Straight on to the Exit

  There are still things that we need to know about you, beyond
  what you've written on the forms, beyond what is in the public
  record.  Understanding will come from intimate acquaintance, from
  knowledge of detail, from the shape of the mirror in the morning,
  the number of hairs on the back of your thumb.

  Not that we need to know you at quite that level.

  There are concerns we have about your life.  You are a mass
  of contradictions.  We have not yet formed a coherent
  image of you in our minds.  A coherent image is what we
  need, if we are to be successful.  If you, as well as we,
  are to be successful.

  Look up at the light and relax.

Stories

"The skilled liar is shunned by all societies, from the most
primitive to the most sophisticated.  Mankind discovered at
a very early age that trustworthy communication is the most
powerful weapon it has against the world.  It was with
that discovery, in fact, that mankind became mankind.
Society is the essence of humanity, and communication is
the essence of society."

Hunter isn't looking up as the Professor talks, nor listening
to more than the bare flow of his words.  Neither is most of
the rest of the class, nor (Hunter suspects) is the Professor
himself.  The classroom is hot from the sun shining warm
through the windows and the floating dust, and the air smells
of time, of age and erasers, of generations of students not
quite listening to generations of professors.

This morning the Professor seems relaxed, at ease, something
like beatific.  His gaze wanders around the ceiling of the
room, and his fingers are laced together across his broad
stomach as he leans back in the ancient wooden swivel-chair
behind his desk.  His voice too is relaxed, deep and soft
and floating with his gaze up into the high corners of the
room.

"There would be a great advantage to the individual in being
an expert at the art of lying.  Normal men are terrible liars,
worse at lying than at anything else.  We take this for
granted because we have grown up with it, but in itself it
is amazingly strange.  Why should we squint our eyes when
we lie?  Why do our minds and manners tangle themselves into
knots, and make us stammer and hem?

"The expert liar could be a king among men, a thriving
parasite in the body of society.  And to defend itself
against this parasite, this terrible danger, society
employs the strictest of sanctions."

Hunter is looking down at the surface of his desk, at
the book that lies there open at random to a paper on
the effects of expectation on social performance.  His
hands are beside the book, holding a postcard.  Hunter
is wearing a thin dark turtleneck sweater and black
pants with many pockets.  The Professor is wearing a thick
wool vest over an old cotton shirt, and worn khaki pants
with a hole at one knee.

"But by shunning the liar, by bringing the full force of
despite and isolation against anyone who seems too adroit
at the art, society cannot in the same breath insist on
absolute truth in all interactions.  I don't speak of white or
honest lies, Dr. Stern will fill your heads with wisdom on
that score; I speak rather of stories, of those lies that are
not lies, because everyone listening knows that they are untrue."

Hunter stares at the postcard.  His mind shifts between
the picture there (he is looking at the back of the postcard,
or the front; the side with the picture rather than the address),
and his own inner spaces; between an attentive gaze and a
mindless stare.  The picture is black-and-white, grainy
(intentionally grainy? made grainy by the postcard company,
to reinforce the age and perhaps therefore the authenticity
of the image? to connect it with other grainy images that
the viewer, or more to the point the purchaser, has seen
before, and thus to borrow some virtue from them, or at least
take part in a kind of collective virtue?).  The woman in the
picture sits on a block or a stone seat in a square in some
city, with her feet up and her skirt hanging down from her
legs.

"Stories, fiction, anecdote, fable."  The Professor is out of
his chair now, animated by his subject, beginning to pace the
aisles between the bolted-down desks of the old classroom,
looking down at his students.  They are too large for their
seats, his students, too long and lean and lanky, or too
robust and well-fed and thick-waisted, to fit in the old
chairs, designed for a more timid and wasted generation of
students.

"Love stories," he intones, taking a dog-eared paperback with
a luridly-colored cover from the desk of a long-haired woman
with large paisley eyeglasses, holding it up and turning it in
the air, a specimen for display, and then returning it to its
owner.  "Science fiction, aliens, death-rays!" holding up
another book from another desk.  (The students have without
exception scattered or piled their books on the tops of their
desks, or in the metal cages suspended underneath their
chairs, or on the clean dusty floor beside them, for ease
of access.)

"And here," unaccountably, the Professor lifts the postcard
from Hunter's hands, holds it up, turns it this way and that
before his own eyes, "the fiction of society itself."  And
he lets it drop, and Hunter has to snatch at it to keep it
from falling to the floor.

Earlier that morning, on the way to class, a student walking
just ahead of Hunter stubbed her toe on a gap in the pavement,
stumbled, and uttered a most unladylike curse.  Hunter was
reminded, and is now reminded again, of a story that someone,
perhaps his mother or his grandmother or his Uncle Shaytl,
told him years ago.  This is the story:

A long time ago, a rich greedy man summoned the Devil, Lo
Toyfel, to make a bargain with him.  In those days Lo Toyfel
would appear openly to men, unlike today when he has hidden
himself in advertising signs and the seats of buses and the
linings of wallets, and he appeared to the greedy man and most
ingratiatingly bargained with him.

"So here is our pact," the man said to the Devil after a
surprisingly short space of negotiation, "I will go with you
about the world, and find souls that you may take as your own,
and in return you will provide me with all the riches I desire."

He was especially proud of himself for "all the riches I
desire"; rather than demanding a fixed sum which the Devil
might twist to be too much or too little for his happiness,
he had asked for an amount that would unfailingly be just
what was wanted.  Lo Toyfel had resisted this at first, but
the man had insisted, and was now quite pleased with himself
for his sharp dealing.

"It is agreed," said Lo Toyfel, and after providing the man with
a bagful of jewels and gold pieces as a token of his good faith,
the two set out to look for souls that the Devil might take, to
keep the man's side of the bargain.

They came first to a crowded street, where people shifted to
and fro, passing narrowly by each other about their business.
A merchant, impatient with an old woman hobbling along the
walk in front of him, began shouting at her to make way for
him.

"The devil take you, old woman, make way for a busy man!"

The greedy man grinned and nodded and gestured at Lo Toyfel
to take the woman's soul, but the old Enemy shook his head.

"No, friend," he said, "that man does not have the power to give
me that woman's soul.  He speaks thoughtlessly, mouthing words
that he has heard others mouth before, but there is no power,
none whatever, in them."

And the greedy man frowned, thinking that perhaps his task
would be harder than he had thought.

They came next to a road by a farmyard, where the stable master
was rebuking an apprentice for laziness.

"Move your lazy ass from that seat, you useless lump, and may
the Devil take me for having ever hired you!"

The man grinned again and nodded, for surely the stable master
had just given himself to the Devil of his own will?

But Lo Toyfel again shook his head, and little puffs of smoke
came from beneath the dark hair of his human form, and the
corners of his diabolic mouth turned up, his lips pale and
thick, and he said that this man also had spoken thoughtlessly,
reciting insincere phrases without meaning, and that no one
could think that he had really consigned his own soul to
eternal torment.

"But patience, my friend, for I am sure we will find a sincere
curse before the day is out, and your side of our bargain will
be fulfilled."

And as they passed the house of that farm where they had seen
the stable master, the door opened, and an old belledam came
out to sweep the step.  Looking up at them in the road, with
an old brass crucifix dangling from her neck, her eyes opened
wide, and she took a long astonished breath.

"Ah," said Lo Toyfel confidentially to the greedy man walking
beside him, "this one knows me."

"Who are you," declaimed the belledam, "who are you who walks
with Lo Toyfel himself?  Do you not know who it is that goes
beside you?  If you are plotting mischief for us, you sinner,
may he take you away with him to Hell before you can do us any
harm!"

And with that, of course, Lo Toyfel put his arm around the
shoulders of the greedy man, and conveyed him straightaway
to his infernal stronghold, despite the man's protestations and
his urgent haggling.

And as he passed the man through the gates, into the care of
the demons and their pitchforks, and the seething lakes of fire
and brimstone, he took from the hand of the man the bag of
jewels and gold that he had given him just hours before.

For the man would have no need of them, and Lo Toyfel is frugal.

Remembering this story, Hunter missed the next several paragraphs,
or pages, of the Professor's lecture.  The class now half over,
the Professor settled himself down behind his desk again, and
resumed his quiet and abstracted discourse.  Hunter looked at
the woman on the postcard, idly turned a page in the textbook
on his desk, and reached under the waistband of his pants to
scratch himself at his waist.  Under the turtleneck Hunter wore
only a thin grey undershirt; under his pants only a worn pair
of boxer shorts.

The undershirt is one that he brought with him to the city.  The
boxer shorts he has forgotten about, could not tell you if you
asked him where they came from, partly because he never knew.
They are someone else's boxer shorts in fact, accidentally carried
away from the laundry when Hunter put his own dried clothes down
on the counter without first looking, without noticing the abandoned
pair of shorts, just his size, crumpled in the corner.  So they went
home with him, and now he is wearing them, under the pants with
all the pockets, on a bright but sleepy morning of scholarship,
while the dust dances in the sun and the Professor lectures
half-asleep but earnest, addressing the corners of the room
very pleased with himself, and at peace with the world.

Years before, in another city, Klara, sitting on the stone bench
with her feet up on a discarded wooden box, watched the birds in
the square, and watched the water sliding by in the river to one side.
She turned her head at the sound of the camera, and the photographer
waved and smiled at her.  She was a pretty woman, young for
her age, well-shaped and well dressed, with a thoughtful face
used to smiling.

Questions for Chapter One
Your impressions of the setting and characters

How do you picture Hunter, the protagonist?  How old is he?
How tall?  How long has he been in school?  Identify passages
in the text that support your impressions.

Where is the classroom of the first scene?  Is it urban or
rural?  In what nation?

What does the Professor look like?  How old is he?  What
subject or field does he teach?  Is there any merit to the
argument that he puts forth in this chapter?

How old was Klara when the picture was taken?  How old is
she now?  Is she still living?  Is this the first time she
has met the photographer?

Have you heard the story of Lo Toyfel and the Greedy Man before?
Is what language, if any, is "Lo Toyfel" a name for the Devil?
Besides the obvious moral message, what meaning might the story
have to Hunter?  What other stories do you know about humans
dealing with the Devil, or other personifications of evil?

Why does the author tell us the detailed history of Hunter's
boxer shorts?  Does the reference to undergarments make you
uncomfortable?


Kinds of Flower

In his youth, in the earlier parts of his youth, before the
sunny dusty classroom and the beneficent Professor, before the
light making long shadows in the courtyards late in the afternoon,
Hunter learned to draw.  Or, as Mother Canna would always insist,
Hunter discovered that he could draw.

The fields of Hunter's youth were, at least as he remembers
them in later years, sun-drenched and warm, moist with dew,
and bright with the buzzing of insects.  He lived, they lived,
for awhile (for an eyeblink, for the long eternity of a
childhood) on the second floor of a large old house on a
hill above the river, and while his parents worked he played
in the meadows with numberless other children, and had his
lessons from Mother Canna, and his Uncle Shaytl, and dark
Maria, through some arrangement that he never entirely
understood, that at the time seemed to need no explanation.
But they were, as he remembers it, happy.

One afternoon, in a trodden-down place among the meadow grasses
on a long afternoon with the clouds white in the sky, he and
the other children gathered around Mother Canna, with her skirts
spread out around her as she sat on the blanket, and took
their slates and their papers and their pencils (special
pencils brought out from somewhere in the house, for the
day), and gathered around the stately old woman, she had
them draw.

In the years since, Hunter has forgotten the details.  But
in the beginning of that afternoon he drew a flower, and a
tree, and he drew the edge of the blanket, and then he drew
all the children gathered around Mother Canna, a tiny
picture drawn as though from the eyes of an eagle circling
on the winds far above them; clustered with heads inward
and feet outward, lying on their stomachs facing the
woman in the center, they looked in the drawing like the
blossom of a small flower.

And Mother Canna (not really an old woman, not then, but old
to Hunter and the other children as adults are always old
to children) smiled at the children's drawings and patted
their heads, and when she saw Hunter's, with the flower in
one corner and the flower of the children and herself in
the other corner, and sketches of the tree and of the ragged
edge of the blanket in the center, she raised her eyebrows
and looked at him in a different way, and said that tomorrow
he should draw for her again, if he wanted to.

The next day while the other children were flying kites
and learning sums from dark Maria, Mother Canna sat with
Hunter on the blanket again, now under a blue sky without
clouds, and they drew.  She showed him how to look at a plant,
ways to hold the pencil that he would never have thought
of himself, and what happened when the pencil pressed harder
against the paper, or touched it softer.

At the end of the day she smiled at him again, and shook her
head with some unspoken adult thought, and he went in tired
and sniffling and sneezing from the pollen of the meadow,
but also excited, and puzzled, and proud.

In the next weeks Hunter carried a sheaf of papers with him,
and two of the pencils that Mother Canna had given to him to
use, and he drew things.

Later, not long before he left the big house and the river,
when he was no longer carrying paper everywhere and when
Mother Canna was only a friend of his mother's and not
a teacher or an enchantress or a queen, she told him a
story.

"There was once," she said, "a young man like you, who found
he could draw.  But with him his drawing was like bread and
water, like blood and air.  As he spent longer and longer at
his drawing, it became the world to him, and he withdrew from
the rest of his life.  His friends came and marveled at his
skill, and wondered at the depth of his devotion to the page,
and tried to draw him back out into the world.

"But he could not be drawn, and his friends despaired of
him, and left him to his isolation.  He had paper and
pencils to last him longer than he would live, and except
for the need for food and sleep he was content.  In his
drawings he created worlds and people and animals, love
and death and fever-dreams, and endless pictures of flowers
and birds and broken trees.

"One day, soon after his last friend gave him up, he drew
a crowd of people, and at the front of the crowd stood a
woman.  He had drawn countless women before.  Liking the
way this woman stood, he drew her again, standing in a
forest valley.  Then he drew her face, looking off the paper
in surprise.  Then he drew her sleeping, naked, in a bower
on a hill, under a crescent moon.

"For weeks he drew this woman, and of course he came to
love her.  He loved her more than sleep, more than food,
more than life.  And as he drew her and did not eat, his
body wasted.  And as he drew her and did not sleep, his
eyes were ringed and his hands shook, except when he was
drawing.

"One morning, as he lay before the closed door drawing and
dying, he tried to draw the woman again, and found he
could not.  His pencil did not slip, but what he drew was
not her face, but a melon, or a leaf.  He drew other
people, men and other women, and his hand was as deft as
ever, but he could not draw his love.  He felt she was
hiding from him, and looked to his older drawings (as
he never did, for he loved the drawing itself, not the
looking).  But he could not find her there.  Her figure
had disappeared from every drawing scattered around the
filthy rooms.

"In despair, he found that without her to love he had no
more reason to live; he had been drawing now only to
draw her.  With the last of his strength he gathered
all his papers, not looking at them, and threw them into
the paltry fire, which blazed up and consumed them.
Then he curled himself on the rug, weeping, to die.

"There was a knock at the door, but he did not answer.
The door opened, and of course it was the woman herself,
come out of his drawings to bring him back into the world."

Hunter had thanked Mother Canna for the story, but said
he was not sure he understood its lesson.

"That is not quite the end of the story," Mother Canna
had said.  "The woman picked up the artist and fed him
and put him to bed.  And they lived together for months,
and he loved and adored her, and through loving her
he came back into the world.  But after a time, and not
a very long time, he found her insufferable.  Because,
being in the world, she was no longer a creature of his
mind, whom he could control with an easy stroke of his
pen, but was a being with her own will and wants, and
a mind of her own.  So one morning he spoke curtly to
her, demanding some particular obedience.  And that
afternoon she left him forever."

But that was long after the day that Hunter found he
could draw.  And many things would touch him in the
meantime.

Questions for Chapter Two

Hunter remembers his youth as a sunny, happy time.
Why does the author stress that these are Hunter's
memories?  How might the reality have been different?
How old do you think Hunter was when he learned to draw?
Why?

Who is Mother Canna?  What is her role in the family?
Why do you think she is called "Mother"?

We have now been told two different stories.  How are
they similar?  How are they different?  Both story
tellers are older members of Hunter's family group.
How might the differences between the stories reflect
differences between the story tellers?  What do the
stories that you tell say about you?


Three and Two

The group of children with whom Hunter grew up, in those
seasons by the river in and around the big grey house
with its porches and meadows, remain in his mind largely
as a mass, an undifferentiated mob, a shifting crowd of
anonymous arms and legs and heads and here and there a
fist.  There were not as many of them as he remembers, nor
did new ones arrive or old ones leave as often as he
remembers, but still they were a mixed and mixing group,
being the children of all the gracefully poor people who
lived in the scattered houses of the river valley, and
whose parents worked as servants or tailors or clerks
for the tall wealthy people in the newer houses on the
hill.

Of all the children, in particular of the children who were
gathered around the outspread skirts of Mother Canna on the
afternoon when Hunter learned that he could draw, only two
remained firmly in his memory, two who had come into young
adulthood with him, and whose lives brushed against his.

The three of them were marked, or so they told each other,
by an extra degree of refinement and sensitivity, an extra
measure of intelligence and delicacy that set them off from
the others.  Hunter was one; the other two were a girl and a
boy.  Ona was willowy and pale, with long arms and legs,
and Marc was her reflection, with light hair, narrow feet,
and a broad forehead.  Their families lived in a pair of
brown houses just down the river from the meadow.  They were
always taken for siblings, or cousins, although as far as
anyone knew they were not related.

Hunter saw himself through Ona and Marc, and for much of his
late childhood his image of himself was taller and thinner, paler
and whispier, than the reality of his body.  Full-length mirrors
would surprise him.  Hunter remembers all three of them as quiet
and studious, staying away from the rough games of the boys and
the giggling gossip of the girls; although in fact he and Marc
played chase and tackle with the boys, and Ona sat and gossiped
with the girls, on any number of forgotten September days.

As the other children began to grow up, to pop one by one into
adulthood like bubbles through the surface of a lake, Ona and
Marc and Hunter stayed behind for a time in their childhoods,
embarrassed by the curves and fullnesses coming out in their bodies,
turning away in disgust from the children, the former children, who
would sometimes creep away from their tutors into the grasses of
the meadow, to court and to spark.

"As children," the Professor said, on a different day in a
different season, off on a tangent even longer and more
wandering than usual, behind his desk in a room full of large
and mostly well-fed former children, "we need to practice
every motion and every task.  A young child will do the same
simple thing a thousand times; he will go and fetch a stick from
among the leaves over and over all day, because he needs to
learn every motion and every thought involved in fetching a
stick.  As adults we will still do some old thing a few times,
simply because it reminds us unconsciously of childhood, and
so gives us pleasure in false memories of purity, but because
we no longer need to learn those motions we tire quickly, and
we wonder what has become of our former selves."

Here are the three of them, Ona and Marc and Hunter, small and
thin in the morning light, sitting together on stones by the
edge of the river.  The water is thick and green-brown in the
shadows of the weeds in the eddy.  This is before Mother Canna
watched them draw, before Hunter learned that he could draw.
They are sitting with their heads together, two heads of light
hair almost white, Hunter's a light pearly brown.  With long sticks
they are stirring a piece of damp earth into mud.  It is a game
with no reason or object, but they are too young to need reasons
or objects.

Ona's stick clicks against Hunter's, and the tip of Marc's
burrows into the soil.  Hunter thinks of them, Ona and
Marc, in the same mental breath, as though they were part of
the same thing.  He met them, in the way that children meet
without ceremony or self-consciousness, only a few weeks before,
when their parents came to the big house and up the stairs to
where Hunter's family lived.  Avoiding a knot of louder and
rougher children had brought them together, and their natures
had fit at once.

The soil by the river is dark and rich, full of seeds and the
roots of grasses.  Their sticks stir up insects and worms,
small white rocks and larger brown stones.  They shift around
on the rocks, now one of them and now another on the wet flat
stone that rests on the bank itself.  No one will fall into
the river today.

Ona reaches down and picks out a white stone that Hunter's stick
has turned up.  She puts it next to the rock she is sitting on.
Her fingers are thin and pale and muddy, and there is a long streak
of green algae from the lake on the back of her hand.  Then Marc
picks out a white stone and puts it next to hers.  Ona picks out
another.  After a long time of only mud and seeds and crawling things,
of writing in the letters of unknown languages and shapes from the
back-end of dreams, Marc's stick, scraping into new ground, turns
up a sharp whitish stone, and Hunter picks it up and, after a
moment, reaches across and drops it onto to the pile.

By the end of the morning, when the adults call them in for
lunch and lessons, they have churned a wide mud hole into the
earth beside the water, and dozens of white stones are piled
between the sitting rocks.

His Uncle Shaytl once asked him, when he was playing in the
sand with a shovel, if taking one grain of sand away from a
sand pile could ever stop it from being a pile.

"What do you mean?"

"Look, if I have a pile of sand, and I take away one grain,
do I still have a pile of sand?"

"Unless the wind blows it away or something."

"The wind doesn't blow it away; I just take out one grain,
and the other grains all stay there.  Is it still a pile
of sand?"

"I guess."

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"And so I still have a pile of sand.  And if I take away one
grain from that pile, do I still have a pile of sand?"

"Yes."

"Yes.  And so every time I take away a single grain from a
pile of sand, I still have a pile of sand.  But if I take
away every single grain, I have no sand at all!  Do you see?
How can I have a pile of sand still, when I have no sand at
all!"

"You can't."

"Yes!" And his Uncle had laughed, and then looked at Hunter
as though he expected Hunter to laugh too.  But Hunter had
gone back to his shovel and his sand, and his Uncle had shaken
his head and walked off, chuckling to himself.

Here is Hunter later, long after finding he can draw, walking
in the meadow by the edge of the woods, with his pencils and
a handful of paper, a downy mustache on his upper lip, his
arms and legs awkward and unfamiliar, but his hand as sure as
ever.  He draws what he sees: the curve of a branch, a clump
of meadow grass, the way the shadows cross each other down at
the level of the ground, the texture of the earth.  He sits
for awhile on a fallen log at the edge of the woods, and looks
back up at the house.

He has never really been in love with drawing; it is more
something that his body needs to do, or that irritates his
mind like an itch.  Some of the things that come in through
his eyes need to be drawn, or ask to be drawn, and his
hands are always quick and eager on the paper.  Mother
Canna has told his parents that he must go to the city,
to college or to an art school, as soon as he is old
enough.  His parents are not, he thinks, quite sure yet
whether to believe her.  Thinking about the city makes
him feel passive, and he surprises himself by what seems
an indifference to his own life.

Finishing a picture of the house, the roof and chimneys of
the house showing above the crossing lines of the grass, a
picture different from all the dozens or hundreds of pictures
of the house he has drawn before, Hunter stands and walks
along the margin of the meadow, by the edge of the wood,
away from the river.  Here a narrow path ducks under a
tangle of brambles and winds back into dimness under the
trees.  Where the path wanders into nothing is a flat
dark rock, covered with green moss, that Marc and Ona and
Hunter have used for years (for months, for days) as a
private meeting room, a lodge, a refuge.

He avoids the brambles and starts down the path, thinking
of nothing and of the shape of the house against the sky,
quiet and distracted.  The ground under his feet is firm
and clean.

In their private place, on the mossy rock, Ona and Marc
are sitting entwined.  Hunter stops by a thick dark tree,
half behind it, and sees their figures as an odd shape, as
something to draw.  But his face is hot.  Ona's hands
are spread open on Marc's back, and Marc's lips are
slowly pressing against Ona's.  Their eyes are closed,
and small sounds come from their throats.

Hunter breathes, and Ona's eyes open.  The two long pale
former children turn and look at him.  No one is surprised.

He stands, there in the quiet of the woods.  Nothing comes
to him to say.  Ona's arm is around Marc's back, comfortable
there.  Hunter turns half away from them, back toward the
path.

"No," says Ona, "come here."

And he sits between them, and Ona's mouth touches his lips,
and Marc's mouth touches his cheek, and he closes his eyes.

The next day Hunter draws Marc and Ona sitting on the porch
of the house.  He is not a portrait artist; his people are
shapes and forms and arrangements of line.  Between the Marc
shape and the Ona shape, he sketches in the lines of himself.
He shows them the picture, and the three of them smile,
and walk hand in hand in hand to the river.

At the end of that summer, Hunter started college in the city,
and Marc went north to his Uncle's horse farm.  Ona stayed by
the river, cooking with her mother in a kitchen on the hill,
and later she met two other men, and married one.  Sitting in
the dusty classroom, holding a postcard and dreaming, Hunter
has not seen her in many months.  But he will again.

The photographer has invited Klara to take tea in a cafe on
the square.  Amused, she has accepted, and allowed him to
flatter her.  "You are very kind," she says, "but it would be
unkind of me not to tell you that I am pregnant."  It occurs
to her that this young man with the bulky camera, this
stranger, is the first person that she has told.


Questions for Chapter Three

This chapter centers around the three children and their
relationship.  Are Ona and Marc really as similar as Hunter
remembers them?  How are they like, and unlike, Hunter himself?

There are a number of stories and story-frames in this
chapter.  Name three, and discuss how they might illuminate
Hunter's life, and his relationship with Marc and Ona.
How do the stories change, and how do they remain the
same, as the children mature and begin to enter adulthood?

How does the relationship change, if at all, when Hunter
comes upon Marc and Ona "sparking" in the woods?  What
is the significance of the drawing that Hunter makes the
next day?

Klara again appears in the final paragraph of a chapter.
How might this paragraph relate to the rest of the chapter,
or to the previous paragraph in which she appears?



Black and White

The end of the class period is marked by the Professor taking
an old watch from his pocket, squinting at it, yawning hugely
with his arms above his head (threatening to tip the chair
backwards into the wall or onto the floor), and nodding benignly
at the class.  Some of the students have been looking at their
own watches for many minutes, sitting poised with their books
in their arms, and spring for the door at that nod.  Others,
Hunter among them, have been daydreaming or reading or lost in
the paths and byways of the lecture itself, and shake themselves
back to reality, blinking.

There is a round black and white clock on the wall of the room,
but although it always runs it is always slow by an unpredictable
number of minutes, and the class has learned to ignore it.

Hunter closes the postcard between the pages of the book.  He
piles up his two other books, a spiral notebook, and a sketchpad,
and pulls himself to his feet.  The floor of the classroom, clean
and dusty yellow wood with years of scratch marks from the metal
feet of the chairs, creaks as he walks to the door, the last student
to leave the room.  The Professor has settled back in his chair with
his hands behind his head, apparently returning to his contemplation
of the corners of the ceiling.  Hunter pictures him, after the last
student has gone, resuming the low rumble of his lecture in the
empty room.

In the small room that he shares with Courant, a fellow student from
the south (a quiet, almost truculent, student of art and the law,
who bathes twice a day but keeps his clothes in undifferentiated
heaps under his bed), Hunter sits in one of the two chairs, and
puts his feet up on the table.  The last class of the day is over.
Tomorrow when the light is still fresh he will be at the drawing
studio with his paper and his pencils.  In an hour it will be
time for dinner in the dim dining hall of the college, eating
the unremarkable food in company with his fellow scholars, under
the time-darkened portraits of past dignitaries, the smell of
baking, the gentle clatter of forks.  But an hour is a long time,
in a quiet room with nothing moving.

Hunter takes the postcard from his book and sets it on the table,
leaning against a green glass jar full of lentils.  He takes a
pencil from his pocket, and begins to draw the woman sitting on
the stone block.  As the light from the windows fades, he reaches
across the table and turns on a yellow-shaded lamp, and returns
to his drawing.

That morning in the corner of the window of Hunter's room,
a spider built a web.  To three surfaces of painted wood it
anchored a long strand of silk, and then wound a sticky
spiral between and among them, an invisible glyph in spider
language graven in the air.  During the day the spider has
been dozing in the center of the web, now and then roused by
the sweet impact of a gnat or a mosquito straying into the
trap.  Then it carefully picks its way down the main cables,
and feeds.

As Hunter came into the room and dropped his books onto the floor,
a large beetle, startled by the vibration, flew up into the window.
It beat itself futilely against the glass three times, a clockwork
of wings and legs running an ancient program written long before there
was glass, and then it careened into the sticky strands of the web,
tearing a hole in the delicate structure and tangling itself
tightly in silk.

The spider, sensing from the frequency and volume of these new
vibrations the striking of some disaster, swung itself down a
cable to the edge of the rift (investigation prevailing over
skittering flight in the scanty tangle of its gangly brain),
and began cutting fibers, sacrificing the structure of its web
to be rid of this too-large intruder, this frantic bumbling
behemoth, this misfortune.  The beetle's mechanical struggles
wound it tighter into the web and spread the damage, as the
spider's more careful but not less desperate cutting worked to
set it loose.

Of this struggle only a few taps of beetle-carapace on glass have
reached Hunter, who is still leaning back in the chair with his
feet on the table, his eyes on the postcard and his fingers on
the pencil, drawing.

A few lines, light but thick, outline the essential field;
the woman and the block on which she sits are a single rough
shape on the page.  Hunter's mind, the part of Hunter's mind
that does the detail work of drawing while the rest of him dreams
or rests or looks on, considers whether to separate them, to
unify them further, or to emphasize one over the other.  The
woman is the subject of the photograph, a simple and pleasant
composition.  But the subject of his drawing could be the seat
she is sitting on, the drape of her skirt over the lines of her
legs, the light on her face (half-averted, looking at something
outside the frame, the curve of her cheek just visible in the
grain of the print), or the line of the street beyond the edge
of the square in which she sits.

(In fact what looks like the line of a street in the photograph
is the stone bank of the river, toward whose wide and lively flow
Klara's face was turned when the photographer, taken by the
beauty and simplicity of the woman sitting in the square, swung
the awkward bulk of his camera toward her, hoping to catch her on
his film before she rose or turned entirely away.)

On the wall above the desk is a drawing, a sequence of four panels
on a single page, from a class on sequential art from Hunter's
first term at the college.  In the first panel three shapes sit,
lit from the side, on a featureless flat plane, with a hint of trees
or mountains or shadow on the infinitely distant horizon.  In
the second panel something, an indistinct blur, arrives at great
speed from somewhere high above.  The something itself is made
indistinct by its velocity, and the shapes of the stationary objects
are also distorted, leaning toward (away from, along) the line of
approach, anticipating the event.  The third panel is all explosion,
the forms of force, jagged lines of happening and energy, bold
words in some artificial alphabet standing for sound.  And the
fourth panel is almost identical to the first, the same three
shapes, apparently unchanged, drawn from the other side.

Hunter likes this page, for reasons he doesn't completely
understand.  Once, on another long idle evening, he said to
Courant that the panels said something about the relationship
between drawing and plot.  In the written word, he said, plot
is clear and evident, and anyone can point to it.  In drawing,
the plot is the way the viewer's eye moves on the image, and
gives motion to (or withholds motion from) the static ink on
the still paper.  Putting obvious plot into drawing, as
sequential art does, is at best, he said, adding a superfluous
layer of story, built out of the inchoate plots of the panels
themselves.  At worst, it is an excuse for ignoring the
individual plots, the movement of the eyes and the flow of
attention across each frame, and building (attempting to
build) an edifice out of haphazard blocks; if the bricks
are cracked and crumbling, he asked, how can the structure
be solid?

Courant was not impressed by this thesis, as frankly Hunter
was not himself, but he made no particular answer.  The best
reply, Hunter has come to think, the wittiest and most
insightful, would be to lean back in one's chair and lace
one's fingers across one's stomach, and stare with all good
will into the corners of the room.  Hunter is alert for
opportunities to use this riposte himself, but none have
presented themselves.

Hunter's fingers move the pencil in a broad curve, joining
the figure of the woman and her seat to the line of the
street (the river in the photograph, the street in the
drawing) and then upward to a line that he has drawn in the
sky, perhaps a bridge in the background or the line of an
overhead wire.  The curve does not correspond to anything in
the photograph, or in the world of the drawing, but it guides
his mind around the drawing's emerging logic.  The curve
makes sense to him.

Perhaps in reaction to Courant's jumbled piles of socks and
shirts and hats under his bed, Hunter keeps his own clothes
neatly folded in the top two drawers of the room's standing
chest.  The drawers are wide but shallow, bowed out in front
with small carved handles dark with age and the finger-oil
of generations of students.  The inside surfaces of the handles
are smooth, smoother than anything else in the room, and
touching them is a pleasure.  Hunter takes his clothes to
the laundry once a week, runs them through the machines and
carries them back to the room in a cardboard box.  Only
once has he accidentally picked up a bit of someone else's
clothing, the boxer shorts that he is wearing even now, as
he draws the drape of the woman's skirt as it flows from
her legs to the ground.

Two pieces of Hunter's own clothing have gone astray in the
laundry (and one pair of his socks is currently in one of
Courant's piles under the bed, mixed with Courant's clean and
dirty linen).  One of Hunter's undershirts is lying crumpled
in a corner beside a washing machine, where is it gradually
attracting dirt and cobwebs (has the fatal struggle between
the spider and the beetle, in the corner of Hunter's window,
come to some conclusion?).  And one of his cotton collared
shirts, the one with a torn pocket, is in the closet of a
young woman sculpture student, who found it among her clothes
on a rainy Wednesday morning, and wears it when she feels
tired.  Not knowing who else has worn it, or how it found
its way to her, makes her happy.

Hunter finishes the drawing, as much as he plans to finish it,
and leans it next to the postcard on the desk.  He sits back
and looks at the two images.  Like many of Hunter's drawings,
this one can be seen as an abstract collection of shapes, or
as a representation (a surprisingly realistic representation,
given the abstractness of the shapes) of a piece of the world.
Becoming sleepy in the quiet evening, Hunter sits in the
quiet room and enjoys the ambiguity until dinner.

In a clean tiled kitchen, the day before the photographer
took her picture, Klara made soup from peas, lentils, a
large fragrant ham bone pink with shards of meat, a thick
bunch of carrots, and a pile of red potatoes.  Slicing the
clean vegetables with the water boiling in the pot, she
hummed a nursery rhyme to herself, and wondered about the
tiny life just forming, deep in the roots of her body.

  How far have you come, to reach this point?  We
  regret that we cannot take the time to fully
  appreciate the complexity of the path you have
  taken.  But we are concerned at this moment with
  your present state, not your history.

  Whatever you have left behind along the way, let
  it be forgotten in this place.  If you have lost
  your innocence, tell us the story of your new maturity.
  If you have lost illusions, tell us your truths.

  Hope for redemption, hope for the future, hope for
  a justification of the present.  In the background
  of the sound-field of this instant, listen for a
  unifying theme.

  You are standing in an open field west of a white house,
  with a boarded front door.

  There is a small mailbox here.


Power and the War

Hunter's Uncle Shaytl seldom mentioned the war.  When he did,
it was in a story about the bumbling inadequacy of human nature,
or a cautionary tale of things not to do.  The war was not a
popular topic at any time on the second floor of the big house
across the meadows from the river; to the children it was only
a piece of dead history.  Once Hunter asked his Uncle about it,
asked the inevitable "what did you do in the war?" question,
hoping for a story with thrills and guns and daring raids.
But his Uncle had just snorted and turned away, looking out
the window and puffing harder on his pipe.

"War!" he had growled. "Foolishness."

At the start of the war, Shaytl was the assistant manager at an
electrical substation near the heart of the city.  By the time
the bombing raids began, he had risen by attrition, and was the
general manager of the main power plant.  He and his wife had sent
their infant children off to the countryside, to the care of rural
relatives (into, in fact, an earlier version of that big worn house,
that mixing mob of children, that nurtured Hunter like a Petri dish).
They discussed leaving the city themselves, but were torn in
a bewildering number of directions.

"Why should we stay?" he asked one night in the plant's central
office, sitting before a bank of switches and dials, smoking a
heavy brown cigar.  The smoke curled around him and up into the
dimness of the ceiling; the lights in the plant were all set low,
to save power.  Every other bulb was unscrewed.  "Why should
anyone stay?  We have no prospects in the country, but what
are our prospects in the city?  To be bombed to death?  To
have the walls come down around us?"

"The people still need power," rumbled Georgi, his remaining
assistant manager.  Georgi was a thin man, tall and brown,
with long arms poking bare-wristed out of a company uniform
a size and a half too small for him.  His hair stood out about
his ears like tufts of grass.

"Pah," Shaytl replied, smoke billowing from his wide red mouth,
"will one man's leaving, will my leaving with my wife to the
country, close down the power?  You will take over here, or
someone else will.  The city is still full.  What is one man
less?"

"Would any grain of sand on the beach be missed?" asked Georgi.
Shaytl did not always understand Georgi.

"Of course not!  My point exactly.  Shaytl and Leona leave for
the plateau, and Georgi and Anna, or Peter and Mary, or Boris
and Betty take over.  One grain of sand is nothing."

"And if every grain of sand thinks this?" continued Georgi,
"If every grain of sand leaves, rightly thinking that one grain
cannot make a difference?  What then?"

"Pah!" Shaytl frowned and his forehead creased.

"Then," finished Georgi, "why then there is no beach at all,
and no sand, and no one to say which grain's leaving broke
the back of the camel."

The first wave of bombers, on that moonless July night, had
gouged jagged holes in the city, in the runways of the airfield,
the proud bulk of the armory, a random scatter of office buildings
along the Mile, and killed three men at the substation where
Shaytl had worked.  In the aftermath, normal sounds stunningly
quiet after the drone of the bombers and the shouts of the bombs,
the city had hung its head.  The stream of refugees, people fleeing
down every outbound road in their cars and carts and on their bicycles,
had abated for a day (people too frightened to leave their homes,
a husband or wife dead, a road destroyed, plans changed), and then
redoubled.  No more bombs fell the next night, but a building
collapsed, and the hospitals began to run low of medicine.  The
bombers will be back, the street said, and where will the food
come from?

Shaytl and Leona stayed, two grains of sand on the beach.

An order came, to cut the power to the three main districts
between sundown and dawn.  "Why," Shaytl angrily asked the
functionary who came with the message, "why do we cut the
power, and why was I not asked for my advice in this
decision?"

"The city must be dark, to keep the bombers from their
targets.  Your job is only to throw the switch, not to
ask the question.  The Council has the advice it needs.
Or so we must hope."

Shaytl had no desire to cut the power.  The thought of the
dark bulbs, the silent radios, the cold ovens, was oppressive
to him.  "This will be another blow to the people.  Can the
Council not issue a proclamation requiring lights to be
turned off?  Appoint wardens to walk the streets and enforce
the rule?  I do not want to turn off the stoves and the
radios of the city."

"Just throw the switch."

"The people will put the blame out here, on me.  There will
be a riot at my gates."

The functionary frowned, his eyes narrowed.  Shaytl felt for
the first time that he was not, to the Council, a person, an
independent and valuable player in the game of government,
but was rather a part in a machine, a part perhaps valuable
and awkward to replace in this time of shortages, but a part
none the less, a part not expected to be giving advice to the
operators of the machine.

"Perhaps we will send you more guards."

Shaytl had, at this time, only three guards left for his station,
and they were not even sufficient to prevent looting of anything
left between the gates and the locked doors of the plant itself.
A storage shed had been stripped and dragged off for its metal and
parts.  But if the power were cut, he would be dealing with anger,
not only with greed.

The Council did send him guards, a tired but disciplined gang of
short-haired young men in drab uniforms, with sidearms and rifles.
When the announcement came that power would be cut each evening,
some people did come, in ones and twos, and three times in a mob,
to shout and plead before the gates of the plant, but the hard
eyes of the soldiers discouraged further trouble.  For a week,
the city lay in darkness each night.  No more bombers came.

"Do they think the bombers will stay away just because it is
dark?"  Shaytl and Georgi in the central office again, banks
of dials and switches again, still, and no droning of planes
in the sky.  But always rumors.  "If they want to bomb, they
will bomb, and not care what they hit."  The power plant is
a huge old coal-fired thing on the plain outside the city,
connected by a long umbilicus of empty highway.  Impossible
to aim at the city and hit the plant (or aim at the plant and
hit the city), lights or not.  At least so Georgi says.  Not
that either of them know about bombers, except from below.

Distant explosions the night before, far off to the west.  A
fuel depot bombed, someone said.  Saboteurs blowing up a munitions
factory, someone said.  No one killed, dozens killed, a town
wiped out, hospitals in ruins, a clean miss and no casualties
but one boy out in the fields with a cut on his face from a
flying branch.  No telling.

His Council guards have been replaced by a squad of police.
Leona says the Council have left the city, and the chief of
police has put the Premier under house arrest.  The newspaper
no longer comes (too many grains of sand blown away by the
wind).  He no longer trusts the plant out of his sight at
night; he sleeps on a cot in an alcove off the central office,
waiting for Georgi to wake him up with news of disaster,
waiting for the mobs to outnumber the police.

He has received orders to continue the blackouts, and now
even if he wanted to defy them and run the boilers and the
turbines all day, keep the power flowing, they do not have
the coal.  Their reserves are emptying fast, too fast, and
the trucks and trains that once flowed in across the peaceful
plains, down from the mountains and the mines, are a jerky
ragged trickle, coming in at night under cover, escorted by
grim soldiers and harassed by bandits.  Now two bulbs out
of three are unscrewed.

Should he ask Leona to join him out here?  He hates to leave
her in the city.  But they might bomb the plant, or burn it
down, with them trapped and screaming inside.  He is not
sleeping well.

One night, rumors flying fast and hot through the anemic
threads of the city's whispering mill, he kisses Leona good
night at the door of their flat, looks out at the sunset
pale and purple against the hills, and sighs.

"Come out with me to the plant tonight," he says, "I miss
you."

"Mrs. Vonchoy needs me to look in at her."  She closes her
eyes.  "And I hate the plant."  She looks up.  "I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to say that."

He shakes his head, kisses the part in her hair, and goes
out into the night.  The sky seems far away, and indifferent.

That night Georgi does come to his cot to wake him, but
the plant is safe.  Somehow he has slept through the sound
of the bombers, and the explosions in the city.

"You should go home, Shaytl, see to Leona.  I hear...
that some flats are hit."  And he turns away into the
dark.

Rushing through the city, the wail of sirens and the pop
and boom of anti-aircraft still loud in the sky, and fire
and smoke on the near horizon, Shaytl tries not to listen
to rumors.  Streets are closed off, he is forced far out
of his way.  To reach his own street, thick with smoke,
he has to show his papers.  He sees running shapes, smells
fire, chokes from the smoke.  His Leona, he is sure, is
dead.

But she is not.  Mrs. Vonchoy is dead, and young Grazio
from the first floor is missing (his wife, eyes and mouth
a wounded red that looks black in the turgid light, crying
in a corner and grasping at sleeves).  But Leona has only
(only!) a broken leg, and she can smile at him when he
squeezes her hand, and they wait together for a stretcher.
He says something to her (something, anything; what do you
say to the mother of your children when you find her crumpled
in the corner of a crumpled street, her leg bound to the
slat of a crate with none-too-clean bindings, a tiny thing
with a tired face, but still the same, still the same?),
but she only shakes her head.  She is deaf from the blast.

He tries to touch her face gently, to smooth the hair from
her forehead.  Like a young lover, he thinks.  Was I ever
a young lover?  Leona is a strong woman, forearms strong
from kneading and lifting, from carrying a child on each
hip, from a life's worth of days.  The stretcher takes
entirely too long to come (so many, so many, and each one
the most important).  She begins to sob and shake, and
he holds her carefully.  No more bombs fall, but the fires
come all too close before the rushers in the dark (is it
safe to use lights? is it safe not to? the portable generators
are louder than the planes) douse them with water and they
steam out.  Shaytl strokes the face of his dear broken wife,
and she grips his arms and cries.

The next day, Shaytl gets a call through from the hospital
(crowded, of course; bloody, of course; but also still the
same; he passes it every morning on the way from the flat
to the plant; but there is no flat anymore) to the plant with
only an hour of trying.  Georgi has stayed on duty, has
heard, is ready to take up the mantle.  Has already picked
a new assistant manager, one Tolgey, the most competent of
the boiler engineers that remain.

"We will continue," Georgi says.  The telephone is sticky in
Shaytl's hand, and fragrant with medicine and sadness.

"I regret that the wind is blowing me away," he says, and at
the other end of the line Georgi raises his refulgent eyebrows.

"Don't waste your regret," he says, "if every grain waits for
a wind this strong, the beach is secure."


Questions for Chapter Five

This chapter is a story in itself.  How does it relate to the
other stories that we have heard?

Hunter's Uncle Shaytl used the paradox of the pile of sand in
a very different context in Chapter Three.  Does that story
tie these two sets of events together in a significant way?
Does the story have different meanings the two times it is
told, or is there a unifying meaning?


A Rainstorm

Hunter is walking back across the city toward the college as
the sun sets.  He has spent the end of the afternoon on a hill
that rises like a curl of hair above the fishmarket.  The hill
is windswept and dirty, but covered with tenacious trees; from
the top (among the dust and the stones and the half-dead shrubs,
scrap paper brought up from the streets by the wind caught in the
thorns and heaped in the cracks of the rock), the city unrolls
under your feet (under Hunter's feet, under the feet of the lovers
that stray up there on violet evenings in the summer), inviting
the eye, and inviting the pen of the student.  Hunter has brought
back with him, stuffed in his brown portfolio, a picture in
charcoal that he thinks he likes.

The fishmarket is more than half-empty this late in the day;
the fish arrive in the morning, having rattled and clanked their
way from the sea in pungent crates the night before, to be
laid shining-eyed and split-gilled on the long tables, and
haggled over by the servants and the wives of the quarters of
the city.  By mid-day the best of the catch is long gone, and
by the time Hunter passes through with his portfolio under his
arm the fish are present only in their lingering scent.

He passes a woman in a heavy shawl, walking with her head bowed
and humming a tune he doesn't recognize.  He passes a street
vendor pushing his cartload of indefinitely-shaped fried dough
from one side-street to another.  He passes a man and woman
with four little children in tow, hurrying through the quarter,
and after they pass by he stops and turns to watch them.  There
is something about the motions of their feet that he would like
to draw, but they turn a corner and are gone.  It occurs to him
that the rows of dead fish, shining in the sun and shadowed by
the bodies of the people, would be a good image.  Perhaps he
will come back and draw that.

As he walks through the streets (fishmarket to greenmarket,
alley to plaza), the clouds close and thicken.  The day has been
sunny and cool, and windy on the height.  He is wearing his jacket
of ochre boiled wool; warm but too small, tight in the shoulders.
He squints up at the clouds as the wind begins whistling down
the street.  He walks faster, no longer looking around for things
that he might draw (a woman's leg, a splintered chair lying in
the corner of a building, a streetcorner where the wall is an
odd truncated shape, only half-rebuilt from the war), but he
is only half way to his door when the rain starts.

Hunter shelters in a concrete alcove at the side of a squat
and bulky building as the rain pours down.  He sighs and squats
on the cracked surface, stretching his knees and looking up at
the falling water, wondering how long the rain will last.  How
absurd, to be crouched here helpless, not knowing something that
will be common knowledge, will be clear, certain, in a few hours.
How long will the rain last?  Where is his heaviest pencil, the
one he spent twenty minutes vainly searching for this morning?
Of all the women in the city, which one would he, marrying, be
happiest with, and which one would, marrying him, be made the
most happy?

Once upon a time (this is another story that his Uncle told him,
he thinks; or perhaps his father) there were in a far-off country
two Gods.  One God lived on the highest mountain in that country,
and one lived on the coldest mountain.  Each God knew all that
there was to know about the country; the flow of every river,
the name and fate of every man and woman, the hairs of every head,
the sound of every sigh (and, Hunter thinks, the whereabouts of
every pencil, the length of every rainstorm).

Both Gods knew everything there was to know about the country, but:
neither God knew who he was.  The God that lived on the highest
mountain knew everything there was to know about the country, and
knew that the country had two omniscient Gods, but he did not
know "I am that God that lives on the highest mountain".  The God
that lived on the coldest mountain knew everything there was to
know about the country, and he knew that the country had two
omniscient Gods, but he did not know "I am that God that lives on
the coldest mountain."

Every man knows who he is, and every woman knows who she is.  So
these Gods, high and omniscient as they were, grew jealous of the
poor ignorant mortals, for their self-knowledge.  The God on the
highest mountain plotted to rain fire on the valleys, and kill
the men and women (and he knew "the God on the highest mountain
is plotting to kill the people", but he did not know that that
was him).  The God on the coldest mountain resolved to become
a human himself, sacrificing knowledge of all things for knowledge
of himself.

On the day that the God of the highest mountain was set to
release the killing fire, the God of the coldest mountain
perfected his magic, and entered the mind of the country's
tiniest infant, just being born and crying the cry of his
birth.  Then the God of the highest mountain knew "there is
only one omniscient God in the country", and knew it must be he,
and withheld his fire.  And the God of the coldest mountain,
now only an infant bloody and wailing on his mother's stomach,
sucked in air, and knew who he was, and knew nothing else.

The first blast of the rain, the downpour, the cloudburst,
has died down, but the drops are still constant and heavy.
Hunter sighs again and stands up, surveys his temporary
(how long?) prison.  The alcove is an arched cell in the side
of the building, unevenly walled with cement and brick.
In one corner the wind has built a pile of paper scraps,
dirt, and blown leaves, now moist and contentedly rotting
in the rain-dampened air.  The back wall of the space, against
the building, tapers backward to a narrow flat place where
the floor is a metal grate and the wall shadowed dark.  Two
streams of water drip and flow down the wall there, leaking rain
from somewhere above.

Hunter is intrigued by the shape and shadow of that space,
in the dripping darkness.  He reaches for his portfolio, his
paper and pencils, but as he does a gust of wind pushes a
burst of rain into the space, splashing his hand and arm;
it is too wet here, now, to draw.  He runs his eye over the
shapes, and wrinkles his nose.  He will come back when it is dry.

When the rain does stop, Hunter hugs his portfolio close to
himself and walks out into the street.  He notices the buildings
nearby, the block he is on, so he can find the place later.
Then he starts across the city, the second half of his walk
back to his room.  Rain still drips from cornices, from wires,
from the few branches of the few trees, from awnings on
storefronts, but the clouds are clearing.  It would be
sunny, but the sun has set.

As Klara ladles the soup into bowls, the rain begins to fall
in her story as well.  This will mean extra mouths at the table
for her, most likely.  She gets out two more bowls, and reduces
the portions one half-ladle each.  The corner of the windowsill
does not begin dripping with dirty rainwater until long minutes
after she has put a pot there to catch the drips.  The city
could use a good washing, she says to herself.  And she rubs
her stomach with her palm.


Questions for Chapter Six

This chapter is full of symbols.  What does the hill symbolize?
The rain?  The fishmarket?  The shiny eyes of the fish?  The
metal grating?  How do you know?

What is the lesson of the story about the two Gods?  How is
it similar to previous stories?  How is it different?

Klara appears in the last paragraph of this chapter also.  Is
the storm outside her window the same one that Hunter shelters
from?  How do you know?


Square Worlds

The dining hall is crowded and noisy and warm, full of people
who would otherwise be out in the damp cold.  Hunter has stopped
at his room just long enough to put his portfolio safely away,
and now is sitting at one of the long tables eating black bean
soup, dark crusty bread, and a tomato stuffed with something
shapeless and sweet.  Courant is near by, on the opposite side
of the table, and others Hunter vaguely knows; Paul Gavisko
(a large young man with an enormous beard), Gretl Tayne (a
bold young woman in a long black skirt, come over from the
women's side of the hall to continue some dispute with Paul,
started in a history classroom earlier in the day), Geoff
the Monk (no one remembers his last name; he is slight and
stern and dressed in heavy sober clothing, and does nothing to
discourage the nickname).

The ceiling of the dining hall is high; in the dim spaces
among the rafters mix shadows and smoke, smells and the echoes
of noise.  High on the walls huge old portraits in gilded
frames stare down at the diners, or across at each other, or
up into the ceiling.  The portraits are dark, with time and
cooking smoke and the aging of lacquer.  Once a year they are
taken down and cleaned, if the Steward remembers, but any
cleaning that would remove the darkening would also destroy
the images, so every year they are darker, and since little
light reaches them at any rate, and the students seldom look
up, the faces they bear are obscure in every sense.  The only
painting that is ever lit by the sun is the immense one at
the extreme end of the hall; for an hour not long after sunrise,
a beam of light through a high dusty window in the roof of
the hall will sometimes light it like a flame.

Most of the framed pictures on the long walls of the hall are
portraits, conventional paintings of past Presidents of the
college, done in oils by an especially promising student, by
a visiting artist, or by one of the Portrait Masters in those
years when the college had Portrait Masters.  A few Provosts,
and one especially notable Steward, have insinuated themselves
in among the Presidents.  Three Presidents share their canvases
with their wives, and the Steward's wife has a frame all to
herself.  That was an odd year.

Daniel Prado was President of the college when the war began.
He maintained order when the students threatened to riot, and
he shut the college down when bombing seemed inevitable.  He
fled the city the next day; the Steward stayed to deal with the
panic, the looters.  For the most part the college was spared
any physical destruction.  When the war ended and the nation
re-opened, Daniel Prado returned to the city, but found he no
longer had a post.

Arkity ten Drummon was President of the college many years earlier.
The third President to serve the college in its current incarnation,
he was a small bent man with only one ear.  He came that way from the
womb, small and bent and one-eared, the space on the left side of
his head that would normally have contained an ear having only a
tentative whorl of skin, with no opening or organs of audition.
The college flourished under his hand, troubled only by the Church's
suspicions of witchcraft, devilry, and general forbidden knowledge.

Brith Salien, the tenth President of the college, is pictured with
his wife, or the woman that many assumed was his wife.  She was in
fact a sometime bawdy-house singer and former Nun, whose talent for
the pianoforte was unmatched among college wives, and whose taste
in clothing was the talk of the back benches for years afterward.

In the portrait, she is holding her (nominal) husband's arm and
smiling most freely out of the canvas.  President Salien, by
comparison, appears hesitant, perhaps confused, perhaps a bit
puzzled about how he got there, in a yellow-lit room full of
books, standing beside a globe of the world, his arm in the arm
of this happy large-bosomed woman with the thick mole under her
right eye.  And then how he got there, high up on a wall, in a
chipped gilded frame, suspended above the heads of chattering
students, engulfed in the smell of bean soup.

The college is of ancient vintage and variable fortune.  Here
are Hunter and Courant and Geoff the Monk, lingering late on
another night, with the wind rattling the windows.

"Courant, your family has money.  They pay your fees and don't
care if you are good for anything.  But the rest of us grind
our fingers to pay for this, and then learn nothing to enrich
us."  This from the Monk, his hood thrown back and his legs
stretched out under the table.

"It is your own fault if you learn nothing."

"Pah!  The faculty are dodderers and fakes, serving their time
and collecting their dole.  I labor at the drafting boards
for pennies, and it all goes to buy booze for Professor Sniker
and his doxies.  The glory days of this place are long past;
it lives on its old repute, and our gullibility."

"Hunter, you work; is your toil at the drafting tables worth
the tutelage it buys you?"

Hunter lifted his eyes from the tabletop, where they had been
studying the pattern of scratches.  He smiled and put his
hands together.

"The work isn't hard.  And I'm here to draw in any case."

"Feh!" blew the Monk, "you say that only because you are the star
of the drafting room, and Gleel overpays you for little work,
just because your fingers are magic.  Magical fingers, he has,
and what does he draw with them?  Women's elbows!  The shadow
of a turd in the gutter.  Sheer waste."

"Are the Masters dodderers and charlatans?  How would we tell?"

"It's you that sits in endless lessons on the meaning of life
and the history of Human Civilization.  I can barely afford
pencils for Elementary Bum-Scribing."

Courant, here, threw a buttered roll at the Monk, who put up his
hood and went silent.  Hunter returned to the table top, his eyes
and fingers idly decoding the palimpsest of old gouges and knife
nicks in the brown varnished wood.

The painting at the end of the hall, the one that the light
strikes on certain spring mornings, is different in oblique
ways from the others.  Its frame is heavier, and it pictures no
definite elder of the college or the city.  It shows a man in
a red robe, thin pointed beard hanging from his thin pointed
face, squinting out of the canvas with his hand resting on a skull,
by a table full of books, in a room with odd and sketchily-drawn
apparatus barely visible behind.

The plaque on the painting, too high to be seen by anyone but
the Steward's assistant in the annual taking-down, says "The
Philosopher".  He is meant as the figure of knowledge, of the
thirst for knowledge, of the desire for understanding that so
disturbed the Church in the Presidency of ten Drummon, among others.
But the painting is a copy of an older (and much better) work,
which was itself a copy of (or, at least, inspired by) an original
portrait taken, by this time, four hundred years ago, in a different
city by the same river.

The man in the frame, or the original man whose portrait was
painted before steam was harnessed, whose portrait was then
copied by an itinerant painter of considerable skill, the copy
hanging for centuries in an armorial hall in a stone barony,
and finally copied itself into the approximate work that
hangs largely unremarked in the smell of bean soup, that man
was Seamus Archer, a contemporary and sometime colleague of
John Dee, and like him a scientist or scholar or wizard or
charlatan or seducer of wealthy idle wives, to your taste.

The skull under his hand (or the original skull under the
original hand of the original man) is the skull of a badger,
kept on a shelf for study, and brought out by the portrait
painter (the painter of that original portrait) as somehow
representative of the man, or complementary to his image.
(Then as now painters and sculptors and artists being allowed
their intuitions, their inchoate notions of proper and
improper relations of space and frame, color and shape, in
return for their willingness to live in garrets, to suffer,
to be picturesque.)  For momento mori, Seamus Archer had in
that same room a human skull, now and again used to hold a
candle and in consequence heavy with sightly wax; but the
painter did not consider that object a good fit.

The original of the book beside the skull (unremarkable in the copy
of a copy that hangs over Hunter's head as he eats, but thick and
heavy and portentious, or ominous, in reality) is the memorable
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; not the artistic but theologically
almost safe version that has come down to us (and that exists in
one and a half copies in the college's own library, in the
Medieval Art Special Reserve shelves), but the suppressed first
version, which raised questions in its text (and more disturbingly
in its illustrations) that John Dee and Seamus Archer were
glad to have asked, but that the Church (then, as now) would prefer
remain unanswered.

The other books on that same table were the journals or daily
books of Seamus Archer himself, now for the most part lost to
scholarship due to the offices of rats and bookworms and dry-rot,
with the exception of a set carefully kept behind glass in a
small private gallery outside Paris; also a volume of the
"De Polis Humanus" with its lewd illustrations, and a folio
of obscene plays by the man called Soutis Drome, both kept
at hand by this Seamus Archer both for study and for diversion
(the two were not as separate in that day as they are in
this).

At the time the portrait was taken (the original portrait, you
will recall), Archer (sometimes called the Magister Archer, or
Archer Sapienta) was at work on three books of his own.  Two,
concerning the nature of sound and the transmutation of substances
(milk into butter, water into ice, food into excrement) were to
be promulgated under his own name; the third, speculations on the
nature and origin of the world that stepped well over the line into
heresy, to be printed anonymously or (as it ultimately turned out)
over a name picked out of the air on the moment, passing into
history as the "Speculations" of one Mercutio of Egypt.  All
elegant in form and construction, almost entirely mistaken as to
fact, but closer to the truth for all of that than almost anything
else to be found at the time.

Having finished his soup and cleaned his bowl with his bread,
lingered for a long ten minutes listening to the warm voices
around him, Hunter gets up and goes out into the chilly night,
to squint at his books for an hour, and then to sleep.  Ravens
circle in the sky far above his head.


Questions for Chapter Seven

Describe two other portraits that might hang in the college
dining hall, and the lives of the persons they picture.

What is a momento mori?  If you were constructing one today,
of what would it consist?  Be specific.

Would Hunter really draw the shadow of a turd in the gutter?
Would you?  Describe the relationship between the three young
men.


The Dry Corner

Hunter wakes with an early bell, changes one set of clothes for
another, and goes out into the day.  The light is slanting down clear
blue and orange through a thin layer of cloud.  Sitting at the desk under
the window, listening to Courant snore, Hunter tries to memorize
a passage from Pliny on governance, looks out at passing birds,
waits for the next bell.  There are no classes today; he is waiting
only for his body to finish waking up.

Out in the square, his boiled wool around him against the cold and
his pouch of paper and pencils under his arm, he looks for the
hot bun vendor to break his fast.  The bun is salty and sweet
and hot, and he lets the thick pulp of it dissolve in his mouth,
casing his tongue with soft heat, before he swallows.

Halfway across the city, the corner is still there, the stolid building,
the arch and alcove in the wall.  Now the sky is nearly clear, the dawn
haze burnt or blown away by the day.  The quality of the light is fine.
Hunter sits on the pavement, propped against the inner wall of the cell,
and takes out a sheaf of paper.  Paper is the one thing the college
has in abundance.  He rubs a sheet between his fingers, feeling the
texture of the rag and the flatness of the fiber.

He draws quickly, with a quiet mind.  The frame of the page holds
half of the back wall of the alcove, the metal grate on the ground,
the rusty marks from the drip and flow of the rainwater leaking in
from above.  A few curves hint at the water itself, a stroke of
shading captures the slant of the light.  Part of Hunter watches
as another part draws, in a sort of disinterested appreciation.
And the part of his mind that itches for the pencil is, for the
moment, appeased.

He finishes one drawing and starts another.  These are not ones
that he is likely to keep, to husband and put on the wall above
his bed.  Like that picture of the roof of the house in the
meadow long ago, like most of the snippets of vision he has ever
drawn, these will be added to a pile under his bed, or folded into
a book, or given casually to a friend, a teacher, or a passerby.

The picture of Ona and Marc, with himself hinted by a few lines
between them, he gave to Ona, or left to her by default, when he
left for college, on a bright morning much like this one, the
breeze newly chilled by Autumn, and birds calling in the trees.

Here are Hunter and Marc in a tower room in the old house, a room
owned by no one (the stairs are dark and twisted, and not entirely
safe, and the floor has begun to rot), sitting as young men sit
across from each other, talking extensively of nothing, tired after
a long afternoon carrying wood to fill the bins for winter.

"What do you think I hear of Peter Kale?"

"His arms have dropped off and been eaten by bears."

"Besides that."

"His mother has been named King, and now he is a Princess, with
a castle and a garden of his own, and closets full of dresses."

"You are an ass."

"What do you hear of Peter Kale?"

"Who?"

"Hee-aww, hee-aww!"

Steps creak on the stairs, and here is Ona, her cheeks admirably
pink from the air, slightly winded from the stairs, her slim
pale body visibly taking and releasing the air, her blouse tight
cross her stomach and chest, for they are all growing, have all
grown, and clothes are clothes.  Hunter has not seen her for a
week, as she has been in town visiting an Aunt or a cousin or some
other branch of her family, all tall and pale, but none as lovely.

Marc's face lights, and Ona is in his arms, and their mouths and
bodies are together as the mouths and bodies of young people come
together, urgent but immortal, eager but with all the time in the
world.  Hunter looks at them and aches.

Ona pulls back from Marc's embrace.  "Brother," she says, although
he is not her brother as far as anyone knows, but they play at
brother and sister at the most implausible moments, "that is a
lovely welcome.  But Hunter --" and she uncoils one arm from Marc's
back, a gesture that he remembers, that he sees in his dreams for
years after, and he stands.

Her lips are sweet.  Both their arms around him, all their arms
around each other, he stands in a moment of joy.  Ona, he realizes,
has the same smell as Marc, an elusive mercurial scent of herbs and
earth.  "Three again," Marc whispers, his breath warm on Hunter's
cheek.

He adds another drawing to the pile, this one quick and simple,
a few strokes mirroring the curve of the water stain on the wall,
a piece of the archway to the street.  Then he stands and flexes
his back, stands for a moment on the tips of his shoes, crumpling
his toes.  He walks over to the inner end of the cell, where the
wall is cracked over the grating.  Looking down through the crossing
metal, he sees an unexpectedly deep space, going down into the
street into darkness, and he is reminded that the street, the sidewalk,
are just the thinnest of skins on the deep deep earth, the wilderness
on top of which all civilization floats like scum, or like the
lightest cream on a jar of milk.

He moves sideways, the better to see downward, and sees that the
wall is not only cracked but holed, and there is a space wide enough
to step into.  He does.

The space he has entered, the accidental room behind the alcove
within the arch beside the street, is a close and dusty place,
its walls the inner surfaces of the building wall, rust and
dirt hanging from the beams and joist-ends like stalactites in
a cavern.  Enough light filters in through the hole in the wall
to see that there is nothing here, nothing purposeful, just the
nests of mice, the patterns of debris blown in by the wind.  Hunter
goes out to the alcove again, gathers his drawings and his
pencils back into his pouch, and putting it under his arm slips
again through the crack, through the hole, over the grating, into
the enigmatic empty space.

There are shapes here to draw, but he is content for the moment to
stand and look.  The light from the street fades quickly as he
looks further into the cell, but his eyes adjust.  The space is
close and narrow, but now he sees that it is long, perhaps as
long as the width of the building, receding to his left into
darkness.  Carefully, he steps forward.  The light is just enough
to make out a rough scrawl on the inner side of the broken wall,
in charcoal or old paint.  A name, or a pair of names, perhaps
a date, a smudge, a line.

Many slow steps away from the entrance hole (he is a miner in a mine,
an explorer in a cavern, a philosopher following into the outer darkness
some dangerous but inexorable train of thought, one slow syllogism at
a time), where the darkness is almost impenetrable, his hand lights on
a metal railing.  Squinting into the dust, he seems to see a rough
flight of steps, leading downward.

"Lantern," he whispers to himself, and backs out of the narrow place,
back out through the crack, back out under the archway and into the
street.  Back to his room, where Courant has a lantern.

A month before, his architecture class copied some drawings of
Giovanni Piranesi.  Hunter chose two plates of the Carceri, Piranesi's
imaginary fever-dream prisons of stairs and arches and balustrades
and columns massive enough to support the world, and tiny flecks of
humans lost in the stonework.  He went home with his head full of
them.  That night he drew his own room, his hallway and his building,
in the same style, twenty times life size and full of grand and
sinister stairways, and then he drew basements and dungeons beneath
(adding on sheet after sheet of paper below the panorama of the
first two).  Stairs led to stairs led to sudden drops into vast
and stygian abysses; arches and columns supported each other in
beguiling but impossible ways, chains dangled, water dripped.  He
drew a wide wrinkled river flowing far beneath the sun, from stone
arch to stone arch and vanishing into the gloom.  He drew humans,
lost in the labyrinth or standing with their tools engraving new
names on the walls, as tiny specks of ink.

When he finished, spent and sated, the drawing covered twenty
sheets of paper.  He pushed it under his bed without looking at
it, tossed his pencils onto the desk, and collapsed into bed.
He slept without dreams that night.

Now he is walking back through the streets, lantern in hand and
pouch again under his arm, as the sun rises higher in the morning
sky.  A woman passing the other way looks at him oddly (or simply
looks at him, or looks in his direction, or looks somewhere else
entirely, but he gets the impression she has looked at him oddly),
and he wonders if it is strange to be walking quickly (for he is
walking quickly, against all habit and usage) through the streets
in the growing daylight, holding a lantern.

As he crosses a street, his eye is caught for whatever reason by a
man, or a figure, in a long dark coat, crossing the same street, one
block to his left.  Crossing the next street at the end of the next
block, he sees the man again, or another man dressed the same way,
still walking parallel to him.  There is nothing at all unusual or
noteworthy about this, he knows, but he feels a chill.  He pictures
(as in a drawing) a city full of parallel streets, and in every street
a man in a dark overcoat, all walking in the same direction, with a
long deliberate stride, quick but unhurried, all darker somehow than
the shadows around them, as if the light is gathered into them and
absorbed.

In the next block, Hunter looks both left and right, but there is
no man in a long dark coat walking parallel to him.  As he dodges into
the archway (feeling for the first time furtive, as though he should
try not to be seen, as though he should make sure no one is about or
directly paying attention to him as he slips into the bloodstream of
the building), he thinks for a moment that he glimpses the man again
(or a similarly-dressed person again), but on leaning back out and
looking up and down the street, he sees no one but a woman and child
walking away from him in one direction, and an idler facing the other
way in the other.

The best of the light is now gone from the little cell off of the
street.  Now that the sun is higher in the sky, less light reaches
into the crack, the hole in the wall, and Hunter can see even less
well once he is inside.  He does not light the lantern at once, though;
his new furtiveness brings him to hide its light as long as possible.
It occurs to him that someone must own this building, that it probably
has tenants, that he has no business poking at its fundament and
foundation.  But he slips deeper in, carefully feeling with his feet
as the darkness becomes absolute (the only light the blue smudge of
the hole behind him; ahead is nothing).  When he finds the cold metal
railing with his hand, he stops and lights the lantern.  Now he can see.


Questions for Chapter Eight

Hunter has found an odd place in the city, and gone to explore it.
What is he likely to find?  What significance is there to the fact
that he drew the crack in the wall before he knew it could be
walked into?  That he drew it before he entered it?

Who was Giovanni Piranesi, and what are his Carceri?  There is an
obvious connection between the vast dungeons that Hunter drew, inspired
by Piranesi, and the enticing staircase that he has seen (or thinks
he has seen) in the dark place within the wall.  Find at least one
other connection between a drawing of Hunter's and the events of
this chapter.

How do Hunter's thoughts on looking down into the grating prefigure
what he finds within the wall?  How do they relate to the man that
Hunter saw, or thinks he saw, walking parallel to him on his way to
the crack with the lantern?  How do either or both of these relate
to his memory of a reunion with Marc and Ona in the old house by the
meadows?



Metal Rods, Heartbeat

The lantern's glow illuminates dirty walls converging to a point,
and a metal staircase (once painted, now bare metal and lines and
patches of dark green paint, clots of dust) leading down under
them into another narrow space.

Hunter goes carefully down the first few stairs.  The lantern
bobs with his steps, and light and shadow swing unnervingly
around him.  A step, a step, a step, and he feels himself going down
below the skin of the world; not just into a basement, but into
a channel in the body of the earth.  A step, a step, a step, the
hand that holds his pouch also holding the cold railing, a step,
a step, and he is down below the skin and in the flesh.

The wall to his left ends, and the narrow space opens out into
a larger chamber.  Metal rods cross the space in all directions,
seemingly at random, reinforcing the walls and the stairs against
unknown stresses, or holding together the mass of the building
above.  At a distance, where the light of the lantern (more
feeble than he remembered, expected, less like a small sun than
a tiny uncertain moon) begins to be swallowed up by the bars
and lost, something like a heavy chain is draped across a bar,
leading down into the dark below.  A step, and the space is
full of echoes for an instant.

This is a thing Hunter needs to draw.  He sets the lantern
carefully on a step (there are railings on both sides now, but
they are thin and their posts are far apart, and one could
easily fall, although it is impossible to say to where).  He
sits down on the step below it, rolls his shoulders, takes out
paper and pencil, and looks up.  His eyes roam over the rods and
the shadows and the railings, and the logic of the image imposes
itself on him.

For a month or more, years before, Hunter had drawn nothing but
bits of houses, cooking utensils, pots, the legs of furniture.

"These are wonderful," Mother Canna said one evening, after a
light dinner, looking over a handful spread on the table.  He
had left them scattered around his room, pushed under things and
crumpled out of the way.  Mother Canna had gathered a dozen of them
up and brought them into the open, like kittens rescued from drowning.

"Marc says I am an odd duck," Hunter replied, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, watching the shadows of the fire playing over the
underside of the table.

"What is this one?"

"Hm.  That's the left side of the teapot, that curve there, and
that line is..."

"The side of the window," she said, finishing his sentence for him.
"What is the shape that they make?"

"Just a shape."

This place, Hunter thinks sitting on the metal stair and watching
himself draw, is the perfect place to lose track of time.  His
fingers sketch lines, a few heavy a few light, for the closest of
the rods, the light of the lantern, the feeling of depth and
deepness.  The chain enters the picture as a trio of curves.
The pencil sketches the shape of the darkness.  He stops, looks
at it once, slides it folded into his pouch, and starts another.
This one is a part of his boot, a piece of step, and the rods
going like crazy ladders down into darkness.

Both pictures secure in his pouch (will he put them on his wall,
give them away, stuff them under his bed, burn them?  no need to
decide), he picks up the lantern, shakes his head slightly
(disoriented for a moment as the world changes from subject to
place), and continues down the steps.  What time is it?

A step, a step, a step, and he feels that his steps on the
stairs are the heartbeat, or echoes of the heartbeat, of this
place.  A step, and below he sees the hint of a floor.  The
rods are thinning out.  The far wall may be approaching.

A step, a step, a step, and his is only a few steps from the
bottom, where something like a room, or something like a
corridor, stretches away in two directions into the dark.
He thinks of Geoff the Monk, the catacombs of an abbey, a
story by Poe, the sound of water.

A step, a step, and he is down.  The ground is packed earth
with chunks of cement, or cracked cement with thickly layered
dirt.  Sound echoes, but is smothered at once.  The smell is
moist and earthy, but sterile.  His face is cold, the hand
holding the lantern is hot.

At the bottom, a decision.  To the right is a corridor into
the darkness.  Ahead is another, perhaps slightly wider.  Hunter
thinks of the mass of the building above him, the streets, the
steam tunnels.  What is this abandoned space?  He has strayed
before into the intimate functional spaces of buildings, into
the halls where servants move, the stone and cement places where
trucks deliver and men pile crates, where stacks of chairs sit
for days or years, where parts of broken machines are tossed.

All those places have their people, their habitues; for all that
they seem deserted and forgotten when you happen into one
(chasing a shadow, looking for a compelling shape, finding
something that needs to be drawn, or a place to sit).  For
someone, each of those spaces is familiar, routine, the office,
the playground, the closet.  This place feels emptier than
that.

There are three ways he might go, of course.  Right, or ahead,
or back up the stairs, toward the light, the street, and places
where he has a right to be.  He thinks again of the man, or men,
or person or persons in the long dark coat (or coats), striding
through the city a block away from him.  Has that person gotten
to his (her, their) destination (destinations), gone inside,
taken off the coat and hung it on the hook?  Is he (are they)
sitting now, reading a newspaper, feet on a footstool?

His foot kicks something on the ground.  A bottle, old and
dusty and broken, half-buried in the dirt until the toe of
his boot dislodged it.  Near it the rotted ends of two ancient
cigar butts are returning to the soil.  People have been here,
but not recently.  He moves forward, into the dark.  Does he
hear the sound of water?  Or does he imagine it in the silence?

On the righthand wall, there is a door.  It is metal, painted
a drab brown.  There are slats in it, at eye level, perhaps
to let air in, or out.  The knob is pale metal, dusty but
not dirty, and it shines dully in the light of the lantern.
Hunter puts out his hand (why is he reluctant to touch this
dust, no thicker or dirtier than the dust that must have been
on the railing?), and grips the knob in his fingers.  But it
will not turn.  It is locked, or frozen or stuck with age.
He feels no desire to throw his shoulder against the door,
or even put much force into turning the knob.

He walks onward.

There are gaps in the base of the wall on either side of him,
dark rectangular holes extending up two feet from the floor,
each perhaps twenty inches wide.  Standing, he can see only
darkness inside them.  Kneeling down and holding out the lantern,
some seem to be meaningless shallow rectangles cut from the
wall; others are deeper, going back further than he can see into
ducts, or rooms, or further open places.  There are a dozen
altogether.  He sits against one wall, puts his back on the
space between two of the gaps, and draws the gaps on the other
side, the shadows cast by the lantern, and hints of strange
rich spaces beyond them.  He folds the picture and puts it
into his pouch.

Standing up and reaching for the lantern, his foot slips on
a round stone and he falls, right arm and cheek scraping
against the hard earth.  He rolls over onto his back, rubbing
his face (is the skin broken? is there a cut on his cheek
with the dirt caked in it?).  He shakes his head and gets to
his feet, picks up the lantern, and walks onward.  A step,
a step, and now he feels his own heartbeat (the sting in
his cheek, the pace of his steps) echoing the earth his
is embedded in.

Another door, brown-painted metal and square vanes, this one
on the left.  His right arm, holding the lantern, aches.  He
tries the knob, and it turns.

Something Written on a Scrap of Paper in the Room Hunter is
About to Enter

Imagine the color of work.
Imagine the color of tiredness.
Imagine the colors of birth and death.

How fast does the world change?
How long was your childhood?
How long will you live?


In the Dark

Klara is sitting on her sofa with her legs on the low table in
front of her, resting.  It is the end of the day and her feet
are sore.  She rubs her stomach through the thin dress with the
fingers of her left hand, and lies her head back against the worn
cushion.

"Oh, little creature," she murmurs, "aren't we tired?"  And
she hums a cradle-song to the child in her body, and she smiles.

Down under the skin of the world, Hunter opens the door; it opens
with a hard push, breaking the stiffness of the hinges, scraping
against dirt and debris around the lower edge.  He reaches into
the room with the lantern.  The space is musty and compact, neither
small nor large, dirty with the dust of years.  There are sticks
that might once have been furniture, there is something like a
chair, something like a table.  Leaves, or papers, or both, are
drifted on the floor, piled in rough piles, overlapping and
spilling into one another.

Something square and heavy-looking, the most definite object in the
room, sits on the probable table.  The walls are gray and patterned.
A cluster of pipes crosses the ceiling, running in a jagged zig-zag
from one corner to another, coming and going through holes in the
walls.

The patterns on the wall catch Hunter's gaze, and he holds the
lantern closer.  They are worn by time and damp, faded to blankness
in places, but he can still read them, and they are in a language
he knows.  These are drawings, drawings of enormous complexity and
peculiar form, drawings of birds and buildings, of birds that might
be buildings, of buildings that might be trees.  The wall just
beside the door is covered with them, bold sweeps of line and tiny
intricate details (surviving only in the smoothest and driest bits
of wall), scrawled and inscribed on the grey wall in something
charcoal (inky, midnight) black.  And entwined in the drawings
there are words.

Hunter closes his eyes tightly; he can hear the beat of his
heart in his ears.  When he opens his eyes the lines are still
there.

Some of the drifts on the floor of the room are indeed leaves, and
fragments of peeling paint, and flat clumps of debris and dirt.
Others are scraps of paper, some rotted to nothing, a few blank,
but the rest covered with the same universe, the same riot of
line and shade and unreadable meaning.  Hunter struggles to keep
his gaze on a single piece, to begin some sort of understanding
by holding his eye on a single something, an unmixed object.

Ridiculous to be so overcome here under the world.  In the light
of the sun, he thinks, this would be comprehensible.  But in the
dim yellow of the lantern, he is for this moment quite helpless.
Kneeling on the ground, he puts his hand on the chair (it is,
he decides, in fact a chair), tests it for steadiness, and sets
the lantern on its seat.  With the light at least steady, if still
dim and unilluminating, he takes a breath and sits back on his
haunches.  The room waits in silence.

Here, on this bit of paper in his hand, the rest ignored, not
there.  This bit of paper, the one between his fingers, is
torn and moldy and rotted at two edges.  Drawn on it is part of
the head of a bird, or an odd graceful awkward shape that could
be the head of a bird, and behind it part of a staircase, and
written on the staircase smudged spidery words, most of which
he cannot read.  "Mother", perhaps, and "climbing", and something
like "afraid".  He puts the scrap, carefully, in his pouch.

On another scrap, no discernible mark survives.  Another is
only a dry leaf, that sheds in his fingers.  Another, another
among the hundreds or thousands or millions scattered in this
cell in the body of the earth, has two intersecting triangles,
or the corners of squares, and where they cross there is an eye,
and the eye is a fountain.  The water of the fountain (the fountain
that is an eye) rises into the air and forms a word, or a name,
in some language Hunter has never seen.

He closes his eyes again for a moment, but the room is not
spinning.  When he opens them again, he is looking at the shape
on the table.  He takes up the lantern again.

His way to the table passes through more drifts of pattern and
dirt.  He does not drop the lantern, there is no explosion, no
sheets of flame in the old paper and dry leaves, no cleansing
destroying conflagration.  He bends and takes a few papers in his
fingers as he steps across the room, passes them through the
light (a city of faces, a monster of string and bolts, a tribe
of mice carrying a bloody crown, a mass of close print too small
to read), lets them fall.  On the table, of course, the shape
is a massive impossible book.

Leona and Shaytl joined the refugees, the endless stolid chains
of people, families, carts, honking engines, leaving the smoking
city.  The way was long and slow.  After some days they reached the
country, the place they had sent their children, and found it
startlingly untouched by the war.  They held their small ones,
and they wept.

Leona's hearing never returned, except that if you put your lips
to her ear (and only Shaytl and her children and her sister did
this) and spoke loudly, she might sometimes hear a whisper of
your words.  Over the next years, at the same time that she
learned to listen by watching the shapes of mouths, her voice
drifted and became odd.  Shaytl and the children understood her
perfectly, but to neighbors and strangers she might have been speaking
an alien tongue.  She became quieter.  Her leg did heal, although it
always pained her in the autumn.


Questions for Chapters Nine and Ten

How likely is it that a building in a city would have a crack
in the wall, leading to a long flight of stairs down to a dark
mysterious hallway?  Is Hunter surprised by the existence of the
place?  Is he more or less surprised than you would be?

What sort of lantern is Hunter carrying?  Is it, for instance,
an oil lamp, or an electric light?  Whose lantern is it?

What might be the function of the set of low gaps in the walls,
either functionally or symbolically?  What is the significance
of Hunter's fall?  Do you think he has cut his face?

What are Hunter's feelings on discovering the drawings in
the dirty room?  How do these drawings relate to his own
drawings?  How are they similar?  How are they different?

In Chapter Ten, Hunter's examination of the scraps of paper,
and his discovery of the book, are framed by brief sketches
of women: Klara and Hunter's Aunt Leona.  How are these
women similar, as they appear in this chapter, and how are
they different?  What relationship might their stories have
to the main story of Hunter?


What the Book Said

Hunter tests the table with his hand, decides that it is a table,
and it is strong enough.  He sets the lantern down, next to the
book.  It is thick, thick and huge, or seems huge in the light of
the lantern and the strangeness of the place.  The covers are heavy
leather.  He kneels on the dirty floor (filthy leaves beneath one
knee, sheets of paper beneath the other, pictures of flames, of
children carrying crosses, of enormous roses growing out the
windows of palaces) and opens the book carefully, slowly, not to
destroy anything within.

The pages of the book are not bound, not because the binding has
dissolved with age, but because they were never bound.  They are
hardly pages, in fact, less pages than single sheets of paper,
variable and irregular in size and shape, that have come by
accident to rest, squeezed and compacted together, between the
heavy covers on this table, somewhere in the flesh of the world.

The first page, the first sheet, his eyes rest on is covered half
with writing, half with a drawing of a weed growing beside a stone
wall.  This is what the writing says.

 Ten Days After Drowning

 My imprisonment continues.  There is no way to tell day from night.
 When last I awoke, there was a woman in the corridor.  Her body was
 composed of flames, and her hands were the heads of cats.  She
 spoke to me in the language of the Gods.  Thirty years before I
 was born, she said, the Gods in their wrath caused a great storm.
 The storm engulfed the land for many miles up and down the coast;
 the cities of Arsh and Manemnon-Tier sank into the sea, and leopards
 spoke with the voices of men.  For thirty years, the anger of the Gods
 did not cool, until with my birth they were finally mollified.  The
 cause of their wrath is forgotten now, even by the Gods themselves.

 I am hungry.  This room, and the room of the black curtains, are
 both filled with food.  I am thirsty.  This room, and the room of
 the ambitious machines, are both filled with drink.  My eyes are
 heavy with sleep.  You shall be my cushion.  I shall plump your
 thighs and your belly under my head, curl my body up on your
 body, and sleep.  While I sleep, you will weave me dreams out of
 the threads of memory.

That is the first page, its drawing and its writing.  Hunter sits
for a long time touching it with his fingers, moving his eyes over
it by the light of the lantern.  "Ten Days After Drowning" it says.
He shakes his head, turns to the next sheet.  It also has its image
and its writing, its shapes and its words.  The image is abstract and
disturbing; perhaps a face or a crouching animal.  The words are
smudged, but with his eyes close to the paper (it smells of ink and
age and damp) he can read them all.

 Eleven Days After Drowning

 The world has been changed while I slept.  Where the corridor was,
 there is a field of wheat.  Where the window was, there is a portrait
 of an asp, holding a baby in its teeth.  The mice have eaten the
 feast that was on the table, but I broke my fast with the bread
 that they left behind.  It was savory, and tasted of meat.  When
 I was a child, we made cheese from the bones of old men.

 Have I described the conditions of my imprisonment?  I
 am permitted to eat and drink all that I can find myself.
 I am permitted to write, but I may not read what I have written.
 I am required to make my own clothes from cloth that drops from
 the ceiling when my back is turned.  In all other things, I am my
 own master, except that I must remain in these rooms forever, and
 I may not speak without first closing my eyes.  These rules
 were explained to me when I arrived, by one of the children
 that rule here.  His name is Tenderness.

The writing is, mostly, delicate and dense, the writing of spiders or
watchmakers.  Here and there (the word "wheat", the phrase "In all
other things") it becomes larger, darker, more bold.  The shapes of
the letters are that of an old-fashioned hand, but their connections
are odd and awkward.  There are wide spaces between the sentences.

Turning the page carefully over, Hunter is suddenly chilled.  A gust
of wind, dank and unpleasant wind, has blown in through the hole
in the corner, one of the holes that accommodate the pipes in the
ceiling of the room, and blown out again by the open door.  The
lantern flickers, and Hunter suddenly sneezes, a loud and violent
sneeze that takes him completely by surprise.  The sneeze throws
his head forward, and his cheek stings.  Touching it with his
fingers, he feels pain and stickiness; the fall in the corridor
did break the skin.  He feels stiff and sore and cold.  Another
gust of wind breaks through the room, and the piles on the floor
move restlessly.

"One more," he whispers, and turns many pages at once, the bulk
of them thick and solid in his hand.  This page is blank, except
for a small square and a circle, perfectly ordinary, in the center.
The next page has a thick diagonal line, surrounded on both sides
by the most delicate, intricate, and meaningless curves imaginable,
thousands of arcs on a sheet the size of his palm.  On the next,
only the writing, spider-scratches in uneven lines across the paper.

  One Week After the Maiden

  Now I name my days after the frozen maiden sleeping in her tube
  of ice.  She has been there at the last seven of my wakings.
  She is the steadiest thing in what remains of the world.  So
  I name my days for her.

  Ways that the human body may be transformed.  The human body
  may be transformed into ice.  The human body may be transformed
  into vegetable matter such as trees, grass, or moss.  The human
  body may be transformed into a mass of snakes.  The human body
  may be transformed into clockwork.  The human body, additionally,
  may be transformed into glass, water, or air.  It is not known
  whether the human body may be transformed into light.

  To transform the human body into glass, first purify the essential
  spirit.  The essential spirit may be purified by a regime of
  fasting, abstinence, and chastity.  The essential spirit may be
  purified by an all-consuming joy.  The essential spirit may be
  purified by intense concentration.  Once the essential spirit is
  purified, the material substrate must be stabilized.  To stabilize
  the material substrate, bathe the body in the light of the sun
  refracted through crystal.  To stabilize the material substrate,
  hold the body motionless in extreme cold for one day.  Once the
  material substrate is stabilized, the dross may be transformed.
  To transform the dross, soak the body in the alcohol extract of
  lemon, diluted in one hundred parts of pure water.  To transform
  the dross, wrap the body in spun glass and hold it motionless in
  the darkness for one year.

  In this way, the human body may be transformed into glass.

  The process for transforming the human body into ice is
  recorded on the forehead of the frozen maiden.  The words
  are written in the language of the Gods, and I cannot
  read them.  The process for transforming the human body
  into air is written in the clouds.  The words are written
  in the language of the Gods, and I cannot read them.

Hunter shivers again, and sneezes.  He touches his forehead.  He
gets to his feet, suddenly, spasmodically.  He picks up the lantern.
The book, the hundreds of scraps and leaves and clods of dirt on the
floor, lie motionless in the swaying light of the lamp.  He puts out
one hand, in a vague grasping motion, but then (leaves and scraps
scuffled under his feet, a picture of two lions tied in a knot,
a picture of a burning carriage, a picture of dust) he turns and
rushes (a slow, awkward, sickly rush) from the room, back into
the corridor, past the gaps in the walls and the place where he
fell (is there blood of his there, mixed in the dirt?  blood of
anyone else?), and he puts his foot on the bottom step of those
long metal steps.

The next morning, he is lying in his bed, tangled in the sheets.
The human body, he thinks, may be transformed into a mass of
snakes.  Then he opens his eyes and groans.

"You're a mess."  Courant, sitting at his desk, looks at Hunter
over his shoulder.

"I don't remember..."

"You stumbled in here just before sunset last night.  I think
you had a fever."

"Just before sunset?  But, I--."  Hunter shakes his head, touches
his fingers to his cheek.  Dirt and a scab.  The sheets are grimy.

"You weren't dying, so I just showed you the bed.  At least you
returned my lantern.  Did someone beat you up?  Should I call the
doctor?"

"No, no I'm all right.  Just tripped..."

Hot water, light, the sun on his feet, a sticky salt bun from the
vendor, feel good.  He is clean, he has a plaster on his cheek,
he has stretched and swung his arms around himself, and changed his
sheets.  But he is lightheaded, and perhaps, he wonders, a little
feverish still.  But he has energy, not the drained aching tiredness
of fever.

"So what happened?"

"It's hard to explain."

"So don't tell me."

"I went, well, into a building, down some stairs."

"What building?"

"Just a building, a place I noticed from the street."

"And you went in?"

A sudden thought.  "Did I have my pouch with me?"

"Don't you always?  I think you kicked it under the bed."

Hunter stoops, pulls the pouch from under the bed (among the
scattered leaves of drawings, drawings of the heads of women
seen from the window, water flowing down a drain, the shape
of a lamp; no burning fingers, no women with bodies of fire
and hands of cats), dumps out the contents.  Blank paper,
pencils, an apple, some drawings.

"So this is where you were?"

"There's a crack in the side of the building, just there, and
these are stairs going down into a sort of basement."

"And you tumbled down the stairs."

"I just tripped once in the dark."

"Breaking and entering for the sake of your art.  I suppose
if you'd been caught they would have believed you were just
looking for things to draw."

Hunter smiles, a bit weakly, and gets back into bed, into
the clean sheets.  He is at once content and confused.
Courant puts on his jacket and leaves for a class.  The
process for transforming the human body into air is
written on the clouds.  Hunter closes his eyes.

Questions for Chapter Eleven

What is the significance of the repeated metaphor of the
skin and flesh of the earth?  Support your answer with
passages from the text.

How are the images and texts that Hunter sees in this
chapter similar to the drawings and stories we have seen
earlier?  How are they different?

If you were to write a question about this chapter, what
would it be?  How might an observant reader answer it?



One and Two, Two and Two, One and Three

Weeks before, the midwife had pressed her fingers into
Klara's stomach (wrinkled knobby fingers, but still delicate,
something like tender, on the vibrant smooth swell of her
belly).

"What do you think?" she had asked Klara, smiling up at her,
deep creases at the corners of her mouth upturned.

"I think this is the most squirming child ever quickened," she
said, "and that I may never sleep again."  Although in fact the
writhing and poking of the little limbs at night woke her only
into a gentle doze, a happy awareness of being full.  Now that
the sickness was over, her pregnancy lay lightly on her.

The midwife's cracked smile broadened further, "My dear, that
is because you are carrying two."

Now Klara lies on her sore back on the bed, sheets piled all around
her, with her knees in the air and her body straining.  The
midwife has given her a specific, and she is not thinking well,
but her muscles are clenching in that demanding rhythm, and she
is shouting from the pain.

She has told the midwife that the father is dead, although she
hopes that is not true.  In the shallow places between the impossible
contractions of her body, she thinks of him, the broad planes of
his shoulders, the rich pale brown of his hair, the muscles of his
arms.  Memories of his face and his body are some comfort to her,
and the midwife is some comfort to her, and she still hopes this
will be an easy birth, as her mother long ago told her that she was
an easy birth.  The pain and pressure begin again, and despite herself
she thinks, Twice?

Shaytl and Leona sit in gray wooden chairs on the porch of a house.
He is robust, aging into size and strength like a big cat.  She
is small and frail now, and looks ten years older than her husband,
though in fact she is five years younger.  They watch the children
playing in the meadow, passing in and out of the house.

"The children do you good," she says in her personal voice, her eyes
smiling on him.

"Look at those two rabbits, hand in hand down to the river."  He rumbles
and puts his hands on his knees, benignly regarding the world.  (When
he speaks, he turns his head automatically toward her, so she can see
his lips.)

"Children's hands," she says, "what does it mean?"

"It is good to see them touching each other.  It is good when people
reach out beyond themselves, learn kindness, learn to look for someone
else.  Two rabbits hand in hand."

"Ah, Shaytl," she says, reaching a thin arm across to smooth a strand
of hair off of his forehead, "two can be as cruel as one."

Hunter wakes again at noon, his eyelids sticky and his mouth tasting
of something vile.  He rises and washes again, swings his arms around
him again, changes his clothes, and sits at the desk in the light
from the window.  He has missed, he realizes, a handful of classes,
and he has lost something like a day out of his memory.  I may not
speak, he thinks, without first closing my eyes.

He takes from the floor a handful of mostly blank paper, a set of
pencils, an apple, and stuffs them back into his pouch.  He puts one
sheet of paper on the desk, and takes one pencil in his fingers.  He
imagines the room, the door forced open, the pipes in the ceiling,
the papers, the table, the silence.  He draws a rough sketch from
memory, frowns at it, tosses it onto the floor.  He stands, and
puts the pencil back into the pouch.  His eye lights on the postcard
and the copy (not a copy, but a similar picture, a picture brought
to mind by the postcard) that lie on the desk.  He picks them up and
puts them into the pouch as well, and goes out to find food.  At a
narrow table, he eats warm bread and yellow cheese.

In class in the studio, his hand is as sure as ever, but his own
pictures (a cloud, the corner of a table, the monumental column
they have been set to copy) puzzle him.  The words, he thinks, are
written in the language of the Gods.  He shakes his head.  Finishing
the assigned drawing, he takes another piece of paper, and draws a
face.  Ona's face, drawn with more detail and care than he uses on
faces, the curve of remembered lips, the pale arcs of her hair, the
rounded ears and placid eyes.  Beside her, looking at her from behind,
he draws another face, Marc's, the shadow and reflection of Ona,
his lips fuller and eyes rounder.  Behind them a few curves are
trees, clouds, the world.  He draws slowly and thoughtfully.

When the class ends and the other students stand and leave, Hunter
is still there, finishing the picture, the shading under Ona's
cheekbones, the slant of Marc's eyebrows.  The next class files in,
and he looks up in surprise, gathers his things, and goes out.

"You are all asleep today!" the Professor bellows, standing among
them in the bright dusty room, whose windows are closed now against
the gathering chill.  "Where are your minds?"  And this launches
him onto a discourse about mind, and attention, and the locus of
consciousness.  The ancients, he says, thought that the spirit was
in the heart, or in the liver.

"Now," he says, at ease again in his chair, no longer concerned
if his students are asleep, scratching his scalp with an idle hand,
"now we think that consciousness is in the brain, and why should
we be any less stupid than the ancients?"

Hunter is quiet at dinner, sitting with his friends and acquaintances
under the high ceiling and the eyes of Daniel Prado, Arkity ten Drummon,
Brith Salien and the dancer, Seamus Archer, the Presidents and the
Steward's wife.  He eats chicken stew, the flavors warm and familiar
in his mouth.

Although he slept until noon, he is fuddled and sleepy early in the
night.  He yawns hugely, to Courant's puzzled amusement, and crawls
again into bed.  He is asleep at once.  He dreams of a woman whose
hands are the heads of cats, and whose body is transformed into glass
by an all-consuming joy.

The next morning he awakens early, or early for a dreamy slightly
dissolute student of art and the history of thought, takes his
pouch of pencils and paper from under the bed (pencils and paper
and still that apple, gradually becoming bruised, the postcard and
the picture), and steals from the room.  The sky is overcast, but the
air is sweet with a promise of decay and renewal.  There is no real
wind, but breezes ruffle the fallen leaves and Hunter's hair.

There is a large and prosperous shop in the city, two blocks
north of the line between Hunter's bed and the drawing studio.
It is full of objects of all kinds, edible and useful, elegant
and plain.  It is full also of clerks and proprietors, the
servants of wealthy city folk, students with pocket-money, women
with dogs on leashes, the sound of doors opening and closing,
the smell of dust and autumn.

Hunter goes to this shop (not that his pockets are overflowing
with money, not that he does not owe Courant for two dinners
and a breakfast), and at this shop he purchases a lantern,
a bright lantern, a lantern that the clerk assures him will
light a dark room as though it were day.  It is heavy and
squat, but it gleams on the counter like a coiled star, and
Hunter can, barely, afford it.  He also buys a handful of
paper bags, and a large cloth sack, and stuffs them empty
and folded into his pouch.

He crosses the city, again with lamp in hand and pouch under
his arm.  He looks up and down the streets as he goes, but
(except for one tiny glimpse, far away and easy to discount)
there is no sign of a walker in a heavy dark coat, dogging
his footsteps a block, or a mile, or an inch, away.  The
clouds thicken as he walks.

For the third time, the building is still there, the arch
in the wall.  This time, three young women, perhaps students
themselves (at his college or some other, or strayed for an
hour from some school for young women, or perhaps servants
on a free day, strolling the city in their best clothes),
are standing and talking by the arch, blocking its mouth.
The tallest of the three, a dark girl with a very red
arrogant mouth and hoops in her ears, is addressing the
other two as Hunter comes within sight of them.  He stops
and stands by a light post, pretending to look at the
bills and urgings plastered to it.  He can barely hear
her voice, carried to him or kept from him by the variable
breeze.

"Hardly," he hears her say, and "what does that" and "amazing"
and possibly "foolish little", and then they are all three
laughing, and they put their arms around each other's
shoulders (the tall one in the center, the fair ones on
either side) and stride off down the sidewalk.  Hunter
watches them go, and when they turn a corner and are gone
he walks to the alcove, looks to his left and right (the
street is far from deserted, but no one is watching him in
particular, everyone is intent on their own business, their
own thoughts, their own objects of pursuit or goads to
flight), and goes into the space in the building's side,
where the gray light of the sky barely penetrates.

He sits again, out of something like habit, and takes his
pouch from under his arm.  This morning he draws, beside
an imagined arch more graceful and soaring than this one, three
figures, or one shape, with three heads and six feet, and in
drawing it he makes it both beautiful (beguiling, erotic,
strong with a vital and enticing strength) and disturbing,
the six legs not being entirely the legs of three young women,
but also the six legs of some truly six-legged and unnatural
beast.  He holds the picture away from himself at arm's length,
and smiles.

Then he stuffs it carelessly into his pouch, stands up, and
moves to the back of the cell.  Within the hole in the wall, it
is very dark.  He steps in, and lights the lamp.

  A Hundred Years Ago

  A man sits in a cramped space, writing by a single short
  guttering candle.  On the surface of the table, or desk,
  or counter where he writes, objects are scattered in
  the circle of the light.  Two knives, the small pitted skull
  of a weasel, an empty bottle and a full bottle, folded papers
  and crumpled papers, a crust of bread, a piece of woven
  cloth.  From somewhere above him comes the sudden sound of
  a bird's wings.

  He sits with his face close to the paper, because his eyes
  are not strong.  The sun dazzles them, and on bright days he
  does not go abroad.  In the evening, and under the clouds,
  he goes up and down the lanes, and children run from him and
  follow in his wake, and never dare to throw stones.

  Under the table, in the darkness, (but he knows where they
  are; he needs no light to lay his hand to anything in this
  room, for it is a small room, and only he touches these things),
  lie two stacks of books, worth more (to those willing to buy
  them, to those who can read them) than the tiny house (once
  the base of a windmill) in which the room cowers, worth more
  than the piece of land it sits on.

  In his youth, he was prone to rage.  Frustrated by life, by
  failure, by a fellow, he would stamp his feet, flail with his
  arms (thin pathetic arms when he was a child, large and more
  dangerous arms when he was older), and his face would turn
  red with the pressure of wrath.  He would hit, punch, kick at
  people and walls, and he would take things in his hand (tightly
  in his hand, his fingers pulling hard against his palm) and
  hurl them away from him, and if they broke, broke loudly, he
  would feel an instant of satisfaction.

  Once in a fit of overwhelming rage he suddenly put his hands
  to his chest and fell to the floor, and lay there white and
  still.  When he awoke (and he did awaken, against the expectations
  of most who saw him fall, the ashen pallor of his face, the
  twitching quiet of his body), he was weak and unsteady.  He
  knew his rage would kill him if he allowed it to return.
  Now he sits in the dark, shrunken and quiet, and allows
  any hint of rage he feels to flow unimpeded out his pen
  and onto the page.


Returns

In the narrow place past the hole in the wall, Hunter lights
the lantern.  In the brightness of his light, he walks inward,
and stops, and stoops to squint at the black writing (or drawing,
or scrawl) on the inner wall.  He cannot make out the letters,
only old smudged shapes.  Two names, he decides, standing bent
over with the lantern held above his head, his face almost
pressed to the wall.  "Karel and Annota", or "Karl and Anna",
or "Karen and Andreas".  Was it one writer, he wonders, or
two?  An unrequited lover, writing his name here with his
beloved's for the magical effect of this obscure space; or
two lovers, cuddled close here in the private dark, recording
their own (or each other's) names side by side, to pin the
passing moment to reality?

He straightens and continues inward.

The metal stair is still there, the cold metal tube, bar, of
railing.  The lantern is not as bright as he had hoped, no
brighter perhaps than Courant's, no brighter than an ambitious
moon.  The rods and hanging chain inhabit the space in the
same bewildering complexity.  He does not stop, not this time,
to draw them.  His mind touches the image of descent through
and below the skin of the earth (a step, a step, a step, the
rhythm of the heartbeat of the earth echoing his steps), but
he will not dwell on it, will not this time let it oppress
him.  He reaches the bottom quickly (a minute, perhaps two
or three; not an hour, by no means a day, nothing like a year
or a lifetime).  The lantern illuminates the junction, where
the two corridors meet at the base of the stairs.  Not
quite like day, he thinks.

He holds the lantern high and looks down the corridor to the
right, the way he has never been.  The light does not penetrate
very far.  There are no visible features there, only stone
walls vanishing quickly into blackness.  Nothing to draw his
eye, or his mind, or his feet (the shadows are deep, but what
are they shadows of?).  He walks forward, the other way, the
way to the room of the table and the chair and the book, looking
at the walls as he walks, peering into the dark, looking down
for the marks of his own feet on the dirt ground (he does not find
them; is the earth too hard packed, did he leave no prints in his
last passing in and out, or does he only overlook them, or have
they been swept away, or has he perhaps never been here before,
despite what seems to be in his memory?).

  Sin

  The dome of the sky is broken by sin.  The skin of the
  Earth is broken by sin.  By sin and the odour of sin,
  the human body is transformed into a frog, a flock of
  geese, a school of fish.  My sin is the sin of rage, and
  the sin of self-regard.  The sin of my parents was the
  sin of generation.  The sins of my children shall be the
  sin of indolence, the sin of curiosity, the sin of pride.

  Foxes are without sin, and rabbits are without sin.  Sin
  lives in darkness, and in the sun.  Eels are without sin.
  The hairs on the back of the arm are without sin.  The
  sins of owls are large and quiet, with wings as silent as
  the wings of owls.  The sins of men are small and
  multitudinous, bright and small as the eyes of men.

The room is the same as before, the same darkness (the light
of this lamp is, if anything, dimmer than the other, and no
more steady), the same piles and drifts of leaves and scraps,
the same pipes in the ceiling, the book heavy and enigmatic
where he left it.  He stands without moving for a moment, in
the open door (passing the locked door, he turned his eyes away
from it; passing the low gaps in the wall, he wondered why
they were there, and did not stop to draw them).  His arms
are cold, and he shivers, but he goes to the center of the
room, sets his pouch on the table next to the book, and the
lantern next to that, takes a scrap of paper from the floor
under the table, and reads about sin.  Beside the text on the
page is drawn a single human leg, covered with hair.

He lifts the book from the table carefully.  It sticks for an
instant, the lower cover and the table's surface having begun
to forget that they are separate things.  There is nothing
under it, no stray sheets trapped under the book.  He clears
the top of the table (besides the book, the pouch, the lamp,
there were only a few dry and feathery leaves, a shoal of dirt
along one edge), and puts the book back down.  He opens his pouch
and takes out a few brown paper bags.  When he pulls them out,
the postcard (the woman still sitting, looking to one side,
her skirt hanging from her legs) flutters out onto the floor.
He picks it up and looks at it for a moment (grainy monochrome
indistinct in the uncertain light) and puts it back into the
pouch.

  Three Days After Drowning

  I arrange my things around me, although they will be moved or
  stolen while I sleep.  I hang a lamp from the ceiling, although
  it will be moved or stolen while I sleep.  I put a pot of water
  on the table, although it will be moved or stolen while I sleep.
  I pile my books at the foot of the bed, although they will be moved
  or stolen while I sleep.  I clear the objects from under the
  table, although new ones will appear there while I sleep.

  When last I woke, there were under the table a hundred
  figures of animals.  The shape of each was softened and
  distorted, like wax before the fire, although each one was
  solid and hard.  I take the half-melted figures from under
  the table, and array them on the floor between the bed and
  the wall, although they will be moved or stolen while I sleep.

  Through all its history, humankind has speculated on the
  nature of the forces that move and steal objects while we
  sleep.  Through all its history, humankind has speculated
  on the nature of the forces that cause to appear under the
  table, while we sleep, a hundred figures of animals, their
  shapes softened and distorted, like wax before the fire.

  I see that until this moment I have not sufficiently
  appreciated the inconstancy of this place.  It is not only
  the walls that change.  It is not only the floor that
  changes.  It is not only the contents of the room that
  change.  It is not only the ceiling that changes.  It is
  not only the smell of the air.  It is not only the posit