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 position
  of the door.  It is not only the number of the windows.

Hunter puts the page about sin, with the picture of the leg, into
a paper bag.  He puts the page "Three Days After Dronwing", with
the picture of a bottle filled with shapes (noodles, or worms, or
entrails, or the map of a nightmare city) into the same paper
bag.  He has steeled himself against disturbing the order and
shape of the piles on the floor.

(What if they were purposeful, what if their arrangement had meaning,
what if the tenuous signification of the words and images depends on
where they are on the floor, in which pile, how oriented and situated
relative to all the others?  What if even the leaves and the dirt are
part of the message, the work, the intent?  But, he consoles himself,
the wind that blows around the pipes and into the room through the holes
high in the walls will have rustled and turned and shuffled any such
ordering into meaningless chaos long ago.  And it is impossible that
the wind itself and its effects are part of the message, the work,
the intent.)

The pages of the book he cannot bring himself to disturb.  The first
two pages he read, "Ten Days After Drowning" and "Eleven Days After
Drowning", are in the book.  They could be placed, with the obvious
claim to logic, appeal to reason, justification by common usage, in
the bag with the "Three Days After Drowning" page (and the "Sin" page,
each hair drawn in detail, each pore on the leg visible as a small meaty
dot), and he could search the book for "Two Days After Drowning", and
for (how much more significant? how revelatory?) "The Day After Drowning"
and "The Day Of Drowning", and put them in the bag in their natural (or
their obvious, their superficially correct) order.

But perhaps the titles are misleading, he thinks.  Perhaps the book
intentionally starts, starts for some important reason he does not
know (for he knows almost nothing, standing at the edge of a continent,
peering only a few feet into the tangled forested wilderland, seeing
only thick brush, the tops of a few hills, of distant mountains, and
close at hand a maze of shadowed paths leading inward) at "Ten Days
After Drowning", and unless the book starts that way, the whole will
be forever incomprehensible.

He leaves the book closed, reaches under the table for another bit
of paper.  On this one, once the leaves and stems and cobwebs clinging
to it have been brushed off (the leaves and stems and cobwebs are
not part of the book, not part of whatever it is he has found in
this room, they are only accidents; he has decided this, and the
decision makes his head swim), are a man and a woman standing by the
edge of the water (the water reaches to the horizon; it is an ocean,
or a vast lake, or the other shore is obscured by haze).  The man
holds a sword, and the woman holds a pole.  Looking more closely
(the smell of dust and time in his nose nearly making him sneeze)
he sees that the sword is made from the word "treachery", written
over and over in an impossibly tiny hand, and the pole is made, in
the same hand, from repetitions of the word "mastery".  There are
no other words on the page.

Hunter puts this sheet, too, into the bag, under the page with
"Three Days After Drowning".

He reaches his hand again under the table (how long to clear the
entire floor, all these piles and drifts, all this apparent infinity
of word and image; and what to do next after it is clear?).

  What will be in the sky on the day of your death?
  What will be the last flavor you taste?
  What will be the last color you see?

  These are harbingers of death: a cock crowing at midnight,
  the ticking of a beetle in the wall of the bedroom, the
  wail of a banshee outside the window, the crying of a black
  cat.  These are the messengers of death: the rat, the
  brown moth, the red-eyed hen, the shadow of a church
  steeple.

This scrap of paper, the one about death, has no title, and has
been torn half way down.  If there was a drawing there, it is gone,
somewhere else on the floor, or somewhere in the book, or blown out
along the pipes by the wind, or somewhere else entirely, in the studio
of the artist (whose pen was this?), hanging in a gallery, stuffed
in a pocket, long ago burned to ash.


Questions for Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

What is the significance of the title of Chapter Twelve?  How
might Klara's "two" relate to Leona's aphorism, "two can be
as cruel as one"?

How is the picture of Ona and Marc that Hunter draws in Chapter
Twelve different from the picture he drew of them earlier?  What
do you think this difference represents?

What is the function of the passage titled "A Hundred Years
Ago"?  Is it another scrap of paper from the underground room?
Or does it take place within the reality of the story?  Support
your answer with evidence from the text.

Choose one of the texts or images from the room, and connect
it to one of the stories we have read earlier.  Use your
imagination.


Fading

Hunter's Aunt Leona died when he was very small.  She was by
that time a tiny woman, thin and frail, with a high odd voice that
she seldom used, speaking only to Shaytl her husband and to her
grown children, who would lean down low to her where she sat in
her wheeled chair or lay abed, or stretched out under comforters
on the long porch on her best days, and answer quietly, or
silently, while her bright old eyes watched the motions of
their mouths.

She held Hunter on her lap once, twice, a dozen times, her hand
like a thin branch touching his hair, her fingers twisted like
twigs, still gentle.  He remembers, he thinks he remembers (but
perhaps it is only stories he was told) her hand on his head,
the bones of her knees under all the layers of blankets.  He
does not remember her smell (but might he recognize it if he
smelled it again?), or her eyes, often sharp and bright but
with moments of dullness, like the sun and the clouds.

One morning, early in a spring that came late, Shaytl and
Hunter's mother, with Hunter tottering along beside them,
stopping to play with dirt and fall over rocks, wandering
off into the edges of the meadow and the mud of the bank,
walked along the edge of the river, watching the birds skim
the water, watching Hunter learn to walk, and talking
between themselves.

"She is weak.  Weaker every day."

"Shaytl."

"She is fading away from us.  But she has little pain.  A
week ago, she was bad.  It was good of the doctor to come
all this way.  I don't know if his pills helped, but it was
good of him to come.  She likes the doctor."

"She is happy."

Shaytl smiled.  "She has always been happy.  Ah, look at the
little rabbit!"

And Hunter was scooped up from the edge of the river, and
the mud knocked off of his shoes, and he was hoisted up onto
his Uncle's shoulders, though his mother scolded.

"Shaytl, your back."

"Pah!"  And he had ridden there a long time, or a short time,
on the path between the river and the meadow, pulling his
Uncle's white hair as the voices of his Uncle and his mother
went back and forth, and the sun dazzled his eyes.

The next morning, the sun slanting down yellow through all
the eastward windows of the house, coloring the meadows,
Leona was dead.  With no sound and no struggle, sometime
in the night, she had taken the last small step.  Hunter
doesn't remember (but remembers being told of it, years
later) Shaytl on his knees by the bed, crying in volume
and without restraint, holding the twigs of her hand,
his broad body bent double and his shoulders shaking.

The children were led in, two by two, to pay last respects.

"You were very proper and sweet, and you kissed her on
the forehead and said good-bye."

"Did I cry?"

"You cried that night, at bedtime.  You said it was because
your Uncle was so sad."

"Uncle is never sad."

"He is often sad.  But he is easy with his sorrow, and it
does him no harm."

Sitting under the skin of the world, Hunter closes his eyes
and breathes in the close stale air.  The rat is a messenger
of death, he thinks.  The crying of a black cat is a harbinger
of death.  He moves his tongue against his teeth.  What was
the last thing he ate?  When was the last time he saw the
sun?  Marc's hair, in the sun, was like gold, or like straw,
or like Ona's hair.  He imagines the feeling of that hair
on his face.  Then he opens his eyes again.

How many pages are there, scattered on the ground?  How many
will fit into his bags?  Are any of them too large?  Will he
have to fold some of them?  Are they too brittle to fold,
will some of them break, or shatter, or turn to dust?

  Two Weeks and One Day After the Maiden

  Objects that are the same shape have the same function.
  A pencil has the same function as a pen, so an apple has
  the same function as the sun.  A shoe has the same function
  as a foot, so a door has the same function as a window.
  A man has the same function as the shadow of a man.

  People have doubted this.  The man who drove my carriage,
  in the days before drowning, would have doubted this.  He
  would have sucked on his pipe, and looked at his shoes, and
  spat, and doubted.  The woman who cleaned my clothes, in
  the days before drowning, would have doubted this.  She
  would have tossed her head, and pursed her cheeks like the
  cheeks of babies or melons, and doubted.  But I have never
  doubted.

  The ice surrounding the body of the maiden is in the shape
  of a tube.  Other things in the shapes of tubes have the
  same function as the ice surrounding the body of the maiden.
  The volume of air connecting my body to the moon has the
  shape of a tube.  It therefore has the same function as the
  ice surrounding the body of the maiden.  The volume of air
  connecting my body to the moon has the same function as
  the ice surrounding the body of the maiden.

  The rules of my captivity do not permit me to write in any
  more depth of this subject at this time.  When last I woke,
  my room was empty but for the mattress on the floor, the
  frozen maiden in her tube of ice, and a large hexagonal
  box.  I expect that it will prove to contain my food for
  the day.

On the bottom of this page is a drawing of (what must be) the
top of a hexagonal wooden box.  The artist has rendered it in
excruciating detail, every knot in the wood drawn in a thousand
careful strokes (a knot in a piece of wood is not just a knot;
it is a million wood fibres, a hundred different colors and
shades, a dozen different textures).  The box has a thick wooden
cover, and appears to be held on with strong nails.  Around the
heads of two of the nails, the artist (the writer, the author
of whatever Hunter has been reading, dreaming, living in) has
drawn blunt circular dents, places where the hammer hit out of
true, bruises in the wood.

The lamp is terribly dim, or looks terribly dim to Hunter, as he
puts this sheet, "Two Weeks and One Day After the Maiden", into
the first paper bag.  Somewhere in the center of the book, he
knows (he could probably find it, if he opened the book, if he
turned over the pages) is the page "One Week After the Maiden",
the page that he read on another day, just before he sneezed,
and winced, and fled.

He frowns.  Some resolution (but had he any resolution?) is fading
within him.  Rapidly, he takes a half dozen pages, one after the
other, from the floor, brushes off the dirt, and slips them into
the bag, not reading them, not trying to see the images (a broken
knife, winged figures dancing around a pit, three sliced lemons).
He clears a patch of floor with his hands (his fingers dirty, as
the knees and cuffs of his pants are dirty, his shoes are dirty),
and begins tossing clumps of dust and leaves onto it.

He picks out pages, brushes each one off over the bare place,
and pushes them into the bag (words, a face, more words, words
written in spirals that form the fronds of a tree).  He picks
up all the pages that lie in the piles around the space he has
cleared; now there is a larger space on the floor where there
are only leaves, and twigs, and shards of wood, and cobwebs
and dirt: no pages.  The space is circular.  When he stops and
looks up, looks around at the room, the space seems very small.

Objects that are the same shape have the same function, Hunter
thinks.  This pageless space on the floor is round, therefore
it has the same function as the sun.  He laughs (a short,
barking laugh, or the laugh of a child, or a deep free laugh;
the details are obscure), and listens to the echoes swallowed
up by the dark of the corridor outside.  He sits down and
opens the book, somewhere near the center.

A drawing of three drops of liquid, reflecting the sun.
Water?  Blood?  Wine?  (Objects that have the same shape
have the same function.)  He turns the page.

  Time Subsides, Two Terraces

  The present is inconstant.  The past is divided into two
  parts by an unscalable cliff.  Observed phenomena include
  the motions of your hands, and the formation of sweat under
  your arms.  Another table has appeared in the room while I
  slept.  Sleep divides time into segments.

  Spirit forms take part in the replication of the world.  Time
  is relevant to spirit forms.  For the material body, the length
  of a cycle is one hundred years.  For spirit forms, the length
  of a cycle is different with each revolution.  I have compiled
  a list of truths from the writing that appears on the wall
  when I sleep.  I will return to this place in spirit form
  after one revolution.  I will return to this place in spirit
  form when this place is beneath the skin of the world.  I
  will return to this place in spirit form when this place
  is abandoned, and no longer changes.  I will return to this
  place in spirit form, and I will hold this page in my dirty
  hand.

Hunter stops reading, and pushes that page (the words surrounded
by detailed drawings of vague abstract shapes, like faces or sand)
quickly into the bag.  The bag is getting full, beginning to bulge,
the papers inside pushing out the sides.  He opens another bag,
pulls more scraps from the piles on the floor, averting his eyes
from the pages (brushing them off with his fingers, without looking,
a leaf or two, a layer of gauzy cobweb sliding into the bag).
Under one clot of leaves is a bundle of papers, held together only
by time and dirt, but all the same size and shape; he resists
more than a glance at them, fills this bag up with them, opens
a new one.

The cleared space, the space that has no pages (or no pages unless
he has missed some, a small one among the leaves, a corner bearing
just a word or two among the cobwebs; but is that word not part
of whatever it is he is trying to separate from the other things
in the room, in the darkness, in the flesh of the world?), that
space is larger now, as the bags fill, but still small, still
smaller than even the circle of light from the feeble glow of
the lantern.

(Hunter will never remove every bit of figured paper from
that room.  Years after this, a pair of lovers, stumbling giggling
into the space within the wall, finding their way to the stairs
by a stronger light pulled from a coat pocket, will pass the
odd gaps in the walls, find the room, its door open a crack,
find one, two, a dozen scraps of paper, a monstrous eye
devouring the sun, an elegant pentagon covered in leaves,
words about transformation and pain, and love, and drowning.
The child they will conceive in that room, on that day, will
grow to rule, and ruin, a kingdom, and to write poetry that
defines a generation.)

Hunter stuffs papers into bags, breathing the stale air, hurried
but still careful enough not to destroy much, not to crush or
crumple many, working mechanically with his eyes almost shut,
more leaves and dirt making their ways into the bags (particles
rustling and rattling against the paper, high hissing little
sounds as he works).  His legs are sore, his hands dirty and
somehow raw, the skin feeling tight on his fingers.

With a deep breath (that, reaching to the bottoms of his lungs,
makes them feel dusty, congested, like coughing), and a shudder,
Hunter stops and stands up.  He goes to the table (through the
clear space, the space with no pages) and stands looking down at
the pool of light, at the book, at the bags (nearly a dozen now,
full of unknowns, of dirt and paper and ink), at the pouch.  He
reaches into the pouch and takes out the cloth sack.  He unfolds it
and opens it, pulling the mouth open, the drawstring slithering
through the hem.  It looks large enough to hold the book.

The book is heavier, or lighter, than he remembers.  It comes
off of the table easily, slides into the sack almost eagerly,
staying closed, held closed by its own mass weighing down the
sides of the sack so that they pinch in.  Hunter slides one,
two, five filled paper bags in next to it, pulls the drawstring
tight, and ties it off (Marc's fingers making knots in cords,
Ona's fingers untying them).  And the rest of the filled bags
fit into his pouch (bags, papers, pencils, and that apple).

He puts the sack over his shoulder, the pouch (heavy now) under
his arm, lifts the lantern, turns (stepping across more papers,
papers he has not taken with him, words, bulging triangles,
a skull with coins in its eyes), walks through the door
(the past is divided into two parts by an unscalable cliff),
strides down the hallway, toward the bottom on the stairs.

In the space at the bottom of the stairs, in a dim nimbus
of light, stands Ona.

He stops, holding the lantern, holding the sack, the pouch
under his arm.  The circle of yellow light from the lamp
just brushes the standing figure, the figure who cannot be
Ona, slightly tingeing the white of her dress (is it a dress
he has seen her wearing before?).  She is looking up, at
something somewhere over his right shoulder.  She smiles.

It is the same smile, the same mouth, the same arms, the
same body, the same girl.  Her mouth moves, but she makes
no sound.  She raises her arms, as though taking something,
or giving something.  She takes a step back.  The skirt of
her dress presses against her legs (the same legs, the same
knees, the same flesh).  She turns, and walks toward the
steps.  And vanishes.

Hunter moves, suddenly, into the space below the steps, staring
up into the dark, peering, listening, but there is no one,
nothing.  He looks down at the dirt, the scuffs of his own feet
(are there any, this time?).  But she is not there, she cannot
have been there, she can never have been there, here, at all.
He steps back, into the center of the space, his eyes closed.

Then he straightens, and with a half smile (how odd the
world is, how lovely Ona's face, how strange and sweet the
flavor of memory), and tightening his grip on the lantern,
the sack, the pouch, he steps, almost bounding, onto the bottom
step, up the first dozen steps of the long stair, rising quickly.

And then his foot slips, and he falls.


Making Tea

The day before her children were conceived, Karla arrived home tired,
as always.  She slipped her shoes off of her feet and pushed them under
the side of the bed.  Then she lay down on her back, on top of the
sheets, and breathed, and counted to one hundred.

Home, the place she lived at that time, was two rooms, a bedroom
(windows looking out over a side street, noisy in the mornings) and
another room, with cabinets, a sink, a small stove, a small couch
(windows looking out over an alley).  In one of the cabinets was an old
wood box in which she kept a quantity of black tea.  After counting to
one hundred, lying on her back on the bed, she rose, reached her arms
to the ceiling to stretch her back, and went and opened the cabinet.

The tea was black and fragrant.  Beside the stove, hanging on a brass
hook in the wall, was a tea-ball, a tea-strainer, a metal sphere with
cut-out places in the shape of a climbing vine (stem, leaves, curls),
cut in half and hinged, with a sliding clasp to hold it closed.  She
took this in her fingers, pulled it up and off the hook (her knees
tired, an ache in her back), opened it, and used it to scoop out a
pinch of tea from the open box.  Then she closed it and shut the
clasp, closed the box and returned it to the cabinet, shut the
cabinet door.

Sitting on one of the stove's two burners was a dented copper teapot.
She lifted it with one hand, rocked it to feel the water move, put it
back down on the burner, and turned the dial on the front of the stove.
Flame caught with a quiet rumble.  She went back to the bedroom (tea-ball
sitting filled by the stove, three empty cups in the cabinet by the
tea box), and sat on the bed, resting her head in her hands (elbows
on knees, looking at nothing), to wait for the water to boil.

Gas flowed through the old thin pipes of the stove (elegantly
designed, carrying warmth and death faithfully for months, for
years, without being tended to or thought of, like the veins of
a heart, like the bones of a spine).  It flowed into a ring of
fire, taking flame and becoming flame, to light the bit of gas
next behind it in the pipe, the heat of its taking flame rising
against the curving bottom of the teapot, heating the air,
heating the metal, heating the water.  The pot pinged and snapped
as the cool metal became warm, became hot.  Karla closed her
eyes, listened to the small familiar sounds, and breathed.

The sound of the pot changed as the water began to steam.  Karla
still sat, without moving.  Something rattled noisily past in
the street (a wagon loaded with barrels, ineptly secured, loose
and crashing against each other with the jolting of the wheels
over the irregular street).  Karla was wearing a dark dress that
reached the middle of her calves, a grey shift that tied below her
breasts, a white ribbon behind her head holding back her hair.
Water for tea should not be allowed to boil, or to boil long.
The sound of the pot began to change again, and she opened her
eyes and stood.

  Eating and Drinking Stones

  If I find that food has been provided for me, I eat.  If I
  find that water has been provided for me, I drink.  Sometimes
  I am provided both food and water, sometimes I am provided
  food but not water, sometimes I am provided water but not food.
  During my last time awake, I found in this room only a bottle
  of bitter wine, and fifteen small white stones wrapped in
  brown paper.  In this time awake, I find at the foot of my
  bed a loaf of bread on a white plate, and a wide shallow bowl
  filled with warm and slightly scented water.  The bowl is
  light blue, with patterns of singing birds.  In one corner
  of the room there is a conical pile of crumbled chalk.

  There is water suspended in the air, in tiny drops too small
  to see.  The light passes between and around them.  There is
  food suspended in the air, in tiny pieces too small to see.
  The light passes between and around them.  I have drowned.
  I am in exile.  Why should I need more to eat than is provided
  to me by breathing the air?  Why should I need more to drink
  than is provided to me by breathing the air?

The tea was hot and sweetly bitter.  Karla took in a spoonful
between her lips, breathed air over it (the air spilling down
into her lungs hot and humid and fragrant), closed her eyes
and breathed in through her nose (the steam from the cup
touching the inside of her nose, among those tender hairs,
touching the secret moist places inside her head, the heat
a delicate desirable pain), swallowed and felt the tea flow
into her throat and become lost within her body.

This was Klara, on that day, before the day the photographer
saw her sitting by the river, before life (two tiny lives)
began quickening in her body, standing in her room (the room
with the stove and the sink, not the room with the bed) sipping
her tea hot, thinking about supper.  She was a woman, a mostly
unremarkable woman, with two legs (ankles, calves, thighs),
two feet (toes, instep, blood vessels under the skin), two
arms two eyes two ears two nostrils two hands, one navel,
one vulva one anus one nose one mouth one tongue.  She is
not waiting for anything in particular.

This was a man, on that day, at that time, a man walking
down a street looking for a particular door, in a certain
building.  He was a mostly unremarkable man, with two legs
(ankles, calves, thighs), two feet, two arms two eyes two
ears two nostrils two hands, one navel, one penis one anus
one nose one mouth one tongue.  Blood vessels under the skin.
Walking down a street looking for a particular door, in a
certain building.  A few minutes before, a poorly-loaded wagon,
full of barrels, clattered past him on the street and veered
around a corner.

He began whistling, just then, because he was happy, because
he was, certainly, getting near a certain place, a place he
wanted to be, a place he had been moving toward for a long
time.  The tune he whistled was a tune he had whistled often
before, the tune to an old drinking song, and also the tune to
a child's nursery rhyme, about a money and a river, or a
pony and a garden.  The sky, that day, was an ordinary mixture
of clear and cloud.

  What the Tempter Said

  The people who brought you up are not your real parents.
  Your real parents died when you were very young.  Your
  ancestors were unique people.  You are from a lineage that
  can trace its roots to the dawn of time.  People of your
  family have special powers.  People of your family have
  remarkable rights, as well as remarkable duties.  Soon
  all this will become clear to you.  Those who have
  behaved poorly toward you will be punished.

  People who are loyal to your ancestors are searching for
  you.  They have been searching for you for a long time,
  and are now close to finding you.  Servants and allies of
  your family will soon come into contact with you.  You
  must prepare yourself.  You must prepare yourself, and be
  vigilant.  You must prepare yourself, and be vigilant, and
  keep yourself pure.

  To keep yourself pure, you must not be fooled by those who
  claim to be your parents.  To keep yourself pure, you must
  carefully guard your inner truths.  To keep yourself pure,
  you must not be fooled.

  Above all, you must not be fooled.

Klara heard the whistling, among the background of noise from
the street (more people were abroad than that man, more people
were walking than that man, but only he, in that street, was
whistling).  She opened her eyes.  She took another sip of her
tea.  He found the door he was looking for, went in (these are
the stairs, this is the bannister, yes, this is the way up),
and now she heard feet on the stairs, and the whistling stopped.

A man was standing in front of a door, on the second floor of
an apartment block on a certain street in a certain town (a
large village, a small city, a cluster of houses and apartments,
stores and warehouses and mills by a small river, where two
roads crossed).  He was not an unusual man; it was not an
unusual door.

He knocked.

And Klara put down her cup, and went to the door and opened it
(because these were simpler and more trusting times, perhaps,
or because she was Klara, or perhaps because she had heard
the whistling, and the feet on the stairs, and because she
had made her tea).  And then her eyes were closed again,
because of the kiss.


The Shock of the New

Hunter fell backward down the hard metal stairs, without any
control over his fall, with his arms splayed out grasping at
and missing the railings, the sack dropping from his shoulder
to land on one step, his pouch (stuffed and heavy) falling
from under his arm and tumbling with him down the stairs,
the lantern flying over the railing into the darkness and
breaking loudly somewhere below and going out, his head
hitting the rail or a stair or the wall then his neck
bent into an impossible position for a moment as his body
tumbled over (shooting pain through his skull, perhaps
an instant unconscious, in the place of sleep and death),
a wrenching in his left knee.  A final roll, off the bottom
step onto the dirt ground, and then peace, silence, stillness.

Lying there now, in whatever position the fall has put his body,
not yet back to imposing his will even on the part of the
world he identifies with himself, he is aware at first only
of sound.  Again the sound of water teases the outer edge of
his hearing, just too quiet to be sure of.  Some noise from
the street far above, too muffled by the ground and the air
to retain any identity, only a low rumble left, reminds him
of the world.  Slowly, he sits up.  It is very dark.

One hand falls onto his pouch, which has ended its fall just
next to his body.  He feels around with the other hand (feeling
in the dirt, but both hands are already dirty, and one is torn,
and there is a gash on his head that oozes dark red blood),
but the sack is not in reach, and the lantern is gone.  As
he fell his eyes were full of dazzle; now they are full of
night, darkness as dark as he can remember.  He sits and waits
for the light, for his eyes to understand and decipher this
blackness.  He listens to himself breathing.

After some time, he thinks he can see a glow, a memory of
the sun, from far above.  He holds up his hand, and believes
he can see the fingers.  That line, there, must be the railing
of the stair.  He pulls himself to his feet, then cries out,
falls back to the floor, clutching his left leg (his eyes closed
tight, so tight they are again full of dazzle, of lightning,
of clouds of sparks).

When the pain subsides, he stands again, gingerly, keeping his
weight off that foot.  He puts out his hand (that was indeed the
rail; the metal is cold and familiar on his palm).  He bends
(a bruise on his back), feels around, picks up the pouch.  He
turns himself, hobbling, toward the stairs; the muscles of his
left leg tense, and pain nips him.  He takes a deep breath.

With his hand tight around the rail (the pouch tight under his
other arm) he hops, levers, lifts, himself up onto the first
step, his right leg bearing his weight.  His left knee twinges
sharply, and he gasps.  But he does not fall.

He pulls himself up onto the second step, the third.  He is
breathing hard, can hear his pulse in his ears.  He stops,
weight against the railing, to rest.  He is, suddenly, very
hungry.

He closes his eyes, and is heartened to find that he can see
the difference, that the insides of his eyelids are darker
(darker still) than the space in the skin of the earth where
he stands; that the space is lighter, to his eyes, than utter
darkness.  Another deep breath, another two, three, four steps.
How many steps are in this stairway?  He has never counted.
Coming down it has always been, taken, given, a timeless time
(his heartbeat and his step the rhythm of the earth).  How
lucky they are, he thinks, on the surface, to have working
legs, light for their eyes.  (For the material body, the
length of a cycle is one hundred years.)

Another breath, another step, two steps, another rest.  His
right ankle already aches (a bruise on his back, a bruise on
his cheek, the blood slowly seeping into his hair, a throbbing
in his left knee).  And again.  And again.  (How graceful she
was, raising her arms with her face upturned.)

Another breath in the darkness, he pulls himself up toward the
next step, and his left foot strikes the sack (the book, unbound
pages between heavy covers, the bags of loose pages and leaves and
dirt, the drawstring, the tube of the hem).  Fire shoots up his leg,
he crumples, but he does not (does not does not) lose his grip
on the railing, or even the pouch.

So now he is half-crouching on the stairway, his right knee on
the sack.  And slowly he puts the pouch down on the step below.
And slowly he gropes for the sack, finds where it is and how
it lies, finds the opening of the sack, pushes it wider with
the fingers of his free hand.  And slowly he shifts his weight,
so he is sitting on the edge of a step, stable, and can take his
other hand from the rail.  He picks up the pouch and pushes it
into the sack, sliding the material up around it, forcing it to
fit.  He draws the drawstring, puts the sack over his shoulder
(it bumps the bruise on his back, and he winces, but the pain
is a small increment and really barely noticeable).  Stands.

Another rest, another deep breath, another step, two steps,
four steps, a rest.  Is the light brighter?  Are those lines
the rods he drew on some former day?

Once more, the light certainly closer now, his left knee hits
the railing or the wall, and he collapses, but he does not,
does not, let go of the railing, and does not fall.  So finally,
another breath another step another breath another step, he
comes to the top, in that narrow space in the wall of a building,
and he lies on the flat ground there, the sack under his body,
and closes his eyes.  Ona steps and turns lightly, dancing,
the sun on her hair, and the scent of her body fills his throat.

He opens his eyes, shivering on the filthy ground.  The light
from the hole (outside it is afternoon, clouds gathering, muted
sun) seems impossibly bright, and he squints.  He reaches up
for the top end of the metal rail (so hungry), and pulls
himself to his feet, to his single foot, and balances there,
the drawstring of the sack in his free hand.  He touches his
left foot to the ground, presses lightly, gasps at the pain,
although the pain is smaller now, less all-encompassing,
coming not from every fiber of the leg but only (only) from
the knee, as though it were on fire, or broken, or broken
and on fire at once.  He hobbles forward on his right foot,
his hand on the wall for support.

So, eventually, a battered dirty young man comes slowly out
from under an archway in the city, with a cloth sack on his
back, and leans against the wall.  He looks about him, the
street nearly deserted, its aspect desolate in the fading light,
for a long moment, then turns, limping along close to the wall
(his hand, dirty and the skin torn, always on the wall, to
keep the weight off of his left leg), making slow progress
down the block (the sack bumping against his back).  Near
the corner he stops, bends over, sinks to the ground.  There
are some sticks there, on the sidewalk, some broken boards,
but they are short, and splintered, and weak.

There is no way to get from here to the college without
crossing a street, several streets.  There is no way to
cross a street using only one leg.  (When he was young, he
and Marc and Ona had raced each other, hopping on one foot,
from the bottom of the porch steps to the edge of the
meadow.  They had, then, infinite energy.  For spirit
forms, the length of a cycle is different with each
revolution.)  Will someone, passing by, lend him a cane,
find him a walking stick?  He turns his eyes down to
the pavement.

Eventually (the light dimming, the wind cold, Hunter more
hungry than he can remember) someone shouts his name, and two
feet (two feet, two useful legs) come running across the
street and stand in front of him.  It is Geoff the Monk,
in a brown quilted coat and a dark broad-brimmed hat (flapping
like a distressed bird), exclaiming over him and helping
him to his feet (one foot, one useful leg).

"Good God, I didn't think it could be you.  What's happened?"

"I was, in a building.  I fell."

"And half killed yourself!  Here, give me that."

And they went across the city, the sack over the Monk's shoulder,
Hunter's arm across the Monk's back, an awkward halting creature
with two heads and three legs (and one vestigial appendage
dangling cumberously in the midst of it all), burdened with
burdens known and unknown, making for shelter before the rain,
reaching the college as darkness closed in, reaching Hunter's
rooms (Courant at his desk, looking around and only raising an
eyebrow as the Monk helped Hunter through the door, to limp
to his bed and fall exhausted atop the tangle of sheets) just
before the rain started, a fine chill mist of rain, quickly
coating the street, the leaves of the trees, the somber roofs,
with fine cold water.

"What is it that the cat has dragged in this fine evening?"


Questions for Chapters Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen

In these chapters, the various worlds of the story (Hunter's
past, his present, Karla's past, and the writings from the
underground room) follow each other in a complex sequence.
Make a diagram illustrating the pattern of this sequence,
and indicate the position of the formal chapter breaks.
What can you say about the pattern of intermingling?

The chapters also contain passages in different grammatical
tenses.  Extend your diagram to show where changes in tense
occur.  How is the tense pattern similar to the story pattern?
How is it different?

List two things that Hunter gains in Chapter Fourteen, and
two things that he loses.

Why does Klara count to one hundred in Chapter Fifteen?
What might this tell us about her?

Read the last few sentences of each chapter again.  How is
the ending of Chapter Fourteen similar to the ending of
Chapter Fifteen?  How is it different?  Who do you think
speaks the last sentence of Chapter Sixteen?  Why?

Hunter sees Ona, or has a vision of her, in Chapter Fourteen,
and again briefly in Chapter Sixteen.  Is she actually
present in either case?  What is the best explanation for
what Hunter sees, or seems to see, in each instance?

List three ways that Chapter Fifteen relates to the rest of
the story we have heard so far.


Telegrams

Hunter struggles out of his clothes (not very bloody, not terribly
torn, not utterly filthy), hobbles out to the washroom and pours
water over himself (cold, stinging the gash on his head and his
torn hand and his bruised back), hobbles back and collapses again.
Courant or the Monk have called for the doctor, who comes and pokes
at Hunter's bruises, and his blue and swollen leg, and shakes his
head and wraps the knee in a bandage (not broken, only wrenched,
only stay off of it for a week, two weeks, until it heals) and leaves
him a specific for the pain and gauze for his hand.  Keep it clean,
only keep it clean.  Of his lightheadedness, his feeling that the
world is hollow and spinning, that the wall is impossibly far off,
Hunter says nothing.

When the doctor is gone, Hunter takes the cloth sack from the
floor where he let it fall coming in, opens the mouth of the
sack, takes out the pouch (looking at, touching, nothing else
inside), opens the pouch and digs for the apple (looking at,
touching, nothing else inside), wipes it on a clean sock (what
has happened to the neat rows of clothes in his drawers, the
neatly sequestered laundry in the corner?) and eats it, in
huge bites.

"I need to send a telegram," he says to Courant, around the
apple.  Courant snorts.

"I need to memorize Catullus.  And you owe me money."

"If you will send what I give you," tearing a scrap of paper from
some old drawing (the leg of a chair, the sun on a cup, a piece
of bread) and finding a pencil, scrawling words, "and if you
will send someone to tell Gleel that I am unwell and cannot work"
(urgently gathering all the needful things in his head before he
is overwhelmed by the surf), "then, well then I will borrow more
money from you, so that when I finally pay you back you will be
all the richer."

Courant smiles at this, and takes the paper from Hunter's hand.

"I suppose I can read this scrawl.  You lie there dead and
I will do your errands."

Hunter lies back on the thin mattress (his back aches, and his
knee twinges again from the movement).  Eyes closed (the sound
of Courant pulling on his jacket, opening the door, closing the
door, walking down the creaking hallway and fading away), he
thinks of the telegram, of the telegraph office in the old
wooden building across the next courtyard, between the offices
of the bursar and the steward, the clicking relays and the shuffle
of papers.

The old house (with the porch, by the meadows by the river, where
his mother and father still live on the second storey, those
children scattered to the winds, or off to second storeys of
their own, or small houses along the valley) has no telephone.
His words, his telegram that Courant will send, will go through
the long wires, out of the college and out of the city, across
miles of land (towns, fields, hills, what pushes the message
along, what keeps it moving through the wires?), eventually to
the village (wires hurtling down to the telegraph set in the
back room of the post office, a line of unwashed coffee cups
on the counter beside it, a stack of mail, dust on the tops of
the pigeon holes).

The telegram, his words, will go to old Mr. Trask, or to
young Mr. Trask his son, not as young any more (is old
Mr. Trask still alive, still working?), be put down on
paper, put in the bag for Bobby Cramm (or is he married
now and off to town, is one of the boys from the meadow
carrying the bag, working for the government, wearing
the shiny button on his belt?).  And Bobby Cramm will take
it on his bicycle out over the hill, into the valley, down
the road that runs in sight of the river.  To the house.

Why does he not know who carries the telegrams now?  Why
does he not know if old Mr. Trask is still at the post
office, still smoking his pipe, still alive?  Why, in three
years and seven months, has he been back (been home) so
seldom?  Why has he slept so long?

When Bobby Cramm (or whoever carries the telegrams now)
comes to the house, rings the bell on his bicycle coming up
the lane from the road, gravel under his wheels, people
will come onto the porch, find out who the message is for,
go and get his mother, or his Uncle, or both (both of them
on the porch, squinting at the printed paper in the bright
light, wondering, with the messenger waiting by his bicycle
for a reply).  His Uncle will grumble about the pennies a
reply will cost (how white is his hair now?), his mother
will smile, and write on the form in her small precise hand.
But how long will it take?  Will the messenger already have
made his rounds today, gone home?  Will they send him out again
for Hunter's words?  (Should he have told Courant to pay
extra, for the "urgent" stamp?)

Hunter lies back on the pillow and falls asleep.  His knee
throbs and his back is stiffening, he is still hungry (what
is an apple?), but he falls asleep, and dreams of pain and
impossible shapes, a hexagonal box, tubes connecting to the
moon.  Courant goes, with some dispatch, to the telegraph
office (the rain still a fine mist drifting in the air),
fills out the form (name and address of recipient, message,
special handling), pays the counter girl (plump lips, a soft
pink chin), and goes out.  It occurs to him to find a late
vendor and buy a packet of meat.

The smell of the food wakes Hunter, slowly.  When he opens
his eyes he sees Courant's back (at the desk again, head down
over Catullus), and a steaming meat bun on the chair by the
bed.  He eats it in large slow bites, his eyes closed (the
air flowing hot and pungent into his lungs across the food
in his mouth).

"You are an angel."

Courant snorts.  Hunter's words travel the wires, clatter into
the relays, into the telegraph set beside the coffee cups.
Bobby Cramm (it is still Bobby Cramm, still hoping for a
position in town, an income, to ask the dark-haired girl with
the laughing eyes for her hand, some night under a full moon),
has gone home for the night.  The words will sit until morning,
printed on the form in the proper pigeon hole, waiting to be
delivered to the house above the meadow.

"ALL FINE," the words say, "WHERE IS ONA?"


The Quiet Man

The man keeping Abram awake now, hands slapping his cheeks, another
pot of water (cold, rusty water) poured over his head, has broad
shoulders and a large bulbous nose.  He is not cruel, not overtly
cruel, affable really.  He seems entirely ready to believe that
Abram knows nothing more than the nothing he has already told,
nothing about strategy, about troop movements, about lines of
supply.

"We do this to everyone.  Means nothing.  You have nothing to tell
me, so tell me nothing.  Just you will not sleep for awhile."

Abram thinks the man may have said this before, or something like
this.  It is difficult to think, the twitching in his legs is a
constant distraction, the chafing of his wrists tied behind the
chair, where he still holds them sometimes, although they untied
him hours ago.  He swings his arms and almost topples over.  Voices
sing hymns through the walls, and out of the corner of his eye
a vibrant shape rushes toward him and he flinches.  The man
laughs good-naturedly, as though he had told a joke.

Being a student had kept Abram out of the army, out of the war, until
comparatively late, when the battle lines had hardened, the trenches
already been dug.  When he was finally called up, trained quickly in
an empty warehouse by the train station, he was sent off with twenty
other raw boys and one officer (an officer with a thick shock of white
hair, a row of military decorations on the breast of his uniform jacket,
a scar on his forehead and a heavy limp), to guard a supply caravan
crossing what should have been safe ground.

They were set upon at night, against all expectation.  Abram's
watch had ended an hour before, and he was curled in his sleeping
roll (still not used to sleeping in a sack, sleeping in a strange
place, sleeping with a rifle by his side, among strangers), and
did not even wake up until he was already a prisoner.  They took
him out, bound, past the broken wheels and the bodies of the dead,
and he vomited up the stale camp supper (leaning over a muddy
rut, ashamed to be weak with his body untouched, never having raised
his rifle in anger).  They blindfolded him and tossed him into the
back of a cart, and the next night, the next nights, he spent in
a dirty shed, sleeping on rags on a dirt floor, other prisoners
(more strangers, all quiet, spent) lined up beside him.

The building where the prisoners are questioned is cramped and dark.
It sits between the place where they sleep (another abandoned warehouse;
this war, Abram thinks, is between abandoned warehouses) and a low
square building that was perhaps an office.  The unit that captured
them seems to be well settled-in here.  Abram wonders how far behind
the lines they are.  Sometimes, far off, he thinks he hears bombs or
gunshots, deep coughs in the earth muffled by distance, sharp cracks
that could be trees breaking in a storm.  Planes go by overhead.

On the first day of his questioning (prisoners taken one by one away,
without a word, none returned), he hears singing coming through the
walls, a shout of harmony, strong rhythms.

"What is that?"

"What?"

"That singing."

"What singing?  You are going mad already."

"You must hear it."

"Neh."  This was before the beating began, when he was simply bound
to the chair and asked the questions over and over, encouraged to
talk, his questioner bored and without expectation of success.

"Listen, I know you can hear it."

"Neh, of course.  You are not quite mad yet," and here his questioner,
not the large-nosed affable man, but a thin twig of an officer, narrow
lips and pale eyes, almost smiled, "in the building next door is our
church, eh? Our sanctuary.  You hear the hymns."

And now, how many hours or days later, in the questioning room between
the church and the warehouse, Abram sits on the chair, forgetting whether
or not he is bound, the muscles of his eyelids twitching in spasms (if
he closes his eyes, he knows the slap will come, or the water, or a
fist to his ribs).

"We do this to everyone.  Means nothing."

Abram wonders if his army also does this to everyone.  If it is only
this unit of the enemy that routinely tortures prisoners, or if it is
a general policy, a requirement, a universal rule of war.  The big
man swipes his hand across the back of Abram's neck, casually, jerking
his head up.

"Hello!" he shouts, "Stay awake!  If you tell me something, I can write
it down on the pad here, and then you can sleep."

Abram knows nothing to tell him, knows not even enough to tell a
useful lie.  What shape are the truths, the secrets, that they want
him to reveal?  What does information from a prisoner sound like?
Abram has no special loyalty, has no feel for what this war is
about, has no resistance whatever, none, to this or any other sort
of torture.  This much he has learned about himself.  His officers
knew of it already, his worthlessness, must have seen it in his eyes,
and so he has no secrets to give up.

"We have many guns.  I saw boxes full of guns."  He had tried to betray
himself even before they started keeping him awake, after only a beating
or two.  But they had just laughed at him.

Abram was married just a month, five weeks, before he was called into
the army.  Sarah was not yet with child, he was only a student, and
that was no longer an excuse.  He tries to recall (sitting in the
chair, his clothes wet, shivering from the cold and the jerking of
his muscles) her face, Sarah's, at the wedding, the shy kiss when
they were made man and wife.  They had been so happy, even with
the war shaking the ground with its feet (Abram's feet quiver, one
toe broken).  He sees her standing before him, with a cap on her
head, and she is singing, singing like an angel, and around her
shoulders is a cape of feathers.  Then the big man pours more water
over his head, and he is awake again, but the singing goes on.

"I was in the army only two weeks.  You are wasting your time on
me."

The man's voice is thick and rough, with a heavy accent.  "Time,
we have.  You talk, perhaps it will tell us something."

But they have said this before, and Abram has talked, talked in
long unconscious bursts, about the supply train (but they have
captured that, they know everything about it), the names of his
officers (those he could remember, those he made up), the number
of his unit (which they have also captured, and know everything
about), how to clean and load his rifle, how to march in parade,
the meanings of the bugle calls.  Still they beat him, still they
will not let him sleep.

There is a man here, now, who will not meet his eyes, who asks
if he would like water to drink (he would, his lips are cracked,
he has learned that having water dumped over your head does not
keep your lips from drying), if he would like a warm bun.  Tears
leak from his eyes at the taste of the water in his throat, and
he chokes on the bun, but swallows it down.  The man is an angel,
and he tells the man everything again, about the train and the
officers and the crates of guns, and about Sarah and the wedding
and his classes at school and how he vomited into the mud.

The man is sympathetic, understanding (an ordinary man, slight,
brown hair, straight nose), but Abram must understand that he
cannot sleep unless he tells everything he knows.  Perhaps
something he heard the officers say?  Abram thanks him, is
eternally grateful, recalls hearing the officers speak of a
big plan, a major advance, an attack scheduled for midnight,
thousands of troops, elephants, tigers, coming up the road
from Africa (his arms are twitching now, the large muscles
pulsing like gnats).  The man stands (his face no longer
so warm?) and shakes his head, and leaves the room.

Left alone, Abram slumps to the ground, his eyes close, and
he is instantly asleep.  He sleeps as they carry him away, and
toss him in with the others.  He groans in his sleep when they
(the other prisoners in this smaller and darker place, the ones
that were tortured before him and haven't yet been taken away
to some further place in the labyrinth of the war) lift his
head and put a pile of rags under it, straighten his body on
the ground and cover him with something gritty.

Later he awakens enough to eat a little and drink a little.
They tell him their names (some he knows from the floor of
the warehouse, some are from his unit, some are strangers),
he tells them his.  Then a guard comes, picks out a dozen,
Abram among them, and pulls them roughly out into the compound.
They are loaded into another cart (it is sunset, and beginning
to rain), and driven off again.  In the jolting cart (his
throat is sore, his lip bleeding again, his toe a throbbing
pain) sleep overcomes, envelopes, him again.

The cart stops, and they are pulled out, to stand facing a
lighted place, fences of barbed wire curling away in all
directions, a gate.  "Prisoner exchange," says a guard.
"Line up, walk through there.  Slowly.  You run, we shoot
you."

They stagger, twelve of them in a ragged line, out between
the fences and the wires, through the gate, across a barren
field.  Bright lights shine from both sides into the center
of the field.  From the other side a dozen other men are
trudging, in the remains of enemy uniforms (are they better
fed, less worn out, healthier?).  The lines pass each other.
Abram's eyes meet for an instant the eyes of a man coming
the other way, and in the middle of nothing they smile at
each other.

Hunter thinks of Abram, his father, as a quiet man, not
courageous.  His father tells few stories, and none are
about the war.  The little toe on his right foot is an odd
twisted stump.  Sometimes he wakes in the night, and Hunter's
mother holds him, and her voice is soft.

  Memory as a Vessel

  The world changes when I sleep.  I notice these changes
  because my memory tells me what the world was like before.
  Where there was a table before, now there is a chair.  Where
  there was a well, now there is a mountain.  Where there was
  a nation of weasels, now there is a song of victory.

  Memory may be inscribed on tablets.  When we are young,
  we inscribe our memories on our bones.  Men whose bones
  are filled up with memories are called governors.  Women
  whose bones are filled up with memories are called angels.
  When we are older, we inscribe our memories on the inside
  surfaces of our eyes.


Night

There is no reply to Hunter's telegram that evening.  He
dozes and wakes.  People come in and out, talking to Courant,
asking after Hunter's health (he is a minor celebrity now,
returning from the city with his wounds, found lying in an
alley, having been beaten and robbed, or hit by a cart, or
a dozen other rumors).  Someone brings a crutch for him,
and he gives thanks sleepily.  Courant goes out somewhere,
and Hunter, finally, sits up and opens his pouch again.

He takes out the filled bags that are in it and puts them on
his lap on the bed.  He takes out the few remaining empty bags,
considers them for a moment, tosses them onto his desk (one slides
off to the floor).  Takes out a few drawings of his own and
adds them to a sheaf under the bed.  Takes out the postcard
and the picture of it, takes out the blank papers and the
pencils, and then puts them all back in again.

He reaches down and opens the mouth of the sack.  Inside,
the paper bags have been bent and slightly crumpled.  The
book, still and heavy, lies undamaged at the bottom.  He
takes out the paper bags and puts them on his lap with the
others, stacks them up into stacks, presses them with his hands.

He selects one bag (at random, at whim), sets it aside,
and puts the others one by one, efficiently, into the cloth
sack, on top of the book.  They just fit, the ones that he
brought out of the underground in the sack, and the ones that
he brought out in the pouch.  He tightens the drawstring, and
pushes the sack under the bed.

He picks up the one paper bag in his lap and looks at it (looks
at it as though it were a single thing, not a container full
of other things, of paper scraps and ink, words and drawings,
dirt and cobwebs and the ends of leaves).  He yawns.  He
feels perfectly at home in the bed, secure, warm.  Still
hungry, but with a hunger that pleasantly anticipates the
next meal.  His knee aches, but aches comfortably in the
doctor's dressing.

He puts the bag down again on his lap, reaches into it with
two fingers, draws out a sheet of paper, and reads "Memory
as a Vessel".  At the bottom of the page, under the words,
is a picture that matches the words (Hunter smiles at it):
three graceful pots (or vessels), with liquid pouring
between them (in defiance of gravity), like the top of
a fountain, or a factory in a dream, and a pair of hands
reaching, and a bone.  He puts the page down on his lap,
closes his eyes, and falls back into a doze.

He wakes up with Geoff the Monk sitting in a chair beside
the bed, frowning at the paper in his lap.  (The world changes
while I sleep.)

"Sorry if I woke you."

"I'm sleeping too much anyway."  His hands go to the paper
in his lap; he finds he wants to hide it, to slip it
(innocently, accidentally, unnoticeably) away from Geoff's
eyes (Geoff in a dark shirt, dark pants, a dark hooded
cloak with the hood thrown artfully back).

"Thought I'd just look in on the invalid.  But what do
you have there?  New masterpiece?"

"Not mine, not my work.  Just something I, I found."

"Heh."  Is he looking at the bag, folded among the sheets
in Hunter's lap?  "Found where?"

"Ah, just, in the street."

"In the street?"  Geoff takes it in his hand and holds it
in the light.  Hunter is too flustered (why does he care
if Geoff touches it? why doesn't he tell the story?) to
prevent him.

"Well, no, in a building.  Just in a pile of trash.  Blowing
around."

"Fascinating stuff.  Is there more?"

"Uh, more..."

"Could I borrow this?"

"I'd like to keep it," regaining himself, Hunter's fingers
take it back, turn it toward his face (when we are young, we
inscribe our memories on our bones).

"Well, sure.  Maybe I could, well."  And suddenly the Monk
is standing, waving his hands vaguely about, bidding him a
cordial (if somewhat confused, oddly diffident) good night,
and is gone.  Hunter shakes his head.

He puts Memory as a Vessel to one side (if his friend returns,
why should he not offer it to him, apologize, at least lend it
to him, at least still have it here, out, and not draw
attention to the bag, the bags, the sack, the book). The
next paper in the bag is covered with a city of tiny
buildings, interspersed with globular shapes like maggots,
or sausages.  The next is covered with words, smaller than
ever, covering the scrap of paper (torn in a rough trapezoid
from some larger piece) except for a clear triangular space
in the center, in which there is a single dot.  This one
has no title.

  I am a prisoner in a castle.  The castle sits atop a high
  mountain.  Because of its height, the castle is often
  surrounded by clouds, and the ground around the castle
  is always snow-covered.  There are three mirrors in the
  castle, in which I may look at myself.  I may also look
  at my face in pools of water.  Aside from myself, there
  are three people of whose presence in the castle I am
  certain.  One is a man, one is a woman, and one is a
  small child.  Birds the color of rubies build nests
  in the towers of the castle.  In the night, the floors
  of the castle shake as though from enormous footsteps.

  The man, the woman, and the child with whom I share
  the castle do not speak my language, and I do not
  speak theirs.  My attempts to communicate with them
  with gestures seem to frighten them.  My attempts to
  speak to them directly, as by pointing at myself and
  saying my name, seem to upset them.  They are most
  content when I keep myself at a distance.  Twice a
  day, the man or the woman leaves a basket of food in
  my room.  They do not look at me when they do this,
  if I am present.

  The castle is made of stone, and seems very ancient.
  When the air is clear, the sky above the castle is
  bright with stars.  When the ground is not hidden by
  clouds or mists, and it is daytime, it is possible to
  see for a great distance from the towers of the castle.
  To the north of the castle lies a range of mountains.
  These mountains are rocky and snow-capped, like the
  mountain on which the castle sits.  To the south of
  the castle is a broad plain, covered with trees.  On
  some nights when the air is clean, a dim light can be
  seen some distance out on the plain.

  In the center of the castle is a courtyard.  In this
  courtyard there is a well.  The well is wide and
  shallow.  There is water at the bottom of the well.
  The water is not far below the ground, but it is not
  near enough that I can see my face in it.  In the well
  live innumerable small snails.  When the weather is
  damp, these snails come out of the well.  On mornings
  that are both damp and warm, the walls of the courtyard
  are full of snails.  The snails move slowly along the
  walls, leaving moist trails behind them.  Sometimes the
  trails are in the form of words.  Sometimes the trails
  are in the form of pictures.  Sometimes the pictures are
  pictures of hands, or mountains, or rows of women standing
  by a river.  I do not eat the snails.

Hunter puts this scrap back into the bag, with the city of buildings
and sausages, with the other scraps and pages that he has not yet
seen.  He is very tired, although he has slept.  He opens the
sack and puts the bag into it, then he pulls the drawstring
tight, and knots it.  He puts the sack on the floor and lies back,
Memory as a Vessel still in his lap.  Then he frowns, and sits up,
and reaching down he pushes the sack out of sight under the bed,
and piles some of his own drawings (the back of his own hand,
a lamp, two sticks floating in a pool of water) in front of the
sack, so it cannot be seen by anyone standing in the room.  Then
he lies back again.  Outside it is quiet.

Hunter dreams of snails, and dreams that he is a prisoner.  He
dreams that he is very sleepy, dreams that he lies down on the
roof of a building atop a high mountain, and dreams that he falls
asleep.  Asleep, dreaming that he is asleep, Hunter's breath is
deep and quiet.  Later, Courant comes in and turns off the lamps,
and gets into his own bed.  Outside the sky clears and the
moon comes out.  Moonlight flows in through the window and
across the sleepers.  A bird calls.

In the house by the meadow, the house with the porch, Hunter's
mother and father, Sarah and Abram, are asleep.  Hunter's Uncle
Shaytl is also asleep, dreaming of Leona and the sound of
airplanes.  Nocturnal animals are about their business among
the grasses of the meadow, feeding and hunting and fleeing.
In another city, Ona lies in her bed, suddenly awake, looking
up at the moon.

A fever swept through the town just before Klara's babies
began to walk, just after they had weaned themselves from
her milk (the sweet tug of those mouths on her breasts
filling her body with warmth).  She feared for them, but
this was a fever that fed on adults, and it was Klara
herself that it struck.

"Am I going to die?"

"The fever has abated.  Stay in bed, drink all the water
you can stand."

"Why is my breath so short?"

"The fever lodges in the lungs."

"Will they heal?"

"Rest."

Two nights later, her babies plump and graceful, fussing in
their slatted bed, the fever returned, and Klara died.
The doctor, come to sign the death form, stood over her
bed.  Her eyes were closed, her face was pale, the skin
translucent, untenanted.  On the low table beside the bed
sat a stack of postcards, a gift from the photographer,
come in the mail a month ago.  She was a lovely woman,
thinks the doctor.

That year, with the deaths of so many parents, the town
was awash in severed babies.  Klara's were well, if
casually, cared for, two babies in a flood of babies,
of children, of tears and trouble.  Later there was a
fire, and rain, and haste, and somewhere they were separated,
and somewhere the last person who knew forgot that they
were brother and sister.


Replies

In the morning Hunter wakes very early, swings his legs over
the side of the bed (his knee stiff and sore), sits up, rolls
his shoulders up to his ears and back (those muscles working,
the bruise on his back a warm ache).  He tries the crutch,
gingerly tries his left foot on the floor; the leg is
weak and the knee very tender.  But touching his foot to
the floor is no longer a tearing agony.

With the crutch, he hobbles into the corridor, to the
bathroom, out to the courtyard to break his fast with
another hot bun.  The day is clear and cold, the sun
just rising over the roofs.  No reply yet to his telegram.

In the post office at the end of the wires, where the
telegraph set lies beside the coffee cups, Bobby Cramm
yawns and stretches, and takes the paper with Hunter's
words from the pigeon hole.

Back in his room, Hunter sits at his desk (tensing the
muscles of his knee to feel and gauge the tug of pain,
putting his fingers in his hair to feel the lump on
his head, tender but no longer bleeding).  He turns his
hands palm up on the desk and looks at them, at the
scratches and marks that cross his life lines at
unwonted angles, at the torn place, still red and raw,
on the broad pad below his right thumb.  He takes
paper and pencil, and begins to draw.

In the house by the meadow, on the second storey, Shaytl
sits by the window, his pipe unlit in his hand.  He has
been awake for an hour.  He feels, as he sometimes feels,
a sense of oppression, of sourceless discontent, as though
the world were a reproach to him.  He sighs, alone in his
room, looking out at the relentless blue of the sky and
the green of the trees.  He scratches his stomach and
shakes his head.

In half an hour, he will hear the bell of Bobby Cramm's
bicycle (his hearing has stayed sharp into his old age,
every creak of the old house sharp in his ears).  Going
down to the porch, reading Hunter's telegram along with
Sarah, this inexplicable heaviness will lift from him, for
no more reason than it came.  When they have sent the
cyclist off with a reply (greetings, love, Ona's last
known address), he will take bread and cheese and his
black and red coat, and stride off (a thumping rolling
stride) down the path along the river, his old arms
swinging, no destination in mind, no thought in his head,
only the color of the light and the taste of the air.

"She is in Pullen."

"You should write her."

The reply has come, Hunter's mother to Bobby Cramm to
young Mr. Trask at the post office, through the sending
set (hot coffee fresh in the morning, the cups still
unwashed) through the wires, back over the hills and
fields, to the college, to a telegraph boy, and up to
Hunter's room.  Greetings, love, an address.  Hunter
(on the bed, his leg up) and Courant (and his desk) and
Geoff the Monk and Gretl Tayne (in the doorway, claiming
that they have somewhere else to be, that they are about
to leave) pass the reply from hand to hand.

"I will take the train," Hunter says, suddenly knowing
that he will in fact take the train, that Pullen is not
all that far away (although in fact it is, in the other
corner of the country, more than a day away).

"Or you could simply walk," says the Monk, eyeing Hunter's
leg, the knee still bandaged, the crutch in the corner by
his bed.

Gretl shakes her head (her hair long and black as jet, worn
free, cascading down the column of her figure in a calculated
torrent).  "You are all entirely mad."

Three hours later, Hunter is in the common compartment of the
train, and it is moving out of the station.  He has his
leg up on the seat beside him, the cloth sack (the book,
the bags, the words and drawings, the flaming horses) and
a bulging carpetbag (clothes, paper, pencils, bread, two
apples) underneath.  The paper with Ona's address, a boarding
house in Pullen, is in his pocket.  The line is a modern
one, the engines large and smooth diesel-electric, pulling
away from the platform with a humming roar.  Behind him
in the station, Gretl and Geoff turn away back toward the
college.  Folded carefully in Geoff's pocket is the page
called "Memory as a Vessel".  Hunter is pleased with himself
for having left it.

Packing, sending to the station to find the next train,
the trip across the city with his crutch and his friends,
all this has gone by in a moment, and now he is settled,
motionless in motion, looking out the car's sparkling window
at the engine yards and warehouses sliding by, faster every
moment, and he is quite content.

There is a table before him, between his seat and the
empty seat opposite.  Once the train is moving, he says
to himself, tightening and relaxing his leg to relieve
the ache and stiffness, he will open the sack, get out the
book, and by the light through the windows he will read it.
But for now, for the time being, he will sit looking out
the window and let his mind wander.

The world, he remembers Ona saying, is a library.  They
had been, the three of them, lounging by the river some
rainy holiday afternoon, watching the sun trying to break
through the clouds, and talking nonsense.  Every tree a
book, Marc had agreed, every person a bookcase tall as a
house.  And Hunter had told them a story, a story that his
mother had told him just a few days earlier.  This was not
long before Hunter had left for the city, and gone to
sleep.

There were once, the story said, three princes, the sons of
a great king.  Although they were triplets, born on the same
day, they were each very different.  One was tall and strong,
with flowing hair and the eyes of every woman young and old
upon him as he walked (a flashing smile, arms like the limbs
of a great tree).  One was quick and limber, with a proud
high forehead and a mind as bright as the sun; he sat with
the greatest scholars when he could barely walk, and astounded
them with his knowledge.  The third was small and quiet,
hardly noticeable in the shadow of his brothers, but the one
that children loved the most, and the one you would go to
with troubles.

It came to pass that in the year these three remarkable
princes came of age, the press of events in the world
rushed against the king their father like storm clouds,
and he was overthrown, and his family and followers
scattered to the four winds.  On the edge of a barren
field one night, camped under ragged tents that had
once been grand, the king called his boys to him, and
told them their fates.

The king revealed to the boys that their mother (whom they
had never known, growing up mothered by a family of queens
and a castle full of doting noblewomen and servants) had been
a Goddess, an avatar of Athena the Wise, who had come to the
king in the great temple in the capital city, and loved him,
and borne him sons.  And after the sons were weaned from her
breasts she had left them, gone back to the hills of the
Gods, and behind her she had left three books, and told
the king their purpose.

Now the king brought out the three books, from a chest he
had taken with him fleeing from his palace, and he gave one
to each of his sons, in the ragged tent by the barren field.
The books were all three the same: richly bound in soft leather,
filled with the finest paper, and every page blank.

"You are each to go out into the world," the king said to
his sons, "and in your book you are to write everything that
you find of immortal wisdom.  When you come to the golden
city of the Gods, you will each present the book to your
mother the Goddess, and it will determine your legacy."
And the three boys, now men, took their books and left
their father that very night, going off into the world
through the darkness.

The first son, the strong one, rode to a far country, and
joined the army there as the lowest recruit.  He patrolled
haunted swamps, guarded high passes choked with snow, drove
monsters away from the fields of the farmers.  His strength
and his skill won him acclaim, and honor, and at the height
of his manhood he was made a general of the army, with thousands
of men under his command.  In his book, he recorded all that
he heard of martial history, of the daring of kings, of the
laws of war and strategy.  Many women admired him, and he
fathered a score of children.

One day, years later, when his hair was streaked with white
but his limbs still strong, he heard a traveler's tale of
a golden city, hidden in the snows of a mountain far to the
west.  He gathered his most loyal retainers around him, begged
the king he served for leave to go in search of his fate, and
set off.  After many adventures and trials, he reached the
base of the mountain, and saw glittering above him the golden
light of the city of the Gods.  He bid his followers farewell,
and making his way up the mountain (the snows parting before
him in welcome, if the tales of his retinue may be believed)
he came to the gates.  They opened of themselves to let him
in (gates golden and graceful, as high as the sky), and he
saw his mother within, all in white, and more beautiful than
any mortal.

The first son handed his mother the book, and looking through
its closely-lettered pages she smiled, and embraced him, and
made him the general of all the hosts of the Gods.

The second son, whose mind was as bright and quick as a flame,
went off into the world alone, and traveled alone, going
from city to city, from collegium to tower to hermit's cave,
sitting with the wisest of scholars and learning their wisdom.
In his book, between the soft bindings, he recorded the
deepest and most arcane lore: the true names of the stars,
the secret of the transmutation of the elements, the powers
and weaknesses of every spirit of the woods, the deserts, and
the hearts of men.

Where the second son went, scholarship bloomed; in his wake
sprang up renaissances, scientific revolutions, the breaking
and forming of schools of thought, philosophies, systems of
knowledge.  In one city, in an ancient book long lost in a
dusty corner of a royal library, he found a rumor of the
golden city of the Gods.  In a slender tower on a sun-drenched
mountain peak, sitting cross-legged between twin sorceresses
with the faces of birds, he heard disembodied voices tell a
story of the founding of that city, and a cryptic hint of
where it might be found.  The answer to that riddle he
discovered in a laboratorium at the edge of a foetid marsh,
laboring into the night with a bent old man with stained
hands, boiling obscure liquids and collecting the steam
on sheets of glass.  Five years later, riding a camel whose
saddle-bags were stuffed with parchments and herbs, he
topped a dune in the middle of a desert, and before him
lay the city of the Gods.

The second son was welcomed by his mother (her eyes wiser
and her face more learned than any he had seen in the
realms of men), and on looking through his book she
embraced him, and made him the chief of the scholars of
the collegium of the Gods (for not even the Gods know all
that there is to know of the cosmos; to create is not always
to comprehend).

The third son walked from the tents of his father, along
the road into the darkness.  He looked at the sky, and thought
of his mother, and wondered.  He arrived the next day,
somewhat footsore, at the edge of a town, and found a room
to let.  The forces of the world that had pushed his father
from his throne swept over and through the town, and the
third son helped tend the wounded, and worked for a baker
baking bread.  The war passed, and in peace the town
prospered, and the third son kneaded bread in the morning,
and sat by his window in the afternoon, looking at the
sky and feeling the wind, and talking to the folk that
passed by in the street.  He often took out his mother's
book and held it in his hands, feeling the fine softness of
the covers, and resting his eyes on the empty pages.  Only
once did he write in it.

As his youth began to fade, the third son met a woman of
the town, and married her, and they had three children
together.  In time the children grew, and went into the
world, and in time the woman died.  The third son wept.
And one morning, when the clouds sped along the sky
swept by a wind in the heights, the third son took his
mother's book and went out into the town, stood for awhile
with his head down before the grave of his wife, and then
walked out across the fields, to the gates of the golden
city of the Gods, and knocked at the doors, and they
were opened.

The third son was welcomed by his mother, who tousled his hair
and kissed his cheeks.  He gave her his book, and she opened it
and saw the one thing that he had written within.  And she
smiled gravely, and embraced him, and led him to the top of
the city of the Gods, and sat him in the golden throne at
the top of the city, from which he could see all of creation
and all the doings of men and Gods.  And standing next to the
throne, she put her arm around his shoulders and kissed him.

"Welcome home," she said.


Questions for Chapters Eighteen, Nineteen, and Twenty

What does the story about Abram (Hunter's father) tell
you about him?  What does it tell you about Hunter?

What elements do the three stories, of Abram, of the
prisoner in the castle, and of the three princes, have
in common?  Pick another story we have heard, and
say how it might be related to them.

How does Geoff the Monk react to the paper in Hunter's
lap?  How does Hunter respond?  What ultimately becomes
of that paper?  How do you explain this?

How does Klara's death fit into the narrative as a
whole?  What might be her role in the story?  What
ambiguities surround her?

In what sense is the world a library?  What might her
observation tell us about Ona?

Does the story of the three princes have a moral?  What
might the moral be?


The Quest Continues

The train put behind it the last of the local station
stops around the city, and entered the countryside, the
plain between cities, the express leg of its route.  In
the tug of the open space, it moved smoothly, gliding
along the tracks like a skater, eager for speed, stopping
for nothing.  Hunter watched the outlying houses, the farms
wealthy and poor, long streaks of electric lines sweeping
in to follow the tracks, joining and dividing and reaching
suddenly off for the horizon.  Here a village, the tracks
flying by the backs of the poorer houses, broken carts and
neat stacks of wood against the fences, here a market town,
a level crossing with children waving up at the cars, here
a graveyard, here a field of wheat.  Hunter roused himself
with effort.

The cloth sack was heavy, but lighter than he remembered.
He lifted it to the seat beside him (the car not crowded
today for this part of the route, no one looking at him or
using the table, no one concerned), and opened the drawstring.
He took out the bags, one by one, and piled them on the
table.  He took out the book and placed it beside them.
He sat back, imagining himself a glutton before a feast,
a libertine before an orgy.  He almost drew back before the
density of the unknown before him, put them all away again
to turn back to the window, but in the light of the sun
he was able to resist.

He opened the book to the first page, reads again "Ten
Days After Drowning", familiar now like an odd old friend.
He turned the page (turns over the first scrap in the
crumbling heap) and read "Eleven Days After Drowning".
Another train passed, going the other way, on the other
half of his train's track; the cars rattled and clanged at
each other, and the engines sounded their horns in greeting.

He turned over the next sheet.  The third page of the book,
the third sheet in the heap, was burned at the edges.  In
the center of the page was the face of a woman, staring with
ambiguous intensity out at him.  Around the edge was a sinuous
curl of writing, just a few sentences, in that same hand.  The
words grew larger and smaller in waves along their way.

 The hand of a woman.  Two fingers bent around the stem of
 a glass.  The hand of a woman.  A grey eye and a blue eye.
 The hand of a man.  A broken board.  A nail.  Five toes,
 in the shadow of a cross.  A cup, a knife, and two spoons.

Hunter smiled at this homely row of narrated objects, smiled
at the intent woman (what is Ona doing now?  what will she
say when she sees me?).  And he turned the page.

The next sheet, the fourth in the book, was nearly blank.  Or,
he saw, leaning forward so his nose nearly touched the page,
the writing was very light, nearly invisible, truly invisible
in places, fading in and out without obvious order.  What he
could see of the image was a city, seen from far above, or
in one place the back of a foot, and elsewhere a jumble of
letters or words, all too light to make out.

Frowning, Hunter closed the book again and pushed it aside.
He opened a bag and took out a sheet.  It was stuck with
tangled cobwebs to another, and the two of them slid out
together, scattering dirt across the tabletop.  Hunter
sighed and separated them, and brushed the dirt onto the
floor of the car.

On the first page was a burning bridge.  People walked
across the bridge, and flames clung to their heads, their
hands, their shoulders.  The trees along the bank were also
in flame.  Burning branches hung down, fell onto the road.
None of the people, flaming as they were, seemed to be in
any pain, or to be frightened, or aware of anything out
of the ordinary, except for one young woman, on the edge of
the page.  She was untouched by the fire, except for one
spark that had landed on the edge of her dress, and was
smoldering.  On her face was stark fear.

Hunter put that page back into the bag.  On the next page,
the other page (outside, a forest has sprung up on both
sides of the train, and trees rush by, not burning), Hunter
found words, and a pair of hands.  In the center of one hand,
taking up half the palm, was a placid lake, on which swam
a flock of perfect geese.  In the center of the other hand,
two men, one with the head of a dog and one with the head
of a flower, both nude and corpulent, stood facing each
other, their legs braced, their arms pressed against each
other, snarling.  Between the hands, these words.

 The Journey

 If I close my eyes, I inhabit a different world.  With my
 eyes open, I stand in a field, but if I close my eyes my
 ears hear walls, close to either side.  With my eyes open,
 I stand in a room, but if I close my eyes my ears hear a
 vast open space behind me, and a yawning abyss before.
 Walking with my eyes closed, I hear openings in the wall
 to my left.  I pass one opening with every four strides.
 With my eyes open, I am walking in place, in my cell.

 The sequence of events is determined only by the story
 that the narrator chooses to tell.  I am drowning in cold
 water.  I am riding in a coach, wearing a red silk coat.
 I am waking in my room, to find that the ceiling has been
 covered in layers of dangling fur, and sweetmeats are
 scattered across the floor.  With my eyes open, I am
 myself, writing on a piece of flint with a burned stick.
 With my eyes closed, my story merges into a thousand
 other stories, and I am a woman with a tiger.  I am a
 clown.  I am the palms of two hands, covered with oil.

Hunter touched the page with his fingers, as the forest
around the train dwindled to a thin wood, to fields of
brambles, to an open plain beside a river.  The rhythmic
chuck of the rails seemed louder now, the eager gliding of
the train more a pulsation, a quick beat.  He heard footsteps
coming from behind him.

A woman was standing beside him, slightly behind him, looking
down over his right shoulder (he twisted in his seat to see her
and his knee protested, pain bringing him back still more
sharply to the world).  She was looking not at him, but at the
page before him on the table.  Her face was placid, appraising.
Not an especially pretty face or an especially plain one, it was
framed by short hair (very short, Hunter saw, much shorter than
his own, capped by a black beret).  Her hand was on the back of
his seat, supporting her body against the slight swaying of the
car on the tracks.  A leather bag hung from her other shoulder,
molding itself against her hip.

"That isn't one that I know," she said.  She looked for a moment
at his face (her eyes black and forthright, unhesitating), then
at the bags and the sack beside him. "You have a great many.
You're lucky."  She looked down again at the paper before him,
the two palms, the lake and the contending figures, the flock
of birds, the text, and Hunter looked down also, flattening his
hands against the top of the table.

He heard her open the bag, heard a small rustle of paper.  Saw
her hand (blunt fingernails, a small scar at the joining of the
first and second fingers) as she placed another sheet in front
of him. He felt as though a great hollow had opened inside him,
in the core of his belly, as though the train had suddenly
plunged into an abyss.

So here is this new sheet of paper (new to Hunter, not new in
itself; in itself at least as old as any of his, not dirty but
frayed, somehow carrying an air of age older than his, but
more elegantly preserved).  It sits on the train table before
him, above and slightly to the right of the sheet that rests
between his hands, under his fingers.

It bears words, in a different hand than his own, an open and
looping hand, each letter a crafted thing, a claim upon the world.
It bears no drawing, no representation, but along each vertical
edge is a series of lines, patterned but imperfectly, straight
and slanting, bringing to mind by its single example a million,
an infinity of, other lines and patterns that might have been
there, a million, an infinity of, other sheets of paper that
might have been there on the table, above and slightly to the
right of his own.  Each of those other sheets would bear other
words, or none.

  Ygraine and Memnon celebrate these rites with an
  ecstatic dance, in company with a thousand weeping
  angels.  Wrath, the enormous strider whose sisters
  Calm and Quiet rule the void as his regent, is held
  at bay by torches and lamps and the light of burning
  books.  An army of crofters surrounds the dancers,
  uncertain supplicants.  Or hunters finally taking
  their quarry to ground.

Despite himself Hunter touches the page.  Its words are nonsense,
he tells himself, then laughs inwardly (does he laugh also with
his breath?  does the woman hear?  does her breath laugh with
him?) at himself for the thought.  He looks up at her.  He finds
no words of his own.

"You are young," she says, softly judging him, and she puts out a
hand and touches his forehead.  He feels very young, although from
her face and her form she is no older, or not much older, than he is.
She smiles, her unpainted lips curling higher on one cheek than
the other.

"How it works," she says, "is that you take this one, and I take
that one of yours."  And she moves her hand down (her fingernail
brushes his cheek, and he thinks of Marc's fingernail brushing
his cheek, of the shape of Ona's toes) and rests it on the table,
beside his hands and the two papers.

He thinks of the scraps still buried under the skin of the world,
in the room in the hallway below the stairs and the crossing rods.
He thinks of the drawings on those walls, fading and crumbling and
washing out with age and water, and of the page that is a single dot,
or the page with the smudged staircase and the bird's head.  They all
seem in this moment to be equally vital, integral, indispensable parts
of whatever it is that he has separated from the world.

To exchange with this woman, this bold woman standing in the
aisle of the speeding train (outside a village flashes by, the
gates of another level crossing, the railings of a bridge, a
narrow glittering river), would be to sever something, or to
entangle something irrevocably.  The thought twists his heart.
He looks away from her, down at the table, and she lifts her
hand, moves it over his, touches two of his knuckles with the
pads of her fingers.

And he lifts his paper, this scrap of writing between the two
drawn hands, and his hands put it into her hand (her fingers
closing leisurely on it, not snatching, giving him time to
rescind, to recover, to maintain the whole), and his hands
move her paper, the other paper, with its looping letters and
enclosing lines, between them, on the table in front of him.
There is silence for a moment (a noisy silence, the clatter
of iron wheels on iron track and wooden ties, the creak of the
car, the humming roar of the engine always somewhere ahead),
and then he hears (uncertain supplicants) her open her bag, and
the rustle of paper.

He takes this new sheet (has he brought any empty bags?
should he press it between the covers of the book?  fold
it in his pouch? burn it, toss it from the window?) in his
fingers, and leans back in his seat (knee creaking, asking
to be bent to exercise its pain).  She looks down at him and
smiles, a smile of triumph or victorious conspiracy, and
then she flicks two fingers, and a small card flies from
them to land in his lap.  He picks it up.  An address in
Pullen (near Ona?  across the city?  he does not know Pullen),
no name, blank on the back, no burning bridges or men with
the heads of birds.

When he looks up she is walking away from him down the
aisle of the car (where was she going when his paper
caught her eye and she stopped?).  At the connecting door
she stops and looks back at him, gravely, and raises her
hand.  Then she is through and gone (the clatter and rush
of the train louder for an instant, then quiet).

He holds the paper (this new paper) in his hands (the hand
with a lake, the hand with two men), and looks out the window
of the train, at things (shapes, colors) rushing by, all in
the same direction.  He could, it occurs to him, go through
that door and find her, search for her, and if he found her
ask her questions (about this paper, about other papers like
it, about what she will do with his paper, about this card
with the address in Pullen).  But the thought seems absurd
even before it is fully formed.

He reaches into the bag and pulls out a handful of papers,
seven papers, and fans them (brushing away the dirt, the
small stones, because dirt and small stones are not part
of the thing that he has separated from everything else in
the world, and put in his sack) out on the table in front
of him, and slips the new page in among them.  No danger
that this one will be confused with those (the world holds
itself apart).  The paper is different (although not all of
his papers, the papers from the room under the skin of the
world, are the same), the ink is a different shade, the
writing, the speed of the strokes, entirely different.

He takes the card and puts it in his pocket.  The train
rushes on, just as headlong, just as determined, across
the plain, toward the other end of its route.  The steeple
of a church flashes past the window, and then another one,
at a distance over the top of a hill, floats by at a more
stately pace.  There was an ancient ruined church at the
head of the valley (a more modern, smaller, less ambitious
one in the center among the scattered houses).  The three
of them, Ona and Marc and Hunter, had walked to it more
than once, along the path and road by the river, in the
sun or through the fog, and lay on their backs on the
cracked flagstones of its courtyard, and watched the sky.


Eight Cards on a Table

 Water up to the Shins

 There is a regularity in the world.  That regularity is, as
 I began to suspect when last I was awake, the steady rising
 of the water.  I will name my days now by the rising of the
 water.

 On the first day, the water was a film on the low parts of
 the ground.  The water was a film on the ground before
 the idol in the shape of a lion.  The water was a film
 on the ground before the idol in the shape of a woman
 with eight arms and four breasts.  The ground before the
 idol of swords was slightly higher, and that ground was dry.

 On the second day, the water was high enough to cover my
 feet.  That second day is therefore named Water up to the Ankles.
 On that day there were no longer any idols in the room, but
 the water covered all the ground.  The water was up to my
 ankles next to the shattered machine, and the water was also
 up to my ankles on the other side of the room, by the
 gouges in the wall and the broken axes.

 The water enters the room through cracks in the walls.  It
 enters the room by dripping from the ceiling.  It enters the
 room by seepage from the floor.  The water enters the room in
 slow but unvarying drops from the gilded pipe that protrudes
 from the mouth of the stone dragon twenty feet above my
 head.  There is no regularity to the source of the water,
 but its rising continues.

 Today the water is up to my shins.  The ground is uneven,
 and although the water is clear it distorts my vision.  The
 ground is also slick, and I fall often.  Stone columns rise
 above the water at intervals throughout the room.  On these
 columns are piles of stinking offal.  Some of these piles are
 my food for the day.  I must examine them carefully before
 eating.

Hunter recalls the water that swirled in and around the banks
of the river in flood, the mud that formed under their feet when
they stirred up the ground on summer days, the shimmering blur
between the air and the water when they went, hiding from their
parents, out to the river in the driving rain, and got soaked,
all three, to the skin.

The second sheet of paper has the word "substance" written in
one corner, the word "hope" in the other, and an image in between.
Hunter feels how the image draws his eye around, from one word to
the other, in arcs.  The image is of an arm, bent gracefully but
somehow unnaturally across the page, and of threads or small
ropes arcing through space around the arm, as though fastened
to arrows.  In the background, light and barely visible but
reinforcing the guiding of the eye, a city on the side of a
hill, with a bell-tower rising above it, and above that a
platform of cloud curving over the city and recapitulating
the shape of the hill, of the arm, of the threads.  Substance
and hope, Hunter thinks, and wonders if there is some meaning
he should see.

The third piece of paper is a small scrap, burned on two edges,
with a face in profile, and before it a column of writing.  Only
the first few lines are legible.  He thinks about the missing
letters, words, the dark room underneath the city, the door ajar.

  My records have been lost.  My records have been
  destroyed.  There is no one who can recount my
  history.  There are no stories about me remaining
  in the world.  The books that contained my name
  have been burned in the public square.  My name

and that is all that he can read.

The fourth paper in the pile fanned out in front of Hunter on
the table (the train going up a slope now, slower but still
unfettered, running without strain against the pull of the
earth) bears a woman in a wide hat, her eyes peering up out
of the paper, her hair in tangles spilling out from under the
hat around her face.

  Diana, the Huntress, holds up the lintel of the window.
  Mary, the Mother of God, supports the left side of the
  window.  Astarte the Abundant supports the right side of
  the window.  Above the window there is a cloud in the
  shape of a woman.  The cloud has no face.  Through the
  window, I can see the whole of the universe.  Through
  the window, there is only mist.

Hunter remembers, and can find no reason for remembering, the
day that dark Maria told the children, gathered around her on
the porch of the house, about the inward organs of the body,
and how they communicate one with the other within the darkness
of the body by substances they introduce into the blood.  Hunter
imagined these substances as thick and syrupy, as flowing or
oozing through the blood vessels slowly, pushed on by the
rushing of the quick light red blood.  Later he learned that
hormones are like scents, like dust in the wind, tiny puffs
of chemical dispersed into the blood and flowing within it.
But he still thinks of the organs in the body as great slugs,
conversing by way of globules oozing slowly and reluctantly
through the veins.

The fifth paper in the pile is the paper that the woman gave
him (he could still go forward in the train, go through the
door between the cars, and find her, or look for her), the
paper with the looping words that sit on the page like statuary.

  Ygraine and Memnon celebrate these rites with an
  ecstatic dance, in company with a thousand weeping
  angels.  Wrath, the enormous strider whose sisters
  Calm and Quiet rule the void as his regent, is held
  at bay by torches and lamps and the light of burning
  books.  An army of crofters surrounds the dancers,
  uncertain supplicants.  Or hunters finally taking
  their quarry to ground.

Do other papers describe the rites of Ygraine and Memnon, of
Wrath and Calm and Quiet?  The woman said that he was lucky,
that he had a great many.  Does she have only a few?  Has
she given him a tenth of what she has?  A quarter?  What
are the books that are burned in the rite, to hold Wrath at
bay?

The sixth paper in the pile, the fifth that he pulled from
the bag (so many bags in the pile of bags, and the book lying
heavy on the table, all but untouched) is blank.  He turns
it over; the other side is blank as well.  Holding it to
his face (it smells of both fire and damp, of rot and of
heat) he cannot make out even the lightest and most faded
of drawn lines.  There is a smudge of dirt on the back of the
paper (the side that was facing down when he drew it from the
bag, but it is no more the back than it is the front), a
smudge in what might be the shape of a fingermark.  He
puts his own finger against it.  The train rushes under a
bridge, and the sound of it sweeps through the car and out.

The seventh and eighth sheets, the sixth and seventh of the
seven he pulled from the bag, are stuck together.  Not looking
at the face of either, he pulls their edges carefully apart,
slides his fingers between them, prying gently at the join.
They pop apart with a little puff of dirt; Hunter's fingers
touch the drop of resin (or glue, or sap, or clay made from
dirt and cobwebs, or ichor, or something dried), and a bit
sticks to his skin.  He pinches his fingers together and pulls
them apart, and the pads of skin are pulled out for an instant,
stuck to the adhesive fleck, and then spring back when the
contact breaks.

He rubs his fingers on his pants.

The seventh sheet has two long lines, sinuous lines running up
and down the page, crossing each other three times, floating
side to side in the space of the page.  Between the long vertical
lines are short horizontal ones, forming what might be a twisting
flexible ladder, and grasping the rungs of the ladder are figures,
vaguely human figures but flexible themselves, long and boneless,
also twisting sideways in the space of the page as they climb
up, or climb down, the twining ladder.  Behind the ladder and the
figures, low on the page so only the top limb shows, sits the sun,
vast and brilliant (drawn vast and brilliant despite being a few
marks with a pen on a few inches of paper, and Hunter nods to
himself, admiring the technique) casting the figures into shadow,
into the shadows of themselves, and filling the space with light.
The words sit on the page in a thin column on the left, not
lit by the sun, not taking part in the image.

 Rescued from Drowning

 Had events occurred differently, I would be in a constant world,
 and the moon would not fill this room with the grey and white
 bulk of its body.  Had events occurred differently, I would be in
 my carriage, driven by the man who drove my carriage, and I would
 be eating from a box.  The order of events is arbitrary.  The
 set of events that occurs is arbitrary.  The set of events that
 occurs is in control of the narrator.  By narrating my story in
 a different order, I may rescue myself from drowning.  By narrating
 my story with a different set of events, I may be rescued from
 drowning.

Hunter frowns and turns his head away, abstracted.  Someone passes
along the aisle of the train car, looks down incuriously at the
table, goes through the door (the sound loud again and then soft;
people have perhaps passed along the aisle before, many times, as
he sat here reading, looking, moving his eyes over the papers).

In sudden disquiet, he lifts the book and puts it back into the
bottom of the cloth sack, lifts the bags (one at a time, two at
once, a small pile at once) and puts them in on top of it, and
draws the drawstring, leaving out only the single bag from which
these papers came, and the papers themselves (seven from his bag,
from the room under the skin of the earth, and one from the woman
with the cap).  He lifts his leg off of the seat beside him and
eases his foot to the ground; the flow of blood to his knee is a
throbbing ache.  He tenses and relaxes the muscles, weighs the
pain.

The eighth sheet, the last sheet in the pile before him, the
seventh of the seven sheets he pulled from the bag, is covered
with jagged lines, running diagonally over the paper, never
quite intersecting.  In one corner is a small clear area, and
in the clear area is drawn a clear cylinder (of glass, of ice,
of crystal), and lying in the center of the crystal, eyes closed,
is a young woman.  Hunter leans close to the page (the process
for transforming the human body into ice is recorded on the forehead
of the frozen maiden), but her face remains obscure, distorted
by a wave of density, a refracting of light through the tube
of her prison (the volume of air connecting my body to the moon
has the same function as the ice surrounding the body of the
maiden).


Questions for Chapters Twenty-One and Twenty-Two

How many pages from the underground room have been fully
described so far?  How has Hunter reacted to them?  Name
two things that they all have in common.  Do you think
they all have the same author?  How is the page that the
woman gave Hunter on the train different from them?  How
is it similar to them?

What is Hunter's attitude toward the woman?  Toward
exchanging papers with her?  Why did he not attempt to follow
her as she left the car, and why does he not look for her
later?  What might she be doing now?  Expand on Hunter's
feelings about entanglement.

Some of the passages that Hunter reads on the papers
remind him of scenes from his childhood, although the
connection between the words on the paper and the scene
that he remembers is not always clear.  Describe a time
when something that you saw or read reminded you of
something that bore no obvious relation to it.


The Steam Train

After midnight, the train finally slows, coming into a denser
place in the web of tracks, the bulge at the far end of its
route.  A conductor in a pillbox cap comes through the car
announcing a stop, and the humming of the engines quiets, and
the rhythmic rush of the light poles beside the track unwinds
downward, languorously, and the train stops at a station.  The
doors are opened by booted trainmen, and a few passengers,
with a rustling of luggage, get off, or come on.  Hunter raises
his head from the back of the seat.  He has been sleeping for
some minutes (or hours, or days), his head and his dreams full
of rising water, women with cloud faces, burning bridges, and
an insistent demand for attention from something always just
beyond his vision.  His neck is stiff.

After the first station, there are two more stops before the
railway yard and the grand exchange, the end of the line.  Outside
the windows, lights and darkness advance and pass and vanish,
inky water sparkles with blue light, and the wind whistles through
the walls, whistles more loudly than in the day, when the train
was gliding faster, in the open, in daylight.

Hunter has put the eight papers back into the bag (the seven
papers back into the bag, and the eighth paper, the one from the
black-eyed woman, into the bag for the first time, among the
other papers, there being no chance of confusing them), and
put that bag into the cloth sack (with the other bags, and
the book), and pulled the drawstring to close the mouth of
the sack, and then looped the end of the drawstring around
his wrist.  He did this when he felt sleep coming over him,
while the sun was still sinking red over the fields outside
the windows.

The third stop, a few more people on and off, things rolling
in the aisles, doors closed, into the center of the city,
under a bridge and into a deeper darkness, into the maw of
the great station, the grand exchange, and then up to a
lighted platform, trainmen in elegant black gloves opening
the doors and bowing to the passengers, everyone on their
feet, holding their bags.  Long after midnight, but the
station is alive, and lit, and noisy with the noises of
distance and of speed and of business.

There is a hotel here, enclosed within the station, two hotels
really, one rich and one common (in the same column of the
building, back to back, but with their doors on different long
corridors, a long walk apart), and Hunter could have taken a
room for the night (the last of his money in his pocket, and
Courant still owed, and no plan in his mind beyond seeing Ona,
and hearing her voice), but he has a ticket for the next train
out to Pullen, and it leaves in half an hour.

A conductor helps him with his luggage out onto the platform,
and then he is standing (the line of the train hissing and
crackling softly on the tracks, its parts readjusting to
stillness, to no wind), with the crutch under his left arm,
his suitcase in his right hand, the cloth sack over his
right shoulder.  He feels entirely askew, tired, dazed by
the size and the sound of the place.

"Are you going to the concourse?"

A young couple, perhaps his own age, have come up beside him,
the man (a thin beard and moustache, a long grey coat) next
to him, the woman (a sharp nose, long limbs, a pale yellow
dress) beyond, looking politely at him, smiling as one smiles
to a stranger on a railway platform at night.

"Gate eleven," Hunter answers, feeling in his pocket for
his ticket.

"Like a hand?"

Hunter nods gratefully, and the man reaches out, and Hunter
gives him the suitcase.  They make their way, the three of
them, up off of the platform into the mazy interior of the
station (old wooden corridors, vendors selling meat and
sweets and fried dough, conductors and engineers and
station officials striding past in their own parallel
version of the place), past the wide arch that leads to
the concourse (Hunter offers to take back his bag, but
the young man waves him off), and along another hallway
to the dark rectangle of gate eleven.

"You're very kind."  Hunter would like to draw them, the
graceful shapes of their clothing, their long legs, generous
faces.

"It was nothing."

"Have a good journey!" the woman calls over her shoulder as
they walk off.  Hunter stands on the platform.  His train has
just arrived (from the yard, or from Pullen, or from elsewhere),
and the doors of the cars are not yet open.  The engine, hissing
and cooling here at the head of the platform (the cars arrayed
behind it like logs) is an old coal-fired steam engine; this
is an old line, from the grand exchange to Pullen, its engines
and cars distinguished but slightly shoddy.

A cluster of conductors appear from a door hidden in the
shadow of the wall and open the doors of the cars.  One
comes to Hunter and looks at his ticket, nods, takes his
suitcase, and escorts him onto the train (his knee a dull
ache from even crossing the station, the neck of the bag
rubbing his shoulder).  In the car where the conductor has
settled him, there are no tables, but the seat cushions
are soft (red cloth rubbed threadbare in places, and patched).
He sits down and puts his sack and his suitcase on the
floor between his feet.

The cars of the train slowly fill up; although it is deep
night, hours before dawn, there are people going from here
to Pullen, or to places on the way to Pullen, or places
beyond.  Hunter puts his fingers into his pocket and touches
the paper with Ona's address, and the card that the woman
gave him.  A white-haired couple sit in the seats opposite
Hunter.  A ruddy young man sits two seats away on his left.
Just before the trainmen close the doors, someone heavily
wrapped in layers of dark clothing (a woman? probably a
woman) sits in the seat to his right.  On this part of
the journey, there will be no long hours at a solitary
table, touching paper and hearing only the rush of the
wheels on the tracks.

With a great chugging and hissing of steam (this car is
only two back from the engine, the huge noisy beast that
makes coal into miles), the train backs out from the
platform, backs out of the lit darkness of the station into
the streaked fiery darkness of the switching yard.  A
conductor goes through the cars collecting tickets.  The
train backs up against a great black shape (a roundhouse,
a train shed, a mountain) and then starts forward along another
track, off with a jerk into night black and shiny as coal.

The heads of the couple across the car nod in the rhythm of the
engine, of the ties, of the steady chug of the pistons.  The
train goes through the inner city slowly, making no stops, and
when the darkness is emptier (lighted streets left behind, the
lights of boats at the port left behind) it picks up speed, the
rhythm quickening, blackness rushing past the windows with now
and then a spark from the boiler, a tail of smoke, steam, rampant
exuberance.

Hunter straightens out his knee in front of him, props his
crutch on the vacant seat to his left.  The bundled figure to
his right has her (her?) head down, arms crossed, not moving.
Hunter leans back in his seat.  He thinks about the room, the
room under the earth with the pipes in the ceiling and the book
on the table (no longer on the table).  He sees himself gathering
up all those pages (all the ones he did gather, the ones not left
behind in the silence, the drip of water somewhere in the distance),
stuffing them into bags.  He frowns, recalling a bundle of papers,
all the same size and shape, that his hand found in the dirt, and
that he put into a bag without looking at them.

He opens the mouth of the sack (the rhythm of the train now loud
and steady, the turning of the pistons, of the wheel rods, the
roar of the steam, grander but less certain than the hum of the
diesel), and feels the paper bags, one by one (the grittiness of
dirt, of crumbling paper, of scraps pressed together and tumbled
in travel).  When his fingers find the bundle, he is certain.  No
other place in the bags has this solid feeling, this regularity,
as though he had stuffed a bound book into his sack.  He opens
that paper bag and brings the bundle out, out of the paper bag
and out the mouth of the cloth sack, into the air.  The nodding
pair across the car are looking at him, or only looking out the
window behind him (at the darkness), or only resting their eyes
on the wall over his head.

He holds the bundle of papers in his lap.  They are square and
thick, each sheet thicker than any of the sheets he has read so
far.  They are held to each other by nothing, by cobwebs, perhaps
only by habit.  He turns the bundle over in his hands.  There is
writing on the face of this page, writing in the same hand that
he has become accustomed to, but in a different ink, a smoky dark
blue ink, not the jet black and grey charcoal of the other scraps
(the days after drowning, the days of the frozen maiden).  He
looks quickly through the bundle, at some of the other papers
(are there ten, twenty, a hundred sheets?).  He finds no drawings,
no titles, just lines of even text.

 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.

Hunter rubs his eyes with thumb and forefinger.  He is sleepy;
he is not used to trains.  Travel tires him.  The wrapped body
in the seat next to his moves uncomfortably in its seat.  He
seems to feel warmth coming from there (from her?), warmth and
a certain enclosed animal scent.

 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.

He feels exposed, bare, addressed directly by the words, unable
to reply.  What tyranny, he thinks, does a writer exercise over
a reader.  What insupportable power an artist (he thinks of his
own drawings, and it occurs to him to wonder when he last held
a pencil) has over the viewer, over the audience.  He feels the
night pressing against the back of his neck, and from within the
cloth piled in the seat beside him he hears breathing, air being
pulled in and pushed out, through a nose of some shape, into a
body of some design.  He shakes his head.

 You have thought the world relentless.  If you have indeed
 come here to rest, you may not find conditions entirely to
 your satisfaction.  But others are depending on you, others
 have always depended on you.  We are none of us entirely
 alone.

 We place no more demands upon you than you place upon yourself.
 You have been told that you are your own worst enemy, but
 we do not believe that.  Our evidence does not support that.
 If there is other evidence that you can provide to us, we
 urge you to do so without hesitation and without restraint.

 It is in all of our interests.  Our interests and yours
 coincide in many areas.  You have sacrificed much to be
 here.  We all wish for success.

The white-haired woman across the car has laid her head on the
shoulder of the white-haired man.  They are old, Hunter thinks,
as his Uncle is old.  His parents, too, aren't they old by now?
Hunter thinks of his own hair turning white, of a white head
lain on his shoulder, before dawn, crossing the countryside in
a chuffing steam train, sitting under glass with strangers.

The train rushes clattering across a river bridge; the lights of
boats, or ships, make a line through the dark.

 We do not believe every story that you tell.  That is to
 be expected.  You should develop the habit of telling the
 truth when you speak to us.  It will be better for all of
 us in the long run.

 We are your friends.  You must remember that, whatever else
 happens and whatever other impressions come upon you in the
 course of our interaction, we are above all your friends.
 We have obligations toward you, just as you have obligations
 toward us.

 We will come to know each other well.  Put your fingers to
 the back of your neck, and feel the softness of those hairs.
 We will be to each other like the hairs at the back of the
 neck.  Only relax.

Hunter groans in frustration, or exhaustion (his knee aches if
he does not think about it, feels perfectly normal if he does),
and moves as though to put the bundle (or stuff it, or fling
it) back into the sack.  But he doesn't.  He shakes it slightly
in his hand (the four pages he has read taken off and put behind
the back of the bundle, raised up slightly above the others so
he can find the beginning again, not lose the order that he
found them in, because that order is part of what he is
separating, has separated, from the rest of the world), and
blows with his mouth, and a little more of the dirt and the
remains of cobwebs are shaken off and float or fall to the
floor of the car.


Questions for Chapter Twenty-Three

Hunter travels on two different trains in this chapter.  How
are they similar?  How are they different?

How are the writings that he reads in this chapter different
from the other writings from the underground room?  How are
they similar?

What might the two people sitting across the car from Hunter
in the steam train think about him?  What does the person in
the heavy clothing, to his right, think about him?  What do
the two people who helped him from the one train to the other
think about him?  What might they be doing now?


Pullen

Here is Hunter in Pullen, in bed, early in the morning.  Ona
has just left the room, to go to the shop, with a backward
glance and an odd smile at him over her shoulder as she went
through the door.  Here is Hunter in a thin nightshirt, under
clean but threadbare blankets, a fresh wrapping around his knee
(Ona putting it carefully but firmly on last night, by the
light of the candles, her hands certain and strong).  Hunter
suspended in a moment of time that demands nothing of him.

Things have happened.  The steam train came into a lighter
place, into the city, with the first hint of dawn in the air,
and slowed.  Hunter put the bundle of papers (only a dozen
of them read, and many many miles flowed past beyond the
windows in the dark) back into the cloth sack, back into
the bag, and the wrapped figure beside him suddenly stood
and walked away from him, through the door and into the
next car (two legs, two arms, one head), and the white haired
couple shifted in their seats, and there was the station.

Someone helped him out of the train, someone helped him from
the platform, someone perhaps tried to pick his pocket, or to
knock him down in the jostling corridor.  For a few pennies
(a few of the last few of his pennies) a boy told him where
the street on his telegram was, and carried his suitcase for
him.  And he stood in the street, looking at the door (not
having asked the boy about the other address, not wanting
anything to do in this bleary morning breeze with the woman
in the cap and the looped letters like carved chains), and
it was opened before he knocked.

"So you came here, all the way here, hundreds of miles, on
a crutch, not writing first, with no purpose in mind at
all?"

"Roughly, yes."

To sit with Ona in the little kitchen (the lady of the house,
the taker-in of boarders, letting him in on Ona's word, with
doubtful eye, with a shake of her head more perhaps out of
habit than real conviction, for he looked honest, or at
least unthreatening), to sit and sip hot tea with her eyes
laughing at him and her face (Ona's face just there, two eyes
one nose one mouth, close enough to touch) was all Hunter could
imagine then, in that morning.  Nothing else was possible;
what further purpose could there be?

"Come back with me to the college," he had said, somewhere in
the scent of the tea and the rattling of someone in the room
above.

"Stay here in Pullen with me," she had said.  And he had
frowned, and thought, and smiled.

Now he is in bed.  He has taken a room in the house.  Two
days before two former tenants had left, vanished, after a
vast screaming debate, fight, quarrel (utterly incoherent,
Ona said, mindless but quite ferocious, like cats) in which
they had each pitched the other's things out the window, and
each strode out, tossing bills behind them for rent that was
owing, and turned in opposite directions in the street, cursing
each other foully over their shoulders (like someone screaming
at a mirror).  So now he has a room, three doors from Ona's, and
one room in the house is vacant, and she has just left, for the
shop.

Ona has a place in a dress shop, where she sews, and measures,
and puts things together (separating things from the world by
joining them in well-ordered groups).  "You were always the
one that saw, and Marc would plan, and I would make; you know."
But Hunter did not know, did not know until the moment she
said it (did not see), and saw that it was (of course, undeniably)
true.  She makes some money, she saves some money, and she has lent
him his first week's rent.

"Come up to the shop in the afternoon, we'll talk to Duncan.
In the morning I'll sweeten him up for you."

So here is Hunter in bed.  He stretches his ankles, points his
toes (his knee protests the pulling), bends his ankles (the back
of his leg twinges), puts his arms up above his head (his hands
hit the wall, the wall covered in beige and white striped paper,
waterstained here and there, a stain like a hand beside the bed,
a stain like a mountain near the ceiling), yawns.

The cloth sack is in the corner, under a table.  On the table is
a candle in a black iron holder.  In the sack, still, are the bags
and the book (and the dirt, and the cobwebs, and the fragments of
leaf, the smell of the earth and the sound of water dripping); his
suitcase is in the closet, his clothes on hooks and folded in the
drawers (he wonders what Courant is doing, what is happening in
his classes, what byway the Professor's mind has wandered into and
what patterns the dust is making in the sun).  This morning, he will
send a telegram to his parents, a telegram to the school (what do
they pay draftsmen in Pullen?), saying that he has hurt his leg,
he is staying at this address for now, he is well.  This morning,
he will have a late breakfast downstairs in the common room (the
lady of the house watching him eat, putting pins in her hair,
straightening the table).  This morning, he will step out the
door, onto the street.  This morning he will see Pullen by day.

Ona is walking, walks, from the rooming house to the shop.  She
has walked, many times, from the rooming house to the shop,
and looking at herself she decides that the walk, this day, is
the same as the walk any other day.  Hunter, that boy, that
piece of her childhood (before those other two, her husband
that was, that other, that story that later she will tell
Hunter, in the dark under a frowning moon), is behind her,
lying in a bed (the shape of him under the covers, the odd
smile on his face as she looked back at him from the doorway).
But this is still the walk, from the rooming house to the shop,
past these buildings, around this corner, up this hill.

This building, the one that Ona is passing now, this old red
brick and lath building, three stories above the street and
one below (and then, below the basement, one rough room, or
cell, dug down under the floor and into raw earth, and then
covered with a wooden trap, and that covered with flooring,
and forgotten now, for sixteen years, nothing down there but
a broken chair, ashes, the skeleton of a dead rat, silence,
time, perhaps an old bit of paper with an inch of writing,
perhaps not, the air stale beyond staleness, nothing moving)
has a bookseller's shop on the street level, apartments above
and below (an earnest young couple in the two basement rooms,
suffering bravely with the damp, walking over the wooden
trap a dozen times a day, perhaps thinking idly that the
floor sounds hollow there, perhaps not).  Sometimes the keeper
of the shop, the bookseller, is standing at the door, in the
air, and then Ona nods at him, and he nods at her.  But
today he is somewhere inside, with the books.

This building (Ona has walked along a few long morning steps,
half a block, to the corner), the one she is passing now, the
one on the corner, is a proud stone building, with the name
of the firm carved into the stone (the stonecutter dead now
for two years, a quiet death from the lungs, in the night in
a narrow bed, an owl in the field outside the window), and a
thick oak door with a brass boot-scraper bolted on the top
step.  Ona puts her hand on the stone (waiting for a cart to
pass, a cab, a truck with clattering wheels) and feels the
coolness of the night still in it.  The sun will be bright
today, but the air brisk, damp.

This building (Ona has walked another block, another block,
two feet two legs two arms one head) is the building that Ona
works in (that Ona lives in, when she isn't in her room, or
walking in the street, or sitting in the park eating her lunch,
or somewhere else), the one with the dress shop.  Duncan, who
owns the shop, lives upstairs, in the room that looks out over
the street (birds light on the windowsill in the morning and
sing, and wake him up).  Above the door is a post, and on the
post is a sign (the signmaker still a signmaker, on the other
side of the city, and his son working in the sign shop with
him now, and the months passing by), and on the sign is a
dress, and bonnet, and a pair of shoes (although the shop
does not sell shoes), all arrayed as though dressing a woman,
but there is no woman on the sign (or she is invisible).
Ona goes up the steps, and on the top step she turns and
looks down at the street.

Ona was a child in those same meadows, beside that same river,
where Hunter was a child, or as much the same meadows and
the same river (the same woods, the same stones, the same
sticks) as the meadows and river (woods, stones, and sticks)
of two different people can be.  Ona lived along the river
path a few minute's walk (for a quick child, a leisurely adult,
Shaytl with a little girl on his shoulders, her hands tugging
his hair) from the house and the meadow, in a smaller house
that sat in the shade with two other houses, tiny houses,
large sheds perhaps, in a place by the river a little too
dark, a little too damp, but with a familiar smell.  Marc
lived in the house to the left, close enough that they could
signal to each other out their windows at night, with
carefully hooded candles.  Standing on the top step of
the shop in Pullen where she works (where the adult Ona
works, the Ona who is somehow here and not there), she
thinks of those candles.

Dark Maria was Ona's favorite among the devoted shabby adults
that followed and herded the children in the meadows and
along the river.  She was small and quiet to Mother Canna's
firm-voiced elegance.  Something had hurt Maria once.  Ona
realized one day, on the edge of growing up, with the kind of
shock that comes on the edge of growing up, that Maria was
terribly ugly, her face scarred by something unspoken, untold
of.  Ona knew of course that Maria was beautiful (the shape
of her mouth and her eyes when she spoke to the children,
not patiently but as though patience were the last thing
required, of the relations of numbers, the names of the
birds, the habits of the bodies of foxes and people), but
still, there it was.

One evening, when everyone had eaten a buoyant supper on
the porch of the big house (and on the stairs, and at the
edge of the meadow, fireflies in the grass, crickets in the
air), Maria had walked with Ona (that same Ona, on that same
edge of that same growing up), and talked to her about Marc,
and about Hunter, and about boys and girls and men and women,
all things that Ona already knew (as much as she would ever
know), but that came out differently in Maria's voice, or
in her voice speaking to Maria.

"Do you think you will marry him?"

"Marry?  Which one?"

"Which one?"

And Ona had laughed at the question, and Maria had stopped on
the path and put her hands on Ona's shoulders (small strong
hands, one finger bent at an odd angle, and Ona had shivered and
thought why she could not marry dark Maria, standing there on
the path in the twilight), and Maria had told her a story.

"A woman once died and, finding herself in the mists in the
field of the dead with a candle in her hand, she walked forward,
and after a time she saw ahead of her a golden light.  She
walked onward, and came to a high gate, with pillars of
ivory and handles and fittings of gold, that glowed in the
mist like the sun.  Beyond the gate the air was clear, and
the fields green, and she saw just at the horizon water of
the clearest blue.  But the woman paused, for the gate was
standing open, and unguarded.  She stood for a long time,
holding the unflickering candle and looking at the gate,
but then she turned away, and walked out again into the
mists.

"After a long time of wandering, she saw ahead of her a
red and smoky light, and heard the sound of wailing.  She
walked onward, and came again to a high gate, this one of
ebony and ruby, shining with the light of madness, and this
gate was locked and barred, and guarded by great iron
beasts whose eyes steamed and whose jaws slathered.  And
she stood at that gate for a long time, in the mists.
Turning away, she faced out into the fields of the dead
again, and here and there in the mists she saw tiny lights,
like the light of her own candle, moving slowly this way
and that."

Ona had frowned.  "I don't think I know what that story
means."

"It's just a story," Maria had said, "but I wish someone
had told it to me, when I was your age, and beautiful."

And Maria had pulled Ona to her, Ona's face against
Maria's shoulder, their arms around each other in the
dark, and Ona had felt joy and fear filling her up
together, and she closed her eyes.

Then they stepped apart (Maria's hand squeezing Ona's
hand, and letting go), and they walked the rest of the
way in a close comfortable silence.  At the door of her
house, Ona had turned to Maria again.

"Did she get into heaven?"

"The story doesn't say, I don't think.  It was her choice
to make."

And Ona had kissed Maria's cheek, and gone in to bed.

And now Ona turns back to the door, and opens it, and
goes in.


Questions for Chapter Twenty-Four

We have now seen Ona directly, rather than through
Hunter's memories.  Is she as you had pictured her?
How are her memories of their shared childhood
similar to his?  How are they different?

On Ona's walk to work, we have seen another underground
chamber.  How does it relate to the room where Hunter
got the papers he carries?  What function might this
relationship have in the structure of the story?


 Seven Days After Drowning

 It is entirely to be expected that I am imprisoned.
 Imprisonment is entirely normal.  There is nothing
 out of the ordinary about the vines that cover my
 cheeks.  The covering of my cheeks by vines is
 entirely normal.  The change in the number of
 windows every time I awaken is entirely normal.
 All of this is completely to be expected.

 When mankind was young, we learned the ways of the
 world.  Our superiority to the animals stemmed from
 our knowing that the world was entirely normal.  Our
 superiority to the animals stemmed from our ability
 to mirror the world within ourselves, as the moon
 mirrors the sun.  Our superiority to the animals
 stemmed from our ability to mirror ourselves within
 the world, as the sun mirrors a stone.

 The eyes that watch me from inside the walls are
 attached to small heads.  The small heads that watch
 me from inside the walls are the small heads of
 children, or of animals, or of sculpted figures of
 the Gods.  By watching me from inside the walls,
 they hope and expect to learn the secrets of
 mankind's normality.


Duncan, Marc

Here is Hunter in the room behind the dress shop, in the
room with Ona, and with Duncan who owns the shop, and
with a crowd of headless dummies, a mound of cloth in
oblong bolts, piles of gowns and dresses and thin leaves
of pale paper.  Duncan has slapped Hunter on the back, and
gripped Hunter by the shoulder, and smiled into Hunter's
eyes with his own large grey eyes, eyes with small rivulets
of red crossing the whites here and there in a disciplined
pattern, eyes that invite the looked-at to laugh along with
some joke, if he (if she, if the looked-at) is only clever
enough to discover what the joke is.

"Pullen is the right place for you, for anyone like us,"
Duncan says.  He has also said that he can give Hunter work,
some work, not all that much work, but that there are others
in the city, in this very quarter, who can give him all the
work that he needs, who can give any draftsman, any artist,
any creative person, as much work as any person could need.

"This is the cutting edge of the blade," Duncan says, "the
home of the present.  This is where any young person should be."
And Hunter sees with some surprise that Duncan is young, no
older than he is, no older than Ona is, for all that he
seems to have already taken possession of the world (Hunter
is still waiting for possession of the world, still waiting
for some event or ceremony at which the world will be
passed into his keeping), for all that he seems full-fleshed
and occupied, like a ruler or a parent.

"Find the home of the present, my father told me.  He worked
the steel mills, pouring the hot iron for the railways, for
the trains, for the electric turbines.  That was the home of
the present then, the hard industry and the roar of the
furnace.  And the present is still there, but it is also here,
in this city and in this block and in this room.

"That college you come from?  In a year, it will have a
campus here in Pullen.  In five years, the campus in Pullen
will be the most important part of the college.  I know, this
is an old city, a city on the edge of nothing, but now, with
the war over and the whole country wired for power and for
telegraphy and telephony, the city is becoming new again.  We
make dresses, here in this shop, for people of taste in Paris,
in Rome, in New York.  The present is here."

When Duncan has gone out, out to the front room to speak to a
customer, Hunter sits (he wants to take his head in his hands
to be certain it is still there) and tries to run his memory
back, to see if Duncan has in fact given him any work.

"He has ideas," Hunter says to Ona.

"He is an idiot," she says, "but it may be that he is right.
If he is right, we will all be rich, and we will buy a good
house on a wide street, and we will sit at the window and
call down to our friends."

We will buy a house, Hunter thinks, we will buy a house.

"Or," she says, turning to her work, for Duncan has given her
work, and it is her work that Duncan sells, "he may be wrong,
and we will live in tiny rooms in a rooming house, and we will
still sit at the window, and our friends will call up to us."

Hunter's cloth bag, the book and the paper bags inside it, the
papers inside the bags, are still under the table in a corner
of his room in the rooming house.  He has taken out a few, brushed
off the dirt and tossed the bits of leaf out the window (bits of
leaf from that room under the skin of the earth now blown about
by the winds in the streets of Pullen, muddying the shoes of the
citizens of Pullen), spread them on the table and looked at them.
But not for long, and not often.  He has not told Ona that story
yet, and she has not pressed for it, although she has looked
at them over his shoulder (her fingers touching his shoulder,
rubbing the back of his neck), and said things.

And here is Hunter a week later, or a month later, or three
months, sitting in his room in the rooming house, his knee
hardly stiff, his back not bruised, drawing a standing
woman in a dress (a dress that Duncan sells, a dress that
Duncan or Ona or a friend of Duncan's designed, or someone
Duncan met in a cafe some evening), and the dress is the
subject of the drawing, the woman only a set of lines, of
curves, but lines and curves that someone looking at the
picture will recognize, will admire and overlook, will see
only because they are wearing the dress.  This morning, he
has wired money to Courant, discharging his debt and
equally overstating his good fortune.

The postcard, of the woman on the block in the square (Klara,
who made soup and bread, who had two children, who died in
the night years ago), and his drawing of it (of her, the
arc of her body and the triangle of her dress pointing down)
are propped up at the back of his table.  On the wall above
them is a new drawing, a drawing of Ona, Ona as she is now,
and behind her in the drawing is the corner of a stone
building, the stone building that Ona passes on the way to
the shop (Ona laughs at the picture, and says that he has
drawn the stone more clearly than her face).

And here is Hunter that evening, when Ona has come back from
the shop, and gone to her own room and put away her things,
and taken the tie from her hair, and taken off her shoes (pushing
them, one next to the other, under the edge of her bed, so
that just the backs of the backs of the shoes show in the
light from the lamp), and then come out again, to come and
sit with him on the edge of his bed, and talk about the city,
and the shop, and the light, and time.

So they are sitting there, on the edge of the bed (Hunter's
bed, more or less identical to Ona's bed, and not really
Hunter's, as Ona's is not really Ona's, just rented beds
in rented rooms, but the sheets are clean), and Ona's
arm is around Hunter's back, comfortable there, and Ona's
head is close to Hunter's face, and Hunter's hand is
spread out on Ona's back.  And there is Marc in the
doorway, with two suitcases and an orange jacket.

They are surprised, so surprised that it doesn't matter,
and they turn toward him, and he puts the suitcases down.
And he sits between them, and Ona's mouth touches his lips,
and Hunter's mouth touches his cheek, and he closes his eyes.

And when they are all laughing and talking and staring at
each other (Hunter staring at Ona, too, and Ona staring at
Hunter, for everything is surprising now), someone (Ona)
remembers to close the door.

 The Purpose of Virtue

 The corridor is filled with quarreling men.  The men who
 fill the corridor are small.  The eyes of the men are the
 eyes of waterfowl.  Like the eyes of waterfowl, the eyes of
 the men are clear and sharp. Like the eyes of waterfowl, the
 eyes of the men are transparent to any light but ours.

 Men have always quarreled in corridors.  When last I awoke,
 there was one chair in the room.  On this chair was a book,
 written in the language of the Gods.  The book, of which I
 could read only a few words, was a justification of those men
 who quarrel in the corridors, and an explanation of the nature
 of virtue.

 The circle is the shape of virtue.  The color green is the
 color of virtue.  The month of November is the month of
 virtue.  In virtue all things begin, and in virtue all things
 have their end.  There is virtue in coming together, and
 there is virtue in moving apart.  The number seven is the
 number of virtue, as are the numbers three and eighteen.
 The men in the corridor quarrel, because they are not
 acquainted with the nature of virtue.  This is the rule of
 my imprisonment.

"So I called Bobby Cramm at the post office, on the telephone,
and I asked him to run up the hill and find out where you, Hunter,
where you were, but he said that he didn't have to run up the
hill, because you'd just telegraphed to tell them up the hill
that you were here.  So I came."

Marc is just the same, except for the suitcases and the orange
jacket (bought for working at his uncle's horse farm, but he
tells them that he didn't stay there long, that he promised to
come back in the spring to help with the young ones, but that
horse farms are not where he was born to be, and he says it with
a laugh that says he is serious, and Hunter knows the laugh and
exactly what it means).  And Marc has in his left suitcase a
book with a thick yellow cover, and a bundle of loose papers,
and he says that a box with more books just like this one, and
three more bundles just like this one (bundles tied with string,
string from the dark room at the back of the library, but he
stops because he is running ahead of his story, and puts the
book and the bundle down on the table) are coming by post in a
day or two (too much to carry on a train, he says, and Hunter
thinks of the man and the woman on the platform, and the man
and the woman and their white heads bobbing across the car
from him).

So Marc opens the book to a page, and on the page is a horse,
drawn on the page with something thick and black, and the horse
is the most powerfully drawn horse Hunter has ever seen, and
it rears up out of the page, and under its feet (drawn roughly,
as though in a storm or a fit) it seems to be trampling a city,
or some great hive.  Marc turns the pages, showing them (giving
them just a taste, just a hint to go with his story) some of
the other pages, and on all of them there are horses, drawn
elemental and majestic (as Hunter cannot bring himself to draw
dramatic things, things that force themselves on the eyes), and
at the bottom of every page are symbols, or letters, or numerals
in some unfamiliar script, and Ona looks at Marc and raises her
eyebrows (and Marc knows her eyebrows, and Hunter knows her
eyebrows, and what they mean).  Marc stretches out on the
bed, with his hands behind his head.

(Deep in the night a day, or a week, or a month, ago, Hunter
woke with the moon in his eyes to find Ona lying beside him,
her eyes open and shining with the pale light, propped up on
her elbow.  She had finally told him, it being the right night
and the right moon, of the man her husband, and the other man,
how they had met in the valley and come to the city, how her
husband had wanted a child, been eager or desperate for a child
from the day they were married, or seemed to be, and how he
had let the other man live with them, and when Ona had not been
with child after a few months, a year, had become angry and
unpleasant.

"But I was blessed, by some angel that I thank every night.
Because there was another woman that that man my husband had
wanted, and somehow he got word that he could have her after
all.  So he left me one day," her finger on Hunter's lips when
he started to speak, "and the other man bribed the church to
annul our marriage, so that I never had a husband at all, and
then he let me go, and I came here, and found Duncan.  And so
I was saved."

"You could have gone home," Hunter said, in a whisper as she
had been speaking in a whisper, touching her face.

"I could have gone home, and I could have spread my mother's
legs apart and crawled back into her womb, I suppose."  So
Hunter said no more about going home.

"I can't imagine what this man was like, good enough that you
would marry him, bad enough that he would leave you."

"I think," she said, "that there are in the world damaged and
undamaged people."  Hunter said nothing, waiting.

"One night, we had a basket of fruit, and I was peeling the
grapes with my teeth and offering them to him, and the juice
was running down his chin, and we were happy, or I thought we
were happy.  And then I said to him 'now you peel these grapes
with your teeth, and feed them to me', but he could not."

"Could not?"

"Not that his teeth were dull, or his hands unsteady.  He just
could not make himself, could not bring himself, to peel a grape
and offer it to me.  So damaged and undamaged people."

"Are we undamaged?"

"We are undamaged because we can do whatever we can do; what our
bodies can do, our minds can ask for.  He was damaged.  Somewhere
in him there was something that could not ask his body to do that
small thing.  And I wish that woman the pleasure of him."

And Hunter told Ona, because it was the right night and the right
moon, the story of the room under the skin of the earth, the stairs,
the gaps in the base of the wall, the sound of water in the distance,
the book and the piles of paper.  And when he told her how he saw
her at the base of the stairs, moving forward and back, she held
him and put his head on her chest, and when he told her how he
slipped on the step, and fell, and hit his back and his head and
felt the red agony in his knee, she kissed the top of his head
and wept, and he wept for the cruelty of the damaged man her
husband, and with their tears between them they had gone back
to sleep, and they woke the next morning still together and very
merry.)

So now Marc is telling his story, lying on Hunter's bed (the bed
in Hunter's room in the rooming house with the sounds of the
street coming in through the window) with his hands behind his
head and his elbows poking up, and the yellow-covered book
with its horses open on the table, and Hunter and Ona looking
at him.


A Certain House

After he left the horse farm, Marc tells them, with the smell
of the horses on his boots and his new orange jacket and what
was left of one season's pay, he went to a small city, an old
market town, near the horse fields, and there he took a job,
fell into a job, helping with the renovation, for the governor,
of a large decaying library in a corner of the town square.
The library was to be made new and modern, wired with lights
and telephones and electric bells, and also made clean and
light, and the books chosen to look well on the shelves, and
be full of useful wisdom for the town.  This was being done
because the town had come into money with a particularly
excellent season, and because the governor had taken an
interest in libraries, and also in modern things.

So Marc was engaged to help in the planning, and the sorting,
and the moving of boxes and the running of wires.  He told the
story slowly, and at length, his voice content and peaceful
lying on his back on Hunter's bed, and the two others, Hunter
and Ona, settled in beside him (not that there was room on the
bed for three, but they turned themselves on their sides and
lay precariously, listening to his voice and feeling each
other's warmth, and the cool of the air from the window),
while he talked.

In a far back room of the library, in a place that had been
used to store books that were unwanted even before the library
was to be made modern, where boxes were kept, and string, and
stacks of paper of forgotten purposes, there was a stairway.
This stairway, Marc found (after moving away three boxes, and
a stack of rotting lumber) led down to an even less reputable
storeroom, a dark place with a desk and a chair and bookcases
at awkward angles.  No one knew, and no one cared, what the room
had been used for (a bindery, perhaps, a storage room for books
in dispute, a bolt-hole for some shy scholar), and Marc was to
clean it out and find some purpose for it, or have it boarded
over.

The room smelled of time, Marc said, but of a more fragrant sort
of time than its darkness and dampness suggested, a healthier
smelling kind of time, and Marc came to enjoy minutes spent there,
shuffling through stacks of unwanted (unwantable, unreadable,
fragile and fragmented) periodicals from other decades (not
modern nor clean), account books (of the library? of the town?
of some forgotten concern?) discarded in the corners, broken
boxes and oddly shaped pieces of wood ("I should have brought
some for Hunter to draw; but out of their native habitat they
might not be as interesting").

Behind a bookcase, Marc had come across a set of books, bound
in yellow and less decayed, but no less old and abandoned,
than the rest of the shapes in the room.  The books were (he
gestured at the table) just as you see; horses rearing, horses
straining at the bit, horses trampling cities or running in
herds contained in the bowl of a cup, horses at war with bears,
or dragons, or oval machines, and at the bottom of each page
those words, or numbers, or glyphs, which breathed meaning
without speaking it, and which (with the pictures) demanded
explanation, or experience.

Beside the books were four bundles of paper, with the same
drawings, words (or numbers or runes or hymns or formulae)
in the same angular script, perhaps pages that had fallen
from the yellow bindings or the remains of other books whose
covers had rotted off, or perhaps pages not yet bound when
whatever it was that had created the books had come to an
end.  Marc had spent many hours at the desk, in the chair,
by the light of a lamp he carried down (an electric lamp,
the cord a dirty white stretched across the room above and
down the stairs and threaded through the objects in the room
below).  He had filled pages of his own with copies of the
script from the pages, with notes on which characters came
together, which did not, which appeared on the page with
which sort of horse.

Then (and here his eyes came away from the ceiling, his gaze
met Hunter's gaze) then one night, very late, when he had
been dozing (dreaming? he did not think dreaming) at that
desk, he had seen Hunter in the room beside him, kneeling on
the floor, with his head down and his hair over his face
(but still Hunter definitely and beyond any doubt).  And
when he had (without thinking, in the chair at the desk)
called Hunter's name, the kneeling figure (Hunter, kneeling)
had looked up, and just as he looked up had vanished.

So Marc had gone to the telephone (new, modern, clean) and
called the post office in the town near the house by the
meadows, and there had been no answer, no answer until
sleepless hours later, when Bobby Cramm had been in (still
yawning from bed, still thinking of the dark-haired girl
with the laughing eyes) and had told Marc (on the other
end of the telephone, the miles of wires, standing in an
alcove of the library) that he did not need to run to the
house, because Hunter had just telegraphed, and Hunter
was in Pullen, and (although Bobby Cramm is not supposed
to read the mail, or the telegrams, but they wouldn't mind,
up at the house) here is his address.

"And so here I am."

And so here he is.

"One other thing.  One last oddity."

On the train he had taken out the one bundle of papers that
he brought with him (the others shipped, the mail so bright
and reliable here, after the war, in the clear air and the
yellow sun), and spread a few on his lap, with his notes on
the glyphs (the letters, the words, the numbers, the elemental
incantations).  After awhile (lulled by the running of the
train over the tracks) he looked up, to find standing over
him a woman.

"A woman I had never seen before, and for that matter who
I've never seen since.  And she took one of my horses!"

Took it and gave him in return a different paper, with writing
(readable writing, familiar words) in an odd looping hand, and
gave him also (tossed into his lap, onto his notes) a card, with
an address in Pullen.

"And then she tried to walk away, but I got up and followed her.
I tried to ask her what she was about, why I should give her my
horse for her strange words, who she was, what was at this address.
But she just shook her head!  She said I could have my horse back
if I wanted it.  But she would say nothing more."

It is astounding to think, Marc says, how it is possible to avoid
answering questions simply by not opening one's mouth.  And Marc
looks at Hunter and Ona, on either side of him on the bed, suspiciously,
seeing something in their faces.  He opens his suitcase again and,
after a bit of searching, takes out a card and lays it on the table.
He takes out a half sheet of paper and lays that beside it.  On it,
of course, is writing in an artful looping hand, and along each
vertical edge is a pattern of lines, different from the pattern
of Hunter's lines, the lines on Hunter's sheet, the lines on the
sheet that the woman (the same woman?) gave to Hunter on the
train (on his train), but also the same, siblings in the same
vast unpresent family.

 The scholars reach the moon after a week's travel,
 drawn by the simple intensity of their thought.
 Those they have left behind search through the
 rubble, and find five of the seven metal bands
 that encircled the arms of Wrath.  The other two
 have fallen into a rift in the earth, and will not
 be seen again for a century.

Hunter goes to the corner, where the cloth sack is.  He opens
its mouth, ruffles through the paper bags, takes out his own
paper with its loops and lines (Ygraine and Memnon celebrate
these rites with an ecstatic dance, in company with a thousand
weeping angels), and puts it gently on the table next to
Marc's (Marc's eyes wide and eyebrows arching).  He reaches
his fingers into his pocket (he keeps it in his pocket, with
coins and with pencils and with an old nail) and takes the
card and puts it on the table.  The addresses are of course
the same.

And then Ona smiles and goes out.  Hunter reads Marc's paper, and
Marc reads Hunter's (both waiting, not talking, knowing Ona's
smile and her walk and what they mean) and when Ona comes back
she (there is nothing out of the ordinary) has a card in her
hand, and she puts it onto the table, and the addresses are
of course the same.

So here are the three young people, standing (now all standing)
around the small table, each with a hand on the table, each
hand near a small card, each card with the same address, and
all seems completely obvious.  Their hands touch their hands,
a warm three-handed grip, and they all look into each other's
eyes for a moment (for a long pleasant moment, the balance of
the world shifting for the better Hunter thinks, Marc thinks,
Ona thinks) and they turn, and go out the door, and Hunter
closes and locks it behind them.

Marc is a stranger to the city, and Hunter is still a stranger
to the city (how long does it take to learn a city, to know its
smells and where its streets are, to know its walk and what it
means?) but Ona knows where they are going.  Even with all their
talking and surprise, all Marc's slow story with his elbows in
the air, it is still early evening (or middle evening, the sun
down and the dark settled, but the streets alive, not all the
children in bed) and the city is abroad, walking here and there,
admiring itself in procession.

The three of them (hand in hand in hand now and again, now three
walking a step apart, now two and one, now one and two) cross
the blocks, out of their own quarter, into an older (perhaps a
calmer, perhaps a richer, a quieter) part of the city, where
there are trees between the houses, and courtyards behind some
of the facades.  And crossing the city they come to a certain
street, and on that street they come to a certain block, and in
that block Ona brings them to a certain house.  And they knock
(Hunter, or Ona, or Marc, or all three) on the door.

The woman who opens the door has black eyes and cropped hair.
She smiles at them, but does not speak.  Ona, who has brought
her card with her, offers it to the woman, who shakes her head,
and leads them in, through a dim hallway (a portrait of a
woman, a mountain and a flock of wild horses, an urn with
pastoral scenes crudely rendered, a row of books on a shelf).
In the room at the back of the hallway is another door, and
beyond that door is another room.

Hunter and Marc and Ona sit on cushions on chairs set in a
half circle in the room.  The woman has gone.  The ceiling
of the room is painted with the constellations, and the points
of the compass.  At the center of the half circle (what would
be the center of the full circle) is a table, and two chairs.
Somewhere at a distance, a bell rings (or bells ring, a brief
melody or an order of chimes).

The door on the other side of the room opens, and a man and
a woman come in.  They are not young, not sad, not thin.  They
sit in the chairs, nod at the young people, put their hands
(two arms two hands ten fingers two eyes) on the table, and they
smile.  Ona takes a breath.

"So," she says, "here we are.  Will you tell us a story?"

 The Water Gate

 When last I awoke there was a chair beside my bed.
 Beside the chair was a table.  On the table was a
 loaf of savory bread in the shape of a man.

 When last I awoke I found that my room had become
 elongated.  The wall behind my bed is the same size
 it was when last I fell asleep.  I believe that the
 far wall is also the same size it was when last I fell
 asleep.  However, the other two walls of my room are
 now miles long.

 One of the walls of my room which is now miles long
 is blank.  On the other wall of my room which is now
 miles long are a large number of doors.  Between every
 pair of doors there is a window.  Out each window is
 a narrow rocky beach, and beyond that, the sea.


Questions on the Book

Where did Ona get her card?  What did the third prince write in his book?
Support your answers with reference to the text.

If you were to compose a question about this book, what would it be?
Why?

Get paper and pen, and write something, or draw something, from the depths
of your mind.  Draw a frozen hand, or a city in the shape of an eye, or
write about the shapes of tears, or write glyphs in an unknown language.
Take the paper and go into a room somewhere under the ground.  Hide the
paper in a pile of dirty leaves.

What do you feel?