Toward The End Of Time Part 2

Another capped steam pipe hisses in here, overheating the slant-ceilinged small chamber. Its single window, a dormer, overlooks the lethal sea, with its ragged islands and pewter glare of shrouded sunlight. Deirdre, amid all this treasure, is frightened by something within herself-perhaps a chemical need, for a quick pipe of crack, or a surge of covetousness. I have shown her too much. I make a mental note to change the padlock, lest she and that pimp of a taxi driver return with criminal intent. Gloria's splendid ancestors, so confident in their luxurious appropriations, hiss crus.h.i.+ngly in our ears. As if ashamed of her meagre a.s.sets- her momentarily young and healthy body, her willingness to play the wh.o.r.e-Deirdre folds her thin arms tight across her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her wine-dark nipples are taut, as if from a chill. Fear like an odor leaps from her skin and clings to me, softening my erection.

What do we know about the Egyptian grave robbers? We know, by inference, that they were brave, risking the anathemas of the G.o.ds and execution by torture. They were clever, breaking into even the center of the great pyramid of Cheops and emptying it before the archaeologists arrived a millennium later. They were persistent, gutting of treasure, by the year 1000 B.C., every known rock tomb save that of the golden-faced boy-king Tutankhamen, which had been haphazardly concealed by a pile of stone rubbish from the excavation of another tomb. Tomb-robbing was a profession, a craft, a guild, practiced by whole villages such as that of Gourna, located above the Valley of the Kings, and connected, possibly, with the honeycomb of royal tombs by deep-dug wells. The thieves' tunnels rival in extent if not finish the sanctioned pa.s.sageways of the pharaohs' engineers. The divinely inspired technological achievements of the tomb-builders-false stairways, monolithic b.o.o.by traps, pa.s.sageways hundreds of feet in extent-were matched by those of the sacrilegious thieves, who conquered even the labyrinths of Amenemhat, constructed by the sh.o.r.es of Lake Moeris. Thieves were angry, vandalizing everything they could not steal: levering open giant sarcophagi, ripping apart mummies like jackals at a leopard's corpse, hurling precious vessels and statues with such force against the walls that dents and smudges of pure gold remain in evidence. Their fury was a way, perhaps, of combatting the G.o.ds, whose vengeance they could not help fearing. Yet their crimes were beneficent, performing the useful service, modern economists inform us, of restoring gold to circulation- bringing it back from unsound investment underground, counteracting the severe trade imbalance that this world kept incurring with the next. Tutankhamen's golden coffin alone weighed two hundred fifty pounds.

What did the robbers, breathing the adhesive dust of d.a.m.nation, sc.r.a.ping through crevices of a predatory narrowness, do for light? The builders chiselled by the light of the sun, which was bounced around corners by circular reflectors of bronze and, quivering like water, illumined the deepest recesses of laboriously hollowed limestone. But an outside member of a looting team risked apprehension by the hooded priests' police and death by slow disembowelment, flaying, or impalement. No torture was too extreme for the enemies of immortality; we robbed our victims not merely of life's pa.s.sing illusion but of an eternity. We crept along holding before us lamps of translucent calcite, so the glow permeated downward as well as leaped up, a notch holding the twisted, serpentine wick in place and our fingers warmed through the alabaster. The smell of sesame oil was strong, enlarging the smell of our sweating bodies much as the flickering flame enlarged our shadows, which surged and lunged around us as we inched forward in the silence of the dead. Each piece of floor had to be tested for a pitfall- a precipice or a delicately balanced slab that would tumble our broken bodies onto the bones of previous trespa.s.sers. The light was ruddy on the painted walls; our flames were orange, with a blue base like the change of tint in the heart of a flower, at the base of each fragile petal. There were two of us: if one wick guttered out, it could be relit from the other. If both blew out at once, in a sudden draft from an intersecting pa.s.sageway, we must perish in these subterranean tunnels and turnings unless I could strike fresh fire from the flints and dry gra.s.s I carried in my leathern waist-pouch. This method, though, was chancy, and the outraged G.o.ds would have breath enough to extinguish the fire again.

"The air grows worse," my accomplice muttered.

I ventured to say, though my larynx was clogged by fear as by a cloth stopper, "Mayhap we are approaching the House of Gold, where the mummy reigns, with his rotting nose and urn of foul innards. A pox on Horus! May Anubis dine on his own excrement in the life everlasting!" Insulting the dead and their G.o.ds braced our courage. We had come through the First Divine Pa.s.sage, whose triple doorway had forced upon us two months' worth of gnawing circ.u.mvention, done in the secret stretches of the night, while the priests' guards slept, content with their bribes and stupid on fermented barley. We had negotiated the Hall of Hindering; its tangle of decoy corridors and stairs had been long ago decoded by a trail of henna powder, left by a thief himself now as dead as the Ruler of All in his onyx sarcophagus. Along the walls of a long sloping corridor, bright colors leaped forward into the lights of our lamps-scenes, crowded yet tranquil, of seasonal pleasures along the Nile, of seed being sown and grain being harvested, of fish being plucked from the transparent river waves painted as zigzags of a blue weaving, of cattle being herded and a hippopotamus being hunted, of workmen a.s.sembling a temple and dancing girls with heads of abundant knitted hair applying kohl to the rims of their softly staring eyes. Feathered ibises and ducks, solemn oryxes and monkeys accompanied the brown broad-shouldered human figures undergoing the rites of daily life, a life the dead king in his House of Gold was still enjoying amid his jewelled furniture and dolls of faience-the faithful ushabtiu ushabtiu-in the chamber we had not yet reached.

Now the walls on both sides showed a procession bearing treasures toward this chamber, and hieroglyphic lists of the prayers that must be said to Thoth and Ra on the boat journey to the land of the dead. The ma.s.ses of the stone around and above us pressed on our spirits, making it still harder to breathe. Centuries of stillness had thickened the air's taste. Carefully picking our way through an area of collapsed rubble, we came to the Hall of Truth, where murals showed the monarch's heart being weighed by Osiris, with Ammut squatting near at hand waiting to devour the heart if it was found unworthy. By the flutter of our lamps, the paintings were hasty, sketchy. The king must have died before the tomb was quite completed, because the murals ceased. The walls grew rough-the chisel marks slas.h.i.+ng frantically in the wavering light of our naked flames-and the ceiling grew lower. Of the narrowing pa.s.sageway that loomed to our lamps it was difficult to say whether it was fortuitously unfinished or an intended trap. The slanting ceiling compelled us to lower our heads and bend our knees. When crouching became impossible, we crawled in the pale dust like crippled animals, hobbled by the necessity of carefully moving the lamps ahead of us. A spidering of our double shadows filled the dwindling s.p.a.ce. The walls squeezed inward so that we could no longer crawl side by side. A faint breath, damp as if from a ghost of the Nile, brushed our faces and made our delicate flames stagger. When they had regained steadiness I made out in the dim dust a lintel leaning at an angle above a spill of rubble. The irregular aperture might have admitted, with not an inch to spare, the head and shoulders of a slithering man.

My young companion had pressed up beside me, in a s.p.a.ce scarcely wide enough for one body, and joined his lamp to mine to cast light into the s.p.a.ce beyond. We saw at the very edge of our lamps' merged glow what appeared to be a giant gold face. Gold: the skin of deity. Black irises glared from within whites pieced together of alabaster flakes. Shadows flickered across the immutable great features in a counterfeit of agitation. The inert weight of the stone all about us seemed to be meditating an action. We talked in whispers, so as not to blow out our lamps with our words.

"You go first," I said.

"No," came the sighed response, causing my flame to shrink to its blue root on the fibrous wick before regaining, orange and erect, its strength. "You "You, master," his light voice urged huskily in my ear. He was in a sweat of fear; I could smell it even through the dust.

"You are younger and more slender," I explained.

"But you are stronger and more courageous. You have lived more life."

"There is nothing in there," I stated, fighting panic as his slippery, fragrant body pressed upon mine in our corset of mute stone.

"There is something."

"Our fortune, it may be," I insisted, attempting to wriggle backward, to let him slide forward. "Loot for a lifetime's worth of feasting. Go in in, I tell you. There is nothing" nothing"

"Nothing is not nothing," he moaned. His gritty naked knees flexed convulsively into my chest; in the suffocating closeness I smelled his uncirc.u.mcised s.e.x. As if by an impatient breath, both our lamps were blown out. Absolute darkness encased us.

ii.The Dollhouse

WHITE LIGHT knifes beneath the window shade a minute or two earlier each morning, in strict accordance with the planetary clockworks. The light is bald, a.s.saultive, a supernal revolution removed from the lulling, sifting dawns of December and January, dawns which bid us roll over and drink another half-hour of delicious grainy gray sleep. On the bare roads strewn with salt and sand, on the scruffy lawns and fields whose gra.s.s lies matted in brown swirls like a species of carpet, on the metallic branches and twigs of winter's stripped trees, on the pebbles gouged up from beside the driveway by the snowplows and scattered across the asphalt, this light presses with a blank urgency, beckoning everything into a painful precision. The earth is like a nude woman flash-bulbed in her bathroom at an awkward transitional moment of her toilette. Despite her wrinkled ugliness, we l.u.s.t for her.

Other signs of earliest spring: On a wet day the lilac buds are visibly yellow, pointilles pointilles daily growing plumper and wetter in the gray atmosphere. Little mossy patches appear in the lawn, even before green snowdrop noses break the crust in the border beds. The birds are noisier in the woods; the crows gather in shuffling, ominous clumps in our oaks, and the mourning doves double and redouble their throaty cooing as they cl.u.s.ter in the thicket of mountain ash, sumac, and sa.s.safras to the right of the driveway, below the little straightaway. c.u.mulus clouds appear, s.p.a.ced in a sky of a guileless, powdery blue, and there is a twinkly carefree quality about the way the sea now wears its whitecaps. Even though a perishable March snowfall restores us for a few days to picture-book winter, these vernal signs persist and expand-cracks in the comforting encas.e.m.e.nt of hibernal sterility. Farther afield, willows yellow down by the pond on the Willowbank golf course, and along Route 128, where there used to be miles of overhanging trees, the surviving maples show a distilled red vapor in their ma.s.sed ranks. daily growing plumper and wetter in the gray atmosphere. Little mossy patches appear in the lawn, even before green snowdrop noses break the crust in the border beds. The birds are noisier in the woods; the crows gather in shuffling, ominous clumps in our oaks, and the mourning doves double and redouble their throaty cooing as they cl.u.s.ter in the thicket of mountain ash, sumac, and sa.s.safras to the right of the driveway, below the little straightaway. c.u.mulus clouds appear, s.p.a.ced in a sky of a guileless, powdery blue, and there is a twinkly carefree quality about the way the sea now wears its whitecaps. Even though a perishable March snowfall restores us for a few days to picture-book winter, these vernal signs persist and expand-cracks in the comforting encas.e.m.e.nt of hibernal sterility. Farther afield, willows yellow down by the pond on the Willowbank golf course, and along Route 128, where there used to be miles of overhanging trees, the surviving maples show a distilled red vapor in their ma.s.sed ranks.

I was a student at U. Ma.s.s, in Amherst when I first rode Route 128.1 was nineteen, soon to be twenty. In the spring, when the white light hit and the air warmed the trees into a chartreuse froth, a thirst would arise in our throats, there in that desolate inland campus at Amherst, that drab Satanic diploma mill, for the sight of the sea, and the sensation of sand beneath our bare feet, and the aristocratic scent of salt air. Josh Greenstein, my roommate, owned a white 69 Pontiac Trans Am convertible that looked like a b.u.mpy long bathtub; we would giggle getting into it, as if it were brimful. Josh and his steady, Hester Rosenthal, who went against racial type by being blonde and blue-eyed, sat up front while we in back got the full benefit of the wind, which battered our eardrums and dried our faces tight as drumheads. We would drive north to Route 2 and then east through Concord to 128. The road, flecked with the beginnings of the gla.s.sy high-tech boom, pa.s.sed through Burlington, Wake field, Lynnfield, Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, and Manchester on the way to Wingershaek Beach in West Gloucester. Or we turned north on Route 1 to Crane Beach, in Ipswich, or farther north to Plum Island, off Newburyport. The terrain held clapboard houses few and far between, perched on the edge of greening lawns and fresh-plowed fields, amid steel-blue ponds and spatterings of forest in bud. Forsythia, dogwood, magnolia, cherry, and apple overlapped in a quilt of blossoms. In Topsfield, Route 1 dipped down to cross the gush of a swollen brown river. This antique superhighway went straight as a ruler from Boston to Newburyport, taking the hills as if with seven-league boots. When we crossed over to 1A, along the coast, winter-blanched salt marshes reached to where sky and sea joined. There were wooded islands in the marshes, and long straight ditches. Salt hay (can it be?) had been picturesquely gathered into stacks on wooden staddles. The air battering our faces had salt in it, and Josh and Hester sang along with the radio: "Delta Dawn," "Rocky Mountain High," "Killing Me Softly with His Song." Arrival at the beach parking lot had something heroic about it-we had had the vision and now, after many miles and many songs and not too many stops to pee and eat a hot dog, had attained it.

And who is this sitting beside me, wearing a wind-whipped red bandana and a squint that makes the planes of her face look romantic and detached, like a lean Indian squaw's? It is my my steady, my girl and first wife, the fair Perdita. She was a lanky, taciturn, frequently tan art major who was to bear me five children and remain, loyal if unenraptured, my spouse to nearly the end of the twentieth century. Our children, though slower to marry and breed than we were, have now produced ten grandchildren-nine boys, and a final, adorable female infant. Born so close together, our children were fed and bathed and taken for outings as a close group, and to this day exhibit toward each other a symbiotic deference and regard. They married, for instance, strictly in the order in which they were born, and bore their children-two each-with the same sense of priority. Their generational mode is to have stable small families, in contrast to the large and messy and eventually doomed households in which they were raised. In further evidence of their conservatism, all reside within this state, strung out within an hour's drive along Route 128, so that the ancient highway bears familial as well as romantic a.s.sociations for me. Its hinterland, out of sight beyond the thinned trees and hazardously sharp turnoffs, is rich for me with small backyards and electronically overequipped living rooms and soccer fields and elementary-school auditoriums where I have attempted, however ill-rehea.r.s.ed, to play the role of grandfather. steady, my girl and first wife, the fair Perdita. She was a lanky, taciturn, frequently tan art major who was to bear me five children and remain, loyal if unenraptured, my spouse to nearly the end of the twentieth century. Our children, though slower to marry and breed than we were, have now produced ten grandchildren-nine boys, and a final, adorable female infant. Born so close together, our children were fed and bathed and taken for outings as a close group, and to this day exhibit toward each other a symbiotic deference and regard. They married, for instance, strictly in the order in which they were born, and bore their children-two each-with the same sense of priority. Their generational mode is to have stable small families, in contrast to the large and messy and eventually doomed households in which they were raised. In further evidence of their conservatism, all reside within this state, strung out within an hour's drive along Route 128, so that the ancient highway bears familial as well as romantic a.s.sociations for me. Its hinterland, out of sight beyond the thinned trees and hazardously sharp turnoffs, is rich for me with small backyards and electronically overequipped living rooms and soccer fields and elementary-school auditoriums where I have attempted, however ill-rehea.r.s.ed, to play the role of grandfather.

The catastrophic dip in world population has not, oddly, brought back the stretches of forest through Peabody and Danvers that I recall. Perhaps there can be no replacing the landscape of youth. The towering, freshly leafing branches scudded past Perdita's profile; she squinted with stoic calm while an edge of the red bandana beat at her temple like a frantic pulse, her hazel eyes mere slits, her pursed lips cracked and dry. We smoked, and our cigarettes kept flinging sparks and hot ash on our faces and clothes. We whisperingly would confer, the destination at last reached, about asking Josh to put the top up on our return drive. A chem. major, on the gastroenterologist track, he wore thick gla.s.ses, had a bad complexion, and could be p.r.i.c.kly about what he fancied his prerogatives. Hester, that flaxen-haired j.a.p, was oblivious to the discomfort of those in the back seat. In the tumult of the wind and scudding scenery my eyes fastened on Perdita's exposed knee, already tanned by sessions of semi-undress on the gra.s.sy slopes encircling squarish Campus Pond. When we at last arrived at the beach, and clamorously went forward to dip our toes over the edge of the continent, she would hoist up her winter skirt and expose her lean legs to mid-thigh. Holding her skirt with one hand, she would bend over the shallow, sliding sh.o.r.e waves like some kind of gatherer, a timeless figure from Millet, posing thus until the tumbling water's frigid grip hurt her ankles and she scampered back, laughing with the pain. When we all lay together behind a hot dune the grains of sand would fall from her drying bare feet one by one, like the sands in an hourgla.s.s that silently steal away even the most tranquil and disaster-spared life. I vowed I would live in sight of the sea, and I have.

Her feet were exquisite, now that I think about them-the pads of the soles thick and rounded, the little toes lifted off the ground and clearly vestigial. She was the most placid, the most adrift in nature's currents, of the women I have known, or perhaps that is the way I prefer to remember her, memory being no less self-serving than our other faculties. Her genes now float up toward me from the faces of my grandchildren, diluted by a quarter. My daughters startle me at times by their resemblance to Perdita, her way of absent-mindedly posing, with a certain graceful solidity, as if letting some invisible current flow through them. The middle of my daughters has married an African, from Togo, and it has changed the temper of the entire family, for the better. Split, or extended, by divorce, we did not quite know how to be a family until the Africans showed us. Adrien has many brothers and sisters, in many countries, getting advanced degrees. Though very slender, he speaks in a deep voice, slowly, in an accent in which French and English elements are charmingly mingled. His great-great-grandfather, a clerk and translator for the occupiers, spoke German; Togoland was a German territory until 1914, when Allied colonial armies from the Gold Coast and Dahomey invaded. Would that the trench war in Europe had been resolved as quickly!-the entire maimed and vindictive century now past would have been different. Adrien presides over my children in a way I never did. My status, shadowy at best since my defection from their mother, a matter of sneak college visitations and shamefaced appearances at weddings and baptisms, took on a sudden refulgence with his arrival among us. My sins were brushed aside. His own father had lived in Tanzania, across the great continent, an implementor of Nyerere's ujamaa ujamaa, and with an array of informal wives had bestowed upon Adrien a number of half-siblings. This was patriarchal behavior. I was given a Togolese robe of many colors, and took my place in the outdooring ceremonies whereby my two brown grandsons were presented to the sky G.o.d. I was given cards in which the appropriate blessings in Kwa were phonetically spelled; p.r.o.nouncing in a loud voice, I tipped the gla.s.s of gin, a subst.i.tute for palm wine, three times (inwards, toward my breast, not outwards) to offer libation to the ancestors within the earth. Being an African grandfather was made realer to me than being an American father. My adult children, thanks to Adrien's African magic, suddenly had permission to love me again.

Adrien and Irene and little Olympe and etienne live in one of Boston's endless western suburbs, a slice of land wedged, with its lone factory, strip mall, and playing field, a thrifty distance beyond fas.h.i.+onable Concord and Lincoln. I drive along 128, and then miles of 62. Their house stands in a tract of development on a hillside, with a view of muddy yards and abandoned plastic tricycles. Adrien and Irene go out, after a few grave and girlish, respectively, remarks to me, to dinner and a local movie house, while the boys and I watch some unintelligible (to me) cartoon video that has been thoughtfully provided, and then I try to put them to bed before their parents come back. This is the game, and they know we are playing it, and they tumble and frisk upstairs and down not quite defiantly, just making everything, from getting into their pajamas to brus.h.i.+ng their teeth, maddeningly difficult. The house is full of masks and knotted, braided, beaded pagan symbolizations from Togo; a studio portrait of me, taken at the request of the firm at some stage of my advancement through the ranks of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, occupies a place of honor in the exiguous living room. Yet this fetish does not ensure discipline. The boys, dodging my bedtime attentions, have lovely pearly smiles, like mischievous Irene's when she was their age, but with lavender gums. Their eyes are of an astonis.h.i.+ng inky solemnity-not a fleck of even nutmeg in the blackness of the irises. Their hair is pure Adrien: helmets of kinky frizz, pleasingly springy to touch. I can't stop petting their heads. Where else can I touch an African coiffure? It was something my life hadn't promised me. I wonder what barber, in this nearly all-white town, knows how to give them a haircut. They are seven and five. They like, amazingly, being read to, which I would have thought was too tame an entertainment for children raised among VCRs and PCs and CD players; Adrien teaches computer science at a local prep school and the baseboards of his house crawl with wires, plugs, adaptors, and winking power-surge preventers. So, lying between my grandsons on the bottom bunk of their bunk beds, I drone through one battered, s.h.i.+ny tale after another of fire engines and milk trucks, of elephants wearing trousers and party gowns, of bewildered kings and gentle giants and witches in s.h.i.+ngled huts in forests where medieval Germany merges, in terms of housing, with the round huts of Togoland. After a while the springy soft heads nestling against my cheeks become less restive, and I make my first attempt at abandoning them to their dreams, an attempt which usually collapses in a flurry of scampering footsteps and brotherly blows and cries of recrimination. With a weary imitation of indignation and surprise I mount the stairs again and resettle them in their beds, only to find, on my next return up the creaking stairs, them together in the lower bunk, Olympe asleep but a glitter of wakeful black still caught in etienne's long curved eyelashes. He fidgets against sleep's tightening grip. His bottom lightly touches that of his older brother, through their flannel pajamas; their round heads are side by side on one pillow. I never had a brother. Any moment, Adrien and Irene will be coming back, with a loud crack of the front door that often wakes the boys into a scamper of gleeful welcome. I notice, as Etienne in the dusk of the lower bunk settles into self-forgetfulness, that his bare foot, dilutedly brown, bears a cashew-shaped little toe as vestigially uplifted as Perdita's.

This is set down, I suppose, in the search for meaning. As one supernatural connection after another fails, the chain of ancestors and descendants-the transcendent ent.i.ty of family-offers to solace us. But the dissolution of ego, which family demands, is just what we fight. Immortal DNA offers as cold a comfort as the transmigration of souls. If we can't take our memories with us, why go?

Spring for me has always been the season to fear death. I wake heavily, with something undigestible gnawing my stomach, in the intensifying white light. My idiot subconscious, meanwhile, responds to the time of year with dreams of s.e.x. Last night, as Deirdre's lean body rested light on the mattress beside me-her long tanned bony back is heart-breakingly boyish-I dreamed I was making love to, of all people, Grace Wren. My woken self could not believe the pa.s.sion with which I lay my body on top of hers (trumping it) and I ground my pelvis against the auburn-haired ace of hearts at the juncture of her legs. Her breathless face, her ample (but more youthfully, jauntily so; this was the Grace of twenty years ago) b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and that hairy crotch holding its responsive buds and folds were all under me with such pa.s.sionate reality that my poor hard-on ached like a bursting bladder. In my dream the focus of my pain had recourse to her warm mouth, she was blowing me, she was giving me pure head, for she had no body, there was just her severed head with its closed eyes sucking. Horrors! I awoke with the monstrousness of it, the Dahmeresque atrociousness. It was as bad as something in Greek mythology or Aztec religion. The s.e.xual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact. Society and simple decency keep trying to remind us of everything else-the rest of the body, the whole person, with its soul and intellect and estimable socioeconomic const.i.tuents-but in the truth of the night our dismembering needs arise and chop up the figments of our acquaintance like a Mogul swordsman gone berserk, and revolt us with our revealed nature.

During this same March night, while I was sleeping, a warm rain turned to freezing rain and then snow, depositing a candied crust on the reviving greenery, a white carameliza-don that sparkled on the skin of the driveway and in the buckgra.s.s and wild blueberry that grow along the edge. The winter still had a kick of cold in it. Halfway down, I regretted not bothering to put on gloves and my little rubber hunting shoes, with their soles patterned in chains, for my morning walk to retrieve the newspaper. I slipped and slid. In the headlines, President Smith, that anonymous, derided man, was offering free farmland to citizens willing to go and work an a.s.signed acreage of the depopulated Midwest. The Homestead Act anew. Little fragmentary sheaths of ice showered upon me as a chill breeze stirred the beech twigs overhead. This should be the terminal mood of my life, I thought: everything mundane candy-coated.

Deirdre got me to go to the Peabody mall yesterday; she had a whole list of depleted household necessities, including bathroom washcloths. With her cervine sense of smell she claimed that all of our washcloths inexpungeably stank. "What have you been wiping with them?" she asked me.

I blushed, answering, "Only myself. That's the smell of old age."

She alertly saw, out of those globular s.h.i.+ning eyes of hers, that she had hurt my feelings, to a degree that might cause a rift. Hastily she told me, "You don't smell like that. You smell sweet, like a freshly powdered baby. The back of your neck, especially."

I wondered what she knew of babies. She was not as young, perhaps, as she seemed to me-old enough, certainly, to be a mother, of some child crawling or toddling down there in the murky valleys beneath my little hill.

The mysterious people who dwell in these valleys were out in force at the mall, in their windbreakers and blue jeans, their high-domed, billed bubba hats and their barbarically ornate running shoes. Retirees-who all seemed ancient to me, but some were perhaps younger than I-lounged in a daze of early Alzheimer's on the benches the mall provides, waiting for their shapeless wives to come claim them and lead them to the car. If they had a thought as we pa.s.sed, it must have been that Deirdre was my daughter, or a hard-faced young escort from the nursing home. We entered the mall through Filene's; to swim in such an abundance of scarves and underwear and pointed vinyl shoes, in so pungent and deep a lake of artificial perfumes, dizzied and dazed me. Spring, though not quite yet in the air, was in the fas.h.i.+ons, and in the stir of consumers, propelled by the lengthening light out of their warrens into the wide clearing of consumerism. Young couples, tattooed and punctured visibly and invisibly, with studiously brutal haircuts, strolled hand in hand as if in a garish park of the purely unnatural, so deeply at home here it would not have surprised me if, with a clash of nostril studs and a spattering of hair dye, boy and girl had turned and begun to copulate. Malls have become a public habitat soaked in slovenly intimacy; its customers step naturally from huddling around television in their living rooms to cruising these boulevards of superfluity, where fluorescent-lit shops press forward temptations ranging from yogurt-coated peanuts to electric-powered treadmills. Elderly women had dressed themselves like kewpie dolls, in pastel running suits that suggested an infant's pajamas. I was the only person in sight wearing leather shoes and a necktie. Deirdre parked me outside Banana Republic and at the end of my ordeal took me into Brooks Brothers and bought me a striped s.h.i.+rt that answered some gangsterish beau ideal of her own. She has, it almost made me weep to think, a splinter of feeling for me somewhere in her polished brown machine of a body. Easy weeping is another sign of dotage, along with stinking washcloths.

My grandchildren, spread along Route 128 in the residential gristle between its ossified centers of commerce, tend to have-Etienne and Olympe aside-tony, English-tinted names: Kevin, Rodney, Torrance, Tyler, Duncan, Quentin, and Keith. The girl, perhaps inevitably, is called Jennifer. Where do my kids and their spouses get these monickers? Off of birthday-card racks, it must be, or the Winnie-the-Pooh page on the Internet. They all have their problems. Torrance was born a month premature and is delicate, querulous, and elfin; Tyler, his younger brother, was born two weeks late and has club feet and a prematurely sealed fontanel. Quentin suffers from chronic constipation, and Duncan is hyperactive: he will grab and shake a ficus tree or a floor lamp until the leaves drop or the bulb shatters. Rodney has reading problems, Kevin broke his wrist on the school jungle gym, and Keith is having a hard time adjusting to the arrival of his little sister, about whom so much s.e.xist fuss is being made. And yet they all are dear, and half have learned to spell GRANDPA and send me, at their parents' prompting, birthday and Christmas cards. It quickens my senile tears to think of them all marching-toddling, creeping-into the future, lugging my genes into the maelstrom of a future world I will never know. Such brave soldiers, in what kind of battle, for what n.o.ble cause? The doughboys who swarmed out of the trenches into clouds of mustard gas had geniuses for generals by comparison.

If love between my children and me has achieved, thanks to African wisdom, a certain settled, ironical, negotiable shape, that between my grandchildren and the apparitior that I form at the back of their tadpole eyeb.a.l.l.s is pun chaos. I often try to imagine what they will feel when I die A faint apprehensive pang, tinged with the comic, as with those boys who sneak off to the baseball game on the excuse of a grandparent's funeral. In their up-to-date eyes, I have lived in hopelessly old-fas.h.i.+oned, deprived times, so what can it matter, even to me, that I die?

Building the dollhouse for my daughter in the cellar-at the memory, my pen becomes impossibly heavy in my hand.

Walking back up the driveway with the newspaper this morning, I was suddenly conscious of the noise, through the spa.r.s.e intervening woods, of the sea; it had a new, louder voice. There was a warm, snow-eating drizzle in the air, and a wet wind during the night had activated our outdoor burglar lights, I noticed when I awoke to urinate. The air carried the thras.h.i.+ng of the waves on the beach with the urgency of fresh news, the yowl of a creature new-born. The infant spring has its own acoustics, I noticed. Walking a bit around the property a few days ago, I had taken note of the heavy-headed little snowdrops, and the first pale edges of daylily leaves in the drab soil, but these signs bore no glad message for me. This breezy moist sea-roaring possibly did. Such marine thunder, slowly grinding up the continents, must have sounded thus in our planet's earliest days, when the lifeless seas beat upon rocky sh.o.r.es now lost beyond all geological conjecture. This prezoic sea's invasion of my ear somehow cheered me. I liked the fuss, the stirring up. I walk carefully these days, trying to avoid any thought that will tip me into depression.

Deirdre in her renovations, as she bravely tries to oust Gloria's decor from a few corners of the house, sends me down to the barn with rugs and items of furniture she wants out of sight. Already, in this barn originally built to accommodate carriages and their horses, with troughs and stalls and a drain in the middle of a sloped floor for an Augean hosing, there is an acc.u.mulation of old bicycles and skis and collegiate lamps and chairs and hide-a-beds and cardboard boxes of textbooks that will never be consulted again. It is easier to keep these condemned objects here in a kind of life imprisonment than to steel oneself for execution out on the curb on trash-collection day. Such repositories, in garages and bas.e.m.e.nts and closets and attics, pledge our faith in eternal return, in a future that holds infinite temporal opportunities for eventual reuse and rereading. Alas, time's arrow points one way, toward an entropy when all seas will have broken down all rocks and there is not a whisper, a subatomic stir, of surge. So to fumble and stumble around looking for a cranny of s.p.a.ce in which to lay an old Oriental four-by-six whose American domestic career began in Gloria's father's grandmother's Danbury, Connecticut, foyer is a wallow in one's own death, in funerary s.p.a.ces as futile as Egypt's treasure-crammed tombs.

I recognized a black English bicycle that Perdita and the children had given me one Christmas when I, wheezy and overweight, had complained of never getting any exercise. Its bell was rusty and its tires were flat and I had never ridden it much. A bushel basket splinted and stapled together by some artisan from the other end of Ma.s.sachusetts over sixty years ago held a smattering of my childhood toys which I had come upon in my mother's attic when she a last died. The toys seemed older than I-some bas-relie Mickey Mouse blocks, a cap pistol with fake-ivory handle, tin Pluto who when wound up would whirr himself to th edges of a table and then, his weight s.h.i.+fting to a sideway wheel near his nose, magically turn back from dange Could these toys have belonged not to me but to my fathe that least playful of worried, work-degraded men? He ha been a child in the Depression, when toys were still st.u.r.dily fas.h.i.+oned of tin and wood. In the barn I noticed pieces of rusted drainpipe I had saved when we had the house painted too many years ago, and a crude wooden table, covered with dribbled sh.e.l.lac, that little Henry had proudly built, with my grudging help, when there had been three of us living here. All these uselessly preserved pieces of the past were jammed suffocatingly in. In a kind of panic I roughly, angrily rearranged a few things so I could fit in the old carpet, a tarnished bra.s.s s.h.i.+p's lamp, a faded needlepoint footstool, and a pallid, washy watercolor portrait of Gloria's mother that Deirdre had replaced with a soft-focus tinted photograph of herself in her low-necked high-school prom dress. This duty done, I fled, gulping the air outside the barn like a man who had nearly drowned.

Once I did nearly drown in the dismal detritus of time. Perdita and I, in our earliest thirties, lived in a pre-Revolutionary house in the middle of a drowsy coastal town called Coverdale. We had a small but, what with our children and their neighborhood friends, well-used backyard, in a corner of which I would plant each year two rows of lettuce, four feet of parsley, eight tomato plants, and some mounds of zucchini seeds-salad ingredients, all, within a few strides of the kitchen door. Spring that year had thickened around me paralyzingly. In Boston, in the sealed-in fluorescent environment of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, I was able to function, but at home on weekends, as the trees budded and our plethora of children-four, and Roberta huddled, head down, in Perdita is tummy-trooped through the house with muddy knees and noisy grievances, a paralysis of depression hit me. I saw everything as if through several thick panes of smeared gla.s.s. No air circulated between me and the world. I went out in the late afternoon to dig up my garden plot and a single earthworm, wriggling blindly to return to its darkness of earth, seemed, from my towering height, an image of myself. Except that I was miserable and terrified and the worm was not.

Our eldest, Mildred, had an eighth birthday coming in May, and I wanted to build her a dollhouse. It wasn't to be a very elaborate one, just four rooms, two over two, beneath a peaked roof and a triangular attic, with perhaps a flight of corrugated-cardboard stairs connecting the two floors. I had the wood, the half-inch plywood, the six-penny nails, and the cans of white and gray (for the roof) and red (for the door and window frames and two-dimensional shutters) paint, but whenever I went down to the cellar to work on the dollhouse-it had to be when Mildred was off playing-a clammy sense of futility would ooze out from the rough old eighteenth-century foundation stones and try to drown me. Had my workbench been less rudimentary; had there been objects down there more companionable than an asbestos-plastered furnace, a filthy oblong oil tank, a stack of tattered wooden screens to repair and insert when I could find the time and strength, a tumble of cast-iron furnace guts-ash-coated coal grates and shaking levers-never taken away after the conversion from coal to oil, and a rickety set of bicycles covered with cobwebs; and had the dollhouse been a less makes.h.i.+ft and more intricate artifact by a more skillful carpenter than I, I might have cheered up.

As it was, a dreadful fatigue dragged at my mind and numbed my hands on the tools. The whole real house, with its dependents and its mortgage and its pregnant mistress seemed to be pressing upon me down there. I had taker pride, at first, in Perdita's pregnancies, but by now the process felt stale, a stunt stained with Nature's fatality. Ye another new life coming underlined the pa.s.sing nature of all our mortal arrangements. The house had seen many arrangements pa.s.s through it since 1750. I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die, would die an old lady in whose mind I had become a dim patriarchal myth, and her dolls would die out of the innocent fervent make-believe that gave them momentary life, and the spiders had died in their webs around me, waiting for prey that had never come, and it all seemed futile. The spider corpses were like little white gyroscopes, I remember, and the streaked foundation stones behind the piece of pegboard that I had crudely nailed up over the narrow workbench sweated, at that time of year, with moisture thawing out of the soil. There was no G.o.d, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile. Dust to dust: each hammer stroke seemed dulled by cosmic desolation, each measurement for my rust-dulled crosscut saw seemed part of the grid of merciless laws that would soon extinguish me. I couldn't breathe, and had to keep coming up into the relative brightness of the kitchen, and into Perdita's full-bodied presence, though her puzzled, wifely concern was part of the oppression. She had joined me in natural process; we had bred children, and together we would reap the varicose veins and decaying teeth of middle age. I blamed her; even at those times when, sensing my despair, she tried to lift my spirits with lovemaking, I kept blaming her, and was rapacious but sullen in response. She was the universe that refused to release me from its bonds. Spring and its seminal imperatives hung heavy above me; relief came, amid summer's unclothed flirtations, in her last months of pregnancy, as the beginning of an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time. My marriage, I knew, was doomed by this transgression, or by those that followed, but I was again alive, in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live.

But first, unable to face the suffocating cellar, I bought Mildred a dollhouse at the Boston F. A. O. Schwarz, with a hinged roof and tiny doorways and movable window sashes. I am sure she preferred it to the crude one I would have made. It stood in her room for many years, though the phase of life in which she could entertain domestic fantasies within its miniature walls and enthusiastically play with it soon pa.s.sed. This period of my children's childhoods seems as I look back upon it one great loss and waste, through my distraction. I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow-broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they pa.s.sed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the suns.h.i.+ne of their love.

A line of geese overhead, honking. Not a V-for some reason, in their haste to return to the warming North, they all fly off the same wingtip, and form a single long diagonal line pointing toward the Willowbank Country Club. Green goose excrement makes the short sixth fairway, by the pond, free-drop territory, there is such an abundance of it.

And the sky has a cloudy wet-wash tousled look you never see in winter, when the sky knows its mind for certain. Spatterings of big drops abruptly turn to suns.h.i.+ne, making puddles flash like s.h.i.+elds.

Driving back from a quick run to the former super-market -mostly empty aisles now but word went out that they were expecting s.h.i.+pments of orange juice and chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s in, and the lines would be only an hour long-I heard on the radio this man with a mellow voice from Minnesota reading an old poem about spring, and as soon as I got back I tried to write down some lines. When March is scarcely here a color stands abroad on solitary fields that science cannot overtake but human nature feels When March is scarcely here a color stands abroad on solitary fields that science cannot overtake but human nature feels. This color waits upon the lawn waits upon the lawn (maybe I heard it wrong) and (maybe I heard it wrong) and shows the furthest tree shows the furthest tree and almost speaks to the poet but and almost speaks to the poet but then, as horizons step or noons report away then, as horizons step or noons report away (probably misheard), (probably misheard), it pa.s.ses, and we stay it pa.s.ses, and we stay. It was like being a psychotic and hearing the sick neurons, the degenerate voices of the G.o.ds, broadcasting inside your head. I had never heard the sadness of spring expressed before: A quality of loss afflicting our content A quality of loss afflicting our content, and then something about encroached encroached (it sounded like) (it sounded like) upon a sacrament upon a sacrament Eerie, magical stuff. I never heard the poet's name. Eerie, magical stuff. I never heard the poet's name.

Spin and Phil, the collectors for the local crime overlords, came up to the house for their monthly installment. Nine hundred twenty-five welders for straight protection, one thousand for the deluxe. The money must be in cash, in bills no bigger than twenties. I've been paying deluxe, on their recommendation, but today I asked, "What do I get extra for the deluxe that the straight doesn't deliver?" I think having Deirdre in the house now emboldened me. Though she is just a woman, she is one of them-valley people, people from beyond this hill.

Spin is natty, with a red-and-gray bushy mustache, a toothpick he rolls around in his mouth, and a nice tidy way of expressing himself, like an old-style movie actor. "Mr. Turnbull, what you get is active consideration, not just pa.s.sive. With the deluxe, anybody gives you trouble, anybody anybody, we come after them. With the straight, you get no ha.s.sle from us, but if anybody else gets on your case, you're on your own. Can you follow that?"

"Just barely," I say. "Suppose I paid you nothing, how would that differ from the straight?"

Phil is heavier-set, and still wears brown suits, which don't ever look pressed. "It'd be ugly, Ben," he told me, with a quick hitch in his shoulders that made his suit jacket hang worse than ever. "I don't want to have to think about it. I don't want you you to have to think about it. Hey, this is a beautiful place you got here. Wood, though. Hundred-year-old wood, at least. Get to burning up on this hill, there'd be no stopping it. They don't make fire hoses long enough." to have to think about it. Hey, this is a beautiful place you got here. Wood, though. Hundred-year-old wood, at least. Get to burning up on this hill, there'd be no stopping it. They don't make fire hoses long enough."

I intended to pay, but, as with insurance salesmen in the old days, or company representatives touting a public stock offering, I liked to tease them a little, to make them work for what we both knew was a societally condoned rip-off. "I don't need need so much house," I told them. "With all the expense, I'm thinking of moving. It's not as if I'm not still paying taxes on top of everything else." so much house," I told them. "With all the expense, I'm thinking of moving. It's not as if I'm not still paying taxes on top of everything else."

"Some taxes," Spin coolly sneered. "Local and commonwealth. I can remember, so can you, when there were federal taxes, and the structure in place to enforce the collection. It was called the 1RS."

I said, "There's a lot of talk on the radio about starting it up again. A lot of people miss the federal government."

"Fat chance," Phil said, "after that dumbhead dust-up with the c.h.i.n.ks. They blew it."

Deirdre heard the male voices on the lawn, in the front circle, and came out with her hair in curlers and green cream on her face. "You creeps ever think of getting lost?" she asked.

"Watch your mouth, Dee," Phil said.

"You know Deirdre?" I asked.

Phil didn't answer.

"We went to high school together," she admitted. "He was a loser then, and he's a loser now. What are they asking money for?"

"Protection," I told her. "They see that no harm comes to me, despite the breakdown of law and order."

"Ha!" she said. "These two jerks saying they're the new law and order? Go inside and call the police, Ben. This is intimidation and threatened a.s.sault and arson and I don't know what all else."

"Are there still police?" I wondered aloud.

"Sure," Deirdre said.

"You don't see them standing guard at road repairs any more," I pointed out, adding helpfully, "Maybe because there are no road repairs."

"They're too busy," Deirdre said, "locking up crooked morons like this and throwing away the key."

Spin contemplated her with a smile, s.h.i.+fting the toothpick from one corner of it to the other. "The police," he said, "are our colleagues. We all have a stake in returning order to the community."

Phil tried to reinforce the other man's smile by also leering. "Back in high school, Dee," he said, "they used to say you were a pretty easy lay."

The universe branched; I would come home and find her raped and her throat slit and a leering note pinned to the blood-soaked body.

"I don't give a f.u.c.k what they said," she said. "They used to say you were a simple-minded a.s.shole, too. Get the f.u.c.k off this property and stop intimidating my-my husband."

I had to protest. "They're not intimidating me, darling. We have an arrangement, from long before you showed up, if you don't mind my pointing that out."

Boys versus girls: how often that's what it comes down to. Still, in this day and age.

Deirdre is like Gloria in that she gets excited-panics, really-when she feels her territory is being invaded. Her eyes, weirdly comic in their rings of green face cream, swivelled from one to another of us and then clamped shut; her mouth stretched sideways into a slit and the veins in her throat swelled as a terrible noise came out of her mouth, high like a siren but breathy, panting in little bursts. We all laughed, I the least heartily. "Darling," I told her, "this is the way things are now, since the war. We're all having to make new arrangements."

Deirdre in her blind fury lowered her head and tried to b.u.t.t at Spin's and Phil's bellies; Phil grabbed a fistful of curlers and black hair and held her like that, her arms swinging, while Spin looked at me, the toothpick dangling from the middle of his lip, and said, "This isn't reasonable, Mr. Turnbull. We're just doing the collecting. We don't make the rules."

"I know you don't. I'll get the money. Gloria, you calm down. I mean Deirdre."

"You're with with these creeps!" she cried, her voice m.u.f.fled as Phil bent her head to her chest. "Against these creeps!" she cried, her voice m.u.f.fled as Phil bent her head to her chest. "Against me!" me!"

I raced upstairs, to where the bundles of Ma.s.sachusetts tender were tucked beneath my folded unders.h.i.+rts. The old governor, with sepia hair and sleepy eyes, gazed out from the crude engraving. When the dollar exploded into worthlessness, not just states but corporations and hotel chains had to issue scrip. Ours has been holding its value pretty well lately, thanks to the revival of clamming and lobstering. With the plains a radioactive dust bowl, decimated Midwestern cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State.

The three interlopers had s.p.a.ced themselves out on the driveway circle. Deirdre, putting her curlers back in place, was standing over by the euonymus bush, its brown chewed patches waist-high. Phil was sizing her up, wondering when to attempt a rapprochement. Spin was all business, standing just off the granite porch step; I handed him the money. The sepia bills looked worthless, with their rather supercilious engraved visage. Spin glanced at the welders but did not count them; he tucked the lot into his side coat pocket, taking care to smooth the pocket flap. He was jumping the season with a light checked sports jacket and dove-gray pegged slacks. He debonairly sniffed the air. "Next time we see you," he promised, "the gra.s.s will be green."

Phil pleaded with the back of Deirdre's head, "You get good value, honest. Without us you're totally vulnerable up here."

She refused to turn or say a word. I glanced at the two strong-arm men and shrugged apologetically.

"Want a receipt, Mr. Turnbull?" Spin asked me.

"I trust you," I said. "Take care."

"Explain to your little lady," Phil told me, "that the world's changed. It ain't what it used to be."

"She knows it," I said, feeling hostile now myself. It's one thing to be held up, another to be forced to give your approval. It's true, if they were not "protecting" me, somebody else would be. I actually have a pretty good life, compared with most of the people on this planet, in these sunset years of mine.

The sea earlier this March morning wore a look you never see in winter-a lakelike calm, a powdery blue so pale it was scarcely blue, with stripes of a darker, stirred-up color that might have marked the pa.s.sage of a lobster boat an hour before. The daylilies, in a rock-rimmed bed on the right side of the driveway as I walk down it, are up an inch or two, and the bulb plants on the sunny side of the white garage show thrusting shoots as close together as comb teeth. An occasional boat-motor, not sail-appears on the water, and in the woods there is a stir of trespa.s.sers-teenagers on dirt bikes, sub-teens sneaking smokes.

Last night, stepping out into the misty chill darkness in a failed attempt to see a comet that has lately been much in the Globe Globe, I was. .h.i.t by a true scent of spring-the caustic and repellent yet not totally unpleasant stink of a skunk. One never sees them, except as a mangled mess of black and white fur on the road. But the odor of their existences suddenly reaches us, even through the steel walls of a speeding car, alerting us to the hidden strata of animal existence, whose creatures move through coded ma.s.ses of scent, through invisible clouds of information.

A curious dream last night, whose details fall from me even as I write. Gloria and I were leaving Boston after some event, some little concert or worthy talk, probably at the Tavern Club or her club, called, in honor of Caesar's wife, the Calpurnia. The city, torn up by the Big Dig, could be exited only at "the top"-a narrow place of high traffic like the Mystic River Bridge. We were on foot, she leading. The mouth of a downward tunnel-an oneiric echo of the one under the old Charlestown circle, or the one named after a legendary baseball player-loomed confusingly, like the ambiguous exits off of Memorial Drive that suddenly shoot a car over the river or into Kendall Square. She led me to the right, along a concrete walk that stayed level-one of those ill-marked gritty pa.s.sageways that skirt great new constructions. Except that it seemed to proceed along the edge of buildings that fell away beside me, on the right, dizzyingly. Gloria moved along, with that brisk impatience and obliviousness of the comfortably born, and I timorously followed along the obscure path, which bent now and then as if tracing the ramparts of ancient city buildings: the a.n.a.log perhaps is with those medieval pedestrian ways around Court Square, in the shadow of the ancient gray City Hall, now a Chinese-war memorial.

Gloria did not acknowledge the screaming depths of vertical facade and jutting cornice beneath us, nor did I speak of them: I wrestled with my terror in silence. Then we came, among the building-tops, to a place where there was a gap- a dream image, perhaps, of the Mystic River-and I froze, too panicked to step across. But then somehow she doubled back and deftly traversed the perilous gulf with me and we were together on the opposite side. It was like a flickering at the climax of a silent movie, this transposition to the safe, the northern, side of Boston.

I awoke and it was not Gloria beside me but Deirdre, her lithe and lightly sweating body emitting a faintly harsh, metallic scent, her face tucked into the crooks of her slender brown arms, which were folded around her head with a silken relaxation as she slept the heedless, unshatterable sleep of the young. Perdita, the first woman I slept with on a contractual basis, used to awake, no matter how late we had come to bed, around dawn. To the sounds of her stirring about in the bedroom and then in the kitchen below, I would fall asleep again, as if to the sounds of my mother's morning housework back in Hammond Falls. Like the sun and moon, I as a young husband realized, men and women set and rise on independent schedules.

In the many years of my commuting, from 1977 on, there were two memorable tragedies on the Mystic River Bridge. Just before dawn one morning an overloaded truck swerved out of control and hit a bridge support with such force that the upper deck collapsed, crus.h.i.+ng the driver and stymieing the early commuter traffic, which had to halt at a precipice not unlike that in my dream; the bridge was closed for at least a year. Then, years later, a husband who had almost persuaded the public and the police that an unknown black man had shot to death his pregnant wife when their automobile strayed into Roxbury parked in the middle of the bridge and leaped to his death as the truth began to emerge: he had done the deed, long premeditated in a brain overheated by an infatuation with a younger, non-pregnant woman. To deflect attention from himself he had fired a bullet into his own abdomen, perhaps more painfully than he had intended. His suicide note admitted nothing and was full of self-pity. The incident made us New Englanders all wonder, Inside every husband is there a wife-killer? Inside every husband is there a wife-killer?

Deirdre keeps a very messy house. The laundry acc.u.mulates in the hamper, the dishes in the sink. She even leaves banana peels and eggsh.e.l.ls and crusts of toast rotting within the Disposall, when it is but a few seconds' satisfying occupation to switch it on, under running water, and listen to it grind such garbage away. Before she moved in with me, I had her enlist in NarcAnon, and she was initially enthusiastic and resolute, but I sense backsliding lately. Unaccountable fits of euphoria, with manically s.e.xy and animated behavior, are followed by spells of withdrawn hostility. She is like a kite whose string is still held in my hands but whose distant paper shape I can see fluttering and dipping out of control.

The other night she wet the bed. I was astonished: I awoke at the sting of the warm liquid seeping through my pajamas, and when I wakened her-she was sleeping naked- and roused her to what she had done, she didn't seem to comprehend. She fumbled with me at tearing off the wet bedding, laying a dry towel over the damp place on the mattress, and remaking the bed with a fresh sheet, but seemed still asleep, locked into some drugged continuing dream of her own. In the morning I couldn't get her to talk about it, and indeed I didn't press her too hard: it was embarra.s.sing to me, too.

Some kids-I presume they were kids-smashed a window and broke into the barn. I'm not sure of everything they stole: Two bicycles, at least, that had belonged to Henry and Roger. An inflatable raft, not much of a success, for use in the pond, when Henry was still a little boy, and lonely on our hill, his brother and sister already away at prep school; I remember how he tried to make pets of the pair of ducks that nested near the pond every spring. They produced a chain of fuzzy ducklings that, one per day, would be pulled under by the snapping turtle that lived in the bottom ooze. Also missing were a number of the Mickey Mouse blocks- they have some collectible value now-from my old toy basket, that weathered brittle bushel basket from the apple country of the Berks.h.i.+res. And a porcelain-base lamp and a folded linen tablecloth that I seemed to remember from my previous, depressing visit to this storage area, which had claustrophobically reminded me of the cellar of the house I once shared with Perdita, several worlds ago. Perhaps I had not fled her but that bas.e.m.e.nt, where I couldn't bear to hammer together a dollhouse for a girl who would soon outgrow it and add it to the world's wasteland of discarded toys.

I think the thieves were the kids I hear whooping and cras.h.i.+ng in the woods, now that the weather is warming. Deirdre is certain it was Spin and Phil, "as a warning."

"What would they warn us about? I'm a model member of their club, paid up until the end of March."

"Ben, you're such an innocent. People always want more, more. They keep going until there's nothing left, until they've sucked you dry."

The image recalled to me too vividly her past as a c.o.c.k-sucking prost.i.tute. She seemed to know Spin and Phil too well. I wanted to slap her, to knock that stubborn out-of-reach druggy daze out of her. Her lips looked swollen and moved stiffly, like those of a person in the cold, though the day was sunny, if cool-one of the first basking days, when an atavistic streak in the blood begs you to crawl up on a rock, old turtle, and let the sun soak through your sh.e.l.l.

Ken and Red asked me to go skiing with them. I said yes, though a little loath to leave Deirdre alone in the house all day-she has been acting so dangerous dangerous lately, with that reckless female self-disregard that presumably serves Nature's need to throw DNA around but frays the h.e.l.l out of male nerves. I dragged my skis and boots up from the cellar, where they rest in the little damp laundry room next to the chamber where the jagged ledge sits like an uninvited guest, a chthonic ghost. The cellar of this house is a century-and-a-half newer and several orders of magnitude more cheerful than that of the pre-Revolutionary house that I once occupied with Perdita and my five dependent children. My present bas.e.m.e.nt savors of upper-cla.s.s self-regard in the early 1900s. The same ample scale of construction that obtained in the householders' summer living quarters was transposed, in a minor key, to a netherworld, for servants. There are foundations of pointed rust-tinged granite, part.i.tions of white-painted brick, steam and waste pipes of cast-iron solidity, cobwebbed rooms devoted to the hobbies (woodworking, photography) of the sons of the previous owners. In the darkest and dampest of these-the old darkroom, its windows sealed with taped wallboard-I keep my skis. Since February a year ago, the last time I skied, the edges had rusted, I discovered. The windowless, subterranean damp had penetrated the weave of their canvas carrier, and atoms of oxygen had bonded with atoms of iron. Natural processes continue without our witnessing them: what stronger proof of our inconsequence? Bertrand Russell (I believe) spoke of human consciousness as an "epiphenomenon"-superficially there, a bubble thrown up by confluences in the blind tumble of mindless matter, like the vacuous brown curds whipped up by a fast-running brook. lately, with that reckless female self-disregard that presumably serves Nature's need to throw DNA around but frays the h.e.l.l out of male nerves. I dragged my skis and boots up from the cellar, where they rest in the little damp laundry room next to the chamber where the jagged ledge sits like an uninvited guest, a chthonic ghost. The cellar of this house is a century-and-a-half newer and several orders of magnitude more cheerful than that of the pre-Revolutionary house that I once occupied with Perdita and my five dependent children. My present bas.e.m.e.nt savors of upper-cla.s.s self-regard in the early 1900s. The same ample scale of construction that obtained in the householders' summer living quarters was transposed, in a minor key, to a netherworld, for servants. There are foundations of pointed rust-tinged grani