Toward The End Of Time Part 10

From these same windows-"front" I call them, though Gloria says the seaside faces front-I heard in mid-morning, as I lay there, shaved and fully dressed but recuperating from my insomnia with a copy of Scientific American of Scientific American, a truck roar up and Gloria's pure, bell-like voice, more familiar to me than my own, mingle with a voice also, though less resonantly, familiar. I peeked down and over the edge of the porch roof glimpsed my wife's bright head nodding in eager conversation with a chunky man in the police-blue FedEx uniform, with its tricolor stripe down the sleeves. Not a package changed hands but a sheaf of scrip, from her hand to his and thence into a worn leather satchel. The squirrels are in a frenzy of gathering and hiding; one of them scampered along the roof above my head and when the FedEx man looked up at the noise I saw his face; it was Phil. He had not been rubbed out, then, when Spin was; like me, he lived on. When the truck had roared down the driveway, I called for Gloria to come upstairs. The tyranny of the sick is luxurious. She came. "Who was that?" I asked.

"The FedEx man, darling. Haven't you seen him before?"

"Why were you handing him money?"

"I told told you, dear. They collect, in exchange for peace and order. It was they who took care of those horrible children who had built a hut in our woods and who were terrorizing the neighbors; the rumor is it was you, dear. They collect, in exchange for peace and order. It was they who took care of those horrible children who had built a hut in our woods and who were terrorizing the neighbors; the rumor is it was they they who burned down Pearl Lubbetts's expensive beach house! It's quite wonderful, what they're doing. FedEx, I mean. The guards they use to protect their s.h.i.+pments are being a.s.signed to cities and towns now. They want to bring back green money, that people could use in any state. There's even talk, the who burned down Pearl Lubbetts's expensive beach house! It's quite wonderful, what they're doing. FedEx, I mean. The guards they use to protect their s.h.i.+pments are being a.s.signed to cities and towns now. They want to bring back green money, that people could use in any state. There's even talk, the Times Times says of their moving the federal government, what there is left of it, to Memphis, where FedEx has its headquarters and all its airplanes. It's about time somebody took charge, before the Mexicans invade." says of their moving the federal government, what there is left of it, to Memphis, where FedEx has its headquarters and all its airplanes. It's about time somebody took charge, before the Mexicans invade."

The Mexican repossession of Texas, New Mexico, Ari zona, and lower California had been an item lately in the Globe Globe, along with much else terrible-shootings in Dorchester, rapes in Mattapan-that had merely a literary relations.h.i.+p to me, sequestered in my own microcosmic geography and my seared, chastened body.

"It's a network network, so it can do any any thing," Gloria was going on, with a flash of her beautiful teeth and a toss of her ash-blond hair much like those (the flash, the toss) with which, twenty years ago, she could cap one of her-our, might I say?-triumphant s.e.xual performances. She would coax up an erection through a trouser pocket of my gray suit in the middle of Symphony or, unzipping my fly, while we were driving home from Boston at midnight through the neon carnival of pre-war Route 1. "People say President Smith has already resigned, but there's no way to tell." thing," Gloria was going on, with a flash of her beautiful teeth and a toss of her ash-blond hair much like those (the flash, the toss) with which, twenty years ago, she could cap one of her-our, might I say?-triumphant s.e.xual performances. She would coax up an erection through a trouser pocket of my gray suit in the middle of Symphony or, unzipping my fly, while we were driving home from Boston at midnight through the neon carnival of pre-war Route 1. "People say President Smith has already resigned, but there's no way to tell."

At times I dream I have an erection, with a mauve head like a rabbit's heart, so hard and blood-stuffed a one it makes the veins in my throat sympathetically stiffen and swell; but when I awake and peek inside my soaked Depends, my poor p.r.i.c.k is as red and flaccid as a rooster's comb. How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe? The foolishness foolishness of life hits me, stunningly, as the last plausible shreds of my dream dissolve and the suburban houris conjured by my desire-Grace Wren, sucking; Muriel Kelly, splayed-withdraw their wisps of white flesh, but there is nothing to laugh about. of life hits me, stunningly, as the last plausible shreds of my dream dissolve and the suburban houris conjured by my desire-Grace Wren, sucking; Muriel Kelly, splayed-withdraw their wisps of white flesh, but there is nothing to laugh about.

Still, I burn to see Phil by myself, to ask what happened to Deirdre.

I live on a planet where the vegetation is golden, gold in all its shades from red-brown to platinum-white, but all refulgent, towering, superabundant. Red veins of contrast course through its infinite foliations; sheets of orange twirl and tuck themselves into quilted caverns of rustling shadow; a rain of cast-off leaves twirls and twitters down on the same diagonal as the westering light from our proximate star. Gold on this planet rusts; the atoms of its element are eager to combine with the blue of oxygen, the green of vaporized sulfur. Out of gold's volatile, ubiquitous substance are hewn and thrashed the beams of our homes, the thatch of our roofs, the bedding for our livestock. "Common as gold" is a phrase, and "gold poor." Yet we do not despise the element, but bask in its superabundance, which crowds every surface to the verge of the sea, itself golden, imbued as it is with aureate salts. Stalked heaps of gold froth compete with the clouds in their c.u.mulus, and make a ragged join with the sulfurous sky, which the daily floods of local starlight dye a deep, heavenly chartreuse. Theologians make of this an argument for the existence of G.o.d: if the vast sky were any color less soothing than green, our lovingly fabricated eyes would be burned blind.

Today Phil was waiting for me at the mailbox, his white FedEx truck parked at the entry to our dirt lane through the woods. The pond was having a jolly time reflecting the blazing wall of maples and birches along its edge. A duo of ducks jostled the reflection with their widening rings every time they took off and relanded, or with comic deftness tipped up their tails to grab a bite underwater.

"How're ya doin', Mr. Turnbull?" Phil asked me. The somber blue-gray uniform fitted him better than his brown suits had. "That's some operation you've had, your wife's been tellin' me."

I s.h.a.gged. "They've got it down to a science now. A A stream of pure protons, no bigger than a pencil lead, pa.s.ses through the good cells and slices out the bad." stream of pure protons, no bigger than a pencil lead, pa.s.ses through the good cells and slices out the bad."

"Still, there are lousy aftereffects, she was saying. Your missus and I did a lot of chitchat when you were in the hospital. She's some swell lady, by the way. She knows her own mind and isn't afraid to express it: that's what I like in a dame."

I had never heard Phil talk so much; in the old days Spin had done most of the talking. "She likes you, too," I said. "She likes the way FedEx is going to take over and kill off all the anti-social elements and bring back the United States of America."

"We-ell," he said judiciously, with what I took to be official FedEx gravity; the corporations among their other roles have become the only teachers of deportment. "FedEx has got its compet.i.tion." His eyes were small and close together, but on the other hand they were a light contemplative gray, the color of a machine's burnished underside, and were framed by unexpectedly long eyelashes. "But we're getting a handle at least on everything east of the Mississippi. The strategy is to absorb the little carriers first, and let UPS come to us when it's ready." He moved closer; a sour male essence wafted from his jowls and armpits. "Between us, they're working on a way to remote-control the trinkets, with radio signals; the little things' brains are just a few transistors, after all. Once the kinks are out it'll be the biggest thing in warfare since the taming of the horse."

"And the invention of horseshoes and the stirrup," I said. "Otherwise, warrior herdsmen couldn't have ridden their horses for invasive distances."

"You're losin' me." He frowned. "Hey"-his little eyes crinkled in antic.i.p.ation of the jab to come-"how'd the old dingle-dangle like being knocked out of commish? You were some hot a.s.s-man, to hear Deirdre tell it."

"Deirdre," I said. "Exactly. Tell me about Deirdre. What's happened to her? When Spin got killed, I was afraid-"

"Yeah, Spin," Phil said. "That was real ugly. The kids did it with rocks. Rocks were all the little suckers had-real crude. But you know," Phil went on, waxing philosophical, "Spin, great a guy as he was, led with his chin sometimes. Remember how he had to dress like some dandy all the time? That showed insecurity, knowing he was out there operating pretty much on his own. He didn't have what this outfit"-he touched the insignia on his breast pocket-"has. Esprit de corps. The world like it is, you can't go it alone. Impossible. They'll eat you up. That's what I told Deirdre. But the c.u.n.t, she don't listen."

The present tense was hopeful. "Where is she?" I asked.

He looked at me still humorously. "What you want with her now? Your d.i.c.k's just a memory, the way your missus tells it."

"Gloria talks about it?"

"You know-in a very refined way. Like I say, she's a cla.s.s act. What I really appreciate, she's got a head on her shoulders. She may not call a spade a spade, but she can dig a hole with the best of 'em, you know what I mean?"

People who have come up in the world become boring very quickly; everything they say is disguised bragging. He wanted to talk about his connection with Gloria, I wanted to talk about Deirdre. "You're not telling me about Deirdre," I said. "Did you and she, after she left me, live together?"

I tried to picture this oaf laying his sweaty sack of a body down beside hers with its slender bony back, its silken coating of fine flowing hair, and my anger was all at Deirdre, for allowing it, for giving away so cheaply what I had chosen to regard as precious. "For a while," he casually admitted. Not only were Phil's eyes small, but so were his ears-no bigger than teacup handles, and pressed tight into the spongy sides of the skull between the bulge of his shaven blue jowls and the bulge of his curly, springy hair. Between his hairline and his eyebrows there was little s.p.a.ce for a forehead. "We palled around, she moved into my digs. But she's restless, Ben." When would everybody stop calling me Ben? I was not the world's friend. "She wants to be"-his gesture took in the flaming pond, the walls of woods, the vast presiding illusion of a blue sky-"out there. She's a wh.o.r.e, you know? She'll lay for you, great, but then she'll lay for the next guy. She doesn't give a f.u.c.k, literally. She's hooked on dope and this notion she has of freedom. I tried to beat the c.r.a.p out of her a few times, but it didn't take. She didn't learn a thing. She's like some wild animal, you know?"

I didn't want to hear this, particularly, but I did like being able to talk about Deirdre openly-to drag with my tongue the sweet secret of her name out from the granular dark of my memory cells. The way she would pantingly negotiate the price for every new twist of lovemaking. Her tight b.u.t.ternut a.s.s, with its white thong shadow, up in the air, the little flesh-knot between the gla.s.sy-smooth b.u.t.tocks visible in moonlight that entered the third-story window at just the right celestial angle. The flat planes of her face harking back to the Egyptian Sphinx or some heavy Aztec head of solid sandstone, only transposed to a smaller, female scale, with modern nihilist nerves. The way her stiffish purple dress with its little white collar rustled beside me in church last Easter as the boyish clergywoman preached of how the risen Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, "Touch me not." Her searing wish-I felt it now, at last-to be sheltered.

I drew closer to Phil, as if to a squat radiator on a bleak winter day. There is a warmth in the proximity of a man who has f.u.c.ked the same woman you have. It is as if she took off her clothes as a piece of electric news she wished him to bring to you. He has heard the same soft cries, smelled the same stirred-up scent, felt the same compliant slickness, seen the same moonlit swellings and crevices and tufts-it was all in Phil's circuitry, if I could but unload it. He was a healthy FedEx man, wearing the attractive uniform of power; he could afford to be casual about his conquests, but I no longer could. My s.e.xual memories had become epics of a lost heroic age, when I was not impotent and could shoot s.e.m.e.n into a woman's wincing face like bullets of milk. Deirdre's flanks in memory had acquired the golden immensity of temple walls rising to a cloudless sky and warmed by an Egyptian sun. Wh.o.r.e though he thought her, a nimbus of her holy heat clung to Phil-his oily black pubic curls had tangled with hers-and I moved another inch closer to him, as the two ducks on the pond suddenly tussled, with a quacking and thras.h.i.+ng that sent concentric ripples cras.h.i.+ng into the reflected red image of the maples.

Phil mistook the reason for my intimacy. He thought working for the expanding FedEx conglomerate was the most important thing about him. He lowered his voice confidentially to tell me, "In a coupla months, we'll have the circuitry in place so we don't even have to collect in person; the monthly charge will be automatically deducted from your bank account. Neat, huh?"

"How do I know you won't deduct too much?"

"It's a matter of trust, like you always said. Trust us. You won't feel a thing."

"With you, did she come?"

"Huh?"

"Deirdre." I was shameless now, in my decrepitude. In a world of dwindling days, why wait to seek the truth? "Were you able to give her climaxes?"

"Hey, Ben, come on. What does this have to do with the price of cheese?" He glimpsed my need and smilingly despised me for it.

"I want to know," I pleaded. "I miss her. Deirdre." Saying her name-did my p.e.n.i.s stir? I felt something something. "I wish her well."

"Like I said, she was a wh.o.r.e. Her coming wasn't the issue."

"I tried to make it an issue," I confessed. "I worked at it. But I could never be sure, she was so good at faking it. Her mind was always a little elsewhere, didn't you think?"

He saw that he mattered to me only as an emanation of our shared c.u.n.t, and he felt indignant. He cut me off. "On her next fix is where it was," he said. "They're all like that. They hate the tricks they turn, don't kid yourself, Ben. Hey, you don't look so good suddenly. Think you can make it back up that hill?"

"My doctors want want me to exercise," I told him. "They me to exercise," I told him. "They want want me to drop dead." As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sa.s.safras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my p.e.n.i.s at the mention of Deirdre's name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises. me to drop dead." As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sa.s.safras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my p.e.n.i.s at the mention of Deirdre's name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises.

Rain for three days, one of those fall nor'easters that knock the leaves from the trees and paste them to the wet earth, Still, the hickory outside my upstairs window has scarcely turned, but for patches of yellow. Agitated squirrels tousle it, clambering out on its downward-drooping twigs, and then scamper thunderously across the roof above my head.

The gutter at one end was plugged, and the overflow built up a puddle behind the pachysandra that was draining into a bas.e.m.e.nt window. In a burst of vitality that alarmed Gloria, I put on my old foul-weather sailing gear and in the driving rain set up the extension ladder and climbed its slick rungs and, not daring to look down into the steep triangular s.p.a.ce beneath my feet, cleared away a plug of twigs and leaves with my hands. There was primitive satisfaction in seeing a vortex appear and the level of water standing in the old wooden gutter go slowly down, obedient to the patient, omnipresent laws of physics. Childhood games: getting the elements back on track. Man as hydraulic traffic cop. Down on the ground I tried with the point of a pick to gouge a runnel through the pachysandra to drain the puddle into the driveway, but gravity was against me. If gravity be against us, what can be for us? If gravity be against us, what can be for us? I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature. I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature.

Inside the house, arranging everything in the laundry room to dry, I was aware of the heat from the radiators, as touched and grateful as if a faithful servant had thought to set out for me a tray of tea and warm scones. The house and its appurtenances of wiring and piping pursue an independent life, like a motherly, stationary megatrinket.

Gloria professed alarm at my exertions but in fact I felt invigorated, my face tingling. It was only in the evening, as I tried to read in bed a popular book about cosmology, that a terrific fatigue hit me-that degree of unforswearable weariness that brushes even the certainty of death aside in its haste to close our eyes.

Alive, I'm alive, I sometimes think now, listening to the rain in the gutters, feeling the extension of my limbs beneath the soft sheets. What bliss life is, imagined from the standpoint of a stone or of a cubic yard of black water in the icy ocean depths. Even there, apparently, conglomerated molecules manage to light a tiny candle of consciousness. The universe hates death, can it be? If G.o.d be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the If G.o.d be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the ... Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of b.i.t.c.hes like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as soon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart. ... Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of b.i.t.c.hes like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as soon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart.

The sky this dawn was a pink blotting paper, set above a sea whose blue presented the same misty, fibrous texture. In the foreground the golden trees looked sullen and darker now, curdled and rust-ridden, after the storm. As the leaves thin, the sky lowers again upon our awareness. Making my slow way down the damp asphalt, where flowing water has left drifts and eskers of pine needles, acorns, hickory nuts, dead twigs, and gravel from the edges, I seem to see, in broken arcs beyond the scudding, thinning rain clouds, the heavenly circle, the torus. Has it, in spite of the public indifference that attended its departure, returned, or is it a trick merely of refracted sunlight in a high mist of crystals-a white rainbow?

According to the book that proved such a soporific last night, the torus has a rhythm of appearance and disappearance over the aeons, like one of those comets whose elliptical orbits swing far out into interstellar s.p.a.ce and by the old Newtonian laws predictably return to our sky. To generations its presence is evident and the source of omens, miracles, admonitions, and rea.s.surances. People live by its wan light, sing its praises while they work, construe even their humblest bodily functions and pangs of pleasure and contrition as parts of a pattern the torus by its ideality establishes. Then it gradually dims, succ.u.mbing to mockery and disproof. The generations grow bored with repeating the pieties of their fathers; a cry for human freedom and self-expression rises against the skyey wedding ring, which has come to seem a shackle, or the lid of an oubliette. The chants, perhaps, drive it away. Since it never touches the planet with more than a sense, in certain transits, of global well-being, it can be ignored so thoroughly as to be practically nonexistent.

The altars are slighted; the temples fall into mossy ruin. And yet an air of irresolution hangs in the emptiness. Public disorder increases. Telephone booths are vandalized; graffiti cover every stone surface consecrated to beauty and visual harmony. Children acquire guns and shoot each other as casually as images are flicked away on television; adults drown their disquiet and despair in alcohol. The world by itself is not enough; there must be another, to give this one meaning. And blood sacrifices are initiated by the tyrants who come to power in the resistless confusions and la.s.situde: giant drums and smoke pots call out to the red-streaked sky; drugged adolescents, chosen for their physical perfection, have their hearts cut out of their heaving chests by hooded priests wielding sea-green obsidian knives.

Eventually, in its own time, the torus reappears. Personal sanity and public decency are restored, but always with seeds, smaller and darker than mouse t.u.r.ds, of discontent and resentment sealed within the social order. The new cycle has begun. Those cycles occupy far more time than was at first thought: millions of years, rather than thousands Time grinds the ruins of one epoch, its imperishable monuments, into a fine sand that seems an utter desert to the forebears of the next epoch as they emerge, hand in hand, their nakedness clothed in leaves, out of Eden. And always overhead, silently clamorous, imperiously silver and pure, the stars rotate and ever so minutely s.h.i.+ft, forming new constellations, new arrangements in the sprawl of eventually dying sparks on the velvet display-cloth of s.p.a.ce. The sea through the thinning trees wrinkles in red filaments that threadily reflect the bloated, never-setting sun.

Walking back up the driveway, the Globe Globe in hand, I glance to my left at the sourwood tree that Gloria planted ten years ago and am struck, hard, by its seasonal beauty-long oval leaves, deeply creased like peach-tree leaves, overlaid one upon the other in the lower branches to form a screen of crisscrossing scarlets and browns and freckled yellows and pinks and greens. Gloria has gone, yes, sour on this tree-it grew too eagerly for her taste, between the pears and the lilacs. It quickly towered over them, and heavy snows broke off its overextended branches, which then sprouted an awkward spray of secondary shoots. She even talks of cutting it down, after ten years of trial. The gardeners of the world are unsentimental about correcting mistakes. Perhaps I have for it a certain fellow-feeling. Uncherished, rarely glanced at, the sourwood is humming to itself a complex chorale of autumn colors and at the same time extending outwards, like so many long-boned feathery hands, its flowers, which are spent flowerets a third of an inch high organized into one-sided fanning racemes. It blooms even as it sheds. in hand, I glance to my left at the sourwood tree that Gloria planted ten years ago and am struck, hard, by its seasonal beauty-long oval leaves, deeply creased like peach-tree leaves, overlaid one upon the other in the lower branches to form a screen of crisscrossing scarlets and browns and freckled yellows and pinks and greens. Gloria has gone, yes, sour on this tree-it grew too eagerly for her taste, between the pears and the lilacs. It quickly towered over them, and heavy snows broke off its overextended branches, which then sprouted an awkward spray of secondary shoots. She even talks of cutting it down, after ten years of trial. The gardeners of the world are unsentimental about correcting mistakes. Perhaps I have for it a certain fellow-feeling. Uncherished, rarely glanced at, the sourwood is humming to itself a complex chorale of autumn colors and at the same time extending outwards, like so many long-boned feathery hands, its flowers, which are spent flowerets a third of an inch high organized into one-sided fanning racemes. It blooms even as it sheds.

Then, around four this afternoon, when the sun was angled just right, I wandered into the seaward guest room- not the one I sleep in, overlooking the driveway circle-and was stunned by a window uniformly loaded, like a fabric pattern, with sunstruck b.u.t.ter-yellow hickory leaves. A window like an upright case of pure unfettered brightness.

I see now too late that I have not paid the world enough attention-not given it enough credit credit. The radio, between the weather and the stock report, releases a strain from Schubert's Drei Klavierstucke Drei Klavierstucke, a melody that keeps repeating, caressing itself in sheer serene joy, and I think of him and Mozart, dying young and yet each pouring out masterpieces to the last, rising higher and higher as their lives fall from them, blessing with their angelic ease the world that has reduced them to misery, to poverty, to the filth and fever and the final bed. My eyes cannot help watering, a sure sign of senility.

Gloria has found herself, through the agency of FedEx and its omnivorous networks, a deerslayer. He comes to the house in a dusty green truck, splotched camouflage-style, and parks in the driveway or else down at the entrance to the dirt road, beyond the mailbox. I shuffled downstairs to meet him. He stood just inside the front door, on the Qum rug. He is a man about my age, a bit smaller and more wiry, but with that same dry flattened gray thinning hair and those same h.o.r.n.y splotchy backs to his hands. His hands tremble from a history of drink or the beginning of Parkinson's. Ht Ht has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of "signs," meaning t.u.r.ds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not a.s.sociate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn't have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don't feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport-he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation-and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carca.s.s and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria's saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man-named, like her father, John-a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks. has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of "signs," meaning t.u.r.ds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not a.s.sociate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn't have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don't feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport-he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation-and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carca.s.s and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria's saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man-named, like her father, John-a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks.

His existence crowds my universe, diminishes it and me, yet I am curious to see what will forthcome.

Speaking of masculinity, Red and Ken came to visit me, looking sheepish that they have not visited before. But the golf season had been active until a week or so ago, and they filled me in on the results of the Labor Day Weekend Four-Ball, the Fall Mixed Gambol (you had to play with somebody else's wife, a source of endless t.i.tillation), the Senior Men's Champions.h.i.+p (over fifty-five), the Plimpton Super-Seniors (over seventy, named after Ed Plimpton, a Ma.s.s. Amateur Champions.h.i.+p runner-up who had been a member of the club), the Columbus Day Best-Ball, and a new tournament scored by the Stableford system and named in honor of an a.s.sistant pro, Dale MacPhail, who had been killed in the war, obliterated in an Aleutian missile silo.

I sat uneasily in the library with my visitors. Gloria hates it when I leak urine onto the silk-damask-covered seat cus.h.i.+on of my favorite wing chair; she keeps telling me how much the reupholstering will cost. I tried to strike the correct, hostly, jocular note, but Ken, with his silver hair and bristling black eyebrows, kept looking like an airline logo, a kind of human eagle, and falling into a silent stare, just the way on the golf course he will exasperatingly freeze over a putt or short chip. Red had brought his flip phone in his pocket and it kept ringing, so he would withdraw into the hall and murmur about a fish haul in some remote corner of the world-the Seych.e.l.les, say. It was hard for me to believe that I had ever experienced ecstasy in the company of these men.

Yet, after they left, I was moved to walk through the kitchen to the back-hall closet, where I keep my golf clubs, and to open the door. The masculine pungence of sweat-impregnated grips and often-worn leather shoes swept out at me; hundreds of hours of my life had left their redolent film on this equipment. I could smell the rubber inside the b.a.l.l.s and the tough compressed wood of the tees and the marshy rankness of the wet turf I had trod through, especially the turf of the sixth fairway, where the geese all deposit their tubular green s.h.i.+t and the black-sh.e.l.led turtles bask on the rocks among which a sliced drive raises a supple splash. I longed to be back inside the body of the robust ogre whc had left behind these smells.

"So, when do you think?" Ken had said to me at last.

"When what?"

"When will you be back on the links?"

"There's a lotta good golf left in November, Benny boy," Red contributed.

"December, even, if there's no snow," said Ken, his aquiline stare softening to a teddy bear's at the childish thought of snow.

"Come on, use your heads," I said. "I can just barely walk. Pee keeps bubbling out of me."

"You don't need to walk," said Ken. "We'll all rent carts. All you need to do is swing the club. You tended to swing too hard anyway. Too hard, and too quick. Swing slow, like I do."

"I always said," I said, "the day I can't walk the course is the day I give up the game."

Red snorted impatiently. "You can walk next year. Ride the rest of this. Get off your a.s.s, for Chrissake. You look like a dead mackerel." His phone rang, or rattled, in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. He went out into the hall." "Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!" "Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!" we could hear him shout. we could hear him shout.

It was hard for me to imagine my playing golf next summer. Another year, all those seasonal gears to turn, those heavy heavenly bodies to push into place. "Who've you been playing with?" I asked Ken.

He blinked and stared straight ahead, as if looking for a vision of those other players on the backs of my uniform Winston Churchill. "Oh, we've had some nice games with Fred, his pacemaker seems to be getting less loud, and we had Les out for the Columbus Day Best-Ball, he hit the ball real well, he has a new driver with a magnesium head and a gla.s.s shaft, would you believe? Also, some of the younger members-Glenn Caniff and his buddies, you should see Glenn powder that pellet these days, and little Mel Spiegel-man, he doesn't look like he has a muscle in his body, but, wow, when he winds up..."

He trailed off, perhaps noticing the jealousy, the sadness his recital was inflicting upon me. I would be replaced, was was being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me. being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me.

So when they had disappeared down the driveway in Red's Caravan I paid a memorial visit to my golf closet, and even took out the putter and thought of trying a few strokes on the big blue Tabriz in the living room. But it seemed too much trouble, and to refer to a self I had been quantum-jumped out of, into a new orbit.

When his green truck appears in the driveway-he is scouting the territory, drawing up mental maps-I try to go out and greet the deerslayer. He tells me things about nature I didn't know. One day he pointed out to me the ugly fungi that grow like monstrous tan brains on the lawn. He said, "Those are called hen-of-the-woods. They grow only in a.s.sociation with oak trees. Very delicious, cut and sliced and sauteed, or put into a spaghetti sauce. Soak it in salt water to get the dirt and insects out. Sometimes you find a salamander or two in there; they don't do any harm. Here." And with a black-handled pen-knife, the kind that men used to carry in their overall pockets back in Hammond Falls, John cut a tidy cube of white flesh out of the rumpled brown ma.s.s and handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected, with a pleasant rubbery moisture, like a big art eraser. "Hen-of-the-woods. Not easy to find, and with all these oaks up here you're surrounded. Tell your missus what I showed you, and she'll be thrilled, I guarantee."

Is it my impotent hypersensitivity, or do men keep making overtures to my wife? Am I dead already?

But in truth Gloria was disgusted by the idea, and didn't even want the pieces I had nicely sliced, washed, and placed in a bowl, covered by Saran Wrap, in the refrigerator. To her, this piece of nature, grown beyond the realm of her garden, was impudent if not poisonous. I tasted a raw piece-it was bland at first, like a firmer tofu or a coconut meat less sweet and crisp, but then the aftertaste had a caustic kick that stayed with me, even after I washed it down with a gla.s.s of orange juice. "John says to saute them in a little b.u.t.ter," I said, but Gloria forbade it; she didn't want her kitchen stunk up. Forbidding comes easier and easier to her. It is becoming her metier.

When I venture outside, the sky rushes down at me through the oaks, which have blanketed the lawn and driveway with their leaves. In the woods and along 128, entirely bare trees are appearing: silvery sea-fans-dead or merely asleep, it is not easy to tell. Naked, they reveal their beseeching, striving shapes. The oak trees reach sideways, and the hickories up and down. The ashes are especially tragic in their cl.u.s.tered end-twigs, like s.n.a.t.c.hing, clutching fingers, and the birches in their windswept huddled curves. The leaves were just a cover-up; these colorless warped skeletons are the truth.

In my seaward view, as the sun nears noon, it transforms the sea into a sheet of unalloyed light, cruel to see. The line of the beach is visible through the trees. The autumn's polychrome sinks toward a brittle rust, broken into a thousand dry facets of reflected sun. My eyes keep going to the charred scar where Mrs. Lubbetts' beach house had been, like a tongue to a missing tooth. In the other direction, at night, the lights of Haskells Crossing come closer through the stripped trees, like the flashlights of a hunting party. The poor Lynn boys, if the metallobioforms had not shredded them, would have been exposed by this time of year like wood lice when a rotten log is overturned.

On Halloween night, a new intensity of cold has swollen the stars overhead. No child comes to the house. It is too far off the beaten track; the driveway is too forbiddingly long. Gloria and I, faintly disconsolate, make ourselves sick by eating the candy corn and Reese's Peanut b.u.t.ter Cups we had laid in. Side by side on the green sofa, we watch a television doc.u.mentary on the Old West. Still photos of vast stony vistas and of impa.s.sive bronze faces: Indian chiefs hounded to a humiliating surrender, after creekside ma.s.sacres and epic marches through Dakota blizzards to a Canadian sanctuary where the distant queen's providence declines to forestall starvation; they are driven back to a bitter treaty with the bearded Great White Father in Was.h.i.+ngton and the barren haven of the reservation. A heap of broken promises, and a pyramidal mountain of the skulls of bison spitefully slaughtered to cut the red man's ground out from under him. Modern descendants of these routed Native Americans are interviewed in living color. With their ethnically correct long black hair and slow professorial voices, they expound their historical grievances expertly but less affectingly than the witness borne by the silent bronze faces which the triumphant republic, in token apology, placed on its coinage and postage stamps. The Sino-American Conflict, it came to me, could be seen as revenge administered by the Mongolian superpower of that Asian continent from which the North American aborigines had crossed the Bering land-bridge.

We went to bed sickeningly awash with candy and guilt. I followed Gloria into the bedroom that was ours and has become hers. Shyly I watched her make her methodical way through the rites of flossing, toothbrus.h.i.+ng, mouthwas.h.i.+ng, and applying face cream. She inserted the gel-loaded plastic cooth-guards with which she keeps her teeth the valuable white that my mother had once, not insincerely, appraised as worth investing in. These plastic insertions, though transparent, push her lips out and give her a speech impediment that arouses me, the fraction of me that can still be aroused. A desolate helpless love, as for a child, came over me as she tidily inserted herself into the bed, preparing, with the uncapping of a small bottle smelling powerfully of banana, to replace the paint on her nails. All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run. "Shall I stay?" I asked.

"Why?"

"Oh, for coziness. Because we both feel bad and embarra.s.sed about the Indians."

"I do," she conceded, "but realistically we just couldn't let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows."

"They had learned to use guns. They were trying to learn our ways. Farming, going to church." I was stalling, saying anything to postpone the moment of our parting.

She had become intent upon her nails. She is her own innermost garden, needing incessant tending. I was intruding upon a precious moment of peaceful concentration; her pale eyebrows were knit in a small frown of unvoiced irritation.

"I need a hug," I said.

"Ben. I am doing my nails. You're making me make mistakes."

"I miss us" us" I told her. I told her.

She knew what I meant, but did not look or speak. The tiny brush of chemical solvent made its way around the oval nail of her lefthand ring finger with its slim gold band. What would an interplanetary voyager understand of our little symbolic shackles and their invisible chains?

"I can't do the main thing," I apologized, "but-"

"You'll get me and the bed all wet," she said.

Blus.h.i.+ng, I finished, "I need to be touched. Somehow that show frightened me. That whole dreadful century, all that imperialism, and now everybody dead-the winners and losers, the cowboys and Indians, North, South, everybody. And no children in costume coming to the house. I was talking to Roberta today; Jennifer was going out trick-or-treating with Keith dressed as a bug, with those caps with bouncy antennae on springs. Irene told me that Olympe and Etienne got the idea of painting their faces white, that was their only disguise. A sort of portent in that, no? A few more years, they'll hate me. The white grandfather."

"n.o.body hates you," Gloria said, concentrating downward on her hands. "Everybody knows you can't help what you are."

Hands-how I used to love my own hands. At the ages of twelve or thirteen, s.e.xuality just beginning, and narcissism. Lying on my bed in my tiny dormered room in Hammond Falls, with its slant ceiling and Joe Namath poster, I would stare at my hands and flutter my fingers, and slowly twirl them in the dust-spangled air, the creased palms and freckled backs, and dive-bomb with them and soar, flaring one upward like a s.p.a.ce rocket flattening into the stratosphere for its toss to the moon. I would ponder their articulation, their involuntary grace, their jointed sensitivity and prehensile strength. My fingerprints, unique in the world, in all those billions living and dying. When I asked-when that imperious voice enthroned at the back of my skull asked- my hands obediently became little dancing men, or firing pistols, or b.u.t.terflies, or fists. They were always with me, the closest me I could see at will, without a mirror-emissaries my inner monarch would some day send out to grip and mold the world.

"You won't get wet," I promised Gloria. "I'll put on a fresh Depends-they're quite well designed, actually. I've been doing the Kegel exercises, I can feel a difference, and sometime soon-"

"Exactly," Gloria said. "Sometime soon." She held her face-s.h.i.+ning with unabsorbed grease and protruding around the mouth like that of a beautiful buck-toothed ape-up to be kissed. Her eyes were shut; a little smile of expectancy on her pale lips antic.i.p.ated my kiss, which descended upon her mouth like a hawk gliding down to take up a songbird or vole in its claws. Her face was a cold lake of grease, smelling medicinal.

"Sometime soon," she promised, "we'll do something. It's good you want to; you're getting better. But now go to your room, please. Take a pill if you don't think you can sleep."

I obeyed. It was pleasant enough in the guest room. The bed sheets were clean and cool, and the odd-angled shape in the far corner of the ceiling had acquired by now a guardian-angel quality, a boxed numen. I fell asleep upon the rumble of the eleven-ten train making the whole house quiver, woke once wet, and woke for good when the Times Times man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint's bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the wors.h.i.+pful. man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint's bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the wors.h.i.+pful.

v.The Dahlia

THIS PLANET supports but two life-forms- myself, and an immense fungus that has covered all but the stoniest of available land. The brownish, writhing, mounting formations aboveground are but a fraction of its ma.s.s, made up of microscopic hyphae that extend their network in all directions, knotting and interweaving into the mycelium that makes up the thallus, or undifferentiated body, of my immense companion in vitality. It does not speak, or visibly move, but it does undergo change, the telltale mark of an organism. Its protoplasm is in constant motion, streaming into the tips of the newer hyphae, draining from the older, which become vacuolated and turn pulpy and a darker, more velvety brown. Though the fungus is ultimately one substance, consistent and immortal, its hyphae do organize at times into compact ma.s.ses that perform various functions-stromata, for instance, cus.h.i.+onlike forms that bear spores, and rhizoids, anchoring the thallus to the substrate, and septa, which more or less elaborately functior as valves controlling the flow of enzyme-liquefied starches sugars, celluloses, and lignins. Since the fungus possesses no chlorophyll, it depends for nutrition entirely upon the rotting organic matter in the substrate. Whence came this matter? Its particulars are a mystery, but one that certainly testifies to a deep prehistory upon the planet, deeper than the imagination can grasp. The ground beneath my feet is an abysmal well of time.

I move about and eat of the fungus, tearing it with my hands. Its white, tan-skinned, at places freckled flesh is generally bland, sometimes sweet, rarely bitter. When it is bitter, or sour, I spit it out, and rinse my mouth with a cupped handful of the H2O that is mercifully abundant. Thank G.o.d for pure water Thank G.o.d for pure water, I think; but are such thanks tautological, since without water I would not be here to offer them? Life exists amid benign conditions, inevitably, since conditions elsewhere, malign, would never have sp.a.w.ned it.