weak and fainted. A lab assistant discovered the dead bodies. The program was a secret and needed to remain so. The assistant knew Abrashi’s life story. He took his body to a warehouse on the vast cherry orchard. Some new cherry pickers had been delivered and yeomen were setting them up one by one and testing them out.

They are machines that take hold of a tree and shake it, dropping all the ripe red tart cherries onto a canvas spread out around the business part of the picker, the motor that shakes the trunk. The female assistant put Abrashi’s body onto the canvas and let the machine do its work. However, it did not shred his body; it only severed his head in its core mechanism. She took his body in two parts at four in the morning and buried it in separate spots at the top of one of the most popular tourist sites in the area, Sleeping Bear Dunes. She figured his death would remain a great mystery. She was naive and wrong in her judgments. She simply carried out what she thought might work.

Three members of the Saudi imperial family were on board the plane; all of them survived, but one of them, fourth in line to the throne, would die without a transfusion of his rare blood. He was one of the people Abrashi donated to a store of blood for—in case of emergency, a wise, compassionate and kind prince. A good hospital in the nearby town of Traverse City put out a call for blood for this victim. The lab assistant had had the presence of mind to store all of Abrashi’s blood, oddly, all of it, in a refrigerator in the lab. She delivered half of it to the hospital so as not to seem conspicuous. She explained that it was the blood of a distant relative who happened to be vacationing on the peninsula May through September.

Lasset and Mr. Jardan talk over dinner.

Inspector Lasset explained these findings to Mrs. Jardan while sipping white wine at one of those field-to-table places in the heart of Traverse City. He had made his report to the FBI. No harm, no foul, one of those rare cases. That was the official conclusion.

Ortese Jardan ruminated on these things; She tried to sum it up the way one might approach a great opera, one that told the story of life, a dying princess, a magical event, an enlightened resolution, except it was full of feeling that was almost too hard to state over a glass of wine and finger food: okra and asparagus tempura. This is what she said-free style to Lasset. Her eyes welled with every sentence.

Eternity foreclosed on a moment, and utterly changed the world. How many times will this happen? How many? The blood of the lamb was not lost. This has been the sloppy symbolism of dreams. The fate of the world; your destiny and mine. What the hell does it all mean?

The inspector said this: This story unfolded like the performance of a master singer who gets all the notes right and gets all the feelings right. She wastes a couple of words at the back of her throat and changes register: Then, it all sounds like the truth.

The End

This is a link to my entire book titled Overone, in case anyone needs it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MXhUrNzicE5jWEHh_QtVP09uFzicJqbY4egJNsaMRwQ/edit?usp=sharing